Pasadena
Presbyterian Church "You Can Make a
Difference" Scripture Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-14; Luke 10:1-11 In
a book entitled, The Preaching Life,
Barbara Brown Taylor writes about a conversation with a recent
college graduate about his desire to be ordained.
She describes him as an articulate Christian who had been active in
campus ministry and deeply influenced by the Episcopal chaplain at this
school. He was bright,
committed, and knowledgeable about the faith, but as he talked, Taylor
says she grew perplexed. He
did not want to serve a church, did not think he would like being held
accountable by a denominational body, and was not attracted to a ministry
of the sacraments, although he did believe he would like to preach once a
month or so. “Then
why do you want to be ordained?” she
asked him. He thought a while and finally said, “For the identity, I
guess. So I could sit down
next to someone on a bus who looked troubled and ask them how they were
without them thinking I’m trying to hustle them.
So I could walk up to someone on the street and do the same thing.
So I could be up front about what I believe, in public, as well as
in private. So I would have
the credentials to be the kind of Christian I want to be.”
Taylor writes, “His honesty was both disarming and disheartening.
God help the church if clergy are the only Christians with
‘credentials,’ and God help all those troubled people on the bus if
they have to wait for an ordained person to come along before anyone
speaks to them.” Last
week, somewhere in Los Angeles, three teenagers hanging out in the parking
lot of their apartment building to cool down in the heat wave, saw smoke
pouring out of an apartment on the second floor.
Without a second thought, they knocked the door down and ran
inside, through billowing smoke. They
rescued two children and a grandmother.
As they were gasping for air, outside once again, one of the
children cried out that there was still a little baby inside.
One of the teens turned around, ran right back in through the
smoke, and carried the toddler out. When
asked by a reporter why they put their lives at risk, the young people
answered matter-of-factly, “It was obvious they needed help, so of
course we did it.” Just regular people...doing God’s work. Later
this month, teens and advisors from this church will return to the Gulf
Coast to help again with clean-up and restoration after Hurricane
Katrina’s devastation. They’ll
do ordinary tasks of hauling mud and trash out of homes that were
destroyed. Maybe they’ll nail up sheet rock in new houses.
Maybe they’ll clean yards still cluttered with hurricane debris.
These sound like ordinary jobs, and they are.
These are just regular people going there to do regular jobs.
But they’re all just ordinary on the surface.
God is working through them to restore life. Regular people...doing God’s work. Last
month, a dozen members from
our Spanish-language ministry led worship in the afternoon at County
Hospital. Over 40 people came
to the chapel for the service our people led. Those worshipers were
strengthened, their hearts mended a little, and their shoulders lightened
by the ministry of the regular people in this congregation.
Just regular people ... doing God’s work. This
Wednesday night, as they have for a dozen years, a group of people from
this congregation will serve dinner to the homeless who are staying at
Union Station in Pasadena. These
church members offer not only food, but a sense of shared humanity and
God’s love with the people they are serving.
Just regular people doing God’s work makes a difference. On
Saturday, a group of people showed up here at church to pull weeds and
trim rose bushes. They do
that on the first Saturday of each month.
It makes this corner of God’s creation more beautiful.
They have made this corner of the city into a lovely place to sit
and walk and meditate. Just
regular people doing God’s work makes a difference. In
Sunday school classrooms across the country, regular church people are
teaching Bible stories to children, helping young people make connections
between faith and life, and by their involvement in the lives of those
children and youth, letting them know that someone cares about them. Imagine my surprise when I learned a few years ago that one
of the teenagers I taught in junior high class, and took on youth
retreats, is now an aide to the Honorable Nancy Pelosi, now Speaker of the
U.S. House of Representatives. We
were just regular people...doing God’s work, not knowing that one of the
children whose life we were touching would later be in a position to
affect millions of lives for good or ill.
We were just regular people...doing God’s work by teaching Sunday
school and leading youth fellowship, and saying “hello” to the young
people of the church as we passed them in the hallway of the church. A
man I know has a niece and nephew whose home life makes it hard for them
to feel loved and secure there. It’s
the kind of home life that easily leaves permanent scars. He can’t step in and be their parents, nor will the parents
let him teach them how to do a better job at loving one another and
rearing their children. So he
gives his attention to the children.
He takes his nephew to Boy Scout camp, and both children to the
beach. They love to spend the day at his home, having a barbeque
with him and his partner. When
life at home is rough, these children know somewhere safe and loving.
This second home is the anchor getting them through life.
Regular people doing God’s work make a difference. We’ve
heard this morning about a farm bill that is before Congress at this time,
and reasons why its passage is critical to millions of people.
It not only provides farm subsidies, but contains the renewal of
the food stamp program for millions of Americans.
We know that letters and emails make a difference in Congress: the
large immigration bill that was recently before Congress was defeated
because of the avalanche of letters and emails Senators received from
ordinary citizens. So, I
encourage you to stop on the patio after worship and make your voice heard
in Washington. Regular people
doing God’s work can make a difference.
The
Bible has many people within it whose names we know: Abraham and Sarah,
Moses and Elijah, Deborah, David and Solomon, Peter, James and John, Mary
and Martha, Paul, and of course, Jesus.
We think of them as great pillars of the faith.
After all, that’s why we know their names. But have you ever pondered the fact that nearly every person
in the Bible was just a regular person, trying to be faithful to God in
their own lifetime? They were
mostly regular, ordinary people, through whom God worked great deeds. For generations now, people have read their stories to learn
how we, too, might be faithful to God in our own generation.
This Bible is filled with the stories of regular, ordinary people
on whose shoulders we now stand, by whom we are now upheld, with whom we
now walk the faith in our own day. One
of the threads that ties together today’s scripture readings is that
they are stories of ordinary, regular people whose faithfulness to God
helps make healing possible. In
the story we read in 2 Kings, God heals the great army commander, Naaman,
of his leprosy after Naaman follows Elisha’s directions to wash seven
times in the Jordan River. But
would any of that have happened if it hadn’t been for the ordinary
people who carried God’s messages?
First, there’s the young girl living an ordinary life until
she’s captured in a military raid by Naaman’s soldiers.
She’s made into a slave and sold to Naamon’s wife.
This ordinary girl tells her mistress that an Israeli prophet can
cure Naaman’s leprosy. When
Naaman goes before the Israeli king to seek healing, the king is powerless
to offer help. Then a servant
from Elisha comes to say the prophet will help the commander. So Naaman
goes to Elisha’s house. The
mighty commander of the Aramaen army arrives at the home of a prophet and
demands to see him. But the
prophet merely sends out an ordinary messenger who tells Naaman to go down
to the Jordan River and dip himself into it seven times.
The Bible says that Naaman threw a fierce and mighty temper
tantrum, furious at Elisha’s insolence, and furious at the thought of
doing something as simple as dipping seven times in an Israeli river to
cure the illness that no one has been able to cure.
Once
again it is ordinary people, not the mighty ones, who move God’s action
forward. Listen to the words
of 2 Kings: “Naaman turned and went away in a rage.
But his servants approached and said to him, “Father, if the
prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have
done it? How much more, when
all he said to you was, ‘Wash, and be clean?’
So Naaman went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan,
according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the
flesh of a young boy and he was clean. (2 Kings 5:13-14). Each
time this story moves forward, it is because ordinary people–not the
kings and commanders–speak up and act on what they know to be true, even
when confronted by power and intimidation.
That’s how change occurs. That’s
how God’s message is communicated. That’s how healing happens.
Regular people doing God’s work make a difference. Look
also at whom Jesus sends out in the story we read in Luke.
They are regular people like you and me.
Not only did he call 12 regular, ordinary people to be his inner
circle of disciples, but the next set of people he calls forth to do his
work are regular, ordinary people, too.
According to Luke, they heal the sick, cast out demons, and
proclaim the good news. Regular
people doing God’s work make a difference: people are healed! The
entire Bible is filled with regular, ordinary people trying to be
faithful. They fall down.
They turn away. Sometimes, like Moses and Isaiah, they say “Not me, God,
send someone else.” But
then they go. Sometimes, like
Rahab the prostitute and Joseph the carpenter, they’re just trying to
earn a living, but then God uses their ordinary lives in such a way that,
thousands of years later, we know their names.
None of these people ever thought they’d end up in what we call
Holy Scripture. They were just regular people like you and I, trying to live
life and be faithful to God. All
of this brings me to this point: that maybe the purpose of life is not,
after all, to be rich and famous, to get one’s name engraved on a
pyramid or printed on a magazine cover.
If regular people’s being faithful to God is so important that
their stories are much of what comprise Holy Scripture, then maybe being
faithful to God is the point of human life.
And we know what the core of that faithfulness is: Love God with
all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and love your neighbor as
yourself. Wendy Embrey is a
homemaker in Mississippi. In
an article I read recently, she writes, “I
live ordinary days, as an ordinary mom, with ordinary children, in an The
great author, Henry James was asked, late in life, what he had learned by
all his experiences. His
response? “Be kind and then
be kind and then be kind.” It
sounds rather ordinary, but if we all lived that way, it would bring great
healing to the world. “Do
something as simple, humble and ordinary as washing in the Jordan River,
and you’ll be healed,” said the messenger, and history was changed. “Spread
the peace of God and heal in my name,” Jesus tells us.”
Simple words to regular people who are just like us.
Regular people doing God’s work, make a difference.
The Letter to the
Hebrews states it this way. Now
faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not
seen. (c)
Copyright 2007 by Barbara A. Anderson.
All rights reserved. Permission
granted for non-profit use with attribution. |
