William B. Lawrence - "When the Gifts of God Aren't Enough" (August 3, 1997)
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- | Before you hear the gospel lesson for this morning, | 0:10 |
I should probably (murmurs faintly). | 0:15 | |
In the verses that David is about to read, | 0:19 | |
Jesus is not in a very good mood. | 0:22 | |
It's not a mood of anger, | 0:26 | |
such as the occasion when he overturned | 0:28 | |
the tables of the moneychangers, | 0:30 | |
nor is it a mood of grief, | 0:33 | |
such as when he wept at the death of Lazarus. | 0:35 | |
It is, perhaps, best described | 0:40 | |
as a mood of deep disappointment. | 0:42 | |
These verses in the gospel of John form a portion | 0:46 | |
of a much larger story in that sixth chapter. | 0:49 | |
Thousands of people had gathered | 0:54 | |
on a grassy plain to hear Jesus teach. | 0:56 | |
A few hours later, more than their spiritual hunger | 0:59 | |
had to be fed, they were physically hungry. | 1:03 | |
And from the fragments of five loaves | 1:09 | |
and two fish offered by a little boy, | 1:11 | |
Jesus fashioned a feast for the thousands, | 1:13 | |
and then he left, crossing the Sea of Galilee | 1:18 | |
only to find that most of the crowd had followed him there. | 1:23 | |
And that's where his mood of disappointment shows. | 1:28 | |
Listen. | 1:32 | |
- | "So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus | 1:41 |
"nor his disciples were there, they themselves got | 1:43 | |
"into the boats and went to Capernaum | 1:46 | |
"looking for Jesus. | 1:48 | |
"When they found him on the other side | 1:50 | |
"of the sea, they said to him, | 1:52 | |
"'Rabbi, when did you come here?' | 1:54 | |
"Jesus answered them, 'Very truly | 1:57 | |
"'I tell you, you are looking for me | 2:00 | |
"'not because you saw signs, | 2:03 | |
"'but because you ate your fill of the loaves. | 2:05 | |
"'Do not work for the food that perishes, | 2:08 | |
"'but for the food that endures for eternal life, | 2:11 | |
"'which the Son of Man will give you. | 2:14 | |
"'For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.' | 2:17 | |
"Then they said to him, 'What must we do | 2:21 | |
"'to perform the works of God?'" | 2:23 | |
"Jesus answered them, 'This is the work of God, | 2:26 | |
"'that you believe in him who he has sent.' | 2:29 | |
"So they said to him, 'What sign are you going | 2:33 | |
"'to give us then so that we may see it | 2:35 | |
"'and believe you, what work are you performing? | 2:38 | |
"'Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness. | 2:42 | |
"'As it is written, "He gave them bread | 2:45 | |
"'"from heaven to eat."' | 2:47 | |
"Then Jesus said to them, 'Very truly I tell you, | 2:49 | |
"'it was not Moses who gave you | 2:53 | |
"'the bread from heaven, but it is my Father | 2:55 | |
"'who gives you true bread from heaven. | 2:58 | |
"'For the bread of God is that | 3:00 | |
"'which comes down from heaven | 3:02 | |
"'and gives life to the world.' | 3:04 | |
"They said to him, 'Sir, give us this bread always.' | 3:07 | |
"Jesus said to them, 'I am the bread of life. | 3:11 | |
"'Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, | 3:13 | |
"'and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.'" | 3:17 | |
This is the word of the Lord. | 3:21 | |
Thanks be to God. | 3:23 | |
- | So the people wanted bread. | 3:28 |
They wanted enough bread to fill themselves always. | 3:31 | |
They wanted to know what they had to do | 3:36 | |
in order to get such bread always. | 3:38 | |
And a disappointed Jesus tried to tell them again. | 3:43 | |
It is not a matter of what you do. | 3:48 | |
It's a matter of what you are given. | 3:52 | |
"The bread you eat," he said, | 3:56 | |
"is a sign of the bread of life | 3:59 | |
"you receive by believing | 4:00 | |
"and accepting the gift of God." | 4:03 | |
And Jesus said, "I am the gift of God." | 4:07 | |
So much of the Bible is a celebration of God's gifts. | 4:16 | |
The fourth chapter of the letter to Ephesians | 4:20 | |
read earlier in the service finds the apostle, | 4:22 | |
perhaps Paul, pleading with the church | 4:25 | |
in Ephesus, "Do you wanna find unity with one another? | 4:28 | |
"Well, it's already embedded in the life | 4:34 | |
"of the church that you have, it's a gift. | 4:36 | |
"Accept the gift," he pleads. | 4:40 | |
"Do you need individuals to lead, | 4:45 | |
"to guide, to teach, to build up the church? | 4:47 | |
"They're already present," he says, | 4:51 | |
"gifted people whose capacities to serve are not | 4:53 | |
"their own invention, but are the gifts of God. | 4:58 | |
"Accept the gifts." | 5:01 | |
Why is it that the church ends up in such messes, | 5:06 | |
factions, divisions, abuses? | 5:10 | |
The author of the letter writing from prison | 5:14 | |
struggles almost to the point of exasperation | 5:17 | |
as if to say being the church isn't hard. | 5:20 | |
We make it hard. | 5:25 | |
And he begs us to recognize that the gifts | 5:28 | |
of God are all we need for life with one another. | 5:30 | |
The gifts of God are embedded in our life | 5:34 | |
with one another, enjoy them, use them, | 5:36 | |
build up the church with them. | 5:40 | |
But the people whom Jesus had fed | 5:44 | |
had trouble noticing that his bread signified | 5:47 | |
he was the gift of God and the Ephesian Christians | 5:50 | |
had trouble noticing that each other happened | 5:53 | |
to be bearers of the gifts of God | 5:55 | |
to themselves and one another. | 5:58 | |
But I suspect nobody in the entire Bible | 6:01 | |
had more trouble with the gifts of God than King David. | 6:04 | |
Part of the problem was that he was more gifted | 6:10 | |
than almost anybody else in the Old Testament, | 6:12 | |
a musician, a poet, he was a man blessed | 6:15 | |
with great personal courage, with sharp political skills, | 6:20 | |
with a powerful mind for military strategy, | 6:24 | |
and besides that, he was remarkably handsome | 6:27 | |
and a good dancer. | 6:31 | |
And the tragedy of his story is that all those gifts | 6:34 | |
he decided still weren't enough. | 6:38 | |
He wanted to seize some more. | 6:42 | |
Now most of us are familiar with the story | 6:46 | |
of David and Bathsheba. | 6:48 | |
First, his eyes intrude into the privacy of her bath. | 6:51 | |
Then he took her and had his way with her | 6:56 | |
in an adulterous and probably assaulting act. | 6:59 | |
Then when he learned that as a consequence | 7:04 | |
of his act, she was pregnant, | 7:06 | |
he decided to dispose of her husband | 7:09 | |
even though her husband Uriah happened | 7:12 | |
to be one of the elite commanders of David's own army. | 7:14 | |
So King David used his understanding | 7:19 | |
of military tactics and strategy | 7:21 | |
to arrange a battle that was certain | 7:24 | |
to get Bathsheba's husband killed. | 7:27 | |
So in this one episode, just barely a chapter and a half | 7:31 | |
of one book of the Old Testament, | 7:36 | |
David managed to violate at least three | 7:38 | |
of the Ten Commandments that God had given to Israel. | 7:41 | |
He had coveted, he had committed adultery, he had killed. | 7:44 | |
I know it's often assumed that the flaw | 7:51 | |
in David's life was his sexuality, | 7:53 | |
and I suppose that if we watch | 7:57 | |
enough television situation comedies and mini series | 7:58 | |
or if we read enough Freud, we'll conclude | 8:01 | |
that eventually everything does come down to sex. | 8:04 | |
But David's sin was less simplistic | 8:08 | |
and more sinister than that. | 8:11 | |
It was the way he used his powerful array of gifts, | 8:15 | |
not to sustain his relationship | 8:20 | |
with God and God's people, | 8:23 | |
but to put himself in control | 8:25 | |
of God's gifts and God's people. | 8:27 | |
It was with the same attitude | 8:31 | |
that one of the corrupt Popes in the Renaissance said, | 8:33 | |
"God has given us the papacy, let us enjoy it." | 8:37 | |
David knew he had the gifts of God. | 8:42 | |
He just forgot that they were gifts. | 8:47 | |
And he merely contented himself with using their power. | 8:51 | |
And David in that act became | 8:56 | |
what the old judge Samuel had warned would happen. | 8:58 | |
Samuel had warned this would happen with kings. | 9:03 | |
David had become what Samuel called a taker. | 9:07 | |
Samuel had told the people of Israel | 9:13 | |
that one day the king that you want | 9:16 | |
will come and take your sons | 9:20 | |
and turn them into his soldiers. | 9:22 | |
The king you want will come and take your daughters | 9:25 | |
and turn them into his servants. | 9:28 | |
The king you want will come and take your land | 9:31 | |
and turn it over to his lackeys. | 9:34 | |
Because the king one day will forget that his office | 9:36 | |
and the people in the land are the gifts of God. | 9:42 | |
The king will forget that the gifts of God | 9:46 | |
are all the people in the land | 9:50 | |
and the king will decide | 9:53 | |
that the gifts of God aren't enough. | 9:55 | |
So David became a taker. | 9:59 | |
He took Bathsheba and he raped her. | 10:02 | |
He took Bathsheba's husband | 10:06 | |
and arranged that he be killed. | 10:08 | |
David, gifted with so much, sought to take more. | 10:12 | |
And the real tragedy of it is he could've had more, | 10:19 | |
but he wanted to take more. | 10:24 | |
"If the gifts of God had been too little," | 10:28 | |
Nathan told him, "God would have added as much more. | 10:31 | |
"Why," Nathan said, "why have you despised | 10:35 | |
"the word of the Lord?" | 10:40 | |
So in the end, David lost everything that he had taken. | 10:43 | |
The child born of his liaison with Bathsheba died. | 10:47 | |
His family, his sons, fell into civil war. | 10:53 | |
He lost access to the gift. | 10:59 | |
And were it not for his confession of sin, | 11:02 | |
he would have lost his relationship with the Giver as well. | 11:06 | |
Father Walter Burghardt, who is a contemporary | 11:12 | |
Catholic theologian and preacher, | 11:14 | |
in a recent book of his called | 11:17 | |
"Preaching the Just Word," | 11:19 | |
has written about what he calls | 11:22 | |
the predicament of the prosperous. | 11:23 | |
It involves the feeling that what we have | 11:27 | |
is the result of our own production, | 11:30 | |
and it involves the fear that what we have | 11:32 | |
must be cared for by our own protection. | 11:35 | |
Having enjoyed and shared the gifts of God, | 11:39 | |
not enough for the prosperous in their predicament. | 11:42 | |
The prosperous in their predicament | 11:47 | |
wanna take control of those gifts. | 11:49 | |
And next do away with the the Giver. | 11:53 | |
I daresay that almost no one gets to this campus, | 11:58 | |
at least in any formal relationship, | 12:03 | |
or no one who gets to this campus formally | 12:06 | |
gets to stay on this campus for very long | 12:09 | |
and in official capacity, unless that person is | 12:11 | |
by some definition gifted. | 12:15 | |
Some suspect that it takes a resume | 12:20 | |
about like David's to find and hold a place. | 12:22 | |
You know, you have to have military strategy, | 12:25 | |
political skill, an intellect that's sharp, | 12:28 | |
plus be handsome and be able to dance. | 12:32 | |
But in truth, we in this university are blessed | 12:37 | |
with an astonishing array of gifted people, | 12:40 | |
gifted students, gifted researchers, | 12:46 | |
gifted teachers, gifted practitioners, | 12:48 | |
gifted athletes, and gifted executives. | 12:51 | |
We benefit every day from the services | 12:54 | |
of a gifted crew of groundskeepers and housekeepers | 12:56 | |
because their gifts primarily are the gifts of patience | 13:00 | |
to put up with the rest of us who take the beauty | 13:04 | |
and order of this campus for granted. | 13:07 | |
We manage every day because of the gifted contractors | 13:10 | |
and laborers who somehow can manage | 13:13 | |
to take a space in the medical center | 13:15 | |
and remodel it with almost, | 13:17 | |
almost no interruption in our operations. | 13:20 | |
These are gifts. | 13:24 | |
And when each of us goes about exercising | 13:27 | |
our own gifts, we are tempted to think | 13:30 | |
that if only we could take control | 13:33 | |
of everybody else's gifts, | 13:35 | |
then we could arrange them to suit our priorities, | 13:38 | |
and then we'd be happier. | 13:41 | |
It's tempting to be a taker, | 13:44 | |
but the variety and diversity of gifts | 13:49 | |
that people bring to this campus are | 13:51 | |
what really can make us a community, | 13:53 | |
not someone's taking it over. | 13:56 | |
Earlier this summer, the news that all | 14:01 | |
of the Woolworth stores are going to close | 14:04 | |
awakened a host of memories. | 14:07 | |
Some of us here, I suspect, are indeed old enough, | 14:10 | |
or at least willing to admit that we're old enough, | 14:13 | |
that we can recall childhood days | 14:16 | |
when one actually could find things | 14:17 | |
of value on the Woolworth counters | 14:20 | |
that could be bought for a nickel or a dime. | 14:22 | |
We can also recall that the journey toward | 14:26 | |
racial justice in America included | 14:28 | |
a stop and a very, very long wait | 14:30 | |
at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro. | 14:34 | |
Well, during the summer of the year | 14:38 | |
that my wife and I were married, | 14:40 | |
the year that we moved into our first home together, | 14:42 | |
an apartment in New York City, | 14:45 | |
I was waiting for the start of the academic year | 14:48 | |
at Union Seminary, so I found a job | 14:50 | |
and worked for three months | 14:53 | |
as a stock clerk in Woolworth's | 14:54 | |
at Broadway and 109th Street. | 14:56 | |
It was a great educational experience. | 14:59 | |
I received and stocked merchandise, | 15:03 | |
I checked pricing, I made sure the markup was 42% | 15:06 | |
on all the merchandise, I packed trash, | 15:10 | |
and I met people whose dreams | 15:14 | |
of economic security were tied permanently | 15:18 | |
to this little retail operation. | 15:22 | |
I remember that the store managers were men, always men. | 15:26 | |
And they were promoted on the basis | 15:30 | |
of the success of their stores. | 15:32 | |
And I remember that the success | 15:34 | |
of the stores depended on the women, always the women, | 15:35 | |
who organized day after day the retail floor, | 15:39 | |
who tended their aisles, who kept the books, | 15:44 | |
who monitored shoplifters, and who knew | 15:46 | |
that the organization would never, | 15:48 | |
never recognize their efforts. | 15:50 | |
It was a world segregated according to gender. | 15:55 | |
It was a world indifferent to the gifted | 15:59 | |
human beings who made it all work. | 16:01 | |
The system was arranged with no sense | 16:05 | |
of obligation to anyone else | 16:07 | |
in the company or the community. | 16:09 | |
And what illustrates that best, | 16:12 | |
I think, is not that someday there will be | 16:14 | |
no Woolworth stores to go to, | 16:17 | |
it is that there are, to my knowledge, | 16:21 | |
no Woolworth colleges, no Woolworth universities, | 16:23 | |
no Woolworth hospitals, no Woolworth children's homes, | 16:28 | |
no Woolworth social service centers | 16:32 | |
for retraining the unemployed. | 16:34 | |
There was no sense in that organization | 16:38 | |
of gifts beyond the self. | 16:41 | |
When people ignore the structure | 16:47 | |
of gifts embedded in life | 16:49 | |
and become simply takers, | 16:52 | |
they deprive themselves of lasting hope, | 16:56 | |
and they inflict immense suffering upon the innocent. | 17:01 | |
The debris of David's decision | 17:07 | |
that the gifts of God weren't enough | 17:09 | |
included his children, his kingdom, | 17:11 | |
and his military commander. | 17:15 | |
And in our time, others have suffered | 17:19 | |
at the hands of takers as well. | 17:21 | |
One was a man named William Reese. | 17:25 | |
A very ordinary fellow by almost any objective standard, | 17:28 | |
his world included his home, his wife, | 17:33 | |
their 12-year-old son, | 17:36 | |
the United Methodist church where they worshiped | 17:38 | |
on a regular basis, and his job. | 17:40 | |
William Reese was the caretaker | 17:43 | |
of a small cemetery in southern New Jersey, | 17:45 | |
a cemetery where the bodies of Union | 17:48 | |
and Confederate soldiers are buried. | 17:51 | |
On the 9th of May, this past spring, | 17:58 | |
a man who was driving a stolen car | 18:01 | |
spotted William Reese's red pickup truck | 18:04 | |
at the cemetery property. | 18:06 | |
The man in the stolen car decided | 18:10 | |
to take the red truck and apparently decided | 18:11 | |
that he'd better kill Reese in order | 18:14 | |
to take away any witnesses. | 18:16 | |
So on May the 9th, 1997, | 18:19 | |
William Reese became one more victim | 18:21 | |
of a taker named Andrew Cunanan. | 18:24 | |
The innocent suffer when a taker concludes | 18:29 | |
that the gifts of God aren't enough. | 18:34 | |
It can happen in a terrible act of violence. | 18:39 | |
It can happen, as well, in a mundane moment | 18:42 | |
of indifference to the gifts that God | 18:45 | |
has embedded in our lives with one another. | 18:47 | |
So Kathleen Norris, in her book "The Cloistered Walk," | 18:52 | |
confesses that her two residencies | 18:56 | |
at a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota | 18:58 | |
have taught her the differences | 19:01 | |
between a consumer culture where we cater | 19:03 | |
to our sense of self-importance and take what we want | 19:05 | |
and a Christian approach to culture, | 19:10 | |
which focuses not upon desires, but human needs. | 19:13 | |
Not upon controlling, but sharing. | 19:19 | |
Not upon taking, but receiving. | 19:24 | |
And Kathleen Norris also confesses | 19:29 | |
that her two residencies in a monastery | 19:32 | |
have taught her something about her marriage. | 19:35 | |
"I came to realize," she says, | 19:38 | |
"that marriage is a life-long religious vow, | 19:41 | |
"that I am as committed to monogamy | 19:46 | |
"as a monk or a nun is committed to celibacy." | 19:49 | |
Somewhere in the structure of our lives | 19:54 | |
are embedded the gifts of God. | 20:00 | |
There surely will be occasions when all | 20:04 | |
of us are tempted to conclude | 20:07 | |
that the gifts of God aren't enough. | 20:08 | |
When it happens, and if and when we succumb | 20:12 | |
to the temptation, we are still not without hope, | 20:14 | |
for one of the gifts of God embedded | 20:21 | |
in the structure of the Christian church | 20:23 | |
and the Christina life is the gift of forgiveness. | 20:25 | |
We access it first with confession, | 20:30 | |
then with a plea for mercy, | 20:35 | |
then with a commitment to change, | 20:38 | |
and then with a reconciliation | 20:42 | |
that joins us to all others in the community | 20:44 | |
from which we have been separated. | 20:48 | |
It is possible because of a gift of God. | 20:51 | |
It was announced from a cross by a dying Jesus. | 20:57 | |
"Forgive them," he said. | 21:01 | |
And that is a gift of God which is enough | 21:06 | |
at least for a start, amen. | 21:12 | |
(uplifting organ music) | 21:20 | |
(people murmuring faintly) | 21:47 |
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