II Timothy 4:6-13, 21a
J. Thomas Kort
August 21, 2016

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John 15:12
J. Thomas Kort
August 14, 2016

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Philippians 4:13
Lisa Nichols Hickman
July 24, 2016

A Post-Modern Life Cycle?

Today, in worship, I want us to consider the various ages and stages of a life-cycle. Now, maybe you studied Eric Ericson in college, maybe you picture that when you consider a life-cycle, his very traditional view of a life-cycle. There are some who are saying that view no longer works because our world is changing is so much. Childhood is changing. Teenage life is changing. Teenagers are entering puberty earlier and earlier because of changes of chemicals and estrogens in our environment. The job market is changing. College students are graduating and sometimes moving home, gaining strength and support there before going back out to the world. And retirement is changing. We have longer and longer life-cycles and this is a good thing, but it takes some planning.

So maybe our life-cycle is changing. Can any of us relate to these changes in the life-cycle? We all are going through these. Because of these changes, some scholars are saying we need a post-modern view of the life-cycle that does not simplify life into childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and instead allows for some nuances in between.

I care about this today because I care about the church and I care about Christian ministry and I believe that paying attention to what is changing in the life-cycle might better help us with Christian formation beyond Confirmation class, for better pastoral care in the various ages and stages of life, for evangelism and the ways we reach out into the world, and in light of the big prayers in our world, maybe help put us back together as Christians so we can go out into the world and serve.

Maybe you have read a news article about this. College students at Washington University in St. Louis were asked this past year to take a very interesting course, and the course was titled “When I’m 64.” We got it, the Beatles. I am sure there are few Beatles fans in here. Required curriculum that asked the students to think about the changing nature of the life-cycle.

50% of college freshmen will live to be 100 years old. And so the course invites them to start thinking when they are 18 about how to have a meaningful life, a meaningful retirement, how to plan financially and vocationally and spiritually for ten decades of life.

I wonder if it would be helpful for the church to consider such a course, the changing nature of the life-cycle. So much of our faith formation goes into that first two decades, compressing spirituality and service and social justice and mission trips and scripture learning into Sunday school, Confirmation, and mission trips. All before age 18.

But if we change attention a changing life-cycle in those ten decades, then maybe the church is called to think creatively about ways to minister to people across the life span.

Philippians 4:13

Now this one scholar, Frederick Schweitzer, says we need a post-modern view of the life-cycle. But what I want to say, pushing back, is that we do not need a post-modern view because we have Philippians 4:13. Everything we need for wisdom and strength is right here.

“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Now this is Paul’s letter to the church in Philippi, written while he was in prison. I appreciate my mother-in-law, who makes me appreciate Paul and who says he had so much energy and he was stuck and confined and he could not get the word out and here is this beautiful letter where he talks about “rejoicing the Lord” and “whatever is honorable and true and just, think about these things,” and “I have learned to be content in all circumstances.” Incredible wisdom and joy, topped only by this ten-word phrase, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.”

For Every Age and Stage of Life…

I believe these ten words reflect every age and stage of life, from that first word “I” to the last word “me.” “I” describes that first glimpse of that new child. When Leah was born out in Tuscon, Arizona, it was the best day of our lives. “I” — the unique identity and the miraculous life, knit together in the mother’s womb, blessed here in the waters of baptism. “I” is the beginning stage of the life cycle.

Then we get that great word, “can.” This is a toddler’s first steps, first words, first tumbles. It is why this church is so grateful when space is precious here in Princeton to have that playground right here because toddlers can do great things on that playground. “I can.”

Then we get the word “do.” And when I think about “do,” I think about my time here in youth ministry and all the amazing things our young people can do. They are creative, dramatic, athletic, faithful, and smart. They inspire our best leadership. Three thousand, 5,000, young people just met at Purdue, at Triennium, to think about what they can do in the life of the church in their communities.

As the life cycle moves on, we get to the word “all.” I think about our idealistic young adult days when all things are possible. The world is wide open, no constraints, a future to live into with hope and not cynicism, which comes sometimes in adulthood. Maybe that is why we all love to listen to commencement speeches, because it kindles that hope of all good things within us. Maybe that is why we love living in a place like Princeton where there is a university and a seminary where all things are possible.

I can do all “things.” “Things” might be what happens when you get married, when you have a full-time job, when the calendar starts to fill up, whether it is a written calendar or your digital calendar in your phone. Maybe things are the laundry basket or the routine. Things that take us from the extraordinary parts of life to the ordinary. Maybe technology and our iPhones add to that sense of the things.

Then we get to the fifth word of this life cycle from Philippians 4:13, that word “through.” I can do all things through. “Through” reminds of the resilience by which we get through the tough parts of life. Thanks to friends and churches and prayer we get through cancer treatment, we get through lay offs, we get through addiction, we get through the funeral, we get through relationships where alienation is painful and reconciliation impossible. I heard that prayer for “through” in that beautiful hymn of the psalm.

I think about getting through things when I think of “Going on a Bear Hunt” – I am going on a bear hunt, you can’t go under it, can’t go around it – you gotta go through it.

Thank God for the church, through whom we get strength in that time, in those places of difficult journey.

That’s when we need that next word, “Christ.” The only way we can get through all of that is through Christ who strengthens us, who saves us, who is a companion to us, who is redeemer to us, friend, nourisher, healer, teacher, who is with us to the very end.

Of course there are sometimes in a Christian journey, and we wouldn’t be faithful if we didn’t say this, when we even question who Christ is. I can do all things through Christ, who? Who is this savior? Who is he calling me to be? Is he at work in this broken world today?

This is the place where we pray for belief beyond our doubt. We pray through our struggles and our questions and those places where God is working within us to form us deeper in our life of faith, even in the midst of our doubts and our questions.

Thank God for word number nine, I can do all things through Christ who “strengthens” me. We are allowed us to look back on a life’s journey and see the saving grace of Christ along the way who brings strength to sustain all things. This is the down in your bones faith – deeply engrained even in the strain of circumstance.

Finally, the tenth word comes full circle back to “me.” Our identity is made complete from womb to grave by the presence of Christ who continually saves. But here is where I want to be crystal clear. This is not a journey that is culminated in “me.” This journey is not ultimately about me. This journey is about Christ who calls each one of us into our very best selves so we can serve the gospel and bring about his kingdom. So we are turned loose in this broken world.

Maybe when you are thinking about this text today or on a walk or if you are exercising, if you are driving to the shore, if you are enjoying a quiet moment on a hot day in a hammock, Maybe if you are thinking about these ten words, you might say them slowly to yourself, and pay attention to where you pause. What word catches you today? Because I don’t think life is a linear journey. I think we keep cycling through. There are sometimes when we find ourselves journeying back to “all” or “can” or “I” and finding renewed strength there to continue along with this journey.

 

Power, The Life Cycle and Dunamis…

In any of those ten places along life’s journey the key word to remember is the word strength. In Greek the word is DUNAMIS. It is like dynamite. The Greek is explosive with what that power of Jesus’ strength means when it intersects a life. It literally means to intensify the sharing power and strength of that new ability Jesus Christ imparts to us. It is bursting forth. That dunamis strengthens every moment along life’s way. Not in a self-serving way, but in a self-sacrificing way, so we have the power to serve in Christ’s strength.

Christian Praxis

The prayer for the church is then is to contemplate the changing nature of the life cycle. I was thinking about this when I was sitting last week at my church, First Presbyterian Church of Sharon, sitting next a mom whose youngest daughter was entering high school senior year. I think that mom was a little fragile. I think about that when I think about the retirees who live in New Wilmington. So many of them live into their 90s, even 100, and they are thinking about ways to stay meaningful and connected to the life of the church and Christian community and being of service in this world.

And so it is a question that people might contemplate in a Christian Ed committee meetings and Session and worship committee, deacon meetings, and staff meetings, how are we reaching out to people and offering this dunamis of Jesus at every age and stage of life in our changing world? It is a prayer. It is a great question to wrestle with.

Confronted with the Strength of Christ

I want to close with one story introducing you to a great lady named Margaret Courtwright. Margaret Courtwright lives in New Wilmington. She is a 96 years old. She goes for her walk every day through town and if I haven’t had my walk that day, I go and put my shoes on, because Margaret has been out walking. Margaret grew up in India. Her parents were Presbyterian medical missionaries and she went to the Woodstock School and because that was such an excellent school Margaret had an unusual life cycle and instead of graduating at age 18, she graduated when she was 16 years old. She left India with a nanny, traveled by boat to London and then to New York City and then by train to Ohio, where she started college at Muskingham University.

Now before I tell you the really important part of Margaret’s story I want to set the picture of how cool Margaret is. So when Margaret is 16 and she gets to Muskingham and she unpacks her trunk from India, she pulls out a zebra skin and lays it out on the dorm room floor. She pulls out an alligator head and a snakeskin and hangs all of that on the wall. And one day after freshman orientation she is coming back into the room and she is opening the door and she can see her roommate there — and this is back in the ’20s — and her roommate is squirting something. I don’t know if they had Febreze back then, but she was spraying everything just to make sure.

You can only imagine how terrified Margaret was to make that journey from India to London to Ohio. And she tells the story of arriving in London on her sixteenth birthday — and this is now 80 years ago — and walking into the National Gallery with her nanny. They walked around, they had a lovely day. And perhaps you can picture Margaret back in the day. She was dressed in gloves and hat and skirt and heels, and they were out on the town. And when she tells of that day and how scared she was, she says that she turned a corner and encountered a painting. And the painting was called “Jesus Before the High Priest” by Gerrit van Honthorst. And when Margaret tells of that moment, she says, Jesus caught my eye that day and he has never let me go since.

If you met Margaret today, she would open her Bible and out would fall a postcard of that painting. It has carried her along in all of the changing ages and stages of her life cycle, for 80 years. What I appreciate about that moment in Margaret’s life stories is that it is really a call for us to keep thinking about the ways we put that Christ before all people. For Margaret it happened in a holy and spontaneous and an answer-to-prayer moment. It has blessed her along life’s way.

I think the work of the church, our call to us, is to think about that dunamis, that saving power of Christ and how that can enter in for anyone who is at that moment of a life cycle journeying through “I can do all things.” So that is my challenge and call to you this day. That you will prayerfully think about, as a church, how you might reach different folks in different places as this crazy world unfolds and as that affects the very nature of our lives.

How can we keep putting before folks that dunamis of Jesus?

© 2016
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Luke 10:25-37
Cynthia Jarvis
July 10, 2016

“‘Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hand of robbers?’ He said, ‘The one who showed him mercy.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Go and do likewise.’”

Needless to say, we have endured yet another week when the quality of mercy has been strained to the point of breaking by the inequality of power and fear and race and death over our common life. Lest we be tempted, once again, to walk on by the beaten, the stripped, the abandoned, and the half dead by the side of the road when we leave this temple, Jesus told a parable about the one who showed mercy.

The Greek word translated as pity or compassion or mercy in the New Testament is curiously a word used only of Jesus himself and of three familiar characters in Jesus’ parables: the father of the prodigal, the magnanimous king who has mercy toward a hopeless debtor, and the Samaritan. This is not the mercy or pity or compassion that corresponds to the movements of our merely human hearts. This is a movement in the bowels of God — a movement of the innermost being of God, a movement that is the movement of God toward us in Jesus Christ.

Of God’s mercy, Karl Barth writes: “[God] does not merely help from without…standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again and leaving [us] to [our] selves until further help is perhaps required. [Rather in Jesus Christ] he interposes himself for [us], he gives himself to [us]… he puts himself in [our] place… he makes [our] state and fate his own cause, so that it is no longer [ours] but his…” This sounds to me, for all the world, like the Samaritan in the story!

But God is merciful not only in relation to us: the God who is merciful is merciful from all eternity. God is merciful in God’s self. “God who is rich in mercy,” I often declare when I am privileged to pronounce the promise of the gospel; or “God is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love”; or “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.” God’s very being is mercy. How do we know this? Barth admits that “When we confess God to be merciful, it is not even remotely possible to demonstrate this as a logically deducible truth.” We can only confess that God has given Himself to be known by us as merciful in the name of Jesus Christ. We can only try to recognize the reality of the mercy of God in his name.

The story before us has something to do with recognizing the reality of the mercy of God on the road going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Interrupting a private conversation Jesus is having with the seventy just returned from their first missionary journey, the lawyer asks Jesus, in order to test him, “Good teacher, what I must do to inherit eternal life?” Contained in his question are assumptions about God and about eternal life that we would do well to examine.

There are, Robert Jenson says, “as many eternities as there are… cultures and faiths, but most eternities can be divided into two sorts.” The first sort is secured by law and the second is confessed by promise. The first, secured by law, is the eternity of persistence. “The average God,” Jenson says, “is eternal in this way.” This is the God of religion — “the universal Conserver… the Rock of Ages, the Sheltering Arms, the transcendent Security Blanket” — who “can both guarantee the barns that defend our status quo; and provide a refuge when the status quo becomes too threatening.” In this eternity of timelessness, “the Immutability [the unchangability] of the past settles what can come of the future and so rules time as God: because of what I have accomplished, I can count securely on such-and-such, or because of what I have done, guilt closes such-and-such doorways.” In other words, this average God eternally “guarantees our securities and assigns our guilt; [God is]… the super Bookkeeper who will let us ‘into heaven’ if only we do our best, and are sincerely sorry and try harder from now on.”

The dead giveaway that the lawyer had the average God in mind when he came to test Jesus was the verb he used in his question: What must I do to inherit eternal life? What must I do to be given eternal life as my secure possession? The average God acts to assure the lawyer on the basis of the law as gospel that his status eternally, for good or for ill, depends on his immutable past.

The second sort of eternity is confessed by promise and anticipated in hope. In this eternity the “future [of the God who is rich in mercy] endlessly overcomes all bondage to the past… it is the eternity in which [you and I] are free, exactly in and by what [we] already are, for what [we] are not yet. The God of Israel and of Jesus’ resurrection is eternal in this way,” Jenson says. In God’s eternity of mercy, God even uses the guilt we hold on to from our past as the occasion to do a new thing; and God scandalously uses hope to undo the other eternity’s timeless stasis of good and bad, in and out, justice and injustice, Jew and Samaritan.

Therefore to the lawyer’s question concerning what he must do to secure the eternal life of the average God, Jesus counters with a question concerning the lawyer’s future with the God of mercy. Citing the summary of the law in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, the lawyer says he is to love God with all of his heart and soul and strength and mind and his neighbor as himself. “Right you are!” says Jesus. “Do this and you will live.” “Do exactly what?” the lawyer still wants to know. What is the more and the less he must do in order to assure the average God that I have done what is necessary. “Precisely which ones must I love?”

In response, Jesus answers a question the lawyer did not have it in him to ask. To wit: Who will he finally become? Who will he be in the eternity of the God who is mercy? To answer this question, Jesus abandons abstract principles for a story that turns out to be about mercy: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho,” it begins. No telling who this man is, what tribe he belongs to, what God he worships or what characterizes his human condition other than the vulnerability written all over his face that is written over ours as well. Stripped, beaten, left for dead, he is at the mercy of everyone who passes by. If you are black and male in this nation, every road is the Jericho road. Think Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Laquan MacDonald, Tamir Rice, Antonio Zambrona-Montes, Eric Harris, Walter Scott, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, to name a few.

When I lived here for fifteen years, twenty years ago, I played a mental game with myself. I drove the streets of Princeton and every time I saw a car stopped by a policeman, I bet myself $1,000 the driver is black. About nine times out of ten, I was right. I still play that game where I live. I live in a suburb of Philadelphia. On my way to church, I go by way of a speed trap and I know to do twenty-five miles per hour. And every time somebody is stopped by the side of the road, I bet myself $1,000 the driver is black. I would say nineteen times out of twenty. Nassau Street is the Jericho Road. Witherspoon Street, the Jericho Road. Bayard Lane, the Jericho Road. Mermaid Lane, Philadelphia, the Jericho Road. Germantown Avenue, where my church sits, is the Jericho Road.

Yet Thursday night was a brutal reminder that those we send out to patrol the Jericho Road daily walk in the valley of the shadow of death where showing mercy seems to be a matter of life and death.

The people passing by are identified, though we do not know why they do what they do. The priest and the Levite see the man and keep on going. The usual excuse given for them — that they are concerned with ritual purity — does not avail because they are going “down” the road and so away from the temple. We simply do not know why they keep going, just as sometimes do we know the same about our own deficit of mercy in the face of the brutality that our common life has become.

The Samaritan sees the man as well. The Samaritans, you may remember, had just refused to receive Jesus in Luke’s last chapter. At this point in the story, Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine insists that “we should think of ourselves as the person in the ditch and then ask, ‘Is there anyone, from any group, about whom we would rather die than acknowledge, ‘She offered help,’ or ‘He showed compassion’?” Likewise, is there any group whose members might rather die than help us? If so, then we know how to find the modern equivalent for the Samaritan.” In this xenophobic time, the candidates are legion. Levine proceeds to be more specific than the lawyer ever imagined when he asked his question of Jesus. Who is the one who proved neighbor — who loved God with heart, soul, strength, mind and the neighbor as the self? For Levine as a Jew it is a member of Hamas who showed mercy. In a lecture on the same parable at Auburn Seminary, I was in an audience filled with people who recently had experienced the horrors of September 11th firsthand when Levine suggested that the one who proved neighbor was a member of Al-Qaeda.

So the Samaritan on the road from Jerusalem to Jericho sees the man as well, but here we come upon the word with which we began. He is moved with pity, with compassion, with mercy: it is the verb that is used only of Jesus, the father of the prodigal, the king of the debtor and now the Samaritan. He not only feels in his bowels, in the deepest part of his being, the misery and distress of this man; he also acts, mercy being an action determined by a feeling. He binds the man’s wounds, pouring oil and wine on them — elements used in the daily temple sacrifice; he puts the man on his own animal in order to bring him to an inn; there he gives the innkeeper enough money to keep him for two months and says, “Take care of him….” To repeat, the Samaritan “does not merely help from without… standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again… leaving him to himself until further help is perhaps required. [Rather] he interposes himself for the man, he gives himself to him… he puts himself in his place… he makes his state and fate his own cause, so that it is no longer the man’s but his own.”

Then finally, the Samaritan stands for the man’s future freedom. He says, “When I come back, I will repay you whatever more you spend.” As the man had nothing now but what the Samaritan had given him, he could have been “at the mercy” (so to speak) of the innkeeper — a profession with the reputation for dishonesty and violence — who eventually could have enslaved him for any unpaid debt. If it is mercy you mean to show and if it is the eternity of the God who is mercy that you hope to inhabit more than inherit, then as my former New Testament professor John Donahue put it, you “must enter the world of the injured not only with care and compassion but must leave it in such a way that the injured is given freedom.”

“Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” The lawyer said, because he could not bring himself to say Samaritan, “The one who showed him mercy.”

What would it be for those of us in this sanctuary who are white to not only feel in our bowels, in the deepest part of our being, the misery and distress of black men and their mothers and their spouses and their children, but also to act, mercy being an action determined by a feeling. What would it look like for us not merely to help from without… standing alongside, making a contribution and then withdrawing again… leaving our black brothers and sisters to themselves until the next spate of killings. What would be different if we interposed our white selves for black selves, giving ourselves to them… putting ourselves in their place… making their state and fate our own cause, so that it is no longer theirs but our own? What would it be for us to bear witness to the God who enters the world of the injured not only with care and compassion but leaves it in such a way that the injured is given freedom? Who would our future selves be, our future nation be, if we gave ourselves to the God who uses the guilt we hold on to from our past as the occasion to do a new thing. If we gave our racist and xenophobic and fearfully defended selves to the God who scandalously uses hope to undo the timeless stasis of good and bad, in and out, justice and injustice, Jew and Samaritan, black and white, rich and poor, citizen and immigrant, saved and lost?

“Go and do likewise,” Jesus finally said. We do not know what became of the lawyer. We can only ask after the persons we may become in the hands of the God of mercy, beseeching God to have mercy on us. Amen.

© 2016
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