Sermon – July 25, 2010: Teach Us
Sermon for Sunday, July 25, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Teach Us
Psalm 85; Colossians 2: 6-19; Luke 11: 1 – 13
When Bucknell University celebrated its one-hundred-fiftieth year in 1996, the pastor
of its founding church was invited to offer a prayer at an event commemorating the school’s
beginnings. This church founded the university, I was the pastor, and so I went and gave
the prayer and was able to be at the convocation. Two men from the theater department
read selected passages from the writings of the Baptists who led the effort to begin a
college in this community, and then-President Adams gave an address.
Those who labored and sacrificed in 1846 to bring to birth what became Bucknell
referred over and over to God’s will, God’s guidance, God’s intent, and God’s blessings.
The great enterprise they began and urged along was founded on faith, hope, and love,
and upon a vivid conviction of God’s leading. Starting an institution of higher education in a
community then still near the young nation’s frontier was the result of frequent and fervent
prayer.
So much language, and such impassioned language, about God, sounded a bit
dated in the late-twentieth century gathering. Views of religion vary much more in modern
times than they did in the 1840’s, and America’s culture– especially at a university– is much
more diverse than in was almost two centuries ago.
So it wasn’t surprising that President Adams gave a speech without mentioning God
once. He repeatedly mentioned the importance of the university’s mission, but hope for
fulfilling that mission no longer rested upon prayer and religious devotion. Instead, he said
over and over, it relied on the loyalty and generosity of former students. It was the alumni,
and not the Almighty, who were going to secure Bucknell’s future. This was an appropriate
emphasis in an era when college presidency had long ceased to be the province of
religious leaders, and when the work of a college president had largely become that of
fundraising.
It was also an inevitable message in a time in which the vast majority of America’s
traditional Protestants no longer were so enthusiastic about their relationship to God to live
sacrificially to support faith-based endeavors. In the late twentieth-century the kind of prayer
loosely defined as meditation had gained a great deal of credibility, and began to be
prescribed as therapeutic; but the kind of prayer pursued by Bucknell’s founders, with its
zealous pleading to a familiar God to illuminate their path and provide practical help for their
work, had come to be associated with old-fashioned and unsophisticated kinds of
Christianity. It was hard to regret that the university had come to count upon the usefulness
and reliability of money.
But look what counting on God had accomplished. A small community of only
ordinary wealth, a handful of people no more gifted than the congregation we compose this
morning, had managed to give birth to a school and had begun to transform not only this
town but the wider world. It was recognized as a great work not because of its size, but
because it was for God, and because it was for God, people devoted themselves and
their lives to its success.
The premise of the founders of this church, who then founded Bucknell, was that this
world was part of a larger reality, and that the passing things of this world were overseen
and sometimes shaped by God to conform to a divine vision of the eventual but inevitable
triumph of God’s priorities. When people prayed and did their best to do what they
believed God desired, they were playing a small part in the master plan. Difficulty neither
surprised nor dismayed them. They were realistic enough to know that the world is full of
obstacles and events which at least temporarily extinguish hope–they knew the world was
like that both from reading the Bible and from the evidence of their own lives.
But the evidence of their own lives and the Bible likewise was that God truly exists,
and cares, and carries on a holy purpose to bless Creation. That’s the perspective of
today’s psalm. It invokes God’s deliverance of the people in the past, and then pleads for
help in the present. Any given present may indeed be a time of despair and defeat, when
the once well-established fact of divine dominion over the world and heavenly rescue of the
helpless seems no longer to hold. Faith, however, has no alternative but to insist that that’s
the way it will be again. That’s how the psalm concludes, with the assertion that God’s will
for the good of God’s people will be established, that righteousness and peace shall kiss,
that things will turn out the way God wants them.
Oh, it’s hard to talk about the effectiveness of prayer in a world in which our prayers
aren’t always answered the way we would wish. It’s not the case, as scripture sometimes
suggests, that our prayers aren’t answered only when we are asking wrongly, when we’re
being selfish, or shortsighted. I will insist–and I don’t expect God to contradict me when in
that next world the mysteries of this life become more plan–that there were prayers of mine
that would have been right to have answered, that weren’t answered. That’s the way it is,
but faith expects prayer still to serve its purpose, and experience still supports that prayer
changes things.
It’s because the world the believer knows remains a larger world than the one we
see with our eyes and touch with our bodies. God has revealed to us the reality of God’s
sovereignty and the reliability of Christ’s achievements, and so we have a broader view
and wider resources than we sometimes think. Our tendency to get caught up in the habits
and attitudes of daily living and the expectations of life in the body means that we must be
reminded, again and again, of the larger reality of which we are a part. That’s the message
from our reading from Colossians, that what seems like reasonable supposing about life
shouldn’t mislead us about who we are or what life is– that all those mystical and invisible
realities and supports do under gird our daily existence and define our true nature.
When Jesus’ disciples approach him and ask, “Teach us to pray, as John taught his
disciples,” they aren’t interested only in behaving religiously. They’re not just embarrassed
to feel like they aren’t religious enough in what they do, so they want to add praying to their
daily routine so they’ll seem more like disciples. No; they believe that prayer connects
them with the great invisible powers in the midst of which they live. They believe that God,
the same God who led their ancestors out of slavery by miracles and wonders, will be
more a part of their personal lives if they pray. They hope that prayer will change their
lives, because they see Jesus praying all the time and Jesus’ life is changing the world.
I started out with examples from the history of this church and I will end with a couple.
Twenty-five years ago the church had given its pastor permission to moonlight because
they felt they couldn’t pay an adequate salary, and the church was frustrated because
sharing its facility with lots of self-help groups and other ministries seemed to be taking a toll
on the building and there wasn’t any money to put things right. Someone must have been
praying–and I’m saying this because if someone isn’t praying in a church when there are
needs, then what kind of business is the church in? Someone must have been praying,
and eventually–and you’re free to think there’s no connection, that it’s just a coincidence, the
church gets a big inheritance it never expected to receive. So they can afford to do all the
things for ministry about which they once worried, including bringing back in the self-help
groups and sharing the building for the sake of community needs.
Then around fifteen years ago there was a sense within the church that First Baptist
needed some significant project to focus its work, and a task force investigated refugee
resettlement as a ministry. People met and talked and gathered information and got to the
place where the whole church was going to be invited to endorse this vision, and it stalled.
There wasn’t the unanimity people felt was needed, and it seemed to fizzle. However,
people had probably been praying that God help us help people from somewhere else
find a new life here. Again, it may have been a coincidence, but a man who lives in town
who had a rental property here encouraged a household recently relocated from overseas
to move to Lewisburg and then he encouraged them to come to this church. People will
think what they must about it, but I believe the presence in this church today of that family
and the church’s presence through the years in their lives is an answer to prayer.
The church is always in the process of becoming something else. The world doesn’t
stand still. What I ask all of you to do is to pray for this church, that God show us what God
wants us to do in 2011 and 2012 and the years coming after that. New life in a church
needs to rest upon the guidance and goals of God. It is up to us to be open to God’s
leading, and that’s why I want people to pray about it. We need to serve Lewisburg in
new ways, as the community changes, as this community changes. As a church we need to
open our hearts to God’s purpose for us, so that we can with greater confidence look
forward to our collective life in the months and years ahead, that we be doing the work God
has for us to do.
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