[Propertalk] Fwd: Sermon Resources for September 25 - Part 2

[Joe Parrish]

Be Careful Who You Judge
 
A young minister graduated from seminary just before World War I and he was appointed to a church in a very small town. He had been there only a couple of weeks when he received the call every new minister dreads -- the call to do his first funeral. The person who had died was not a member of his church. She was, in fact, a woman with a very bad reputation. Her husband was a railroad engineer who was away from home much of the time. She had rented rooms in their house to men who worked on the railroad and rumor had it that she rented more than just rooms when her husband was away. The young preacher, faced with his first funeral, found no one who had a good word to say about this woman, until he entered the small old-fashioned grocery store on the day before the funeral. He began to talk to the store owner about his sadness that the first person he would bury would be someone about which nothi ng goodcould be said. The store owner didn't reply at first and then, in his silence, he appeared to make a decision. He took out his store ledger and laid it on the counter between him and the preacher. He opened the ledger at random and, covering the names in the left-hand column, he pointed to grocery bills written in red – groceries that people had bought on credit -- and then the column that showed the bill had been paid.

He said, "Every month, that woman would come in and ask me who was behind in their grocery bills. It was usually some family who had sickness or death -- or some poor woman trying to feed her kids when her husband drank up the money. She would pay their bill and she made me swear never to tell. But, I figure now that she is dead, people ought to know -- especially those who benefited from her charity who have been most critical of her."

"Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you."

Roger G. Talbott, Good News for the Hard of Hearing, CSS Publishing Company 
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If the House Is Messy, Clean It Up 
 
My wife had a second-grader who once drew a picture of a fierce rhinoceros with a disturbing and unvarnished admission as a caption: "I'm as angry as a rhino!" Similarly, in her book, Amazing Grace; A Vocabulary of Faith, Kathleen Norris writes about a little boy who wrote a poem called "The Monster Who Was Sorry." In the poem the boy explodes about how he hated it when his father yelled at him. In anger he threw his sister down the stairs, wrecked his room, then destroyed an entire town. His poem concludes: "Then I sit in my messy house and say to myself, 'I shouldn't have done all that.'" 
 
Commenting on the boy's poem, Norris writes, "'My messy house' says it all; with more honesty than most adults could have mustered, the boy made a metaphor for himself that admitted the depth of his rage and also gave him a way out. If that boy had been a novice in a fourth century monastic desert, his elders might have told him that he was well on the way toward repentance, not such a monster after all, but only human. If the house is messy, they might have said, why not clean it up, why not make it into a place where God might wish to dwell." 
 
Dan Clendenin, The Monster Who Was Sorry
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Availability
 
A man applied for a job as a handyman. The prospective employer asked, "Can you do carpentry?" The man answered in the negative.
 
"How about bricklaying?" Again the man answered, "No."
 
The employer asked, "Well, what about electrical work?" The man said "No, I don't know anything about that either." Finally the employer said, "Well, tell me then what is handy about you." The man replied, "I live just around the corner."
 
Sometimes the greatest ability we can have is availability. To be where God can call us, to be within whisper range of his summons, that is the beginning of a life of meaningful discipleship.
 
King Duncan, Time for Action
 
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It Isn’t How the Journey Starts, It Is How It Ends
 
The great wit, C. S. Lewis, started out a doubter. He saw British Christianity a pale and bloodless business. It did not excite him. In fact, to his reasoned, calculating way of thinking, Christianity made very little sense. It smelled of superstition and made promises about the future he was sure it could not make good on.

But C. S. Lewis came to see that he was missing something. He began to slide into a cynicism about life that frightened him. He wanted something to believe in. Someone who was on the Christian pilgrimage helped him to see that there was room for him in the parade. Not suddenly, but rather quietly, unspectacularly, Lewis came into the Christian camp. We know the
rest of the story: He became a great intellectual apologist for Christianity, writing and speaking to confound the critics of the Faith. He was the reverse of Ralph Vaughan Williams, taking on the critics of the Christian faith in Britain in a series of radio broadcasts which became enormously popular among a population growing steadily more indifferent to Christ.

A similar story can be told of Malcolm Muggeridge, a British thinker who in later life came to see that the Christian Faith made far more sense to him than clinging to agnosticism. He, like Lewis, became an apologist for Christianity. He said "yes" to the invitation, after he first had said "no."

It isn't how the journey starts that counts. It's how it ends that matters.

Michael A. Sherer, And God Said Yes!, CSS Publishing Company
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Fathers and Sons
 
A father once tried to talk to his son about how college was going: The father said, "How are things going?" The son said, "Good." The father said, "And the dormitory?" He said, "Good." The father said, "How are your studies going?" He said, "Good." The father said, "Have you decided on a major yet?" He said, "Yes." "Well, what is it?" asked the father. The son said, "Communication."
 
So it goes as parents and children try to talk to each other. So it was for the two sons in Jesus’ story.
 
William J. Carl III, Church People Beware!, CSS Publishing Company
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Getting All the Facts
 
A little boy was standing on the sidewalk in the middle of a city block. He was obviously waiting for something. An older man approached him and asked for what he was waiting. 
The little boy confidently told the older man that he was waiting for the bus. The man laughed and said the bus stop was in the next block. The boy acknowledged that fact but insisted the bus would stop for him right here.
 
The older man became annoyed at what he thought was insolence. He raised his voice and told the little boy that he'd better start walking if he hoped to ride that bus. The boy politely turned down the suggestion and said he would wait for the bus right where he stood.
 
The man fumed at the little boy and started walking off. But before he was too far away, he heard the screeching of brakes. He turned around and couldn't believe his eyes. The bus was actually stopping for the little boy. The bus door opened and the boy started climb aboard. But just before he did, he turned toward the man down the street and yelled, "My daddy is the bus driver."
 
Billy D. Strayhorn, Seeing Is Believing
 
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Fire on One End, Fool on the Other
 
I remember in High School a physician who came to talk to us about the dangers of smoking. He scared us with his grim pictures of smokers' lungs and tales of death from lung cancer. The doctor finished his speech by saying, "Remember, fire on one end, fool on the other."
 
We were all impressed, especially those boys who would sneak out behind the shop building at lunch to light one up. But a couple of the guys saw the doctor himself lighting up when he got back in his car after the lecture. And his credibility was shot. He was the talk of the campus. It would have been better for the no-smoking campaign if he had never come to speak. Saying one thing and doing another is something nobody respects.
 
Julian Gordy, Didn't You Hear What I Said?
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Which Coaching Is Better?
 
Bonnie St. John Deane in her book, Succeeding Sane, tells about the movie, Hoop Dreams, a true story. For four years a documentary film team takes cameras and follows the lives of two talented young basketball players from one of the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago. The young man with more natural talent gets a high school scholarship, a posh summer job, and a coach from hell. However, the constant badgering, pressure, and demeaning style of the coach slowly destroys any fun the kid ever felt in the game. Once the desire to play begins to crumble, he begins to sabotage his own success. He becomes more vulnerable to injuries, his grades drop, and he acts up socially with drugs and sex. His cry for help goes unheard.

Meanwhile, the kid with less talent gets less help and less pressure. He is left to struggle in worse schools combating pressure from gangs…
 
The conclusion to this list and for many additional illustrations and sermons for Proper 21 can be accessed at www.Sermons.com.
 
 


 
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