Sermons

Reality Faith

John Wilkinson                                 Third Presbyterian Church  May 11, 2003                               Psalm 23/John 10:11-18

Next weekend culminates our 18-month 175th anniversary celebration. Plans are well in place for next Saturday’s festive Garden Party at George Eastman House. The party is shaping up to be a wonderful time. You may still reserve a space, but please do so early in the week. Thanks in advance to all who have labored to make this party happen.

And rightly enough, worship will conclude our anniversary commemoration. Next Sunday’s schedule is a little different – 9:00 and 11:00, both here in the Sanctuary. As identically as Presbyterian orderliness will allow, both services will feature the Chancel Choir and the same liturgy, hymns and sermon. While the focus will be on the future to which God is calling us, we will also look back, the past serving as prelude.

And while we are looking back, allow me to thank all those who contributed to last Sunday’s morning and evening worship and concert. It was very simply a high level experience in our life together, and we are grateful.

***

Reality TV has become an easy target. Every pundit has found a way to be critical. Reality TV, which may or may not be particularly real, has been criticized for being exploitative, voyeuristic, cheap. And I am not jumping on that bandwagon. Mind you, I have invested more time that I might like to know watching TV that had little or no redeeming value, though not much of it the reality TV variety.

It seems to fall into three categories. The first plays off our fascination with human exploits, men and women doing things they probably know they shouldn’t be doing. And then eliminating people along the way, adding an extra layer of survival of the fittest – if “fittest” is the right word.

A second seems to represent the revival of the talent show – tryouts, performances and the like. The new feature, though, is mean judges, and, again, a survival of the fittest quality that seems to be more interested in who gets voted off than if any of this has any entertainment value.

The third type of show has something to do with relationships – either forcing them together under bizarre circumstances, or working hard to break them up. Again, some variety of survival of the fittest seems to be at play, along with a new type of celebrity curiosity.

Again, I am not seeking to be particularly prudish or hypercritical. TV is our great common denominator, and seems to reflect as much as anything our tastes and preferences.

My point for the morning is simple, I hope. It is an alternative vision of things, not simply an alternative to what we watch, but counter-cultural and therefore somewhat revolutionary even to the world that seems to support this survival of the fittest, “vote people off the island” perspective.

The point was made more eloquently than I ever could, by a TV star, of all people. His name was Fred Rogers. Testifying to a Senate committee many years ago, Mr. Rogers spoke of “broadcasting grace.” He said in other settings that “somewhere deep inside each of us is a longing to know that all will be well.” Fred Rogers was also an ordained Presbyterian minister, something that people didn’t quite know what to do about. He said one time that “we are all on a journey, and the only thing we really need is to be trusted, and to have people to trust.”

We are all on a journey. That would be my point, I suppose, and that the journey we are on is qualitatively and ultimately very different than the one offered through reality TV.

Reality life, I have come to think of it, and the point is that it is nurtured and supported by reality faith.

Today offers a wonderful confluence of moments. It is Mother’s Day, a day when we rightly remember and give thanks for those who have nurtured us, cared for us, from whose arms we have been led on our way. We remember with gratitude beyond gratitude – and, as instructions were issued this morning at a certain household – we will be extra nice today.

And in that spirit of remembering, we will remember our own baptisms and confirmations, even as we remember the way we entered into the life of faith. For we will receive 12 young women and men through our commissioning process in a bit. It is very simply one of the best things the church does.

Perhaps something of this journey message relates to that group of young friends. It certainly relates to whatever ways each of us entered the church. I was, in fact, confirmed on Mother’s Day, my wide-lapelled suit and overly combed hair barely restraining my discomfort at standing in front of a large group of people and talking about my faith, which I am sure has absolutely nothing to do with my vocational choice.

And rather than playing to the civic holiday or the church observance, the lectionary committee takes us in an entirely different direction, but perhaps not entirely different. It has been called over many generations “shepherd” Sunday – the texts lift up an extraordinary image both of God as the good shepherd, and Jesus as shepherd and sheep.

And, it is still Easter season, and so the good news of the resurrection of Jesus permeates all of this, which leads us back to the premise.

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us, well in advance of the events that we remembered only a few weeks ago, that he is the good shepherd. I carry with me the notion that those who were listening then did not quite fully comprehend the impact of the message. The good shepherd tracks down the lost sheep, the sheep under attack by the wolves. We know more clearly what that means now, something about sacrifice and crucifixion and death. How we connect the words that he was saying then, to those listeners, to the listeners of this moment, is what the journey is all about.

Isaiah wrote that “we sheep have gone astray.” And so we have. Whatever the nature of your own going astray is as unique to you as your own journey – but you know that you have gone astray as surely as I know that I have. What we hold in common is that. And what we hold in common is a shepherd, Christ Jesus, who will search us out, track us down.

The listeners would have understood this. They would have appreciated elsewhere when Jesus spoke of the shepherd going after one lost sheep and leaving 99 unattended. They would have understood this to be a bad business decision. Any other shepherd would have cut his losses – but this is Jesus, the good shepherd, who will track us down and lay down his life for us.

I will never forget a memorial service in Chicago held for a colleague. He had worked at the church for many, many years. He had retired several months earlier, and then died suddenly, unexpectedly.

My only task at the service was to read Psalm 23, and even then I didn’t do very well. I was one of a few white faces in an African-American congregation. I started to read, but the congregation would not let me read – they said the words with me until I finally stopped and listened. It built to a kind of crescendo. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy road and thy staff, they comfort me.”

Those words have been repeated this week in more places than we could imagine – at deathbeds, at funerals and memorial services. They will be heard in churches everywhere this very morning, this Mother’s Day, by people who are traversing every kind of valley imaginable.

And they are true. That is the point. That we travel on a journey, and that the journey will include green pastures and still waters and restoration. It will include enemies and evil, and death, even. It will be more real than any TV show could ever communicate.

It will be filled with joys and sorrows, celebrations and heartaches. It will be filled with professional accomplishments and professional disappointments. It will be filled with good health and ill health. It will be filled with trusting relationships and broken relationships. It will be filled with moments when we perceive ourselves to be in absolute control and other moments when we lose control, are out of control.

This place, this church, is the venue for such things, serving as the place where our faith – reality faith – becomes a mediator for such things. Life’s grand transitions. A baby is born, a couple is joined, a life passes away. And everything in between.

And because we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever, we will fear no evil, not that’s it’s not all around us.

And because Jesus Christ is the good shepherd, even when we wander away, he will come after us, track us down, and when everything else fails, he will lay down his life for us.

Rather than eliminating people by some twist of fate or the whims of a mean judge, rather than voting people off the island, reality faith is about welcoming people into the fold, welcoming people onto the island, into the community of faith, joining journey with journey.

The good shepherd’s journey is about walking in the valley with us rather than leaving us to our own devices, a community of love rather than a marketplace of isolation and cynicism and abandonment.

It seems difficult to accept sometimes. Either we convince ourselves that we are not worthy enough to be welcomed in, or so worthy so as not to need the gift of this community in the first place. And yet there are moments of honesty, when we look at ourselves, when we examine whatever path we are on, and we know. And we are led onto a new path – our vocations, our relationships, our commitments.

The good shepherd welcomes us in, and we know fully what it means to be loved, and what it means to love one another. What it means to live in the comfort that we are the sheep and not the shepherd. What is means to know that we do not set our own table, but that a table of grace is set for us. What it means to know that we are not the manufacturers of love, but the receivers of it, and the sharers. What it means to know that the horizon toward which we live is lived toward hope, and life, and truth, and justice, and that when we reach that horizon, it will be as if we have been there all along and evermore.

Like a father who welcomes the prodigal home. Like a mother who gently tends to her child. Even like a shepherd, who knows us and loves us, and who is – now and always – our journey’s end.

Worthy is the lamb who was slain, to receive honor and power and glory and blessing. Amen.