Anonymous

1st Lesson: Psalm 77 2nd Lesson: Mark 9: 38-41, NT page Sermon Title: Anonymous The title of this sermon in your bulletin is “Anonymous,” but I have a hard time coming up with sermon titles. I used to not ever give my sermon’s titles, but then a member of the church I was serving told me that if I didn’t put down a title than everyone would think that I had just written the sermon the night before. I was thinking, “What makes you think I didn’t just write the sermon the night before.” Well, I have been better about writing sermons ahead of time, but the sermon titles are hard because I have to have the sermon title for the bulletin by Thursday morning but I’m still making changes to my sermon until Thursday afternoon at least. I don’t know about my sermon title today, but last Thursday morning I was still captured by this God in Psalm 77 whose “footsteps were unseen” and I didn’t know how else to explain it then to say that sometimes our God is anonymous. Now that’s not always good. The psalmist doesn’t like it and you can feel the psalmist’s emotions here. You can feel the author’s longing for God’s presence. I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me. In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; And you know what she’s reaching for. I say “she,” maybe it’s “he,” but regardless, you know what the author of this psalm is reaching for because you’ve reached for God too. There’s a famous preacher named George Buttrick. He was the Professor of Homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity School up the road, and in a sermon titled “God and Laughter” he claimed that “we can neither prove God nor escape him.” I find that statement easy to agree with. On the one hand proving that God exists, while we’ve all spent considerable time and mental power trying to do it, remains about as fruitful an activity as arguing which came first, the chicken or the egg. Even the ones who saw God face to face did not come back with much proof beyond their personal conviction. Think of Moses – he saw a burning bush in the wilderness, which on the one hand is convincing – a bush that burned without being consumed - but how can you be so sure a burning bush signifies the presence of God? Mary told Joseph that an angle of the Lord came to her and made her pregnant with baby Jesus. Joseph couldn’t accept it, not until he had a dream of his own – and based on these examples I tell you that the Bible is not only a book full of faithful Abraham’s who believed without seeing, it is also a book of doubting Thomas’ who could neither prove God nor escape him. So the psalmist’s words represent so many: I cry aloud to God, aloud to God, that he may hear me. In the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; And what does the psalmist’s hand stretch for? What does that hand eventually grasp? The psalmist holds onto the idea that even when God was so profoundly present, so obviously at work in the parting of the Red Sea that saved the Israelites and destroyed Pharaoh’s army – even then there was a question for “your footprints were unseen.” That’s faith for you. They call it a leap of faith for a reason. It’s not proof that can do it, not facts or research. It takes a leap from doubt to get to faith because you can’t always be absolutely sure that it was God and neither can you be absolutely sure that it wasn’t. My friend Andrew Hickman told me a story that works that way. You might say he excelled socially and not academically the first time he went to college, so after a short break he went back with a new attitude and was doing really well, except for this one class – calculous. It’s not that he didn’t try – he did try, but it came so slow that he had a hard time in the beginning of the semester, and not long before the final exam it was looking as though he would not be able to pull his grade up. If you’ve been in this situation before than you can imagine what Andrew might have been feeling. But the professor went to give a guest lecture at another college out of town. He had all the grades in the back of his car – and this was at the time when a teacher’s grades were all on paper and not in a computer – so when a tornado came through and took the class’s grades and test scores with it, there was nothing the professor could do other than tell the class that everyone would be treated as though they had a 100% up until this point. “If you receive a 0 on the final exam you will finish the semester with a 75%,” he said. “Now did God do that?” we ask. “Yet your footprints were unseen,” says the psalmist, just as we believe that the unexplainable has an explanation. “Yet your footprints were unseen,” we say because we believe, but surely the theological questions are not now all put to rest for believing that the Lord is at work in a tornado is not without problems all its own. When that larger than life pastor, Jerry Fallwell told the nation that hurricane Katrina was God’s way of sending judgement to the city of New Orleans no Christian I knew stood with him in agreement. As a matter of fact, when he died I wrote an article for the paper lamenting the fact that without him around “I’d no longer have an example of how not to be a pastor,” but should I have been so bold? We struggle to speak about the ways of our God, and while we, as a church we have a way of determining these things it is a challenge to speak on God’s behalf. The Presbyterian Church has always been characterized by her dedication to democracy, believing that when God speaks the community will affirm the Lord’s voice, assuming that God doesn’t just speak to one person, but to a majority. Therefore, when a man or woman feels the call to preach, the call must be affirmed by her home church, then by her home presbytery, by a whole series of examinations and interviews. You might say that we are not so unlike the Disciple John, who in our second Scripture lesson from the Gospel of Mark, wants to know who these people think they are casting out demons in the name of Jesus Christ and who gave them permission. I can see where John is coming from. If someone walked into this church and volunteered to teach Sunday School we’d all want to check out his credentials, we’d want to hear about his background, especially before we let him loose on a classroom of young children. These days we have to be careful about who does what and when – because we’ve witnessed the danger of unlicensed funeral home directors, unlicensed nutritionists, unlicensed teachers. We have to be careful – but we also have to admit that sometimes we’ve been too careful. John wanted to stop them saying, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him. Whoever is not against us is for us.” I wish people would remember that, especially when it comes to matters of the Gospel, because sometimes we are too judgmental and often we are too timid. Sometimes when you ask a Presbyterian to pray you can see the panic in his eyes. I’ve been better about it lately, but I used to be really bad about forgetting to go to the People’s Table when it was our church’s week to serve the meal. Whoever was in charge of preparing all that food for hungry folks in our community would call me on a Monday or Tuesday and ask if I could make it over to the People’s Table to say the prayer of Friday, and I’d agree, but because the meal is on a Friday and I take Friday’s off, sometimes I’d be cutting the grass and would lose track of time and would forget all about it. Now I wasn’t there to see it, but apparently, sometimes when the good volunteers from our church looked around when it was time to bless the food and saw that I had once again forgotten to attend a terror would spread among the group, and I can understand why. If you’re not used to praying in front of people it’s intimidating, but here’s what I want you to know – if God can use me – don’t you know God can use you? We get worried. We want to do things correctly, be approved, do it all right, and we all know that the Disciple John is there watching, just waiting to tell you that you’ve been casting out demons all wrong. That’s true. And he was there the first time I ever preached a sermon. I was a Senior in college and the faculty member assigned to the pre-ministerial group took me over to the old folks’ home where I preached for the first time, and when it was over, as he drove me back to my dorm room looking for some affirmation I asked him how he thought I did, but the only good thing he could come up with was that I had talked for exactly the right amount of time – “Joe, you talked for 12 minutes, and that was just right.” It’s hard, but Pope Francis is famous now for saying that he would rather have a church that makes mistakes than a sick church, which is nothing if not a call to all of you to be bold enough to try. There is no question that it is difficult to say how it is that the Lord is at work among us. We sit down with our friends who have doubts and don’t know what to say – but if you don’t tell that story – our God’s deeds of power will be anonymous. You must not be so concerned with getting it right that you fail to try. Amen.