Finding Our Roots In God And Country
Sermon
Sermons on the First Readings
Series III, Cycle B
Object:
It's a scary thing to go back and explore your roots. You never know what you might find -- some errant ancestor who was a brigand or a pirate. Maybe one of them spent a fortnight in the stocks or was strung up on the gallows. Nevertheless, Alex Haley and genealogists around the world encourage us to book a ticket and take our chances traveling back in time.
In a way, that's exactly what we do every Sunday when we open the Bible and step carefully like Alice into a biblical wonderland or the children making their way through the wardrobe into the magical world of Narnia. We go back in time and see not only our spiritual ancestors but, says the French phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur, we see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the text. It's what we do every Fourth of July, isn't it, when we reexamine our theological and political roots here in this great land.
Of course, no matter how scary it is to explore one's roots, it also creates the sense of coming home. David must have felt that as he made his way into Jerusalem just before his coronation, as he made his way into the great city of Zion, which some day would be named the city of David. In a way he was finally coming home to his true purpose and goal for life.
I certainly had that feeling a few years ago as I preached and lectured in Cambridge and Oxford in England. The church in which I preached in Cambridge, St. Columba's United Reformed Church, had, I discovered only after arriving, the names of two women whose works I had studied for years written all over the church's history. Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, two eccentric sisters who became famous nineteenth-century Cambridge professors, experts in Greek and Hebrew, traveled to St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt to examine ancient manuscripts just as I had done a few years ago. I was stunned to learn that these same women, these two "Ladies of Castlebrae" as they were called, had founded and endowed Westminster College at the University of Cambridge late in the nineteenth century. In fact, St. Columba's Church has a Lewis Hall and a Gibson Hall named after these two sisters who were generous benefactors of that church throughout their lives. Preaching there and meeting with students at Wolfson College Cambridge was an amazing experience. It felt like coming home.
Of course, there are roots everywhere you turn in a place like Cambridge: our musical roots, our architectural roots, our theological roots and yes, especially our academic roots. After I had preached in the morning service, I went to lunch with the pastor of the church and one of the Cambridge dons, a biology professor, who was quite keen on showing me Emmanuel College where he had attended and taught before retirement. He showed me around campus pointing to the room where he lived when he was a student, the room where he taught when he was a tutor, and another one when he was a fellow.
He was very proud of Emmanuel College. Most of all, he seemed very insistent on showing me one particular plaque. "Ah, yes, here it is," he said, opening a side door where we entered what appeared to me to be nothing more than a broom closet with mops and ladders at the bottom of a back staircase. My eyes adjusted to the darkened space as thin shafts of light crisscrossed the room. "Yes, this is it," he said with great delight. There on the wall in the broom closet was a simple plaque that read, "John Harvard, who attended Emmanuel College then moved to Massachusetts and started a college there." It was almost a "That's what you get for having the American Revolution," the plaque of one of your most famous Americans relegated to a broom closet! Still, I felt very much at home.
What's fascinating about exploring your roots in God and country is that you begin to see how much you have in common. The elders of Israel made that point with David when they wanted to anoint him king over Israel. "We are your bone and your flesh. We have a kinship with you. Thus you must become our king." In other words, we have a lot in common. One does not have to scratch very far to see how much we have in common with our Christian brothers and sisters in England. Our liturgies, our liturgical vestments, our hymnody, and even the architecture of our sanctuaries are similar. The worship spaces around North America reminded me so much of the churches in which I preached in Cambridge, Oxford, and even in the Methodist church in Keswick up in the lake district that I felt very much at home. So many professors and students walk or ride bicycles through town dressed in their black robes that walking through Oxford one Sunday morning in mine didn't look out of place at all.
Everywhere you turn in Oxford you see our common roots and our common history. You see John Wesley, a Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, whose 300th anniversary they were celebrating while I was there. Then you stroll down the street to Magdalene College where C. S. Lewis was cornered by God one day and converted. He wrote to a friend, "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ ... My long night talk with Tolkien had a great deal to do with it." Tolkien later admitted that without Lewis' encouragement he would not have finished writing The Lord of the Rings, sections of which he read aloud at weekly meetings with Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, who would also read from the works they were writing at the time. The very air you breathe is filled with history. Even the Chapel at New College, which looks more like a small cathedral, where I preached and listened every night to the soaring sounds of the New College choir, those little boys and those men who filled that place with shimmering beauty -- New College was named New College because it was new when it was founded in 1379!
Everything was old around there. One of the professors told me about a man from Texas visiting York Minster, that great cathedral in York. At one point, the man from Texas asked, "Now, is York Minster pre-war?" Instead of asking him which war he meant, since York Minster is 1,000 years old, the guide simply replied, "Sir, it is pre-America!" How brief and short our American history is and yet we find our roots in England and Scotland, in Ireland and Wales.
Like David, we have a lot in common in both adversity and unity. God knows that our two countries have experienced our share of adversity: their civil war, our civil war. David certainly did before coming to this point in his life. David had come a long way from his early sheepherding days, through his appointment by Samuel, his bout with Goliath, problems, delays, and civil war that thwarted his plans to reorganize a fractured nation that had been torn apart at the seams. David experienced all of that -- he had spent many years as an outlaw amidst internal conflicts and external strife. God knows England and America understand about conflict and strife with the civil wars that our countries have suffered and there are still differences with all the denominations and all the differing theological and social opinions about the way things should be done.
I even saw this at lunch one day eating with the Oxford Dons. My host, the dean of the chapel, sitting next to me said, "Do you see that man three seats over from you?" "Yes," I replied. "That's Richard Dawkins, world-renowned geneticist and atheist who wrote in The Times that religion was the cause of 9/11, and I wrote a counter article disagreeing with him in the same paper, and he hasn't spoken to me much since." She said, "He doesn't like clergy-types very much. Steer clear of him." We find our common roots in the ways we deal with adversity knowing that what does not kill you can actually make your stronger -- something that David surely discovered.
We also find our common roots in unity, not overcoming adversity, but overcoming our differences. When I preached at the Methodist church in Keswick up in the lake district, I mentioned that I felt right at home since my Grandmother Correy was a lifelong Methodist and that my mother grew up a Methodist. After the kind compliments about the sermon after the service, the pastor said in front of a group of parishioners, "We can forgive you for the American Revolution, but I'm not sure we can ever forgive you for leaving the Methodist church to become a Presbyterian!" Yes, we have our differences, but when we look at our roots we find that we have so much more in common.
We have a lot in common in adversity, but so much more in overcoming adversity, which leads to true unity. David demonstrated that as the elders anointed him king of Israel. By virtue of his office and by virtue of his own person, being anointed as king meant that he brought people of Israel and the people of Judah together into one, and brought them together in great union. Since he was already King of Judah, he now created a union between the two nations by virtue of his new office.
Thankfully, we see these kinds of unions occurring around the world -- in India with the Church of South India, in Canada and in England with the United Reformed Church, which combines the Presbyterian Church of England, the Congregational Church of England and Wales, the Reformed Churches of Christ in England and the Congregational Union of Scotland. Fortunately, the northern and southern wings of the Presbyterian church here in the United States finally came together in 1983 to form the PCUSA. So, as we look at our roots we see that we have a lot in common in both adversity and in unity as did David of old. That coming together was never more evident than when in both Cambridge and Oxford I shared in the leadership of the Lord's Supper as we broke bread and shared the cup together, all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We also shared a common simplicity and honesty about the task before us. David was anointed king in a very humble service. The Hebrew here is very simple. If you read carefully you will see. It's sparse and bare. No inaugural fanfare with pomp and circumstance. Why? Because David was ready to get to work. He went to work with a great sense of enthusiasm as he shared the word of God and helped the poor. We are also anointed to share the gospel and help the poor with enthusiasm. I saw that in England, especially in the little Methodist church in Keswick in the lake district, Southey Street Methodist Church, named after the poet, Robert Southey. But, I also saw this enthusiasm for the gospel in other places.
One of the bishops told us about Ian Paisley, that great Presbyterian evangelist in Belfast who preached regularly to huge crowds. One night, as he was just getting started, he said, "Tonight there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth." A woman jumped up from the front row and yelled, "But I got no teeth!" and Paisley yelled back, "Teeth will be provided!" There is an enthusiasm for the gospel and a care for the poor.
At the conclusion of the service in Oxford, I was privileged to participate in a laying on of hands of elders being ordained. I noticed that one of them had read the scripture because that was the honor provided for those being ordained. He stammered a little as he read, but there was a huge glow on his face as he knelt before us and we laid our hands on his head and prayed for him. Afterward, I asked the pastor about him, "Oh yes, he came to us homeless, a street person, with nothing. We helped him get established, helped him get a job, and now he is an elder in our church, and he feels more pride for that than anything else in his life."
David understood that. He knew how to share the good news of God with great enthusiasm. Keats, in one of his letters uses a vivid expression to describe the literature of Shakespearean England. He speaks of the "indescribable gusto of the Elizabethan voice." Think of the indescribable gusto with which David took on his new responsibilities, just as the earliest apostles took on the work of sharing the gospel and helping the poor. Why? Because they knew God was with them. That's what David knew as he moved into the future God had planned for him. He knew God was with him; and so do we. We know God is with us to the end of the age. Amen.
In a way, that's exactly what we do every Sunday when we open the Bible and step carefully like Alice into a biblical wonderland or the children making their way through the wardrobe into the magical world of Narnia. We go back in time and see not only our spiritual ancestors but, says the French phenomenologist, Paul Ricoeur, we see ourselves reflected in the mirror of the text. It's what we do every Fourth of July, isn't it, when we reexamine our theological and political roots here in this great land.
Of course, no matter how scary it is to explore one's roots, it also creates the sense of coming home. David must have felt that as he made his way into Jerusalem just before his coronation, as he made his way into the great city of Zion, which some day would be named the city of David. In a way he was finally coming home to his true purpose and goal for life.
I certainly had that feeling a few years ago as I preached and lectured in Cambridge and Oxford in England. The church in which I preached in Cambridge, St. Columba's United Reformed Church, had, I discovered only after arriving, the names of two women whose works I had studied for years written all over the church's history. Agnes Lewis and Margaret Gibson, two eccentric sisters who became famous nineteenth-century Cambridge professors, experts in Greek and Hebrew, traveled to St. Catherine's Monastery at the foot of Mount Sinai in Egypt to examine ancient manuscripts just as I had done a few years ago. I was stunned to learn that these same women, these two "Ladies of Castlebrae" as they were called, had founded and endowed Westminster College at the University of Cambridge late in the nineteenth century. In fact, St. Columba's Church has a Lewis Hall and a Gibson Hall named after these two sisters who were generous benefactors of that church throughout their lives. Preaching there and meeting with students at Wolfson College Cambridge was an amazing experience. It felt like coming home.
Of course, there are roots everywhere you turn in a place like Cambridge: our musical roots, our architectural roots, our theological roots and yes, especially our academic roots. After I had preached in the morning service, I went to lunch with the pastor of the church and one of the Cambridge dons, a biology professor, who was quite keen on showing me Emmanuel College where he had attended and taught before retirement. He showed me around campus pointing to the room where he lived when he was a student, the room where he taught when he was a tutor, and another one when he was a fellow.
He was very proud of Emmanuel College. Most of all, he seemed very insistent on showing me one particular plaque. "Ah, yes, here it is," he said, opening a side door where we entered what appeared to me to be nothing more than a broom closet with mops and ladders at the bottom of a back staircase. My eyes adjusted to the darkened space as thin shafts of light crisscrossed the room. "Yes, this is it," he said with great delight. There on the wall in the broom closet was a simple plaque that read, "John Harvard, who attended Emmanuel College then moved to Massachusetts and started a college there." It was almost a "That's what you get for having the American Revolution," the plaque of one of your most famous Americans relegated to a broom closet! Still, I felt very much at home.
What's fascinating about exploring your roots in God and country is that you begin to see how much you have in common. The elders of Israel made that point with David when they wanted to anoint him king over Israel. "We are your bone and your flesh. We have a kinship with you. Thus you must become our king." In other words, we have a lot in common. One does not have to scratch very far to see how much we have in common with our Christian brothers and sisters in England. Our liturgies, our liturgical vestments, our hymnody, and even the architecture of our sanctuaries are similar. The worship spaces around North America reminded me so much of the churches in which I preached in Cambridge, Oxford, and even in the Methodist church in Keswick up in the lake district that I felt very much at home. So many professors and students walk or ride bicycles through town dressed in their black robes that walking through Oxford one Sunday morning in mine didn't look out of place at all.
Everywhere you turn in Oxford you see our common roots and our common history. You see John Wesley, a Fellow at Christ Church College, Oxford, whose 300th anniversary they were celebrating while I was there. Then you stroll down the street to Magdalene College where C. S. Lewis was cornered by God one day and converted. He wrote to a friend, "I have just passed on from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ ... My long night talk with Tolkien had a great deal to do with it." Tolkien later admitted that without Lewis' encouragement he would not have finished writing The Lord of the Rings, sections of which he read aloud at weekly meetings with Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield, who would also read from the works they were writing at the time. The very air you breathe is filled with history. Even the Chapel at New College, which looks more like a small cathedral, where I preached and listened every night to the soaring sounds of the New College choir, those little boys and those men who filled that place with shimmering beauty -- New College was named New College because it was new when it was founded in 1379!
Everything was old around there. One of the professors told me about a man from Texas visiting York Minster, that great cathedral in York. At one point, the man from Texas asked, "Now, is York Minster pre-war?" Instead of asking him which war he meant, since York Minster is 1,000 years old, the guide simply replied, "Sir, it is pre-America!" How brief and short our American history is and yet we find our roots in England and Scotland, in Ireland and Wales.
Like David, we have a lot in common in both adversity and unity. God knows that our two countries have experienced our share of adversity: their civil war, our civil war. David certainly did before coming to this point in his life. David had come a long way from his early sheepherding days, through his appointment by Samuel, his bout with Goliath, problems, delays, and civil war that thwarted his plans to reorganize a fractured nation that had been torn apart at the seams. David experienced all of that -- he had spent many years as an outlaw amidst internal conflicts and external strife. God knows England and America understand about conflict and strife with the civil wars that our countries have suffered and there are still differences with all the denominations and all the differing theological and social opinions about the way things should be done.
I even saw this at lunch one day eating with the Oxford Dons. My host, the dean of the chapel, sitting next to me said, "Do you see that man three seats over from you?" "Yes," I replied. "That's Richard Dawkins, world-renowned geneticist and atheist who wrote in The Times that religion was the cause of 9/11, and I wrote a counter article disagreeing with him in the same paper, and he hasn't spoken to me much since." She said, "He doesn't like clergy-types very much. Steer clear of him." We find our common roots in the ways we deal with adversity knowing that what does not kill you can actually make your stronger -- something that David surely discovered.
We also find our common roots in unity, not overcoming adversity, but overcoming our differences. When I preached at the Methodist church in Keswick up in the lake district, I mentioned that I felt right at home since my Grandmother Correy was a lifelong Methodist and that my mother grew up a Methodist. After the kind compliments about the sermon after the service, the pastor said in front of a group of parishioners, "We can forgive you for the American Revolution, but I'm not sure we can ever forgive you for leaving the Methodist church to become a Presbyterian!" Yes, we have our differences, but when we look at our roots we find that we have so much more in common.
We have a lot in common in adversity, but so much more in overcoming adversity, which leads to true unity. David demonstrated that as the elders anointed him king of Israel. By virtue of his office and by virtue of his own person, being anointed as king meant that he brought people of Israel and the people of Judah together into one, and brought them together in great union. Since he was already King of Judah, he now created a union between the two nations by virtue of his new office.
Thankfully, we see these kinds of unions occurring around the world -- in India with the Church of South India, in Canada and in England with the United Reformed Church, which combines the Presbyterian Church of England, the Congregational Church of England and Wales, the Reformed Churches of Christ in England and the Congregational Union of Scotland. Fortunately, the northern and southern wings of the Presbyterian church here in the United States finally came together in 1983 to form the PCUSA. So, as we look at our roots we see that we have a lot in common in both adversity and in unity as did David of old. That coming together was never more evident than when in both Cambridge and Oxford I shared in the leadership of the Lord's Supper as we broke bread and shared the cup together, all in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
We also shared a common simplicity and honesty about the task before us. David was anointed king in a very humble service. The Hebrew here is very simple. If you read carefully you will see. It's sparse and bare. No inaugural fanfare with pomp and circumstance. Why? Because David was ready to get to work. He went to work with a great sense of enthusiasm as he shared the word of God and helped the poor. We are also anointed to share the gospel and help the poor with enthusiasm. I saw that in England, especially in the little Methodist church in Keswick in the lake district, Southey Street Methodist Church, named after the poet, Robert Southey. But, I also saw this enthusiasm for the gospel in other places.
One of the bishops told us about Ian Paisley, that great Presbyterian evangelist in Belfast who preached regularly to huge crowds. One night, as he was just getting started, he said, "Tonight there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth." A woman jumped up from the front row and yelled, "But I got no teeth!" and Paisley yelled back, "Teeth will be provided!" There is an enthusiasm for the gospel and a care for the poor.
At the conclusion of the service in Oxford, I was privileged to participate in a laying on of hands of elders being ordained. I noticed that one of them had read the scripture because that was the honor provided for those being ordained. He stammered a little as he read, but there was a huge glow on his face as he knelt before us and we laid our hands on his head and prayed for him. Afterward, I asked the pastor about him, "Oh yes, he came to us homeless, a street person, with nothing. We helped him get established, helped him get a job, and now he is an elder in our church, and he feels more pride for that than anything else in his life."
David understood that. He knew how to share the good news of God with great enthusiasm. Keats, in one of his letters uses a vivid expression to describe the literature of Shakespearean England. He speaks of the "indescribable gusto of the Elizabethan voice." Think of the indescribable gusto with which David took on his new responsibilities, just as the earliest apostles took on the work of sharing the gospel and helping the poor. Why? Because they knew God was with them. That's what David knew as he moved into the future God had planned for him. He knew God was with him; and so do we. We know God is with us to the end of the age. Amen.
