Falling Short (Of The Glory Of God)
Sermon
Sermons on the Second Readings
Series II, Cycle C
Object:
Sam Goldwyn, the great picture maker, said of one of his movies, "I don't care if the picture makes money. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it."
Goldwyn has the same relationship to small and large, short and tall, that many of us have. We want both. We don't want the money -- we just want what goes with the money, which is the freedom. We don't want to win the argument; we just don't want to lose it, either. We don't want the kids to be just like us, to be clones of their parents, but we don't want the apple to fall too far from the tree either. As long as everybody sees our picture, we don't need the money, either.
Both Jesus and the writer of Romans join us on the trapeze that suspends us over matters of scale, size, large, and small. Paul knows he has fallen short. He knows we have all fallen short. How can I stand tall in the gospel when my desk is littered with contradictory demands? When several different supervisors are asking me for several different things simultaneously? When the pink slips come out in my business, how do I stay cheery if I am a survivor? With whom do I identify, the boss or the remaining custodian? How can I sing after the terrorist bombings and before the sounds of war fill my living room? How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? How can we keep from falling short? There is too much to do and too little time in which to do it.
Jesus offers the mustard seed as a way through the quagmire of conflicting demands and shortness. He says that a little faith goes a long way. He actually seems to be telling the disciples that they don't need a lot of faith so much as they need a little faith. Let the congregation say, "Phew!" I think that is spelled P-H-E-W. Phew.
Instead of faith being the same kind of matter that most things are -- heroic action, gobs of courage, trusting the untrustworthy, long meetings, thousands of phone calls, renegotiated positions on top of renegotiated positions, locating the lost emails that renegotiated the renegotiated positions ... instead of faith being that kind of complexity, it is a simplicity. It is inching toward the positive, not leaping toward the positive. It is leaning toward hope, rather than dwelling in hope. It is the assumption that God is in charge, not the certainty that God is in charge. Faith is inching, leaning, assuming, and hoping ... it is looking out the window toward the future more than it is staring fixed at the tangles of the present. It is grass waving toward God in clear wind, on that clear day when you can see forever. It is not a swamp where the grasses are stamped down on top of each other, tortuously tangled. Faith is a clearing in a great woods. Faith is small. If you have faith like a mustard seed, Jesus says that you can move mountains. We are all spiritual midgets. We are all small. We are all not enough. But still, if we have the faith that Paul wants for the Romans, we can move mountains.
This matter of getting small and large right reminds me of two things that comedian Dave Barry said. One is "No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously." Just because something has happened in our lives, it can't be taken too seriously -- something impossible to even account, as accountants look for a place to put three trillion dollars of loss on a ledger that can't be found -- just because a big thing has happened doesn't mean that all the rest of the folderol is equally big. This is no time to sweat the small stuff. Although my perception is that more and more people seem to be trying, this is not a time to sweat the small stuff. All have sinned and fallen into small stuff.
Barry also said, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy." The Nigerians have a word for times like these, which is wazu-wazu, things gone nuts and layered, scattered and messed up, the way a house looks after a large dinner party or weekend of guests. It is a good word, meaning the swampy tangle of our strange land, where it is pretty hard to sing the Lord's song. Thus we pick up one piece of the house at a time, room by room, slowly.
We sing a short song, not the big song of victory over our enemies, but a simple song. We may even hum, instead of sing. Albert Camus, the French existentialist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He said, "If human beings cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one." He sounds a lot like Haw in Who Moved My Cheese? Haw found simple steps forward; he didn't let fear govern him. Those who let fear silence their song end up lost -- not so much by the circumstances of their time as by their own fear of those circumstances. Oddly, it is not the unaccountable horror that silences our song so much as the accountable fear that we develop in response to it. When we think we are short, we behave short. We short out. Faith allows us to opt in, small as we are.
Jesus' antidote to fear is faith. Faith that is small, not large. If you can't find a big answer to the big question raised by 9/11 -- "Why do they hate us so much?" -- try a small one. Unpack they: "Who is they?" Unpack us: "Who is us?" Don't let big questions govern. Make it your size. Why do some hate some so much? There is even a little answer to that question. It is that we don't know their names and they have to know ours. They have to know our currency and we don't even know how to pronounce theirs.
Consider more hints of the power of the small over the large. A great nation finds itself at war with a small nation. It sends food to that nation's borders; it feeds the refugees. It helps the innocent. This small act makes the nation great in a way that not sending the food would only make it small. We have reason to love our country every week: It is a generous place with generous people.
Smaller pictures follow. A student got to the end of his final exam in college and found this question on the test, "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the classroom?" With that question, to which he did not know the answer, his commencement began. There is a small hint to these big times there: Those who were already small will be even more threatened than those who were not.
Another picture. Long ago, a ten-year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. "How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked. "Fifty cents," replied the waitress. The boy studied his change. "How much is a bowl of plain ice cream?" "Thirty five cents." He got the plain ice cream and left a fifteen cent tip, and the waitress never forgot the kid. He did the right thing, the small thing. Many of us could be reallocating our own budgets in this way right now. We can learn from the small.
A final picture is one I also wish every man, woman, and child in America would see. A boy gave his sister a much-needed blood transfusion. When the sister was restored to health, the boy summoned the doctor and asked, "Will I start to die right away?" He thought his gift was much larger than it was. He, too, confused the large with the small.
On Reformation Day it is very important to notice that there are a lot of magnificent small churches all across the world. These small churches have fallen no more "short" than large ones. All is the key word for Paul. All do small pieces of the gospel well, and all, even the big guys, fall short. When the Reformation began in Europe, it began as a seed of religious freedom. It began small. It probably never assumed it would be large. Each and every large historical movement has followed this seed-like pattern. Like children, great ideas are short and small before they are large and tall. In a local ministry, it can't matter how many souls are calmed. It can only matter that one or two find God. God is not an accountant. We don't have to do more to be loved more by God. Reformed churches continue to plant small seeds that guard religious freedom. They don't plant large trees so much as small seeds.
Sometimes little sacrifices can go a long way. They can show more love than we even need to deliver. They can turn the tide of history in a way that the large cannot. Trust the small. Trust the first step more than any other step. Trust the seed. Trust the short. The rest will follow.
Goldwyn has the same relationship to small and large, short and tall, that many of us have. We want both. We don't want the money -- we just want what goes with the money, which is the freedom. We don't want to win the argument; we just don't want to lose it, either. We don't want the kids to be just like us, to be clones of their parents, but we don't want the apple to fall too far from the tree either. As long as everybody sees our picture, we don't need the money, either.
Both Jesus and the writer of Romans join us on the trapeze that suspends us over matters of scale, size, large, and small. Paul knows he has fallen short. He knows we have all fallen short. How can I stand tall in the gospel when my desk is littered with contradictory demands? When several different supervisors are asking me for several different things simultaneously? When the pink slips come out in my business, how do I stay cheery if I am a survivor? With whom do I identify, the boss or the remaining custodian? How can I sing after the terrorist bombings and before the sounds of war fill my living room? How can we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? How can we keep from falling short? There is too much to do and too little time in which to do it.
Jesus offers the mustard seed as a way through the quagmire of conflicting demands and shortness. He says that a little faith goes a long way. He actually seems to be telling the disciples that they don't need a lot of faith so much as they need a little faith. Let the congregation say, "Phew!" I think that is spelled P-H-E-W. Phew.
Instead of faith being the same kind of matter that most things are -- heroic action, gobs of courage, trusting the untrustworthy, long meetings, thousands of phone calls, renegotiated positions on top of renegotiated positions, locating the lost emails that renegotiated the renegotiated positions ... instead of faith being that kind of complexity, it is a simplicity. It is inching toward the positive, not leaping toward the positive. It is leaning toward hope, rather than dwelling in hope. It is the assumption that God is in charge, not the certainty that God is in charge. Faith is inching, leaning, assuming, and hoping ... it is looking out the window toward the future more than it is staring fixed at the tangles of the present. It is grass waving toward God in clear wind, on that clear day when you can see forever. It is not a swamp where the grasses are stamped down on top of each other, tortuously tangled. Faith is a clearing in a great woods. Faith is small. If you have faith like a mustard seed, Jesus says that you can move mountains. We are all spiritual midgets. We are all small. We are all not enough. But still, if we have the faith that Paul wants for the Romans, we can move mountains.
This matter of getting small and large right reminds me of two things that comedian Dave Barry said. One is "No matter what happens, somebody will find a way to take it too seriously." Just because something has happened in our lives, it can't be taken too seriously -- something impossible to even account, as accountants look for a place to put three trillion dollars of loss on a ledger that can't be found -- just because a big thing has happened doesn't mean that all the rest of the folderol is equally big. This is no time to sweat the small stuff. Although my perception is that more and more people seem to be trying, this is not a time to sweat the small stuff. All have sinned and fallen into small stuff.
Barry also said, "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command. Very often, that individual is crazy." The Nigerians have a word for times like these, which is wazu-wazu, things gone nuts and layered, scattered and messed up, the way a house looks after a large dinner party or weekend of guests. It is a good word, meaning the swampy tangle of our strange land, where it is pretty hard to sing the Lord's song. Thus we pick up one piece of the house at a time, room by room, slowly.
We sing a short song, not the big song of victory over our enemies, but a simple song. We may even hum, instead of sing. Albert Camus, the French existentialist, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957. He said, "If human beings cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one." He sounds a lot like Haw in Who Moved My Cheese? Haw found simple steps forward; he didn't let fear govern him. Those who let fear silence their song end up lost -- not so much by the circumstances of their time as by their own fear of those circumstances. Oddly, it is not the unaccountable horror that silences our song so much as the accountable fear that we develop in response to it. When we think we are short, we behave short. We short out. Faith allows us to opt in, small as we are.
Jesus' antidote to fear is faith. Faith that is small, not large. If you can't find a big answer to the big question raised by 9/11 -- "Why do they hate us so much?" -- try a small one. Unpack they: "Who is they?" Unpack us: "Who is us?" Don't let big questions govern. Make it your size. Why do some hate some so much? There is even a little answer to that question. It is that we don't know their names and they have to know ours. They have to know our currency and we don't even know how to pronounce theirs.
Consider more hints of the power of the small over the large. A great nation finds itself at war with a small nation. It sends food to that nation's borders; it feeds the refugees. It helps the innocent. This small act makes the nation great in a way that not sending the food would only make it small. We have reason to love our country every week: It is a generous place with generous people.
Smaller pictures follow. A student got to the end of his final exam in college and found this question on the test, "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the classroom?" With that question, to which he did not know the answer, his commencement began. There is a small hint to these big times there: Those who were already small will be even more threatened than those who were not.
Another picture. Long ago, a ten-year-old boy entered a hotel coffee shop and sat at a table. "How much is an ice cream sundae?" he asked. "Fifty cents," replied the waitress. The boy studied his change. "How much is a bowl of plain ice cream?" "Thirty five cents." He got the plain ice cream and left a fifteen cent tip, and the waitress never forgot the kid. He did the right thing, the small thing. Many of us could be reallocating our own budgets in this way right now. We can learn from the small.
A final picture is one I also wish every man, woman, and child in America would see. A boy gave his sister a much-needed blood transfusion. When the sister was restored to health, the boy summoned the doctor and asked, "Will I start to die right away?" He thought his gift was much larger than it was. He, too, confused the large with the small.
On Reformation Day it is very important to notice that there are a lot of magnificent small churches all across the world. These small churches have fallen no more "short" than large ones. All is the key word for Paul. All do small pieces of the gospel well, and all, even the big guys, fall short. When the Reformation began in Europe, it began as a seed of religious freedom. It began small. It probably never assumed it would be large. Each and every large historical movement has followed this seed-like pattern. Like children, great ideas are short and small before they are large and tall. In a local ministry, it can't matter how many souls are calmed. It can only matter that one or two find God. God is not an accountant. We don't have to do more to be loved more by God. Reformed churches continue to plant small seeds that guard religious freedom. They don't plant large trees so much as small seeds.
Sometimes little sacrifices can go a long way. They can show more love than we even need to deliver. They can turn the tide of history in a way that the large cannot. Trust the small. Trust the first step more than any other step. Trust the seed. Trust the short. The rest will follow.
