Sermons & Meditations

Hebrews 11:1-3; 12:1-2
Presented September 25th, 2005, by J.D. Kline
The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost

The eleventh chapter of Hebrews offers a roll call of the faithful, examples of those gone before us who chose to base their lives on the conviction that there is something and Someone greater than ourselves. The Message paraphrases the early verses of chapter eleven this way:

The fundamental fact of existence is that this trust in God, this faith, is the firm foundation under everything that makes life worth living. It’s our handle on what we can’t see. The act of faith is what distinguished our ancestors, set them above the crowd.

By faith, we see the world called into existence by God’s word, what we see created by what we don’t see.

And then the writer of the letter to the Hebrews continues on, offering a representative list of those who exemplify a risky faith, a faith that demands that we count the cost of discipleship. After citing several of the faithful by name, the writer then turns to unnamed persons who nevertheless have also taken the risk of staking their lives on the call of God.

The list continues right up until today, and this morning we remember those Highland Avenue “saints” of the past generation who have gone before us. Saints not because they attained perfection in their lives, but saints—as defined in the New Testament—as those who have decided that their relationship with God shall be the foundation that makes life worth living.

Tom Long, professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, was one of the speakers at the Festival of Homiletics I attended last spring. Long lamented that the church has lost the art of helping people die well, that we live in the midst of a culture that, on the one hand, is death denying, while on the other hand, is infatuated with death. Death denying, in that we find death such an uncomfortable subject, and we are bombarded with advertising that suggests that if we only use the right products, we may well defy the process of aging. At the same time, our culture reflects a fascination with death. What else could explain the thousands of deaths that fill prime time television each year? One author has asserted that in our culture, death is akin to pornography. We view it as voyeurs, but we don’t want consideration of death entering into the respectable parts of our living.

A town council in Colorado a few years back made the decision to replace all “dead end” street signs in the town limits with signs that announce instead, “No outlet.” Said one resident, “It just isn’t very pleasant to look out first thing in the morning and see a sign that reads dead end.” Intellectually, of course, we all know that we will die, but we little plan our lives with that reality in view.

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Romans 13:8-14
Presented September 4th, 2005, by J.D. Kline
Labor Day Sunday

Martin Luther King, Jr. preached the last Sunday morning worship service of his life at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. It was the 31st of March 1968, only 5 days before he was assassinated, and the tile of the sermon was “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” King began the sermon by reminding his hearers of Washington Irving’s well-known story of “Rip Van Winkle,” asserting that the most unique aspect of the story was not simply that Rip Van Winkle slept for twenty years. Much more, during those twenty years a revolution occurred. When Van Winkle went up into the mountain, King George III of England ruled the land in which he lived, but when Van Winkle came down twenty years later, George Washington was president of a new nation. Rip Van Winkle had slept through a revolution!

After reminding his hearers of the Rip Van Winkle story, Martin Luther King asserted that “one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change and yet they fail to develop new attitudes, the new mental responses that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.” In King’s mind, of course, it was the unfolding civil rights movement, challenging the fabric of racism at the core of our society, that all too many were missing. Even more, there was a human rights revolution literally exploding around the world, with all manner of persons standing up for freedom, justice, and peace. Proclaimed King in his sermon that Sunday morning, “Yes, we do live in a period where changes are taking place and there is still the voice crying through the vista of time saying, ‘Behold, I make all things new, former things are passed away.’”

Indeed, this affirmation that God is in the business of making all things new stands at the very heart of Christ’s gospel message. And our high calling as Christ’s followers is to begin now to live as if God’s new creation were fully present among us. Surely this is what the apostle Paul has in mind in this morning’s Scripture lesson, from the thirteenth chapter of the letter to the Romans. Paul is reminding the Christian community of the necessity of being awake and alert to the unfolding of a new day. “It is now the moment for you to wake from sleep” (13:11), prods the apostle. “The night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light” (v. 12). Paul uses figurative language to speak of the new reality that is unfolding—life in the kingdom of God. And Paul reminds his hearers that to become disciples or followers of Jesus is to embrace a markedly new way of life. To follow Jesus, the one whose life and ministry, death and resurrection inaugurates the new age, is to choose to live by light rather than darkness, peace rather than violence, compassion rather than injustice, hope rather than despair.

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