A Sermon Preached by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

September 16, 2007 

Scripture:  Ecclesiastes 3:1-15 and Colossians 4:2-18

 

I was ordained to the ministry of word and sacrament by the Presbytery of Utica on September 15, 1967, some forty years ago yesterday.  As this day has approached I have been mulling over these two score years that have come and gone so quickly.  For everything there is a season….

 

The number forty has special meaning in the Bible.  Forty represents a substantial block of time for an individual or a people.  It rained for forty days and forty nights in the story of Noah and the flood.  The Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert, eating manna on their way into the land that was promised them.  Jesus, early in his ministry, fasted for 40 days and 40 nights, and was tempted by the devil all the while.

 

Nina and I had arrived forty years ago this past August at the Eastside Presbyterian Church in Paterson, NJ, a few weeks in advance of my ordination date.  My first Sunday in the pulpit was Labor Day weekend. 

 

I’ve told the story a hundred times about my inauspicious beginning.  The congregation worshipped at 10 a.m. in the summer months, not its regular time of 11.  The chair of the committee that called me to Paterson had told me that with the coming of September, the congregation was switching back to 11.

 

That Sunday morning at a few minutes to 10 I was sitting at the dining room table in the manse going over my sermon notes, and Nina was nearby ironing my white shirt.  I wasn’t due at the church until about 10:30 by my reckoning, and the manse was just two blocks away.

 

Right after 10 the door bell rang repeatedly.  Nina answered the door, and there on the stoop was Ted Freeman, a boisterous bass soloist in the choir who in his heyday had sung with the evangelist, Billy Sunday.  “Where’s your preacher?” he exclaimed to Nina.  “The service began 5 minutes ago!”  Nina remembers giving Ted a dirty look, and having been tempted to say, “He’s your preacher, not mine!”

 

For everything there is a season….A time to be born and a time to die!  It was quickly apparent that Henry Tobler, the chair of the search committee, had forgotten that the summer schedule carried through Labor Day.  Needless to say there were a few nonplussed expressions on the faces of church members when I arrived at 10:15 that morning.  “What have we gotten ourselves into?” was certainly a thought shared by many.  I have no recollection of what I preached about that morning—only the dim recollection of thinking that Ecclesiastes may be right, that all is indeed vanity.  The best laid plans often disappear into the vapors of life!

This week I got my calculator out.  Starting out as I did as a solo pastor in a small inter-city church, the very first year—right out of seminary—I preached fifty sermons.  How did I do that?  Since then I have preached roughly 1400 more.  Imagine that.  I’ve also baptized over 400 persons, mostly infants but a fair number of adults as well.  I’ve officiated at the Lord’s Table at least 500 times.  I’ve conducted over 600 funerals and at least 250 weddings.  Add to this 350 Session meetings and a zillion committee meetings, and it does feel like this forty-year season in my life has been a full one.

 

Full, yes.  But how do we place value on all that we have said and done in our lives?  Ecclesiastes is a troubling teacher or preacher in this regard, and we have to wonder sometimes why this book is in the Bible.  Ecclesiastes applies the word vanity to all the things you and I value in life—including our striving to know God, telling us that try as we might we will never figure out “what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

His two-part advice tends to be that we “should eat and drink and take pleasure” in our toil and “stand in awe” before the God in whose creation we live out our days.

 

Strangely, the older I get the wiser Ecclesiastes sounds.  He pushes us back from the abyss of pride in our own achievements, and at the same time preserves the grandeur of a God who really is beyond all human knowing.  Ecclesiastes puts us in our rightful place—on our knees before a mysterious God who in some unfathomable way is all in all.

 

This seems to be the right posture for looking back and taking stock.  I have quoted Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Gilead, before, and the 40^th anniversary of my ordination has drawn me back to it, especially on the subject of preaching.  The central character in the novel is Rev. John Ames, who is reaching the end of his life.  He had married late and is now writing a letter to his young son as a kind of last will and testament. 

 

At one point in his letter he tells about the time his wife decides she wants “to read all those old sermons that are up in the attic.”  His reaction is that “perhaps I can get a box of them down here somehow and do a little sorting.  It would put my mind at ease to feel I was leaving a better impression.”  He then says something that made this preacher flinch—maybe it will make us all flinch:

 

So often I have known, right there in the pulpit, even as

I read the words, how far short they fell of any hopes I

had for them.  And they were the major work of my life,

from a certain point of view.  I have to wonder how I

have lived with that.[i]

 

After preaching nearly 1500 sermons, I’m so aware that not one of them was perfectly right, not one was all that it might have been.  The longer I’ve been at it, the more I’ve come to realize what an awesome calling this is.  Rev. Ames’s words are every preacher’s lament:  “Now it’s Sunday again.  When you do this sort of work, it seems to be Sunday all the time, or Saturday night.  You just finish preparing for one week and it’s already the next week.”[ii]

All this is true, but our lesson from Colossians has a way of putting things in the proper context—whether it be the sermons I’ve preached or the tasks that fill your lives on a daily basis.  I just love the way Paul closes his letters with greetings to particular members of the early church.  Sometimes all we know about them is found in the words with which Paul greets them. 

 

Tychicus is a beloved brother, as is Onesimus.  Aristarchus is a fellow prisoner.  Jesus who is called Justus greets you, says Paul.  I love this next one:  Epaphras “is always wrestling in his prayers on your behalf so that you may stand mature and fully assured in everything that God wills.”  There are greetings from Luke, who was to write the Gospel, and words of affection to Nympha, in whose home a group of Christians are meeting.  And Archippus is admonished to finish the task he has received in the Lord, whatever it was.

 

Paul puts a sublimely human face on the church.  It’s not an abstraction, but a collection of real live human beings determined to make the most of the time they have.  This sounds a little like Ecclesiastes, only Paul’s writing is infused with the Spirit of Christ, in whose name these early followers were making their way across the whole of the Mediterranean world.

 

This places me, and you as well, on better footing as we think about how we fill our days, whether it be in writing sermons or some other tasks.  At one point in Gilead Rev. Ames muses about the mystery of our interactions with one another:

 

When people come to speak to me, whatever they say,

I am struck by a kind of incandescence in them, the “I”

whose predicate can be “love” or “fear” or “want,” and

whose object can be “someone” or “nothing” and it won’t

really matter, because the loveliness is just in that presence,

shaped around “I” like a flame on a wick, emanating itself

in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.  But quick,

and avid, and resourceful.  To see this aspect of life is a

privilege of the ministry which is seldom mentioned.[iii]

 

He’s talking about our encounters with one another.  Midst all the clutter and busyness of our every day life, there are moments when we connect with one another at a depth too great for words.  Listen to Rev. Ames as he moves directly from his thoughts about how my “I” connects with your “I” to the subject of preaching:

 

A good sermon is one side of a passionate conversation. 

It has to be heard in that way.  There are three parties to

it, of course, but so there are to even the most private

thought—the self that yields the thought [the “I” who is

the preacher], the self that acknowledges and in some way

                        responds to the thought [the “I” of each of you], and the

                        Lord.  That is a remarkable thing to consider.[iv]

It is remarkable indeed, and it is what makes preaching and living the joy that it is.  This past summer I talked about the death of a dear friend of ours at the St. Lawrence where we spend time each year.  As I preached that day I remember feeling that my sermon may have had a bit too much “I” in it.  Janet’s death deeply affected both Nina and me.  We had known her nearly 40 years.  Our tears are still not dry.

 

That very next week after I preached about Janet’s death I got an email from one of you.  You told of the recent death of a brother.  Then you put your finger on just what Rev. Ames was talking about:

 

As I sat through your service on Sunday, I couldn’t help but

feel that God provided your message and comfort directly for

us on that day.  Although I was still grieving with his loss,

and found it difficult to fully participate in the wonderful

songs, I was comforted by the words and music and will keep

the memory of your service close to my heart.  Thank you so

much for ministering to my needs even when you were not

aware of them.  We are certainly thankful for God’s blessings.

 

Such a message can only humble a preacher or any one else.  We never know, do we, when our words, seasoned with the salt of the Spirit, may actually become a virtual conduit for the grace of God for someone else.  Looking back over 40 years, I can now remember other such notes and comments about three-way communication between a preacher and a congregation and the Lord.  And because the conversation goes three ways, there is little temptation to take credit for the outcome.

 

Standing in this pulpit a year or so ago, I quoted Rev. Ames’s final word on his sermons.  I’d like to quote him again.  Do you remember what he said?  His words are very appropriate for the day we’re having our church picnic:

 

“I’ll just ask your mother to have those old sermons of mine

burned.  The deacons could arrange it.  There are enough to

make a good fire.  I’m thinking here of hot dogs and marsh-

mallows….Of course she can set by any of them she might

want to keep, but I don’t want her to waste much effort on

them.  They mattered or they didn’t and that’s the end of it.[v]

 

On the far side of my ordination by 40 years and a day, I can say Amen to that.  I can say Amen because there have been moments of incandescence between us when the light of Christ illumined our path and gave us hope.  Ecclesiastes is right, there is a time to be born and time to die.  In between these two poles there is life to be lived, picnics to share, words of comfort to shore one another up, a Gospel not our own but a gift from God to preach and live.  It’s good to look back.  And it’s good to look ahead to the seasons that still await us.

 

1Marilynne Robinson, Gilead, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, © 2004, p. 69;

2Robinson, p. 232;  3Robinson, p. 44-45;  4Robinson, p. 45;  5Ribinson, p. 245