PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Acts 1:6-14; First Peter 4:12-14; 5:6-11                                                    DISCIPLINE

Sermon May 4, 2008:  People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE:  the Rev. Dan Griggs

 

          I usually preach on just one of the Scripture Lessons we read each Sunday—usually the Gospel Lesson if we use it.  Today I want to look at both the First and the Second Lessons because I think they speak together about the disciplines of glory.  This is my theme for Ascension Sunday:  the disciplines of glory. 

 

          The First Lesson is the beginning of the Book of Acts, the beginning of the story of the church.  This is the story of Jesus' ascension into the universal presence of God.  He meets with his disciples, soon to be apostles, on a mountain; and there he gives them (and us) the Great Commission to proclaim his victory everywhere.  The disciples have been shocked out of their grief at his death, and now they think since he has been raised from the dead he will obviously lead the revolt to overthrow the Roman Empire and establish the Kingdom of God—right?  Jesus answers:  "That's not up to you.  Your job is to 'wait for the power on high.'"  And that means discipline. 

          Having given the church its mission in the world, Christ ascends into universality—the picture the Gospel writers draw has him going up on a cloud.  The disciples just stand there dumbfounded.  They watch, and they squint, and they strain.  When the two messengers start speaking to them, some of them actually jump from surprise:  "Why are you gawking?  He will return."  And what are they going to do in the meantime?  They go back to Jerusalem, to the upper room where they had celebrated Passover with Jesus, and they wait and watch.  And that means discipline. 

          In the First Lesson Jesus says and does a lot of things, but those who would follow him in the world are called to self-discipline. 

          The Second Lesson is our last Sunday with the First Epistle of Peter, which is basically a baptismal sermon for newly-converted Christians whose lives are under stress.  There's a lightening bolt in this reading:  verse 6: 

He advises them, if they are anxious about their lives, to give that anxiety over to God, because God "cares about you."  And then he tells these new Christians:  "be sober, be watchful."  There are spiritual dangers in the world you live in—moral black holes where your life can disappear.  This requires discipline. 

          Both these passages say a lot of things, but the message to us is self-discipline.  We may call this the disciplines of glory. 

 

          Now some of us are naturally organized, disciplined, neat.  Some people have tidy closets, tidy garages, tidy desks.  Last year when our Associate Conference Minister preached here, she made a comment in the pulpit about how tidy my desk is:  she must have missed the piles of papers strewn all around my office on the computer desk, the credenza and the file cabinets.  Others of us are not naturally self-disciplined.  We like to say we're "free spirits," but most of us are just messy. 

          We begin to learn the lessons of self-discipline early in life.  Did you ever have a Christmas Club?  My mother decided when I was six that I needed to have a Christmas Club, so in January we went to the bank and signed a piece of paper, and every week I was supposed to go to the bank and give them fifty cents.  If I did that for the whole year, when it came time to buy Christmas presents, I would have more than twenty dollars to shop at the Eagle's five-and-dime store where my brother worked.  I never got to twenty dollars:  I didn't have the self-discipline at age six to keep my Christmas Club going. 

When I was eight years old I saw a wristwatch at Cole's Drug Store, that was just right for me.  Back then they had "lay-away plans."  For those who never heard of "lay-away," it means the merchant took the item you wanted to buy and put it in storage, and every week you would go by the store and pay a little bit on the price—a dollar, ten dollars; and when you got it paid off, you got the merchandise.  Well I put that watch on lay-away sometime in November, and every week when I got my allowance I would go to Cole's and give them a dollar.  Fourteen dollars was going to take me forever, but I was learning self-discipline.  Came February my parents rewarded my learning:  they paid off the watch and gave it to me for my birthday. 

          Years later, when Harriet and I already had a four-year-old, we came into that condition again which allowed us to participate in prenatal classes.  NOW we're talking about discipline.  We went for an hour-long class every week for six weeks.  Husbands and wives were sitting on the floor in a circle, and the nurse would have us "practice"—practice breathing, practice counting, practice "a cleansing breath."  And we knew that if I was going to be in the delivery room we'd better pay attention and get this organized.  So there we were, puffing and blowing, and I was counting and coaching—like she needed my help.  The day came, we dropped our son off at his friend's house and drove to the hospital.  The nurse told me where to wait, and two hours later she came running in, "Why are you out here?"  I was doing what I was told.  "They're waiting for you!"  So we ran in, I put on the green booties and the green mask and the green robe, and in we went, ready to puff and blow and count; but Harriet was ahead of me.  All that discipline and I could have gone to work that day!  Yeah, sure! 

          We are not strangers to discipline, but we hardly ever think of it in relation to Christ's ascension, or our baptism, or the way we live our faith.  These scripture lessons today sing in harmony an invitation to the disciplines of glory. 

 

          There are four disciplines of glory that I want to talk about:  a discipline of deeds, a discipline of the book, a discipline of the heart, and a discipline of hope.[1] 

          How should a Christian live?  What are the deeds of faith?  Well, there are some obvious foundation rules:  the Ten Commandments, Jesus' two "great commandments"—love God, love your neighbor as yourself.  But these are lived out, made practical, given life by your deeds, day by day.  Jesus once quoted the prophet Micah's summary:  "to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before God."[2]  But the discipline of deeds is pushy:  God invites us to actually do justice—to immigrants, to prisoners of war, to gay people, to customers, to widows and orphans and victims of physical abuse.  Thinking like that will make you different, won't it!  It's a discipline of deeds.  And it's the same with "love mercy" and "walk humbly with God." 

          Then there's the discipline of the book.  I am amazed, shocked, flabbergasted, horrified at the ignorance our secular culture has of the book—THE Book, the Bible.  Yes, it's a hard read.  Yes, it's a lifetime discipline to really understand it.  Yes, it says things that neither Republicans nor Democrats, neither liberals nor conservatives want to hear.  But where is our vocabulary of faith going to come from if we don't engage in the discipline of the book?  How are you going to talk to me, to your best friend, to members of your family about what's really going on in your heart of hearts if you don't have the words to name it, describe it, remember the saints of old who had it too?  Our society isn't going to teach our children and grandchildren the vocabulary of the spirit, and the news media are not going to use that vocabulary in their reporting.  But it's in the Book.  We won't get the benefit without a discipline of the book. 

          Now about the discipline of the heart:  did you know that you can train your affections to attend to the Good, the Beautiful and the True?  Part of this heart-discipline is gratitude:  when was the last time you really said "thank you" to God for sustaining you against everything you've had to deal with?  And the other part of heart-discipline is compassion, which is social conscience:  people are hungry in this town; people are homeless in this county; people have AIDS and their families have turned their back on them; people are burying their sons, daughters, brothers, friends in coffins covered with the American flag.  Compassion is not just a feeling:  compassion is a discipline of caring—as the Second Lesson we read today says:  "God cares about you."  Who do you care about, and what are you doing about it? 

          And the fourth is the discipline of hope.  Why are some people who have a lot of money having their bodies quick-frozen and stored in  cryogenic containers, so that in a hundred years when medical science has a cure for their illness they might be thawed out and healed?  Why does almost nobody in our country want to talk about death?  Why do physicians keep trying every painful treatment, every exhausting therapy to save a life, and then when it all fails the doctor feels like she has failed?  I asked a group of teenagers one time if they wanted to learn how to do some things that adult Christians do for others, and they enthusiastically agreed until they discovered that one of the things was visiting a family in a funeral home.  There is such a thing as a discipline of hope.  Christians in previous centuries used to read books and hear sermons and confer with their pastors about "dying well"—we don't hear that phrase anymore:  "dying well."  Maybe we don't really believe there could be anything over There better than Here.  Maybe we're really agnostics—we don't know, so we don't trust.  And we die in fear and alone.  To all this short-sightedness the Christian faith says, "NO!  You have hope!"  And that means we can learn to live our lives here, now, in hope:  the hope changes us, transfigures our ways of thinking about who we are and what we're doing.  But none of this can happen unless we take up the discipline of hope. 

          Deeds, the Book, the Heart, and Hope:  these are four of the disciplines of glory to which our scripture lessons today point us.  But we won't take up any of these disciplines as long as we want to keep things just as they are.  The disciplines of glory are about ME CHANGING, by "humbling myself under the mighty hand of God" as First Peter puts it.

 

          On this Ascension Sunday we are reminded that the things that hold our deepest desire are still beyond us:  we haven't "made it" yet.  When the disciples asked Jesus about this, he told them that they (WE) have work to do in this world; and the work we are given is to engage in the disciplines of glory.  It is to this that we are called as Christians.  Do you want the Christian faith to LOOK like something really better than life in this secular desert?  Do you want your own life to BE something better?  Grasp the disciplines of glory, and expect to be changed. 

AMEN