Here's Mud In Your Eye
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
A Story to Live By: "Here's Mud in Your Eye"
Shining Moments: "The Gift of Myself" by Jim Eaton
Sermon Starter: "The Anointing" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "Healing from Heaven" by John Sumwalt
What's Up This Week
"Too many of us," wrote J.B. Philips in Your God Is Too Small (Macmillin, 1961), "are crippled by a limited idea of God." We hear virtually the same warning from Jesus in our Gospel reading this week after he heals a blind man and is reprimanded by the religious authorities for working on the Sabbath. According to Philips' translation of John's Gospel, "My coming into this world is itself a judgment. Those who cannot see have their eyes opened and those who think they can see become blind" (John 9:39).
Check out the amazing account in this week's Story to Live By of a Navy pharmacist's mate who performed a successful appendectomy in a submarine beneath enemy waters during World War II. The seaman, who would have otherwise died, survived -- but like the Pharisees who chastised Jesus, the naval medical officers were very angry when they heard the news. The navy never officially recognized the pharmacist's mate for his heroism until last month. (Be sure to click on the links for the full story -- it makes wonderful homiletic material.)
Look for the second sermon in John's "Caring for Body and Soul" Lenten series in the Scrap Pile. And see the Sermon Starter and Jim Eaton's touching personal story in Shining Moments for stories that will bring home the meaning of the anointing of the future King David in this week's Hebrew scripture reading.
A Story to Live By
Here's Mud in Your Eye
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.... Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God for he does not observe the Sabbath."
John 9:13-14, 16a
Associated Press reporter Steve Hartsoe wrote a remarkable story this week about a healing that occurred on the USS Seadragon over 60 years ago during World War II:
"Wheeler Lipes performed a successful emergency appendectomy in a submarine 120 feet below the Pacific Ocean -- an act that has finally earned him a medal from the Navy. Lipes, then 22, relied on makeshift instruments -- bent spoons for retractors and alcohol from torpedoes for sterilization. He and an assistant wore pajamas rather than operating room gowns. Though a news report on Wheeler Lipes' feat aboard the USS Seadragon amid World War II won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted the Navy to make a movie about his actions, Lipes was never honored. Until Sunday." (For the full story, click here.)
What was even more remarkable than the successful surgery was the reaction Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes received from the naval medical community. One doctor reminded him that he was not authorized to perform surgery and said it would have been better if he had let Darrel Rector die. Another physician actually tried to hit him. Others in the medical community, according to a National Public Radio report on February 19, 2005, spread rumors that the surgery had never taken place, that it was a lie.
"After we submitted our report, there was a great deal of consternation in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Everyone did then exactly what they would probably do now. They reacted to a situation they knew absolutely nothing about. There was an old warrant officer I knew back at BUMED (US Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery) who was on duty the night the message came in about the operation. He told me later how much trouble I had caused him. There were many doctors back there who were very upset about what I had done." (From recollections of Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes collected for the Naval Historical Center. Click here to view the full document.)
(For more information, click here for the NPR story.)
Shining Moments
The Gift of Myself
by Jim Eaton
...The Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; for this is the one." Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:12b-13a
We know how changed we are when someone embraces the child within us. In 1965, I was a 14-year-old geek in the ninth grade at Bloomfield Junior High School on Quarton Road. My family had moved to Michigan a couple of years before and I'd been sick for a year, so I hadn't really found a place or a circle of friends. My English teacher was Mrs. Sonneborne, a towering cyclone of energy five feet tall who invariably wore spiky high heels. Her room was arranged with the desks in a circle and she would walk around and around as she read to us from Shakespeare. This was during Beatlemania and the boys had been growing out their hair since seventh grade; and the girls all had long hair, too. Mrs. Sonneborne insisted on being able to look people in the eye, and when your bangs were too long, she would pick up a hair clip as she went by her desk, and on her next circuit she would deftly pin up the offending hair. Being "pinned" once was more than enough to get her point.
One day Mrs. Sonneborne assigned everyone to rewrite a folk tale. I'd been reading a lot of drama, so I decided to write a play. It was five pages long, typed in dialogue format, and when I showed it to Mrs. Sonneborne, she had two other kids in the class act it out. It was -- and is! -- a heady feeling to watch someone speak lines you've written. After class, Mrs. Sonneborne kept me for a moment and said something I've never forgotten. "Jim, I didn't know what you were until today. Now I know; you're a writer." And I was. I was still a geek, but I wasn't just a geek, I was a writer. I wrote two more plays for Mrs. Sonneborne, and others after that. A few years later, it occurred to me that writing a worship service was a lot like writing plays, and here I am, still at it. Mrs. Sonneborne was right. I'm a writer, and she saw it. She gave it to me. She surprised me with the gift of myself.
Jim Eaton is pastor of United Congregational Church in Norwich, Connecticut. He is a graduate of Boston University School of Theology and Michigan State University. He loves sailing, good stories, and woodworking.
Sermon Starter
The Anointing
by John Sumwalt
...The Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; for this is the one." Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:12b-13a
Did you see the movie The Lion King? Did you notice that there is an anointing at the very beginning of the movie? After the birth of the king's son Simba, all of the animals gather at Pride Rock for the anointing. Rafiki, the baboon in the story who serves as a kind of high priest of the jungle kingdom, marks the baby lion's forehead with oil and then lifts him up for all of the animals to see. The elephants trumpet, the music swells, and the animals all bow down to show their respect for the future king. Rafiki then goes into a cave and draws a picture of Simba on the wall and puts the mark of his anointing on his forehead. Before he has any consciousness of who he is, the most important part of Simba's identity is given to him. He is the son of a king, and he has been anointed as the future king in front of the whole community.
Anointing is serious business. It is holy business.
An anointing is a way of designating a person or an object for a special purpose. Moses anointed the tabernacle in the wilderness according to the specific instructions of the Lord (Exodus 40:1-15).
The anointing of kings and priests and prophets in biblical times was part of their induction into office -- something akin to our modern inauguration ceremonies. But an anointing was viewed as a divine consecration. It was God's mark, God's claim on a person's life for all time. The prophet Samuel anointed the young boy David as the future King of Israel, but David didn't actually become king until he was thirty years old, after he had slain Goliath and had become a great warrior and everyone recognized the mark of God on his life. Then he was anointed again, this time by all the tribes of Israel, and he reined over Israel for forty years (2 Samuel 5:1-5).
Jesus was marked from the beginning as the Anointed, the chosen one of God. All of the stories we love to hear and tell at Christmas and at Easter point to this special designation. Messiah is the Hebrew word for anointed. Christ is the Greek word for anointed. Jesus Christ means literally: Jesus, the Anointed.
Baptism is a kind of anointing. It is the mark of God on all of us who are a part of the church of Jesus Christ. Like Simba in The Lion King, those of us who were baptized as children may have no memory of what took place on the day of our anointing -- but that consecration is the single most defining moment of our lives.
There is an Avery and Marsh song called "Passed through the Waters" which gets at the heart of the meaning of baptism: "We are baptized, I am baptized. We have passed through the waters and that's all that matters. We have passed through the waters, O thanks be to God."
Most of us have passed through the waters, and in terms of what is most important about who we are, that is all that matters -- that mark of God, that sign of saving grace is more important than anything we might do with our lives. You might turn away from God, you might renounce your baptism or forget that you've been baptized, you might commit unspeakable evils unworthy of an anointed Christian, but you will always belong to God. The mark cannot be erased. God will always be after you, before you, around you, forgiving you, saving you, calling you to be the person you have been anointed to be.
In The Lion King, when Simba runs away after Scar has convinced him that he is responsible for his father's death, he tries to forget who he is. He adopts the problem-free philosophy of his new friends, Pumbaa and Timon: "Hakuna Matata." It means no worries for the rest of your days. And for a while Simba is happy just being an ordinary animal enjoying life with his friends. And then one day Nala, his childhood friend and long-lost love, shows up and tells him what has been happening in Pride Land during his absence. She tells how much all of the animals need him to come home and be king. And after some soul-searching and a romp with Nala in the moonlight while Elton John croons his Oscar-winning song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," he goes home to be the king he was anointed to be. And every creature in the jungle lives happily ever after, except for the evil king Scar who is devoured by the hyenas.
Anointing is serious business. It is holy business.
Scrap Pile
Healing from Heaven
by John Sumwalt
John 3:1-15
Have you ever done something completely out of character, something that would have astounded your family and friends? The man in our story does something completely out of character; something that not only would have astounded his family and friends if they knew, but would have mortified them.
Nicodemus was a man of some substance in Jerusalem. He had property, wealth, position, power, respect -- and with all of this a religion that gave him all of the answers. All he had to do was follow the well laid out rules of his religion, and he was set for a good life. Yet Nicodemus was a troubled man. There was something lacking in his life, something crucial, without which all of the other things he had acquired and accomplished meant nothing.
Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, told of a time in his life when he contemplated suicide.
"During the whole of the year, when I was asking myself almost every minute whether I should or should not put an end to it all with a cord or a pistol... my heart was oppressed by a tormenting feeling. This feeling I cannot describe otherwise than a searching after God. This searching after a God was not an act of my reason, but a feeling, and I say this advisedly, because it was opposed to my way of thinking; it came from the heart. It was a feeling of dread, an orphanhood, of isolation amid things all apart from me, and of hope in a help I knew not from."
John Wesley turned to good works and to a more rigorous religious life. He wrote of his dark night of the soul:
"I began to alter the whole form of my conversation, and to set in earnest upon a new life. I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement. I communicated every week. I watched against all sin, whether in word or in deed. I began to aim at and pray for inward holiness.... I began visiting the prisons, assisting the poor and sick in town, and doing what other good I could, by my presence or my little fortune, to the bodies and souls of all men. Yet when, after continuing some years in this course, I apprehended myself to be near death, I could not find that all this gave me any comfort or any assurance of acceptance with God." (Excerpt from The Journal of John Wesley, A.M., edited by Nehemiah Curnock; cited in Conversions, edited by Hugh T. Kerr & John M. Mulder, Eerdmans, 1983, pp. 56-57.)
Have you been there? Do you know what it's like to feel a hollowness down deep in your soul? You might ignore it for awhile, perhaps for years, but sooner or later it demands attention. The hollowness becomes a spiritual panic. Perhaps this is what Nicodemus felt when his search led him to Jesus.
Nick knew everyone was talking about Jesus, the power of his teachings and his miraculous healing abilities. "What would it hurt to talk to Jesus?" Nick thought. "I'll go see him. I'll go after dark. No one will know." So as the sun sinks below the horizon we find our man Nick, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, knock, knock, knocking on Jesus' door. To his great surprise and bewilderment, Nick discovers that heaven is knock, knock, knocking on his door. Jesus is inviting him to see more of the holy than he ever imagined was possible. And to use another worn out cliche from the early Bob Dylan era, it "blows his mind."
Nick is a straight-laced, left-brained, Mr. Spock, scholarly type of guy. And then he sits down with Jesus, the embodiment of... well, you know who, and this you-know-who is about to take him way beyond his comfort zone where no Pharisee has ever gone before. Nick and Jesus begin this wonderful left-brained guy/right-brained guy conversation. Actually it is more of a non-conversation, because they are speaking different languages. Jesus is all metaphors all the time: "I am the light of the world, living water, bread of life, born from above." Nick is a literalist in the law, used to certainties. Nick wants everything pigeonholed, neatly labeled, and analyzed. (Mission Reflections, Chris Lockley, http://www.mncuca.org.au/mission.html)
Nick says to Jesus, "Uh, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." A little buttering up never hurts. Always begin with something positive when talking to someone who scares the "heck" out of you.
Jesus could have said, "What do you mean, 'we'? There is only one of you standing there. Who is this 'we'?"
The "we," of course, as Jesus well knew, referred to all the other guys in the Pharisee union, you know, the guys who had been criticizing Jesus for not washing his hands before dinner; for eating with prostitutes, tax collectors, and other sinners; for healing on the Sabbath; the same Pharisees who lay in wait trying to catch him saying something against the law, the same Pharisees who were plotting to kill him. Why do you think Nick went at night?
What Jesus did say is "...no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."
This goes right over Nick's head. He has no idea what Jesus is talking about. It does not compute in his left-brained world. He says, "How can anyone be born after growing old?" (Here comes the left-brain, literalist stuff.) "Can anyone enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born (again)?"
Jesus says, "...no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit." Nick is stunned. He has no idea what to do with this information. He says, "How can these things be?"
How indeed? We are still asking this question today -- all of us in this left-brained, scientifically trained western world. "How can these things be?" We don't get it. Jesus says, "Let me try again." He speaks slowly now, as if addressing a dim-witted dog. "I tell you what I know... I tell you what I have seen... yet you don't believe me. If I have told you about earthly things and you don't believe, how can I tell you about heavenly things?" Don't you see it, Nick? It is as plain as the nose on your face.
Nick knows there must be more to life than he has known thus far. He yearns for his life to be different, to be, as they used to say in the army ads, "all that he can be." And Jesus tells him just what to do. "Be born from above." But Nick just doesn't get it, perhaps doesn't want to get it. What Jesus is asking of him requires giving up control of his life, something most of us are reticent to do. Nick cannot surrender his will. It is the hardest thing any of us has to do. Nick wants to change, but he also wants to control the change.
Philip Chard is going to be our guest in the "Caring for Body and Soul" healers series this Wednesday night. Philip is a therapist, and he also writes a weekly award-winning column which appears on Tuesdays in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Philip sometimes encourages clients who (like Nick) are unable to figure out something critically important to their well-being to seek out something in nature that seems to have a personal appeal -- and let it speak to them. He encouraged one young man to "walk about in woods of his choice until he came upon a tree that seemed to embody the characteristics he desired." The young man was to "get acquainted" with the tree -- study it up close, then at a distance, and then from different angles. Then he was to feel the bark, touch the leaves, and smell the fragrance of the tree. Philip said he could not convince him to taste the tree.
Then, and this definitely is not left-brained, "he was instructed to assume a posture that approximated the general look of the tree... to 'do' what the tree was doing." Philip says, "This is a bit tricky for the literal-minded, but just as a child can pretend to be a bird, a shark, or a snake to which she or he bears little physical resemblance, so an adult can figuratively reflect almost any creature or thing."
The young man was very reluctant at first (who of us wouldn't be?). But when he finally tried it, "he was surprised to find himself feeling the qualities of the tree -- youthful strength, determination to grow, harmony with surroundings, quiet patience, and consistency. Buoyed by this new experience, he positioned himself with his back against the tree, closed his eyes, and felt himself joining with it." "You'll think this is weird," the young man said, "but for a moment I almost felt like I was drawing strength from the tree."
Chard says, "I have worked with clients who accomplished blending with mountains, rivers, boulders, animals (both wild and domesticated), fog, sand, surf, trees and other flora, prairies, deserts, gardens (both natural and human-cultivated), waterfalls, caves, snowdrifts... even mud. Many, though not all, found that these encounters touched them in some vital place, precipitating emotional and spiritual changes."
A little over a year ago, I was walking with our dog very early one morning along the creek that runs through our 25 acres in Richland County. Something drew me toward a gurgling sound that comes from water flowing rapidly over rocks. As I drew near I found myself suddenly weeping. I had no idea where the tears came from or why. Somehow the flowing water had released a flow inside of me that needed to come out, some sadness, some sorrow that I had not known was there. The experience left me strangely refreshed and thankful.
I wrote to Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean and another Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist, when I was editing the series of Vision Stories books to ask her if she had ever had a mystical experience that she might be willing to share. She wrote back, "I am about as mystical as a fencepost, but my husband tells of a time when mountain climbing that he had an overwhelming feeling of oneness with all of creation."
When people ask him about the meaning of these kind of experiences, Philip Chard says he makes "little or no response, not because I'm secretive, but because rediscovering one's bond with the earth is an experiential event, not one composed of religious or intellectual dogma. It's not that I would rather avoid interpreting the meaning of these events. I truly don't know what they mean. I do, however, have some sense of what these dances with nature accomplish, so I encourage people to make contact and feel the healing and sustaining qualities of the earth. However they choose to pin the intellectual tail on the donkey is their business, not my own." (Philip Sutton Chard, The Healing Earth: Nature's Medicine for the Troubled Soul, NorthWord Press, 1994, pp. 73-74. [Phone 800-328-3895 to order.])
I would be willing to bet, if I were a betting person, that if Nicodemus were Philip Chard's client, Chard would have told him to go stand in a stiff wind somewhere till he understood what it was trying to teach him. Jesus said, "The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Excerpts from a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee on February 20, 2005.
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About the Editors
John E. Sumwalt is the pastor of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, and is the author of eight books for CSS. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), John received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for Parish Ministry from UDTS in 1997. John is known in the Milwaukee area for his one-minute radio spots which always include a brief story. He concludes each spot by saying, "I'm John Sumwalt with 'A Story to Live By' from Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church."
John has done numerous storytelling events for civic, school, and church groups, as well as on radio and television. He has performed at a number of fundraisers for the homeless, the hungry, Habitat for Humanity, and women's shelters. Since the fall of 1999, when he began working on the Vision Stories series, he has led seminars and retreats around the themes "A Safe Place to Tell Visions," "Vision Stories in the Bible and Today," and coming this spring: "Soul Growth: Discovering Lost Spiritual Dimensions." To schedule a seminar or a retreat, write to jsumwalt@naspa.net or phone 414-257-1228.
Joanne Perry-Sumwalt is director of Christian Education at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. Jo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, with a degree in English and writing. She has co-authored two books with John, Life Stories: A Study In Christian Decision Making and Lectionary Tales For The Pulpit: 62 Stories For Cycle B. Jo writes original curriculum for church classes. She also serves as the secretary of the Wisconsin chapter of the Christian Educators Fellowship (CEF), and is a member of the National CEF.
Jo and John have been married since 1975. They have two grown children, Kathryn and Orrin. They both love reading, movies, long walks with Chloe (their West Highland Terrier), and working on their old farmhouse in southwest Wisconsin.
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StoryShare, March 6, 2005, issue.
Copyright 2005 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
What's Up This Week
A Story to Live By: "Here's Mud in Your Eye"
Shining Moments: "The Gift of Myself" by Jim Eaton
Sermon Starter: "The Anointing" by John Sumwalt
Scrap Pile: "Healing from Heaven" by John Sumwalt
What's Up This Week
"Too many of us," wrote J.B. Philips in Your God Is Too Small (Macmillin, 1961), "are crippled by a limited idea of God." We hear virtually the same warning from Jesus in our Gospel reading this week after he heals a blind man and is reprimanded by the religious authorities for working on the Sabbath. According to Philips' translation of John's Gospel, "My coming into this world is itself a judgment. Those who cannot see have their eyes opened and those who think they can see become blind" (John 9:39).
Check out the amazing account in this week's Story to Live By of a Navy pharmacist's mate who performed a successful appendectomy in a submarine beneath enemy waters during World War II. The seaman, who would have otherwise died, survived -- but like the Pharisees who chastised Jesus, the naval medical officers were very angry when they heard the news. The navy never officially recognized the pharmacist's mate for his heroism until last month. (Be sure to click on the links for the full story -- it makes wonderful homiletic material.)
Look for the second sermon in John's "Caring for Body and Soul" Lenten series in the Scrap Pile. And see the Sermon Starter and Jim Eaton's touching personal story in Shining Moments for stories that will bring home the meaning of the anointing of the future King David in this week's Hebrew scripture reading.
A Story to Live By
Here's Mud in Your Eye
They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. Now it was the Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes.... Some of the Pharisees said, "This man is not from God for he does not observe the Sabbath."
John 9:13-14, 16a
Associated Press reporter Steve Hartsoe wrote a remarkable story this week about a healing that occurred on the USS Seadragon over 60 years ago during World War II:
"Wheeler Lipes performed a successful emergency appendectomy in a submarine 120 feet below the Pacific Ocean -- an act that has finally earned him a medal from the Navy. Lipes, then 22, relied on makeshift instruments -- bent spoons for retractors and alcohol from torpedoes for sterilization. He and an assistant wore pajamas rather than operating room gowns. Though a news report on Wheeler Lipes' feat aboard the USS Seadragon amid World War II won a Pulitzer Prize and prompted the Navy to make a movie about his actions, Lipes was never honored. Until Sunday." (For the full story, click here.)
What was even more remarkable than the successful surgery was the reaction Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes received from the naval medical community. One doctor reminded him that he was not authorized to perform surgery and said it would have been better if he had let Darrel Rector die. Another physician actually tried to hit him. Others in the medical community, according to a National Public Radio report on February 19, 2005, spread rumors that the surgery had never taken place, that it was a lie.
"After we submitted our report, there was a great deal of consternation in the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery. Everyone did then exactly what they would probably do now. They reacted to a situation they knew absolutely nothing about. There was an old warrant officer I knew back at BUMED (US Navy Bureau of Medicine and Surgery) who was on duty the night the message came in about the operation. He told me later how much trouble I had caused him. There were many doctors back there who were very upset about what I had done." (From recollections of Pharmacist's Mate Wheeler Lipes collected for the Naval Historical Center. Click here to view the full document.)
(For more information, click here for the NPR story.)
Shining Moments
The Gift of Myself
by Jim Eaton
...The Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; for this is the one." Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:12b-13a
We know how changed we are when someone embraces the child within us. In 1965, I was a 14-year-old geek in the ninth grade at Bloomfield Junior High School on Quarton Road. My family had moved to Michigan a couple of years before and I'd been sick for a year, so I hadn't really found a place or a circle of friends. My English teacher was Mrs. Sonneborne, a towering cyclone of energy five feet tall who invariably wore spiky high heels. Her room was arranged with the desks in a circle and she would walk around and around as she read to us from Shakespeare. This was during Beatlemania and the boys had been growing out their hair since seventh grade; and the girls all had long hair, too. Mrs. Sonneborne insisted on being able to look people in the eye, and when your bangs were too long, she would pick up a hair clip as she went by her desk, and on her next circuit she would deftly pin up the offending hair. Being "pinned" once was more than enough to get her point.
One day Mrs. Sonneborne assigned everyone to rewrite a folk tale. I'd been reading a lot of drama, so I decided to write a play. It was five pages long, typed in dialogue format, and when I showed it to Mrs. Sonneborne, she had two other kids in the class act it out. It was -- and is! -- a heady feeling to watch someone speak lines you've written. After class, Mrs. Sonneborne kept me for a moment and said something I've never forgotten. "Jim, I didn't know what you were until today. Now I know; you're a writer." And I was. I was still a geek, but I wasn't just a geek, I was a writer. I wrote two more plays for Mrs. Sonneborne, and others after that. A few years later, it occurred to me that writing a worship service was a lot like writing plays, and here I am, still at it. Mrs. Sonneborne was right. I'm a writer, and she saw it. She gave it to me. She surprised me with the gift of myself.
Jim Eaton is pastor of United Congregational Church in Norwich, Connecticut. He is a graduate of Boston University School of Theology and Michigan State University. He loves sailing, good stories, and woodworking.
Sermon Starter
The Anointing
by John Sumwalt
...The Lord said, "Rise and anoint him; for this is the one." Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward.
1 Samuel 16:12b-13a
Did you see the movie The Lion King? Did you notice that there is an anointing at the very beginning of the movie? After the birth of the king's son Simba, all of the animals gather at Pride Rock for the anointing. Rafiki, the baboon in the story who serves as a kind of high priest of the jungle kingdom, marks the baby lion's forehead with oil and then lifts him up for all of the animals to see. The elephants trumpet, the music swells, and the animals all bow down to show their respect for the future king. Rafiki then goes into a cave and draws a picture of Simba on the wall and puts the mark of his anointing on his forehead. Before he has any consciousness of who he is, the most important part of Simba's identity is given to him. He is the son of a king, and he has been anointed as the future king in front of the whole community.
Anointing is serious business. It is holy business.
An anointing is a way of designating a person or an object for a special purpose. Moses anointed the tabernacle in the wilderness according to the specific instructions of the Lord (Exodus 40:1-15).
The anointing of kings and priests and prophets in biblical times was part of their induction into office -- something akin to our modern inauguration ceremonies. But an anointing was viewed as a divine consecration. It was God's mark, God's claim on a person's life for all time. The prophet Samuel anointed the young boy David as the future King of Israel, but David didn't actually become king until he was thirty years old, after he had slain Goliath and had become a great warrior and everyone recognized the mark of God on his life. Then he was anointed again, this time by all the tribes of Israel, and he reined over Israel for forty years (2 Samuel 5:1-5).
Jesus was marked from the beginning as the Anointed, the chosen one of God. All of the stories we love to hear and tell at Christmas and at Easter point to this special designation. Messiah is the Hebrew word for anointed. Christ is the Greek word for anointed. Jesus Christ means literally: Jesus, the Anointed.
Baptism is a kind of anointing. It is the mark of God on all of us who are a part of the church of Jesus Christ. Like Simba in The Lion King, those of us who were baptized as children may have no memory of what took place on the day of our anointing -- but that consecration is the single most defining moment of our lives.
There is an Avery and Marsh song called "Passed through the Waters" which gets at the heart of the meaning of baptism: "We are baptized, I am baptized. We have passed through the waters and that's all that matters. We have passed through the waters, O thanks be to God."
Most of us have passed through the waters, and in terms of what is most important about who we are, that is all that matters -- that mark of God, that sign of saving grace is more important than anything we might do with our lives. You might turn away from God, you might renounce your baptism or forget that you've been baptized, you might commit unspeakable evils unworthy of an anointed Christian, but you will always belong to God. The mark cannot be erased. God will always be after you, before you, around you, forgiving you, saving you, calling you to be the person you have been anointed to be.
In The Lion King, when Simba runs away after Scar has convinced him that he is responsible for his father's death, he tries to forget who he is. He adopts the problem-free philosophy of his new friends, Pumbaa and Timon: "Hakuna Matata." It means no worries for the rest of your days. And for a while Simba is happy just being an ordinary animal enjoying life with his friends. And then one day Nala, his childhood friend and long-lost love, shows up and tells him what has been happening in Pride Land during his absence. She tells how much all of the animals need him to come home and be king. And after some soul-searching and a romp with Nala in the moonlight while Elton John croons his Oscar-winning song "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," he goes home to be the king he was anointed to be. And every creature in the jungle lives happily ever after, except for the evil king Scar who is devoured by the hyenas.
Anointing is serious business. It is holy business.
Scrap Pile
Healing from Heaven
by John Sumwalt
John 3:1-15
Have you ever done something completely out of character, something that would have astounded your family and friends? The man in our story does something completely out of character; something that not only would have astounded his family and friends if they knew, but would have mortified them.
Nicodemus was a man of some substance in Jerusalem. He had property, wealth, position, power, respect -- and with all of this a religion that gave him all of the answers. All he had to do was follow the well laid out rules of his religion, and he was set for a good life. Yet Nicodemus was a troubled man. There was something lacking in his life, something crucial, without which all of the other things he had acquired and accomplished meant nothing.
Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, told of a time in his life when he contemplated suicide.
"During the whole of the year, when I was asking myself almost every minute whether I should or should not put an end to it all with a cord or a pistol... my heart was oppressed by a tormenting feeling. This feeling I cannot describe otherwise than a searching after God. This searching after a God was not an act of my reason, but a feeling, and I say this advisedly, because it was opposed to my way of thinking; it came from the heart. It was a feeling of dread, an orphanhood, of isolation amid things all apart from me, and of hope in a help I knew not from."
John Wesley turned to good works and to a more rigorous religious life. He wrote of his dark night of the soul:
"I began to alter the whole form of my conversation, and to set in earnest upon a new life. I set apart an hour or two a day for religious retirement. I communicated every week. I watched against all sin, whether in word or in deed. I began to aim at and pray for inward holiness.... I began visiting the prisons, assisting the poor and sick in town, and doing what other good I could, by my presence or my little fortune, to the bodies and souls of all men. Yet when, after continuing some years in this course, I apprehended myself to be near death, I could not find that all this gave me any comfort or any assurance of acceptance with God." (Excerpt from The Journal of John Wesley, A.M., edited by Nehemiah Curnock; cited in Conversions, edited by Hugh T. Kerr & John M. Mulder, Eerdmans, 1983, pp. 56-57.)
Have you been there? Do you know what it's like to feel a hollowness down deep in your soul? You might ignore it for awhile, perhaps for years, but sooner or later it demands attention. The hollowness becomes a spiritual panic. Perhaps this is what Nicodemus felt when his search led him to Jesus.
Nick knew everyone was talking about Jesus, the power of his teachings and his miraculous healing abilities. "What would it hurt to talk to Jesus?" Nick thought. "I'll go see him. I'll go after dark. No one will know." So as the sun sinks below the horizon we find our man Nick, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, knock, knock, knocking on Jesus' door. To his great surprise and bewilderment, Nick discovers that heaven is knock, knock, knocking on his door. Jesus is inviting him to see more of the holy than he ever imagined was possible. And to use another worn out cliche from the early Bob Dylan era, it "blows his mind."
Nick is a straight-laced, left-brained, Mr. Spock, scholarly type of guy. And then he sits down with Jesus, the embodiment of... well, you know who, and this you-know-who is about to take him way beyond his comfort zone where no Pharisee has ever gone before. Nick and Jesus begin this wonderful left-brained guy/right-brained guy conversation. Actually it is more of a non-conversation, because they are speaking different languages. Jesus is all metaphors all the time: "I am the light of the world, living water, bread of life, born from above." Nick is a literalist in the law, used to certainties. Nick wants everything pigeonholed, neatly labeled, and analyzed. (Mission Reflections, Chris Lockley, http://www.mncuca.org.au/mission.html)
Nick says to Jesus, "Uh, Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God." A little buttering up never hurts. Always begin with something positive when talking to someone who scares the "heck" out of you.
Jesus could have said, "What do you mean, 'we'? There is only one of you standing there. Who is this 'we'?"
The "we," of course, as Jesus well knew, referred to all the other guys in the Pharisee union, you know, the guys who had been criticizing Jesus for not washing his hands before dinner; for eating with prostitutes, tax collectors, and other sinners; for healing on the Sabbath; the same Pharisees who lay in wait trying to catch him saying something against the law, the same Pharisees who were plotting to kill him. Why do you think Nick went at night?
What Jesus did say is "...no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above."
This goes right over Nick's head. He has no idea what Jesus is talking about. It does not compute in his left-brained world. He says, "How can anyone be born after growing old?" (Here comes the left-brain, literalist stuff.) "Can anyone enter a second time into the mother's womb and be born (again)?"
Jesus says, "...no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and the spirit. What is born of flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit." Nick is stunned. He has no idea what to do with this information. He says, "How can these things be?"
How indeed? We are still asking this question today -- all of us in this left-brained, scientifically trained western world. "How can these things be?" We don't get it. Jesus says, "Let me try again." He speaks slowly now, as if addressing a dim-witted dog. "I tell you what I know... I tell you what I have seen... yet you don't believe me. If I have told you about earthly things and you don't believe, how can I tell you about heavenly things?" Don't you see it, Nick? It is as plain as the nose on your face.
Nick knows there must be more to life than he has known thus far. He yearns for his life to be different, to be, as they used to say in the army ads, "all that he can be." And Jesus tells him just what to do. "Be born from above." But Nick just doesn't get it, perhaps doesn't want to get it. What Jesus is asking of him requires giving up control of his life, something most of us are reticent to do. Nick cannot surrender his will. It is the hardest thing any of us has to do. Nick wants to change, but he also wants to control the change.
Philip Chard is going to be our guest in the "Caring for Body and Soul" healers series this Wednesday night. Philip is a therapist, and he also writes a weekly award-winning column which appears on Tuesdays in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Philip sometimes encourages clients who (like Nick) are unable to figure out something critically important to their well-being to seek out something in nature that seems to have a personal appeal -- and let it speak to them. He encouraged one young man to "walk about in woods of his choice until he came upon a tree that seemed to embody the characteristics he desired." The young man was to "get acquainted" with the tree -- study it up close, then at a distance, and then from different angles. Then he was to feel the bark, touch the leaves, and smell the fragrance of the tree. Philip said he could not convince him to taste the tree.
Then, and this definitely is not left-brained, "he was instructed to assume a posture that approximated the general look of the tree... to 'do' what the tree was doing." Philip says, "This is a bit tricky for the literal-minded, but just as a child can pretend to be a bird, a shark, or a snake to which she or he bears little physical resemblance, so an adult can figuratively reflect almost any creature or thing."
The young man was very reluctant at first (who of us wouldn't be?). But when he finally tried it, "he was surprised to find himself feeling the qualities of the tree -- youthful strength, determination to grow, harmony with surroundings, quiet patience, and consistency. Buoyed by this new experience, he positioned himself with his back against the tree, closed his eyes, and felt himself joining with it." "You'll think this is weird," the young man said, "but for a moment I almost felt like I was drawing strength from the tree."
Chard says, "I have worked with clients who accomplished blending with mountains, rivers, boulders, animals (both wild and domesticated), fog, sand, surf, trees and other flora, prairies, deserts, gardens (both natural and human-cultivated), waterfalls, caves, snowdrifts... even mud. Many, though not all, found that these encounters touched them in some vital place, precipitating emotional and spiritual changes."
A little over a year ago, I was walking with our dog very early one morning along the creek that runs through our 25 acres in Richland County. Something drew me toward a gurgling sound that comes from water flowing rapidly over rocks. As I drew near I found myself suddenly weeping. I had no idea where the tears came from or why. Somehow the flowing water had released a flow inside of me that needed to come out, some sadness, some sorrow that I had not known was there. The experience left me strangely refreshed and thankful.
I wrote to Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of Deep End of the Ocean and another Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel columnist, when I was editing the series of Vision Stories books to ask her if she had ever had a mystical experience that she might be willing to share. She wrote back, "I am about as mystical as a fencepost, but my husband tells of a time when mountain climbing that he had an overwhelming feeling of oneness with all of creation."
When people ask him about the meaning of these kind of experiences, Philip Chard says he makes "little or no response, not because I'm secretive, but because rediscovering one's bond with the earth is an experiential event, not one composed of religious or intellectual dogma. It's not that I would rather avoid interpreting the meaning of these events. I truly don't know what they mean. I do, however, have some sense of what these dances with nature accomplish, so I encourage people to make contact and feel the healing and sustaining qualities of the earth. However they choose to pin the intellectual tail on the donkey is their business, not my own." (Philip Sutton Chard, The Healing Earth: Nature's Medicine for the Troubled Soul, NorthWord Press, 1994, pp. 73-74. [Phone 800-328-3895 to order.])
I would be willing to bet, if I were a betting person, that if Nicodemus were Philip Chard's client, Chard would have told him to go stand in a stiff wind somewhere till he understood what it was trying to teach him. Jesus said, "The wind blows where it chooses and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from and where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit."
Excerpts from a sermon preached at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee on February 20, 2005.
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About the Editors
John E. Sumwalt is the pastor of Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee, and is the author of eight books for CSS. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Dubuque Theological Seminary (UDTS), John received the Herbert Manning Jr. award for Parish Ministry from UDTS in 1997. John is known in the Milwaukee area for his one-minute radio spots which always include a brief story. He concludes each spot by saying, "I'm John Sumwalt with 'A Story to Live By' from Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church."
John has done numerous storytelling events for civic, school, and church groups, as well as on radio and television. He has performed at a number of fundraisers for the homeless, the hungry, Habitat for Humanity, and women's shelters. Since the fall of 1999, when he began working on the Vision Stories series, he has led seminars and retreats around the themes "A Safe Place to Tell Visions," "Vision Stories in the Bible and Today," and coming this spring: "Soul Growth: Discovering Lost Spiritual Dimensions." To schedule a seminar or a retreat, write to jsumwalt@naspa.net or phone 414-257-1228.
Joanne Perry-Sumwalt is director of Christian Education at Wauwatosa Avenue United Methodist Church in Milwaukee. Jo is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside, with a degree in English and writing. She has co-authored two books with John, Life Stories: A Study In Christian Decision Making and Lectionary Tales For The Pulpit: 62 Stories For Cycle B. Jo writes original curriculum for church classes. She also serves as the secretary of the Wisconsin chapter of the Christian Educators Fellowship (CEF), and is a member of the National CEF.
Jo and John have been married since 1975. They have two grown children, Kathryn and Orrin. They both love reading, movies, long walks with Chloe (their West Highland Terrier), and working on their old farmhouse in southwest Wisconsin.
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StoryShare, March 6, 2005, issue.
Copyright 2005 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., P.O. Box 4503, Lima, Ohio 45802-4503.
