A mother in the choir had a dilemma.
She wanted to bring her six-year old son to church, but realized he was
too young to sit unattended. Her
solution, have the boy sit with his grandfather – her dad. The only problem was grandpa was prone to
falling asleep during the sermon. The
mother told her son she would pay him $5 if he kept his grandfather from
nodding off. Well, at some point during
the rather lengthy sermon, the faint sound of snoring wafted through the
church. Sure enough, grandpa was fast
asleep. After the service the mother
questioned her son. Why didn’t he keep
his grandfather awake? Didn’t he want to
make $5? “Well, I did,” the little boy
said, “until grandpa offered me $20 to let him sleep.”
Sermons. This past week, while
going through some of our historic artifacts, I came across this booklet. It is a hand-written, pen and ink sermon on
Luke chapter 8, verse 8 – “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Now, there is no indication who wrote the
sermon, but notations in the front and back of the booklet indicate when and
where it was preached. It was first
delivered as a lecture in London, England on April 1, 1792 and then in February
of 1793. One week after the preacher
arrived in the United States he delivered this sermon in Norfolk on March 20,
1796. The notes indicate it was given in
several other Virginia churches through 1808, but there is no record of it
being preached here or how the booklet came to reside in our parish archives.
I spent this past
week transcribing the sermon and let me just say before anyone suggests I
should preach it here and now, please know that it is about six times longer
than my typical sermon and – if I may be so modest – not nearly as
gripping. But, because I know you are
curious, allow me to give you just a wee taste of what a sermon sounded like in
1792 by reading aloud its first two sentences:
He that knew what
was in man, knew also of that slowness of apprehension, their grossnesses of
conception, their blindness and inadvertency, the love of pleasures, the
distraction of worldly cares, and the fear of persecution, were likely to prove
great obstacles to their believing and embracing the doctrine of
Christianity, and strong temptation to make them revolt from it, either in
faith or practice, before they were well established in it. And therefore, he acquaints them in this
chapter under the Parable of the Sower, with the whole state and nature of the
Christian dispensation, the different success and with his Gospel then did and
would ever after meet with, and the main hindrances of its reception.
Shall I continue, “nay farther” (my favorite phrase from the sermon)
with “the instruction in righteousness”, or do those of you in my “charge” –
“careless and inattentive hearers” though you may be – desire and have appetite
for me to move on?
Historic sermons. In this
morning’s first reading we hear the very first sermon ever preached in the
Christian church. The promised gift of
the Holy Spirit has come upon the small band of Jesus’ followers and
immediately they are empowered to proclaim and live out the faith. Peter preaches the first sermon to a crowd which
has gathered to figure out what all the commotion is about. And what is the very first thing he says to
them? What is the first line of the
first sermon ever preached? Here it is:
“We are not
drunk, as you suppose.”
Now that is a fantastic way to begin a
sermon ever, isn’t it!
It may not be what you expected, but at
its heart it is something we still have to address in our own time; namely the
need to give an account of why we are a part of what our Presiding Bishop calls
‘the Jesus movement.’ The majority of
people in our society have little or no connection to an organized faith
community, they have no idea why we are here, what the things we doing here
mean, and what we receive from our experience of being here.
Why do you give your money to support the
operations of this church? Why do you
give your time to teach in the Sunday School, change the Altar hangings, sing
in the Choir, or pull weeds? What fuels
your deep compassion, your readiness to forgive, your strength in adversity,
and your sense of hope and joy even at the darkest times?
The first sermon was preached because
three things happened:
First, something
very powerful happened to the faithful.
Second, the world
new something happened to them, but didn’t know what, how, or why.
And third, Peter
not only felt the need to explain himself, but also understood the importance
of taking advantage of the opportunity.
“We are not drunk,” he said. “God’s Spirit has been poured into us.”
God’s Spirit has been poured into
us. Think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. Do you remember how, in last week’s sermon, I
described God as being a perfect Relational Harmony – that this Relational
Harmony is at the core of all existence and the fundamental essence of all
reality? I said the life of this
Relational Harmony revolves around the qualities of mutuality, generosity,
selflessness, and respect.
When Jesus came to earth, he manifested
this perfect Relational Harmony in human flesh and bone. We could see it, touch it, engage it, listen
to it, learn from it. Peter, in
explaining what has happened to him and his fellow believers, proclaims something
even more astonishing: the perfect Relational Harmony, the core of all
existence and the fundamental essence of all reality, had been poured into them. It lives in them and they in it. It lives through them and they through
it. And by referencing the prophet Joel,
Peter touches on a historic awareness of the perfect Relational Harmony’s
desire to share its life with all people and all of creation.
What do you believe? How do you describe the hope that is in
you? We who are here today no longer do
what everyone else is doing. We are a
distinct minority. The grim possibility
of eternal damnation does not hold sway in our time the way it did in
1792. I can’t image you are here
primarily to avoid it. So why are you
here?
In the year 2260, if someone is tinkering
with the ancient and long forgotten method of opening a Microsoft Word document
on the hard drive of a personal computer and just so happens to come across
today’s sermon, I am confident they will find it to be a curious novelty with a
kind of language and process of thought distinctly unfamiliar to their
own. But I am also confident of two more
things: First, the Christian faith will
be alive and well, but perhaps organized in a way very different from our
time. And second, the faithful will
still need to give an account not so much of what they believe, but why they
believe it.
I am not prepared for the fallout of what
might happen should we all rush out of this service speaking in different
languages, but I do expect us to be occupied by the Spirit of the perfect
Relational Harmony and to manifest its qualities of mutuality, generosity,
selflessness, and respect. In and of
itself, this will cause people to take notice and to wonder what in the world
is going on with us. What will you say
to them? A good opening entrée –
something to lighten the mood – might be to follow Peter’s lead: “Well, I am
not drunk.” What you say from here is up
to you. Why are you here?
