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Living in Between
A sermon by Dr.
David Odom
Executive Director of Leadership Education @ Duke Divinity
Guest preacher at First Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Texts: Exodus 13:7-22;
I Corinthians 13:4-12
Let’s turn to some scripture, some familiar
scripture to start with. The 1 Corinthians passage, since we’re Baptists we can
read the Bible in any order we want to. We’ll start with the New Testament and
work our way backwards this morning. Starting in 1 Corinthians 13, you could all
probably read it with me. Beginning in verse four.
“Love is patient, love is kind, love is not
envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way. It
is not irritable or resentful. It does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices
in truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures
all things. Love never ends, but as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as
for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we
know only in part and we prophesy only in part but when the complete comes, the
partial will come to an end. When I was a child, I spoke like a child; I thought
like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became an adult, I put an end to
childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but there we shall see
face-to-face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully; even as I have
been fully been known. Now faith, hope and love abide these three, but the
greatest of these is love.”
May we pray together? Lord, may thee words
from your scripture inspire us to love, inspire us to faithfulness, inspire to
service. In the name of Christ we ask. Amen.
Have you ever lived in between? In between a
family during an inheritance battle, nothing brings our the best better than
money, does it? Have ever lived in between a pastor and a new pastor—whatever
that looks like. Not to bet personal. I’m living in between right now. I was at
the Center for Congregational Health for 15 years. I started. I knew everything.
Even when I was wrong, is sounded right. And now I’m at Duke where everyone
knows everything, just ask them. I was teaching at Wake Forrest, gone to Duke.
Hell hath now fury like a Wake Forrest scorned. I can’t even spell Scheffisky,
that’s how new I am. Course, no one there can spell football but I haven’t
pointed that out to them yet.
So, what’s required to live in between? We all
live in between. All of us do. Our very faith lives in between if we listen
carefully to 1 Corinthians 13. We’re between what is and what we know and what
God will bring about. What’s required to live in between. We don’t have enough
time to list everything, so let me think about just one today. Courage. It
requires courage to live in between. It requires courage to step in the middle
of friends who are fighting. It requires courage to deal with a family who’s all
broken apart by grief and uncertain about the future. It requires courage to
start a new thing, to give up an old thing. It requires courage to stay with a
thing. So how do we get the courage? How do we get it? Well experience helps,
having done it before—that helps. Knowing the family, knowing the friends,
knowing the work—that helps. But two weeks into the in between time, I can tell
you having done it before not only doesn’t help enough but the other people you
work with don’t care you’ve done it before. They’re not interested. Caught
myself several times saying, “Well, we used to.” They don’t care, they don’t
care what I used to do. So, it requires more than that. What does building up
courage, how do we do it? That caused me to think about the Old Testament. Told
you we were going to go backwards, didn’t I?
I’m going to go all the way back to Genesis,
because that’s where my bookmark is, that’s not actually where the scripture is.
Scriptures in Exodus, it’s on a page 106 and I’m wishing I had one of those pew
Bibles here. Exodus 13 beginning in verse 17 but I need to start earlier than
that. I really do need to start in Genesis. I need to start with Joseph. How
many of you had a younger brother? Okay, as we know from scripture younger
brothers are to be sold into slavery. I doesn’t have to be the youngest, just
“a” younger brother will do. Joseph was sold into slavery because he was a brat,
the first biblical brat. Unfortunately he was also touched by God as brats often
are. Lynn, it is true that the most difficult teenagers often turn out to be the
best adults. God help us all.
Joseph ended up prime minister of Egypt at
just the right time when his family was in a land where there was a famine. They
ended up coming to Egypt as the honored guest of the pharaoh. But from the very
moment (we’ll see in a few minutes) Joseph realize that their journey to Egypt
was going to be just a waiting area, temporary place. And so a time came, after
Joseph had died, when the Egyptians not only no longer honored the Israelites,
they actually enslave them. And so the Israelites cried and pleaded to God,
“Save us, Save us.” Have you ever been in that place, where you were pleading to
God? It seemed like it took God an awful long time to respond.
But God did respond. God sent Moses. You would
want to wait a long time for Moses. Because Moses is, well he’s not the first
choice of your mother-in-law. I mean, he killed somebody, he wandered off in the
desert for years. He’s just the kind of unlikely person. Even Moses thought he
was the wrong person when God came after him. But God sent Moses and sent mighty
acts—what we call the plagues and Moses through God’s help led the people out of
Egypt and that’s where we picked it up in verse 17. “When pharaoh let the people
go, God did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, although
that was nearer. That was the straight line. For God thought if the people face
war they may change their minds and return to Egypt.” So, God didn’t think they
had enough courage. So what did God do? Verse 18 “God led the people by the
round about way of the wilderness, through the Red Sea. The Israelites went up
to the land of Egypt prepared for battle and Moses took with him the bones of
Joseph who had required a solemn oath with the Israelites saying, ‘God will
surely take notice of you and then you must carry my bones with you from here.’
They set out from Succoth they camped at Etham on the edge of the wilderness.”
So, God took them the long way around in order to build their courage. He took
them through the wilderness to build courage. Verse 21 “The Lord went in front
of them in pillar of cloud by day to lead them along the way and a pillar of
fire by night to give the light so that they might travel by day and night.” I’m
going to tell you I wish he’d left the last part of 21 out because it reminds me
of just how much work it is to be in the wilderness. It’s a lot of work, day and
night. But, verse 22 “neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire
by night left its place in front of the people.” So God gave the people of
Israel the long way, but he gave them OnStar, a forty year subscription to
OnStar. There are more people who drive GM cars in this service then the last
service. I had to go on and on about that to try to get them to see the point,
either that or they we weren’t awake yet. God gave them directions—real time
satellite driven directions, pillar right up there. Plus is was a sign of the
presence of God. So all you had to do is follow God’s pillar of fire and cloud,
work hard and you’ll get there. Okay, that’s the end of the sermon. Because it’s
true! That would be enough and I bet I get invited back.
But since we have a little extra time, maybe I
should point out something. Living in the wilderness is extremely difficult. It
is so hard; it is so easy to wish that you could go back. It’s hard, it’s hard
to come every Sunday and hear some new person preach. Some of the sermons are
good. Some of them are holidays, some of them are risky, some of them safe, some
of the preachers are old, some of them are not so old, but not quite young under
any definition beside presidential you know. It’s hard, all that transition and
change. I went to work at Duke 13 days ago. At 11 o’clock on my first day they
brought someone to my office to interview them for a new job. To interview the
other person, no me, I’d already been hired. I didn’t know one thing to tell the
person. “Well, I decided to come here, I hope you will, too.” How hopeful is
that? I had to schedule a meeting with the person who was going to do the
interview with me to ask what it is that the job was so that I would know a
little bit more. Not a good plan.
It’s hard work. So, even when you can depend
on God, how do you get through it? Really! I have an interesting lesson in that,
actually. Lynn and I, Lynn’s here, bless her. We have a, one of our sons—we
don’t have any children, we only have boys—and if you don’t have any boys, then
you don’t know what that means. The middle one is a senior in high school and he
wanted us to take he and seven of his friends to the beach. Now, we’re all
cheap. So, he wanted to go to my parents place in Florida. Even without a GPS
you know that Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where we live, is a long ways from
Florida. There are closer beaches. But none of them are free. So, we all loaded
up. Now, there were four of these characters who were rising college freshmen.
You could tell them because they were all reading the required text for their
college. They were going to three different colleges. They would occasionally
look up in the mirror as we were driving in the van and they would say. “This is
the most boring book, what in the world are they going to talk to us about?”
But, they didn’t know what they couldn’t do yet. So they kept reading. And the
four of them were rising seniors. Well one of them was a senior want-a-be, but
rising seniors in high school—at the apex of their wisdom. Plotting their reign
of seniorhood at their high school. No one is as smart as an 18 year old, except
for a 14 year old who thinks he’s an 18 year old. And they were all together,
all of us in the van for hours and hours. I was able to observe their
conversation. It had three sort of movements to it. The first movement is that
they remembered. They’d all been in the van together, they’d all been in high
school together and they remembered all of those great things that they had
done. And they remembered all those cruel things that had been done to them.
They remembered it all it was really powerful—classes and trips. Then in the
second movement they would, they would dream, they would vision and in that case
it went all over the place. Those freshmen were going to new places, they were
very excited. Two of them were in the band at Appalachian State University and
their chance to raise the money to go to Michigan, they were there. Now, they
had to ride a bus but they were there, they’ll never forget that. See, some of
their dreams have already come true—it’s amazing. And then seniors, of course
the seniors were plotting the take over of the reign of their high school. They
had big dreams. They were going to do it better than anybody else. How they kept
from insulting those other people who had just been seniors, I’m not
sure—anyway, that’s the way it worked. Then the third movement was the most
interesting to me, although I think all three are important. In the third
movement, they just forgot. They absolutely lived in the moment. They played
cards, they build sand castles, they played video games—all night long they
played video games. Four television, eight teenagers one old man, trying to
sleep. And a mother who tried to keep in touch with him. They lived completely
in the moment. I think all of those movements are really instructive about
actually day-by-day living in the wilderness.
It is important, it is important in any kind
of wilderness to be in touch with the ancient stories, the stories of our own
experience; it’s why we come together. It’s why we share in smaller groups—to
remember. Remembering is good, so is dreaming, so is visioning, building up your
imagination. I was at a lunch meeting this week with one of the faculty members
at Duke and he was asking me something big, something or other. He wasn’t
interested in what I was doing, he was interested in what he was doing. Typical
faculty actually, but anyway. I thought to myself and actually even said to him,
“I’m so overwhelmed, I’ve lost my imagination for the moment. So, I clearly
can’t help you with this today, could you get back up with me tomorrow. Maybe
I’ll be doing better.” It’s hard to dream the vision in the wilderness, but it’s
so important. A little later in the day I caught a little bit of imagination, it
was nice, a nice little break from being overwhelmed. But this third thing, this
being able to stay in the moment, to learn and live in the moment—that is really
tough. It’s so much easier to go back. Sometimes you try to skip over the hard
part.
It’s really hard to live in the moment. The
people of Israel found that out. I mean, they had this OnStar thing this cloud
and fire pillar thing going on and yet within six weeks to a story recorded in
Exodus 16 they were so unhappy about food, they were so unhappy about the food
that Moses and Aaron were going to go crazy. You don’t want Moses going crazy,
that happened to them once—bad! So, Moses goes to God and says, “God, these
people are driving me crazy.” Sounds like the prayer of every preschool mother
I’ve ever known. “God these people are driving me crazy.” And God said, “I have
an answer.” This is a paraphrase, “Moses hot donuts now. That is your answer.”
It’s in there, it’s in there. Manna translates into North Carolina as “hot
donuts now.” Manna, hot donuts now. I mean some of the scholars says it means
“what’s it.” But I know what it means. When they got up every morning God said,
“their going to walk out and see a whole field of hot glazed Krispy Kreme donuts
and you go and you eat and you take it in and you leave the rest behind because
they are not any good cold. They turn bad overnight, bad, bad donuts (because
they had no microwaves, no way to recover them). So, the donuts will be out
there and the people would take them in and leave the rest behind, they would
melt away, they were good. These people were walking a lot, so they didn’t have
any cholesterol issues. The next morning they got up and the donuts were there
again. Everyday, they would have the provision of God, something sweet,
something warm, something delicious to take into their very bodies. Apparently
it wasn’t enough just to have God’s elements right there in front of their face.
They needed to be able to touch it, they needed to be able to hold it, they
needed to be able to take it in, they needed to be able to remember that I am
dependent of God this day for every day. Now, God warns them, “If you try to
save this up, if you try to make an investment in the future, it won’t work.”
The wilderness takes as long as it takes, there’s no way to speed it up, there’s
no way hold on to it.
The pastor of the church that I’m a member of,
Ardmore Baptist Church, died. Now, that is an unusually difficult situation,
when your beloved pastor dies in service to the church. It’s an awful time. I
was, at that point, supposedly an expert in interim ministry, (of course you
know, prophets are without honor in their own country and all that sort of
thing). So they asked me, “What should we do?” Well that’s sort of like my 18
year old asking me what should we do. You know, if I say one thing, he’ll do the
other. So, I said to them, “This is what you need to do and this is how long
it’s going to take you. It’s going to take you about two years.” They said, “Oh
no, we’ve got to move faster than that. We can’t wait; we’ve got to build a new
building. We’ve got to move on this.” Okay, fine, you know how long it to them?
Two years my way, three years my way. I was right. I want credit. Perhaps that’s
why they didn’t listen to me; I had that kind of attitude. If you try to speed
up in the wilderness, all it does is slow you down. That is so hard. What is the
right pace, how do you figure that out. It requires a tremendous amount of
discernment and all I could really say is you have to depend on God one day at a
time. You know this devotion book that Lynn had. It’s got a devotion for every
day. Sure you could speed read the whole thing if you wanted to, it wouldn’t
take you that long. But, if you break it down every day and hear from God every
day, it makes a big difference.
This morning we come to a place where we take
hold of something from God. If Jesus had lived in the late twentieth century
this would be coffee and hot Krispy Kreme. Or perhaps, if it was at lunch time,
it would be milk and cookies. But it’s not, its bread and juice.
Jesus when he was with the disciples took
bread and he broke it and when he was with his disciples he took the cup and
poured into it and he gave thanks and he distributed to them. Let us give
thanks. Gracious God for these elements, this bread and this cup and what they
represent in your gift of sacrifice and nourishment of us we are most grateful.
And may we as we hold these elements in our hands for a few moments, may we
remember, may we dream, may we hold fast to the moment your presence and
direction. Amen.
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