Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
September 28, 2003
Proverbs 3: 1-18
William Willimon, a chaplain at Duke University shares a story from his youth about a certain Sunday night in 1963. In his words, “That night, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us, regular attendees of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Methodist Church, made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox.
“That evening has come to represent a watershed in the history of Christendom, South Carolina style. On that night, Greenville, South Carolina – the last pocket of resistance to secularity in the Western world – the church was served notice that Greenville would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free lunch. The Fox Theater went head to head with the church over who would provide the worldview for the young. That night in 1963, the Fox Theater won the first skirmish.” And, I think we could add, has won many skirmishes since. Willimon has got his finger on the life of faith for many of us. It is easy to be faithful when it is convenient, when it suits us, when we have nothing better to do, when there isn’t a good show playing. When our calendar isn’t busy, when there isn’t a soccer tournament.
I was once at a meeting of preachers and had the speaker tell the preachers, “You guys,” he said, “You lives your lives as functional atheists. Oh yeah, you say you believe in God, but as you go through the week, as you have joys and sorrows, as you think about your sermon, as you do all your administrative duties, whatever you do, do you really spend a lot of time considering what God would have you do? Do you really spend a lot of time thinking just where God is in your hearts or do you just kind of go through each day pretty much living as if there is no God?” Functional atheist.
But the sages of Proverbs want to know: when it comes to faith, where is your heart?
“Do not let loyalty and faithfulness forsake you; bind them around your neck, write them on the tablet of your heart….Let your heart keep my commandments…Trust in the Lord with all your heart.”…. With your entire self, with all that you are. You gotta have heart.
I believe Mother Teresa really got to the very heart of our text and its challenge when she once said this: “If you are preoccupied with people who are talking about the poor, you scarcely have time to talk to the poor. Some people talk about hunger, but they don’t come and say, ‘Mother Teresa, here is five rupees. Buy food for these people.’ I had the most extraordinary experience once in Bombay. There was a big conference about hunger. I was supposed to go that meeting, but I lost the way. Suddenly I came to that place and right in front of the door to where hundreds of people were talking about food and hunger, I found a dying man. I took him home. He died there. He died of hunger. And the people inside were talking about how in 15 years we will have so much food, so much this, so much that, and that man died. Do you see the difference?” It is so easy to give a lecture on hunger and do absolutely nothing to help the hungry. It is so easy to talk endlessly about the need for affordable housing in Sebastopol and never build a house. It is so easy to talk about faith, and still keep it separate from our lives.
Maybe our text from Proverbs asks too much of us. “Don’t ask me if God is in my heart. And for God’s sake, don’t ask me if God is in my checkbook. Don’t bother me with all this; God knows I’m doing the best I can.” But the truth of the matter is this: the question is not if you will give your life, the question is to whom will you give it? And if we do not ponder the hard questions asked by Proverbs, if we don’t really think about what’s in our hearts, then we will end up offering our lives on lesser altars before smaller gods. I think of the classic line from Sloan Wilson’s, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit: “How smoothly one becomes, not a cheat exactly, not really a liar; just a man who’ll say anything for pay.” As we journey through life, just what is being written on the tablets of our hearts?
Have always liked these words from Samuel Miller, “We must stop protecting ourselves. We lock not only the doors of our houses in fear, but our souls as well… We are afraid to let our souls play. We are cautious lest we be taken for fools. We are on guard lest we be surprised. We keep the reins taut upon our souls lest they carry us beyond ourselves. We fear too much joy; our laughter is uncertain; our affection hesitates. We open our hand but our heart is covered…. We are careful to do only what we have always done and know how to do well, so we never break the dull repetition of the old routine for the new creation in God. Crawl out of these tombs and prisons – there is a world of light and freedom waiting! Have faith in God. Stop riding the brakes on the heart. The soul will never grow, tied down in bed, with the shades drawn.”
“Incline your heart, keep my commandments in your heart, trust God with all your heart.” Finally, what I think the sage of Proverbs is talking about, what I am pleading for, is faith – faith as the eye of the heart; a faith that enables us to see deep down beneath the face of things; which enables us to see that this world is indeed God’s creation, that God made us out of God’s peace to live in peace, out of God’s light to dwell in light, out of God’s love to be loved and loving.
Can it be true? No, of course, it cannot. How can it possibly be true? You can read the papers and listen to the news as well as I. And yet, I always come back to the words of my old friend Fred Buechner. He says, “Every once in a while in the world, and every once in a while in ourselves, there is something else to read – there are places and times, inner ones and outer ones, where something like peace happens, something like love happens. And when they happen, we should hold on to them for dear life, because of course they are dear life. They are glimpses and whispers from afar: that peace, light and love are where life ultimately comes from…what at its heart life truly is. By faith we know this, and I think only by faith, because there is no other way to know it...’Your faith has made you whole,’ Jesus said to the woman who touched the hem of his garment, and maybe by grace, by luck, by holding fast to whatever of him we can touch, such faith as we have will make us whole enough to become something like human at last – to see something of the power and the glory and the holiness beneath the world’s lost face.”
And in the meantime, we hope, we trust, we continue to care, and we dare to expose our naked hearts to God.