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CONTENTS
--Housing --People Christian Education --PYC
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Preached by O. Benjamin Sparks, Pastor Second Presbyterian Church, Richmond, VA February 19, 2006
TRUSTING GOD WITH YOUR WHOLE HEART
Isaiah 43:18 – 25; Mark 2:1 – 12
There are times when – if it were not for the faith of our friends – we would be without help – or hope – in this world. Once in Nashville when I was about three quarters of the way through my first year as minister of Second Church there, I was asked to officiate at the outdoor wedding of the grandson of one of the faithful members of the church I’d left in Jacksonville to accept the call to Nashville. Margaret Smith was the boy’s grandmother. She had come from Scotland to Jacksonville with her husband, Bob, decades ago. Bob, a successful Florida contractor, had built at cost most of Eckerd College when it was still known as Florida Presbyterian College I was at a low point in my Nashville pastorate – in the that time when the happy flurry of new beginnings is over, and members of the Pulpit Nominating Committee seem to be looking at you with expressions on their faces too easily interpreted as: “What ever possessed us to call you to be our preacher?” They may not have been asking that question, but I thought they were. At the end of the marriage service, Margaret walked through the grass and greeted Annette and me with her strong, dependable warmth, and in her distinct Scottish accent said: “Ben, I have been praying for you and your ministry every day since you left Jacksonville.” She was trusting God with me, for me, for my ministry, while I was shrouded in doubts. I still recall turning away to catch my breath and hide my tears. Thus does someone else’s faith – and not your own – carry us to the foot of the cross, or wrap us once again in God’s everlasting arms. Every parent knows he has to do this for his child, every coach for her player, every teacher for students. We would die without the encouragement – even rescue – of such faith in God – in God, mind you and not in human potential. Just like this paralytic. He would have wasted away on a pallet but for the outrageously expressed faith of his friends. They tore up someone’s house to get their friend placed, on a stretcher no less, directly in front of Jesus. This is one of the first stories I remember from Sunday School. It works well if you show pictures of the way houses in ancient Palestine are crowded up against one another in villages – not spread out on lots with security systems. Jesus was trying to get some peace and quiet – but word had spread about his teaching and healing, about the new life he was bringing everywhere. So the crowds followed him, and had trapped him inside this house. The only access was through the roof, which the man’s friends did not hesitate to rearrange for the sake of their friend. That we all should be loved like that! But even more – that we all should have such faith in the power of Jesus to heal and to forgive, to lead us to go to such lengths to make sure our friends have the help they need. Their faith – remember – is not in what they can do, but in what God in Christ will do – if they (if we, as we like to say) “go there.” They took their friend –“there.” The story – which is another reason why it’s so popular with Sunday School teachers – is a mini-parable about God, and what God has done for Israel, for humankind, and even for jackals and ostriches. (1) God has rescued the beloved community – even when they were paralyzed. God did not leave them in their sins – or in the miserable captivity which they brought upon themselves by practicing idolatry. God instead raises up prophets to call his people to faithfulness, and to implore them to let go of the comfort to which they had become accustomed in Babylon – where God had sent them into exile. But now their time of punishment is over, and God is doing a new and marvelous thing. God is leading them through a well watered desert. God is bringing them home. “Behold I am doing a new thing!” A way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert. “I am the one who will blot out your transgressions for my own sake. I will not remember your sins.” The prophet trusts in God’s word with his whole heart and brings the message of redemption to Israel. The four friends believe the reports that have circulated about Jesus and the kingdom he is inaugurating in Galilee – and they bring their friend, who cannot help himself; they bring their friend to Jesus for healing and forgiveness. I am reading a book just now which describes the life of a Methodist minister when he needed such everlasting arms, foot-of-the-cross encouragement and he receives it. Blood Done Sign my Name is the story of Vernon Tyson and his wife and children and their ministry in Oxford, North Carolina during the terrible 1960s. Racial integration is just beginning in the South. In small towns and backwaters it was not heroic, and did not make the national news – as in Birmingham, Atlanta, or Selma. Integration is resisted; the Ku Klux Klan is active; and people live in paralyzed guilt and fear. (2) The incident from this book to which I refer actually happened in Sanford, NC, before the church in Oxford called Vernon Tyson to be their minister. Tyson had gone to Elon College where he was influenced by the pacifism and social activism of the Quakers, but in seminary he had read Reinhold Niebuhr and had become a Christian realist. He had also been mightily influenced by Dr. King’s letter from the jail in Birmingham. At an ecumenical, interracial conference Tyson met Dr. Samuel Proctor, later to be well known here as President of Virginia Union. But even then Proctor, the President of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College was one of the best preachers in America. So Tyson, naively, as it is recalled, invited Dr. Proctor to preach in Sanford. Dr. Proctor accepted, but in the intervening months, between the invitation extended and the sermon preached, Sanford became a very uncomfortable place, with black student unrest and racial incidents. Hot-wired tension filled Sanford. As you would suspect, the governing board at the Methodist Church asked Tyson to withdraw the invitation to Dr. Proctor. His son, the author of Blood Done Sign My Name, tells that Vernon Tyson was torn between his ambitions as a preacher (he was eloquent, and a good pastor and administrator – and everyone knew he was destined for one of the great pulpits of Methodism). He was torn between his ambition and his deep commitment to justice and civil rights. Yet his eyes had been opened by the gospel, and he could not go back. The response to his paralyzing conflict reveals that faith, the carrying of Vernon Tyson to the feet of Jesus, and it illustrates the trust in Jesus, that was held in the hearts of friends. Listen: On the day that his parishioners held [a] protest meeting
to insist that he withdraw the invitation, Tyson strode into the fellowship hall all shoeshine and handshakes, confident that he would win them over and carry the day, and found instead that he had walked into a hornet’s nest. Daddy (his son is writing this) was stunned by the hostile reception, and disappointed in his own performance. “Our faith is really being stretched,” Mama wrote in her diary on January 31. “At the meeting tonight Vernon was hurt to the core. Several made terrible cutting remarks to him. He just took it, but afterwards shed tears.” When [he] came back to the house there was more bad news.
“Things were just about as bad as they were going to get, [Tyson] recalled . . .and when I got home, someone had just called and said they were going to blow up my house and do harm to my children, and Martha was very much afraid.” He walked quickly upstairs, tears welling in his eyes, wondering what on earth he would do.
“Truth is, he [dais] later, “I might have backed down if it hadn’t been for your mother. I didn’t want to lose. I just could not think about losing.” The main thing he did not want to do was to disappoint Mama. But she followed him upstairs. “Martha grabbed me from behind and squeezed me tight, and she said she’d rather live on a five-point [small church] circuit on minimum salary for the rest of her life than to see me sell my soul. She gave me permission to fail. If she hadn’t done that . . .I might have turned tail and run. But she grabbed me from behind and told me to stand my ground.” (3)
Vernon Tyson found the strength in his wife’s faith in him to face his angry parishioners again, and to lead the governing body of that Methodist Church in Sanford to do the right thing, and not rescind the invitation to Dr. Proctor. We who belong to Jesus Christ, and who stand in the heritage of the faith that has come down to us out of Egypt, Babylon, Jerusalem, Rome, Geneva, and Richmond – we who belong to Jesus do so much more than “get by with a little help from our friends.” We stand tall as disciples because of the faith of our friends. We rise and walk again because they bring us into the presence of the One who heals and forgives, and who confronts those – who even in their hearts – deny the power and presence of the kingdom. The faith into which we baptized Charles a few moments ago, and the church which welcomes him as one if its newest members, is filled with proactive friends – who will not let paralysis and fear – or even the crowds who flock around the gospel – prevent them from bringing people to the only ultimate source of salvation. The mission trips of this church to Guatemala, Malawi and to Gautier, Mississippi, bear witness – that the God who calls us in Jesus and makes us friends of each other – makes us friends also of all those for whom God’s heart yearns. Someone has written: the two scripture passages for today demonstrate two things: the always imperiled nature of human existence – in Babylon, in ancient Palestine, in North Carolina, and in Richmond. The imperiled nature of human existence – but equally and always true: the power of God to save. (4)
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