Sermons
June 9 and 10
Message Delivered at Christ Church
The Weekend of June 9th & 10th, 2007
TEXT: Luke 7:1-10
Delivered by Paul A. Johnson
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A long time ago, a preacher stood up in his pulpit to deliver a sermon. It was in a tiny Congregationalist Church in a little town called Heath, in northwest Massachusetts. There were people who lived in Heath year round, but Heath was also a summertime community where people would vacation to get out of the city. One of the persons who went there for the summer was this preacher.
It was the summer of 1943. The tide had turned in the war, but what was mostly clear was that a lot of people were dying, and the destruction was beyond what the world had ever seen before…this was not the way the world was intended to be.
This preacher had started his career during the 1920s as the pastor of a working class congregation in Detroit.
We call that time the “Roaring Twenties.” But it wasn’t a roaring decade for everybody. It wasn’t a roaring time if you were an African-American who migrated from the South to the North looking for a job, and hoping you might escape the segregation and prejudice you had known growing up. Nor was it roaring if you worked for Henry Ford and were at all interested in unionizing your shop and having some say in your destiny.
It’s in that context that this pastor began his ministry. His was a congregation of persons for whom the decade was not roaring; people who were being left behind by the economic prosperity—false though it was—of the times. And the injustice of what he saw around him supremely affected his head and heart, and led him to an activism that he hoped would bring some sort of rightness to the social order.
Now, along with being a pastor, he was a brilliant man. And in 1928 he became professor of practical theology at Union Seminary in New York. He became a scholar, and writer, his passion being to explore the intersection of Christian faith, society, and politics. In 1932 he wrote one of his most famous works called Moral Man and Immoral Society, a work which articulates the common experience of how persons who are good individually can sometimes act so evil when they are together. And in 1940, at the age of forty-eight he wrote the work he is best known for—his magnum opus: The Nature and Destiny of Man. In this work he expressed a rather confrontational understanding of human sin and human limitations. You see, he was looking around a world where there was fascism and communism, Hitler and Stalin, Auschwitz and the Gulag, and made the argument that maybe humanity isn’t as good as the modern world has tried to convince us we are. Even in democratic systems there is injustice; even we aren’t what God intends us to be. We all might be darker than we want to admit.
And all the time, he kept trying to change things and make things right. He kept writing and teaching. He tried to make a difference by editing a magazine, being active in the World Council of Churches, and once even ran for congress.
But his ideals and vision for what God intends for human society, and the reality of the world in which we live and how we behave, were so disparate that throughout his life he always had to do battle with his own cynicism and despair. In fact, he called his early memoirs Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. He was a tough guy, and a strong man, but still one who was profoundly moved by the gap between what could be through the power and justice of God, and what is. And it wore on him. He never gave up, but there was this burden he always experienced, that he couldn’t quite shake. Seeing so many things in the world that needed to be changed, and being so limited in his ability to bring this change about, left him existentially bereft. He was at the end of what was possible for him to do. And that is a very painful place to be.
None of us operate on the grand stage he did. Most of us live more private lives than he did, with more private concerns. But I’ll ask you…do you ever have that experience of seeing something that needs to happen, and being unable to make it so? Something that needs to be changed, and you can’t change it? Those times we are at our limits, and there’s nothing more we can do? When it is all beyond our control…And I’m not just talking big stuff, here. That maybe sometimes we’ve wanted to change the behavior of another, or ourselves, and no matter how hard we try we can’t; or that no matter how hard we try, we can’t keep our companies from laying us off; or maybe like in this passage from scripture today, we can’t make someone better we really want to make better.
The guy in this story is a centurion, which means that he’s in control and gets things done. He says “go,” and his soldiers go; he says “come,” and his soldiers come; he says “do it,” and his slaves do it. He has been trained to assess the situation; take command; issue orders; get things done; and solve the problem. He’s a good man, who in his spare time builds synagogues. That’s his M. O. He’s a mover and a shaker. Where there’s something wrong, he knows how to get it fixed. That’s what officers do. That’s what project managers on construction sites do.
But every once in a while, life throws problems at us we can’t solve. Every once in a while there are things we’d like to change, but we can’t. That’s where he is in this story.
Well, on that day in the summer of 1943 this preacher/scholar/activist named Reinhold Neibuhr, one of the greatest Christian thinkers of the 20th-century, whose books people still read, got up to give a sermon that no one remembers anymore. Except that on that summer day, someplace in that message, he uttered a prayer that since then has been recited by millions, maybe even billions, in all sort of circumstances…a prayer from his heart, borne of his own experience. And it’s this one: God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed; Courage to change the things which should be changed; and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.
And ever since, this prayer has had its own life on the lips of countless of the lost, seeking, and faithful…all those at the end of their abilities, praying for the strength to get done what needs to get done, and then the wisdom to let go and give God space to do what only the Lord can do; the grace to both act and surrender at the same time.
Act and surrender at the same time. That’s what the centurion does in this story that’s more about faith than healing.
The action is to ask Jesus for help. That’s a pretty big thing, because most of us don’t like to do that. We like to believe we’re independent and self-sufficient, and to ask for help means we are neither of these things.
At the same time, this action is an action of surrender. Now “surrender” is a hard word. We don’t like to ask for help, and we don’t like to surrender. It sounds like we’re quitting or giving up. But in the spiritual life, surrender is something very different than giving up or giving in. In the spiritual life, surrender is the act of handing over. It’s the placing of our concern in the hands of God. It’s what we do when we have done everything we can, and there is nothing left. Because usually, when it comes to the things that matter, no matter how hard we try, we reach the end of our tether, so that the choice is to hold on in futility or let go in faith. And what this centurion does—which is why, I guess, Luke tells this story--is let go. “I can do nothing more,” we can imagine him saying. “I can only hand this over to this Lord I don’t understand.”
And that’s faith.
Sometimes I think we get stuck thinking faith is something much more complex than it is. We get stuck thinking it’s giving our assent to various doctrinal statements. But this centurion shows a truer way. He’s not a guy who knows the ins and outs of Judaism; he doesn’t follow the Law; he probably has only a vague notion of what a Messiah might be. But what he does have is the wisdom to recognize what he can’t do, and a willingness to trust, and hand over, and surrender, and let this Jesus take care of it.
I know that every time I stand up here—or every time Tasha or Hillary or anybody stands up here—that every time we’re together as this Body of Christ there are people here who got something going on. Poke somebody here, and they’ll probably have a story they could tell. We always say that we’re “fine,” and some of us are. But not all of us. We got something roaming around in our soul that’s stirring the waters; something we’re concerned about, or afraid of, or don’t know what to do about…or more likely, can’t do anything about. Something we’ve tried to do our best with, and discovered that our best can not solve the problem. It gets that way sometimes.
Well, what this centurion may remind us of is that sometimes those things we think are our problems are really God’s problems. That a really good prayer isn’t “Lord, I have a problem to solve. It’s “Lord, you have a problem to solve.” That sometimes what matters most in living the life God intends us to live isn’t working harder at it, but handing it over and depending on God to take care of it—which is faith. Not worrying about having enough faith forever. But just enough for today. We don’t need any more faith than what we need for today. Just enough for today, and if even that seems too much for us, maybe just enough to get us to lunch…
Reinhold Neibuhr’s prayer was first popularized when a friend of his asked if it could be included in a pamphlet being given to the soldiers fighting in the war. And in 1948 it was adopted—and adapted—by AA becoming sort of the “official” prayer of Alcoholic’s Anonymous. And when Hallmark asked for it to be on a greeting card, he said “yes.” He was quite content to let this prayer have a life of its own, to speak to people as it would.
But what not a whole lot of people know is that there’s a second paragraph to this prayer, and it’s as beautiful and meaningful as the first. The prayer begins this way: God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed; Courage to change the things which should be changed; and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other. And then this…
Living one day at a time, enjoying one moment at a time, accepting hardship as a pathway to peace, taking, as Jesus did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it, trusting that you will make things right, if I surrender to your will, so that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with you forever in the next. Those are inspired words, that bear godly truth.
So to make the words from this preacher on this summer day worth our time, maybe here’s the exit question for us to ponder: What is it today? What is it today we can hand over? What’s one little worry, or fear, that we can surrender to God so that it no longer torments us, but becomes a tool we can use to practice trust? For a moment, how might we be centurion-like?
And if it is that we find ourselves despairing over what seems impossible for us…whether it’s big like Darfur or something much smaller…maybe Reinhold Niebuhr’s little prayer isn’t such a bad one to keep on our lips. It might be one of those prayers that brings us freedom; that let’s God in to change our lives; maybe that leads to words like this from Jesus: “Never have I seen such faith.”
