Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
Morning Worship · September 11, 2005
Prayer of the Day
Dear God, thank you for the invitation to be here today. Thank you for the warmth of your Spirit which encourages us, strengthens us, and urges us toward compassion. Amen.
Scripture
Romans 14:10-14
Why do you criticize other followers of the Lord? Why do you look down on them? The day is coming when God will judge all of us. In the Scriptures God says,
“I swear by my very life that everyone will kneel down and praise my name!”
And so, each of us must give an account to God for what we do.
We must stop judging others. We must also make up our minds not to upset anyone’s faith. I know and am convinced by the Lord Jesus that there is nothing unclean of itself; but to him who considers anything to be unclean, to him it is unclean.
Message
Turning Up the Heat on Life
Kim Ryan
He became a Christian late in his life as an adult. Previously, before that, he had no use for followers of Jesus Christ. He wasn’t happy to simply ignore them. He advocated against them - strongly. And in the midst of his critical and, even at times, violent antagonism toward them, he had an encounter, an experience with the Living Christ. It was profound. It was mysterious. It was transforming. It was life changing. It is a story we find in the New Testament in the book of Acts.
Years afterward, he would write a letter out of his wisdom and out of his experience of learning how to follow the teaching and life witness of Jesus Christ. Writing from his heart to a group of new Christians in Rome, he wrote friend-to-friend about the friendship, the relationship, the community in Christ. His name was Paul, and he offered instructions about what is required when people of different backgrounds, with strongly-held opinions, try to live together as a community of faith.
So we turn to Romans 14 to find his words:
Let us therefore no long pass judgment on one another. Why do you pass judgment on your brother or sister? Or you-??why do you despise your brother or sister? For we all stand before the judgment of God, as it is written, “As I live,” says the Lord, “every knee shall bow to me and every tongue shall give praise to God. So then each of us will be accountable to God. Let us, therefore, no longer pass judgment on one another, but resolve instead never to put a stumbling block or a hindrance in the way of another.”
Later, within that same chapter, Paul would add the words of encouragement, “Walk in love. Pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.” These words are still relevant in days such as this. Aren’t they? Especially in days such as this. “Walk in love. Pursue what makes for peace and for mutual upbuilding.”
Let me share with you another reading that expresses a remarkably similar sentiment:
“Here I am accepted as an equal, as one of them, and that’s really something. It’s special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we’re that close. Somehow there’s an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other’s triumphs, and when one gets hurt, we all bleed. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. It’s great. It turns up the heat on life.”
Well, any guesses where that quote originates? Sounds a little like something Paul wrote in one of his letters, but actually it was written by a Christian man very different than Paul, one who grew up and into the Christian faith sitting in his Mama’s lap listening to her sing gospel songs and old hymns. He was nurtured in the faith his whole life, and it sustained him his whole life. Those words belong to Johnny Cash, from his autobiography. When I read them, I was struck by how they resonated with the very best of genuine community - Christian community. Paul would approve. Only Johnny wasn’t writing about a church experience. He was writing about his early years playing on the “Louisiana Hayride Radio Show” on their Saturday night programs in 1955.
Now, I know some of you are a bit distracted at this moment, because you’re wondering, “And why was she reading the autobiography of Johnny Cash?” Well, I’ll tell you. When you’re 18-year-old son is in Brazil for a year, and he e-mails you and says, “Mom, read the autobiography of Johnny Cash. I think you’ll like it,” you read it. Anything to feel closer to that boy. The next morning at 8 a.m., I was at the bookstore buying Johnny Cash’s book. But I guess that is only expected that he would suggest a book for me to read, given the books I slipped into his suitcase as he was departing: Frederick Buechner’s Listen to Life, and Marcus Borg’s The Heart of Christianity.
Gage was right. I did like Johnny’s autobiography. He tells a story with all its ups and downs, and downs don’t get much lower than in terms of his drug abuse. He tells of his career, his faith, his spiritual journey. He tells of one day literally crawling inside a cave intending to get lost in its tunnels and die, and then the remarkable experience of God somehow leading him out of that cave and into a new chance for life.
I learned some things I didn’t know, and I unlearned some things I thought I knew. Like, Johnny Cash never spent time in prision. I bet you thought he did. He spent a few nights in jail, but they were just over-nights, and he said that was a good thing. That was where he needed to be, but he was never in prison for any felony or for any time at all.
His description of “The Hayride Show” really caught my attention. His writing about a radio show and its participants couldn’t have been a better description of Church as Paul instructed and hoped it could be, and as I have experienced it here at Broadway Christian Church.
Hear his words again now that you know the context:
“Here I am accepted as an equal, as one of them, and that’s really something. It’s special. The people around me feel like brothers and sisters. We hardly know each other, but we’re that close. Somehow there’s an immediate bonding between total strangers. We share each other’s triumphs, and when one gets hurt, we all bleed. I’ve never experienced anything like this before. It’s great. It turns up the heat on life.”
Isn’t that true? Being a part of a community, a genuine community, especially being a part of this Christian community, “turns up the heat on life.” It turns up the joy. It turns up the compassion. It turns up the purpose and the meaning of our lives. It even turns up the suffering, because we don’t allow one of us to suffer alone, and it certainly turns up the friendship.
Years ago, a professor faced a room full of minister-hope-to-bes and said, “Now remember; you can’t have friends in the congregation you serve. His name was Dr. Stone, and I had held on to every word that proceeded from Dr. Stone’s mouth. In these years since, I’ve forgotten a lot of what he had to say, but I’ve never forgotten his warning, “You can’t have friends in the congregation you serve.”
Well, after my first five years in ministry in Indiana, I might have agreed with him. There was the painful discovery that the elder who had postured himself as our friend, who had pretended to be our friend, was actually the source of innuendo and false statements, the behind-the-back sabotage, the phone calls that wear a congregation down and breaks a minister’s heart and spirit, and keeps people away from the church, sometimes forever.
But these 17 years at Broadway have been very different. Many times over the years I’ve wanted to tell Dr. Stone that he was mistaken. To share life, to share all of life as we do here and as we have is to discover a quality of friendship, a quality of relationship, a quality of community that is unparalleled, and I would wager even to that of the “Hayride Radio Show.”
Walking in love, pursuing what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding, indeed, it turns up the heat on life.
You know, I should have called Dr. Stone the time Phil Fichter sat in the waiting room with me while I waited to have the first treatment for my cancer. I should have called him when Martha Jolly rented a movie and brought me lunch following the surgery that took care of the cancer finally, and when she crawled into my king-sized bed with me, and we watched, and laughed, and cried our way through the movie Phenomenon.
I should have called him the morning that Karen Meeds knocked on my front door. You see, Karen knew I was preparing the funeral service for our sweet Melissa Howland. Karen came to my front porch with roses from her garden and asked if she could pray for me. She came in, and she sat at my kitchen table, and she prayed for me, and she prayed for Rick, and she prayed for all of us. She didn’t know Melissa, but she prayed for all of us as we prepared to say farewell.
I should have called Dr. Stone several years ago when Bill and I were having marital problems, and when the friendship and non judgment of this congregation gave us the room to find and discover how we could walk in love with each other, how we could pursue what makes for peace, how we could find ways to be mutually up-building in our relationship. As some of you know, six years later, Bill and I live separately. We live in separate houses, but every Sunday that I’m not preaching, we sit together at the 11 o’clock worship service with our family, side by side. That is only because of the grace of God, and the grace of this congregation, and the friendship that has loved us and supported us.
I should have called Dr. Stone lots of times with all that we have shared, but especially a few weeks ago when we put Gage on that plane to Brazil, and I learned your heart can actually leave your body, and you will continue breathing. Who knew? But when I got back, on my porch was a sack. Inside the sack was this lovely blue heart of glassware from my friend, from my sister in Christ, Syd Stansberry. With it came this card which said, “Some days I stand on the ledge of life, uncertain about tomorrow. I’m unsure about my destiny. You reach out to me. I see security in your hand. I gladly give mine to you.” It’s a quote from Maya Angelou.
“Hello, Dr. Stone. You were wrong! I just thought you should know.”
The only way to live, to truly live as a minister, or a doctor, or a teacher, or a plumber, or an electrician, a mother, a son, a father, a daughter, is to know a place and a people where we are accepted as equals, where we share each other’s triumphs, and when one gets hurt, we all bleed - a place and a people that turns up the heat on life.
Now, you know, sometimes the heat in our lifes gets turned up all on its own, like on 9/11 four years ago or Hurricane Katrina in recent weeks. There are moments, there are days when we know with such clarity that all that really matters is walking in love and pursuing what makes for peace and mutual upbuilding. Those moments are bittersweet moments, because they are filled with such saddness. And they are filled with such clarity of truth of what counts in this life.
So, today, we thank God for the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, for the “Shelter from the Storm” concert, and all those relief efforts, for our own Week of Compassion that will be there in ways we can’t even imagaine at this moment. We thank God for the Community Disaster Relief efforts right here in Columbia, and we thank God for the two pastors in Houston, Texas who extended an invitation to every faith group in that city to come together, to organize together for all the relief efforts for the Katrina victims. These are not just faith groups calling themselves Christians. These are Christians extending the invitation beyond themselves in the name and the Spirit of Christ. One of those pastors said about this endeavor on the “Today Show” on Thursday morning, “We have religions in Houston that I didn’t even know existed, but we are all working together.”
Paul would call that “walking in love, pursuing what makes for peace, for mutual upbuilding.” And I would guess that God is smiling.
I hope and pray the world is watching this particular Christian witness and others like it in the weeks ahead. I hope it gets a lot of attention and a lot more than its four minutes on the “Today Show,” because, Lord knows, there’s some so-called Christian witnesses I’d rather the world didn’t watch and pay such close attention to.
Today, Broadway is already acting into the clarity of what really matters, what we can do to help, and we will do more, thanks to the leadership of our Outreach Department. What a relief. What a gift. What a joy to be a part of a faith community that believes and knows our highest calling, our deepest responsibility, our contribution in this world and in the Christian family itself is to pursue Paul’s instructions all of the time. All of the time! Turning up the heat on life is what we do every day here - 24/7, 52 weeks a year, year after year, in between the 9/11s and the Hurricane Katrinas.
Today we will join the efforts of relief and support, but the truth is, every day, whenever any one of us is standing on the ledge of life, holding the hand of encouragement, of hope, and of security. Thanks be to God, and thanks be through God for that gift.
And we say together... “Amen.”
Benediction
God and Friend, thank you for this community of faith. Thank you for this house where we are offered a life of peace and passion. Make the doors of our hearts ever open to drawing in new and old friends eager to meet with you in love that is judgment free. Amen.
