Loneliness
Sermon
SEASONINGS FOR SERMONS
The words of a song Sharon and I love to dance to depicts the state of a lot of folks:
"Yesterday's dead and gone
Tomorrow's out of sight
It's sad to be alone,
Help me make it through the night."
An aged widower who lives alone in Atlanta was found in his apartment comotose due to malnutrition. After regaining consciousness in the hospital, he was asked why he had not eaten. He replied, "Because I don't have anybody to eat with."
They were in jewels, and I was in a room filled with them. Some of the people wearing them were famous. The party was elegant.
However, a spiritual emptiness inside that room was a hungry, screaming animal. Men and women struggled painfully to be comfortable within the hard confines of an unyielding pattern that had been meticulously choreographed.
People seemed to limit their own humanness at every turn. No new face could easily break into that tight circle of people who were energetically boring each other to death.
Money spoke loudly, Fame spoke deafeningly. The yearning for human meaning whispered softly but could scarcely be asserted over the din.
- Malcolm Boyd, The Lover, p. 55.
While walking in a lonely wood
I saw a big man fall a tree
his muscles bulging in the sun
he never said hello to me.
Once in a gray-green meadowland
I saw a girl with yellow hair
she didn't pause to speak my name
or even know that I was there.
Some children playing in the street
and bouncing balls against the wall
went right on playing in the street
and never noticed me at all.
I've been a stranger all my life
to everything and everyone
just passing through this lonely world
until my journeying is done.
- Rod McKuen, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, p. 76
Love
Again to Dr. Gerald Lyman, in "Bus Stop," who said, "I never had the generosity to love - to give of myself."
From the musical, "My Fair Lady," we hear,
"Don't talk of stars burning above,
If you are in love, show me!"
Wife number 769 asked King Solomon, "Honey, do you love me?" to which he replied, "You're one in a thousand."
Before the days of blood banks, a little girl was dying; the only thing that could save her was a transfusion. Her thirteen-year-old brother had the correct type of blood and volunteered his services. He lay beside his sister's bed, they put a needle in his arm, and after a few minutes, he asked the doctor, "Well, when am I going to die?" He thought he would have to die to save his sister's life. Inside each of us is that kind of heroic love.
A Gaelic legend tells of an eagle swooping down and carrying a little baby to its lofty eyrie. The strong men of the village tried to scale the high and rugged cliff, but each one failed. Then past them went a small, frail woman, climbing the sheer precipice and returning the baby to safety. "How did she do it?" the strong men asked in amazement. She told them the secret, "I am the baby's mother." Her love enabled her, frail as she was, to outdistance the strongest of men. So does our love, as frail as we are.
Love your enemies; it will drive them nuts.
A thought transfixed me; for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set to song by so many poets. The truth - that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire ... The salvation of men is through love and in love.
- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 59.
Loving is always leaving oneself to go toward others.
Paul Scherer put it this way, "Love is a spendthrift, leaves its arithmetic at home, is always in the 'red' ..."
Eros is all take, philia is give and take; agape is all give.
Naturally such love fulfills not only the law of compulsion, walking the required mile, but the law of concern, walking the next mile also.
- Nels F. S. Ferre, The Extreme Center, p. 139.
Love is discovery without end. When the searching dies, the love dies.
- Earnest Larsen, Good Old Plastic Jesus, p. 56.
Driving along Boulevard Drive in Atlanta I saw these words scrawled in chalk along the sidewalk.
"Carolyn Loves the Baddest Boy in School."
God loves the good and the bad; the saint and the sinner; those of us who have and are a whole lot of both.
Marriage
What many look for in marriage is the other half of themselves. We hunger for completion.
A young husband stopped his minister at the door of the church, "Would it be right," he asked, "for one person to profit from the mistake of another?" The minister said it would not. "Then, sir, would it be possible for you to return the twenty dollars I gave you when you married me last June?"
One of the greatest mysteries of life is how the boy who was not good enough to marry John Doe's daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.
For years I have included a sermon in the marriage ceremony exploring the ingredients of a happy marriage. The bride and groom are usually too nervous to appreciate it but it helps those re-evaluating a marriage or contemplating one. This practice has brought a significant pastoral ministry I would not have had otherwise.
A teacher had her fourth graders draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most drew the usual vocations but one handed in a blank page. The teacher asked, "Don't you know what you want to be?" The reply, "I want to be married but I don't know what it looks like." Do we have the picture of authentic marriage or do we not?
In some marriages, sex is the celebration of love; in others it is a postscript tacked on at the end of a busy day.
A significant symbol for marriage is a triangle with God at the apex; man and woman at the base.
Advice to newlyweds: There's many a rift over the lack of thrift.
The arithmetic of marriage is different than old math or new math. It is one plus one equals one.
Courtesy is essential in a marriage. I have never understood why husbands and wives are more courteous to strangers than to each other.
We are not committed because we are married; we are married because we are committed.
So many are married to a profession or a hobby that being married to another person is actually bigamy.
Howard Cosell speaks of his first two years on Monday night football. He describes the second one as calm and serene because Emmy made every trip with him.
- Howard Cosell, Cosell, p. 350.
Upon the death of his wife, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I have lived the last ten years in unchecquered happiness."
Meditation
Tuning and training the mind as an athlete tunes and trains his body is one of the primary aims of all forms of meditation. This is one of the basic reasons this discipline increases efficiency in everyday life.
- Lawrence Leshan, How to Meditate, p. 8.
Religion should have the power to take us out of ourselves and put us in a sanctuary of solitude. God does not intend for us to smell smoke in our nostrils every hour.
Life is like shooting an arrow. Before the arrow can rush forward it must be drawn back. Meditation is the drawing back.
Our motto does not need be always, "Don't just stand there, do something." Often it need be, "Don't just do something, stand there."
Mind
Milton, in Paradise Lost, wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Ministry
The core of the minister's task is communication of the gospel. Anything else can be done by others.
A certain church found itself burdened with a very tedious self-centered pastor. Eventually the pastor was to be transferred. He announced his move, telling the congregation Jesus had called him to them and had called him to leave them. After a moment's quiet, the congregation rose to sing, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
Every Christian is a minister. My job is to remind them.
On choosing not to enter the ministry a young friend told me, "I want an eight hour a day job ... I don't want to get that involved with people." Dave, you made the right choice.
I heard Sam Southard say, "I am player coach to you fellows who are in ministry to each other so church itself becomes ministry."
There was an old layman, devout,
Who packed a mosaical clout.
In faith and in morals
He won all his quarrels.
He's in and the parson is out.
- Chad Walsh, God at Large, p. 38.
Sam Shoemaker said the way to get better people into the professional ministry is not the indiscriminate net but the rod and line.
What is wrong with the ministry is what is missing in the ministers. If our ministry is powerless, it is because we have a void, a vacuum, a vacancy. If we are not good shepherds, it is
because we have nothing to feed the sheep. If we are not good preachers, it is because good preaching is taking something out of my heart and putting it in your heart; you can't give away what you don't have. If we are not effective reformers, it is because we march never having knelt. If we are not good counselors, it is because those who cross our thresholds find us with pet prescriptions, pious pronouncements and don't find those who walk the victimizing valley of the raw and drink daily at the fountain of God's living water.
- Phil Barnhart, "What's Wrong with the Ministry?"
Pulpit Digest, January-February, 1977, p. 70.
Miracles
When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle may be wrought.
- Helen Keller
Being a fervent believer in miracles, I would not contest the evidence of my own eyes were I to observe someone, whether Galilean carpenter or London stockbroker, walking on water. At the same time, I wouldn't regard what I had seen as a conclusive argument against learning to swim.
- Colin Morris, The Hammer of the Lord, p. 78
One of the key New Testament words for miracle is wonder. A miracle is a remarkable, amazing and astonishing event. It is something to be wondered at. The miraculous quality does not lie in its origin as supernatural, but in its quality as an astonishing happening. For biblical faith there was no problem about whether God could or did make such astonishing events possible. God's power was as much assumed in the rising of the sun as in the healing of a paralytic.
- Roy C. Clark, Expect a Miracle, p. 3.
Mission
The theology of mission makes all people children of God which they are, in one sense, by creation, but must be, in another sense, by redemption.
We in the church are over capitalized and under committed. Our interests are too much on ourselves and not enough on the mission we should be as the Christian church.
Did you ever stop to think that when Jesus said, "to the uttermost parts of the earth" the uttermost part was right here in the United States? We are children of the mission movement.
John Wesley said, "The world is my parish." We often say, "The parish is my world."
Mission is having a pastor's heart toward the whole world situation.
Being in mission is not so much taking Christ to others as being taken by Christ to others.
Moderate
A moderate is a person who makes enemies left and right.
"Yesterday's dead and gone
Tomorrow's out of sight
It's sad to be alone,
Help me make it through the night."
An aged widower who lives alone in Atlanta was found in his apartment comotose due to malnutrition. After regaining consciousness in the hospital, he was asked why he had not eaten. He replied, "Because I don't have anybody to eat with."
They were in jewels, and I was in a room filled with them. Some of the people wearing them were famous. The party was elegant.
However, a spiritual emptiness inside that room was a hungry, screaming animal. Men and women struggled painfully to be comfortable within the hard confines of an unyielding pattern that had been meticulously choreographed.
People seemed to limit their own humanness at every turn. No new face could easily break into that tight circle of people who were energetically boring each other to death.
Money spoke loudly, Fame spoke deafeningly. The yearning for human meaning whispered softly but could scarcely be asserted over the din.
- Malcolm Boyd, The Lover, p. 55.
While walking in a lonely wood
I saw a big man fall a tree
his muscles bulging in the sun
he never said hello to me.
Once in a gray-green meadowland
I saw a girl with yellow hair
she didn't pause to speak my name
or even know that I was there.
Some children playing in the street
and bouncing balls against the wall
went right on playing in the street
and never noticed me at all.
I've been a stranger all my life
to everything and everyone
just passing through this lonely world
until my journeying is done.
- Rod McKuen, Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, p. 76
Love
Again to Dr. Gerald Lyman, in "Bus Stop," who said, "I never had the generosity to love - to give of myself."
From the musical, "My Fair Lady," we hear,
"Don't talk of stars burning above,
If you are in love, show me!"
Wife number 769 asked King Solomon, "Honey, do you love me?" to which he replied, "You're one in a thousand."
Before the days of blood banks, a little girl was dying; the only thing that could save her was a transfusion. Her thirteen-year-old brother had the correct type of blood and volunteered his services. He lay beside his sister's bed, they put a needle in his arm, and after a few minutes, he asked the doctor, "Well, when am I going to die?" He thought he would have to die to save his sister's life. Inside each of us is that kind of heroic love.
A Gaelic legend tells of an eagle swooping down and carrying a little baby to its lofty eyrie. The strong men of the village tried to scale the high and rugged cliff, but each one failed. Then past them went a small, frail woman, climbing the sheer precipice and returning the baby to safety. "How did she do it?" the strong men asked in amazement. She told them the secret, "I am the baby's mother." Her love enabled her, frail as she was, to outdistance the strongest of men. So does our love, as frail as we are.
Love your enemies; it will drive them nuts.
A thought transfixed me; for the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set to song by so many poets. The truth - that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire ... The salvation of men is through love and in love.
- Victor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, p. 59.
Loving is always leaving oneself to go toward others.
Paul Scherer put it this way, "Love is a spendthrift, leaves its arithmetic at home, is always in the 'red' ..."
Eros is all take, philia is give and take; agape is all give.
Naturally such love fulfills not only the law of compulsion, walking the required mile, but the law of concern, walking the next mile also.
- Nels F. S. Ferre, The Extreme Center, p. 139.
Love is discovery without end. When the searching dies, the love dies.
- Earnest Larsen, Good Old Plastic Jesus, p. 56.
Driving along Boulevard Drive in Atlanta I saw these words scrawled in chalk along the sidewalk.
"Carolyn Loves the Baddest Boy in School."
God loves the good and the bad; the saint and the sinner; those of us who have and are a whole lot of both.
Marriage
What many look for in marriage is the other half of themselves. We hunger for completion.
A young husband stopped his minister at the door of the church, "Would it be right," he asked, "for one person to profit from the mistake of another?" The minister said it would not. "Then, sir, would it be possible for you to return the twenty dollars I gave you when you married me last June?"
One of the greatest mysteries of life is how the boy who was not good enough to marry John Doe's daughter can be the father of the smartest grandchild in the world.
For years I have included a sermon in the marriage ceremony exploring the ingredients of a happy marriage. The bride and groom are usually too nervous to appreciate it but it helps those re-evaluating a marriage or contemplating one. This practice has brought a significant pastoral ministry I would not have had otherwise.
A teacher had her fourth graders draw pictures of what they wanted to be when they grew up. Most drew the usual vocations but one handed in a blank page. The teacher asked, "Don't you know what you want to be?" The reply, "I want to be married but I don't know what it looks like." Do we have the picture of authentic marriage or do we not?
In some marriages, sex is the celebration of love; in others it is a postscript tacked on at the end of a busy day.
A significant symbol for marriage is a triangle with God at the apex; man and woman at the base.
Advice to newlyweds: There's many a rift over the lack of thrift.
The arithmetic of marriage is different than old math or new math. It is one plus one equals one.
Courtesy is essential in a marriage. I have never understood why husbands and wives are more courteous to strangers than to each other.
We are not committed because we are married; we are married because we are committed.
So many are married to a profession or a hobby that being married to another person is actually bigamy.
Howard Cosell speaks of his first two years on Monday night football. He describes the second one as calm and serene because Emmy made every trip with him.
- Howard Cosell, Cosell, p. 350.
Upon the death of his wife, Thomas Jefferson wrote, "the cherished companion of my life, in whose affections, unabated on both sides, I have lived the last ten years in unchecquered happiness."
Meditation
Tuning and training the mind as an athlete tunes and trains his body is one of the primary aims of all forms of meditation. This is one of the basic reasons this discipline increases efficiency in everyday life.
- Lawrence Leshan, How to Meditate, p. 8.
Religion should have the power to take us out of ourselves and put us in a sanctuary of solitude. God does not intend for us to smell smoke in our nostrils every hour.
Life is like shooting an arrow. Before the arrow can rush forward it must be drawn back. Meditation is the drawing back.
Our motto does not need be always, "Don't just stand there, do something." Often it need be, "Don't just do something, stand there."
Mind
Milton, in Paradise Lost, wrote, "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven."
Ministry
The core of the minister's task is communication of the gospel. Anything else can be done by others.
A certain church found itself burdened with a very tedious self-centered pastor. Eventually the pastor was to be transferred. He announced his move, telling the congregation Jesus had called him to them and had called him to leave them. After a moment's quiet, the congregation rose to sing, "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
Every Christian is a minister. My job is to remind them.
On choosing not to enter the ministry a young friend told me, "I want an eight hour a day job ... I don't want to get that involved with people." Dave, you made the right choice.
I heard Sam Southard say, "I am player coach to you fellows who are in ministry to each other so church itself becomes ministry."
There was an old layman, devout,
Who packed a mosaical clout.
In faith and in morals
He won all his quarrels.
He's in and the parson is out.
- Chad Walsh, God at Large, p. 38.
Sam Shoemaker said the way to get better people into the professional ministry is not the indiscriminate net but the rod and line.
What is wrong with the ministry is what is missing in the ministers. If our ministry is powerless, it is because we have a void, a vacuum, a vacancy. If we are not good shepherds, it is
because we have nothing to feed the sheep. If we are not good preachers, it is because good preaching is taking something out of my heart and putting it in your heart; you can't give away what you don't have. If we are not effective reformers, it is because we march never having knelt. If we are not good counselors, it is because those who cross our thresholds find us with pet prescriptions, pious pronouncements and don't find those who walk the victimizing valley of the raw and drink daily at the fountain of God's living water.
- Phil Barnhart, "What's Wrong with the Ministry?"
Pulpit Digest, January-February, 1977, p. 70.
Miracles
When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle may be wrought.
- Helen Keller
Being a fervent believer in miracles, I would not contest the evidence of my own eyes were I to observe someone, whether Galilean carpenter or London stockbroker, walking on water. At the same time, I wouldn't regard what I had seen as a conclusive argument against learning to swim.
- Colin Morris, The Hammer of the Lord, p. 78
One of the key New Testament words for miracle is wonder. A miracle is a remarkable, amazing and astonishing event. It is something to be wondered at. The miraculous quality does not lie in its origin as supernatural, but in its quality as an astonishing happening. For biblical faith there was no problem about whether God could or did make such astonishing events possible. God's power was as much assumed in the rising of the sun as in the healing of a paralytic.
- Roy C. Clark, Expect a Miracle, p. 3.
Mission
The theology of mission makes all people children of God which they are, in one sense, by creation, but must be, in another sense, by redemption.
We in the church are over capitalized and under committed. Our interests are too much on ourselves and not enough on the mission we should be as the Christian church.
Did you ever stop to think that when Jesus said, "to the uttermost parts of the earth" the uttermost part was right here in the United States? We are children of the mission movement.
John Wesley said, "The world is my parish." We often say, "The parish is my world."
Mission is having a pastor's heart toward the whole world situation.
Being in mission is not so much taking Christ to others as being taken by Christ to others.
Moderate
A moderate is a person who makes enemies left and right.
