PEOPLE'S CHURCH OF DOVER

Luke 8:26-39                                                                 Testify to Your Experience
Fathers’ Day Sermon June 20, 2010:  People’s UCC, Dover, DE:  The Rev. Dan Griggs

            The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you. 

            My father was a gifted salesman.  During my teen years he was away on sales trips a lot of the time—he traveled Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi selling life insurance policies in the million-dollar range to executives.  He drove—he rarely took an airplane:  I think that was because a lot of the people he talked to lived in smaller communities not near major airports.  He knew Biloxi, Gulfport and Pascagoula, Mississippi well; and Jamestown, Tennessee—in one of the most poverty-ridden counties in America they still had bankers and land-owners.  I think he was in Meridian, Mississippi, one time during my Easter school break:  this was one of the few times that he had taken the plane.  He phoned home and said the entire South was socked in with fog and low clouds.  He had been able to get from Meridian to (of course) Atlanta, but he couldn’t get a flight out of Atlanta to Knoxville (we lived near Knoxville); and he wanted me to drive to Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport and pick him up.  I was sixteen—hadn’t had my license long; and I had certainly never driven 175 miles by myself, much less tried to find somebody in the Hartsfield Airport—it scared me to think about doing it; but he insisted, and Dad was one of those people who know how to insist.  I called my brother and after he got through laughing, he agreed to go with me.  So we drove Dad’s car to Atlanta and brought him home.  So he did a lot of traveling.

            You know, when you’re driving, you talk to the windshield.  And on a long trip you can think about things that are important to you while you’re paying attention to your driving.  Dad had a lot of time to think and to talk to his windshield.  I’m sure he spent a lot of that thinking-time going over business, thinking about family matters and house payments.  I still  have one of his briefcases, and imbedded in the plastic surface are the faint impressions of the words of a letter he wrote to my mother from his motel room somewhere down in the boondocks.  He travelled, and he thought.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but he was constantly talking about the things he thought about in the car, and a lot of it was about faith, and God, and human behavior.  Over the years he worked himself out of the hard-core fundamentalism he had embraced as a young man; and though you could never call him a “liberal” in religion, he was moderate—he had discovered the importance of God’s grace and therefore of people being gracious to each other.  I think he learned how to pray more deeply while he was driving, and some of the phrases and some of the ideas in his public prayers revealed a rich, even poetic sense of God’s love and goodness.  Still today those wonderful phrases echo in my memory of him: 

My sister went to help Mother with him in his last days, and one of the last things he said to her was, “God’s better than folks.”  That’s theology.  And that’s my father’s testimony to his experience of God in his life. 

            Just as Jesus told the Gerasene demoniac, “No you can’t go with me, but instead go home and tell everybody what great things God has done for you”—just like that, my Dad discovered that God had been working on him, and he spoke of his experience.  The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you. 

            I wonder what Bill and Beth are going to remember about my personal faith.  Oh, they’re going to have a lot of memories about growing up in the parsonage, going to church, Sunday School teachers and hymns and my style of preaching.  But I wonder what they’re going to remember about my personal faith.  After they left home they both stopped going to church.  Harriet and I felt really bad about that:  we thought maybe they wouldn’t do what 75% of young adults do.  But they did everything.  Now, in their thirties, they’ve both started back to religious fellowships.  But I wonder what they’ll remember about my personal testimony in their presence about what God has done for me.  Or have I worked harder than the average parent to give them a “normal,” secular home and forgotten that they needed my testimony?  The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you. 

            In Martin Luther’s Larger Catechism, when he gets to the commandment that says, “Honor your father and your mother,” he doesn’t limit that to our biological parents.  He talks about the prince as also being covered in this commandment—“honor your father” means (he says) honoring those who have provided for you.  Every one of us has had somebody other than a family member who has been an agent of God’s providence; and what those “fathers” and “mothers” were really doing was bearing testimony to their own faith experience.  Harriet remembers often a man in her church growing up who was frequently asked to pray in public, and she felt the influence of his faith because in those prayers he always prayed for the young people of the church—he prayed for her. 

            In People’s Church we don’t often have lay members offering public prayers, except those that we pray together as printed in the worship bulletin; nevertheless you have prayed for somebody.  And in those prayers you have born witness to what God is to you.  In how many other ways have you “told others what great things God has done for you”?  Isn’t that what the “Sending Forth” is about at the end of every worship service?  We are sent forth with God’s blessing to live the gospel we have sung about, prayed about, read about here.  In a real sense, church doesn’t end with the “Sending Forth,” church begins with the “Sending Forth.”  Church—real church—happens out there on Tuesday morning and Friday night.  The task of every Christian, then, is to find ways to bear our own testimony in practice.  Our real faith is about our experience.  The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you. 

            So Jesus and his disciples were in a boat crossing Lake Galilee, and they came to the eastern shore—a foreign country, full of non-Jews, people who didn’t believe in God.  And the worst one of them all was this man that everybody said was possessed by demons.  He bore witness to the demonic by living among the tombs.  In fact the description sounds like what we would call psychosis today, but we don’t have any better definition of psychosis than we do of demon possession—it just sounds more modern.  And by the intermediary work of Jesus, God gives the man his right mind back.  The pigs had a hard go of it—Luke took this pig story from the Gospel of Mark, and Mark intended it to introduce an element of humor into a very stressful narrative.  The citizens of Gerasa come out to the beach, and they are as negative as the former demoniac had been—they run Jesus and the disciples off:  the loss of their livestock was a shock.  The man sees their behavior and sees just how changed he is, and he doesn’t want to go back there with those people:  he asks Jesus if he can go with him.  Socially that just wouldn’t have worked:  he was a non-Jew, and his life would have been a constant temptation to turn away from God again; so Jesus said, “No.”  But just because he wouldn’t be part of the ministry of Jesus in Jericho, wouldn’t meet Zacchaeus, wouldn’t know Mary and Martha, wouldn’t see for himself the Palm Sunday victory parade, or share in the Last Supper—that didn’t mean that he was left out of the circle of good news from God.  Jesus said, “Go home and tell everybody what good things God has done for you.”  And that’s his own gospel, his own experience of God’s blessing, his own salvation.  The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you. 

            On this Father’s Day, I’ve been thinking about the example of faith I saw in my father, and asking myself what kind of example of faith I’ve been for my own children.  You see, you can’t bear witness to somebody else’s life experience.  You can see it, be amazed, interpret it.  But when you speak about what good things God has done for you—ah, then, then you really are telling the truth.  The gospel of our redemption is often the story of what God has done, is doing and will do in you.

AMEN