You Put Your Right Foot In…9/03/06
Posted 3 years, 11 months ago at 9:10 pm. 1 comment
You Put Your Right Foot In…
Psalm 15:1-5 and James 1:17-27
at the Forest Grove United Church of Christ
My appreciation to Pastor Kroll for encouraging me to preach this week. It’s been a few years since I’ve stood in front of a traditional Sunday morning congregation. And I know he understands how much I appreciate the opportunity. As a former preaching pastor at a Presbyterian church not too far from here, and now a —for the most part— private, proper, pew-sitting parishioner in this congregation, I have come to understand just how important the Sunday morning message is.
It’s awful easy to fall asleep in a lot of churches nowadays, the Sunday morning sermon being what it is. This church has kept us awake and alive!
So let me say it again, I feel privileged to speak this morning and want to express my sincere thanks again to our pastor and friend, Dick Kroll, for asking us to join and, ultimately, to help out.
The lectionary texts that Mr. Cooper read for us today have a simple focus. They argue, essentially, that what we do is at least as important as what we say or believe, and maybe more so.
Nancy and I went to the coast yesterday. We didn’t want the whole summer to pass without our getting out of town. As our weekday work and our weekend ministry responsibilities sometimes make that difficult, we jumped at my daughter’s suggestion that we spend the day in Seaside and Cannon Beach with her and our granddaughter Grace.
Now, you’ve got to be with our 22 month old granddaughter to understand how good a time we had. I bought some artwork—something I had looked at almost a year ago hoping someday to buy—the three of us shopped for some pretty nice clothes, had some pretty good food, including breakfast at Camp 18, and enjoyed a couple of car lengths of conversations together toward and back again.
But the best time we had was playing with little Grace in the Oregon sand and water. What could life be more about, right?
A DeeperLook
To be frank, just about the time I begin thinking that life is just about my family, or my clothes, or my artwork, or my trips to the beach, or my success at work, or —and you should fill in the blanks here— I bump into simple and sacred texts just like these.
From James, for instance:
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you (by preachers such as these) and is able to enrich your very lives. Be doers of that word and not hearers only. Because religion that is pure and undefiled (before God and whoever and frankly anyone reading these words) is this: care for orphans and widows in their trouble and affliction. And keep yourself unstained by the world.
Most of the time, I want to live the way my neighbors live. I want to do what they do. Have what they have. Be the people they are.
Evidence the bumper stickers on their cars. I caught a fair selection of them the other day in Car and Driver. And prompted to remember some of the pithier ones, I opened a couple of pages of bumper stickers on the Internet. The exercise was not disappointing. For instance:
“The more people I meet, the more I like my dog.”
“Someday your prince will come. Mine got lost took a wrong turn and is too stubborn to ask for directions.”
“My God can beat up your god.” Or its lengthier version: “Militant Agnostic. I don’t know and neither do you.”
Some of the car art you and I see on the road is a bit more pointed.
“Your kids may be honor students, but you’re still an idiot.”
“Four out of three people have trouble with fractions.”
“Sometimes I wake up grumpy. Other times I let him (or her) sleep!”
“Guns don’t kill people. Drivers with cell phones do.”
“Hey idiot! You’re driving a car not a phone booth!”
And more to the point, a great deal of what appears on car and truck bumpers and trunks it is more philosophical.
“Time is what keeps everything happening at once.”
“Always remember that you’re unique. Just like everyone else.”
“Eat right. Exercise. Die anyway.”
And my favorite, of course, from which the title of this brief homily is gleaned: “Maybe the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about.”
Speaking of the Hokey Pokey, in a moment that seemed truly providential and synchronistic yesterday, I was stunned to see the same words inscribed in the wainscoting at Osburn’s Ice Creamery in Cannon Beach. Pinned to the bulletin board just above the wood wainscoting was this version of the famous song and dance that was first popularized in the late 1940s—the Hoke-Poke, as William Shakespeare would have written it.
Turns out that the Washington Post holds a “Style Invitational” in its Sunday paper every week. I don’t see the Sunday paper on my PDA, so I missed that. The newspaper on at least one occasion invited its readers to rewrite some of the bad and banal instructions we get in our lives in the style of a famous writer. And Jeff Brechlin of Potomac Falls, Virginia, won the contest with this sonnet version of the Hokey-Pokey:
O proud left foot, that ventures quick within
Then soon upon a backward journey lithe.
Anon, once more the gesture, then begin:
Command sinistral pedestal to writhe.
Commence thou then the fervid Hokey-Poke,
A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl.
To spin! A wilde release from Heavens yoke.
Blessed dervish! Surely canst go, girl.
The Hoke, the poke — banish now thy doubt
Verily, I say, ’tis what it’s all about.
What if that’s what life is all about, as the song asks? What if it’s just about time with our partners, husbands and wives? Or the trips we take? Or the efforts we make at work?
Today’s texts—both Hebrew and Christian—prompt us to take a gentler and deeper look at the meaning or motivation of our lives.
Walk blamelessly and carry a big stick.
“Be doers of the word,” James the brother of Jesus writes. Because looking at Jesus, stripped of the doctrine and dogma that latter years would weigh on the church, clipped of the expectations that contemporary listeners, like you and I, would ask of the church’s sacred words, simply sitting with the man who was his biological brother, he recalls one thing we shouldn’t miss. Jesus was a doer, he says to the followers of Jesus gathered in his time. We should be doers too.
What a simple picture of the expectations that the mystery we call God has for us.
In the words of the ancient Hebrew, whose reflections are remembered in our responsive reading:
Whoever walks blamelessly and does justice;
Who thinks the truth in his or her heart,
Who slanders not with his tongue
Who doesn’t harm her fellow man,
Who doesn’t depreciate his or her neighbor
But honors those who love and respect their Lord.
That one who doesn’t lend his or her money for interest,
That one who won’t accept a bribe to hurt the innocent,
That one will never be disturbed.
He / she will live in the presence of the Divine.
Several years ago I heard the story of Larry Walters, a 33-year-old man who decided he wanted to live his life with a new perspective. Strapping himself into a lawn chair he asked several of his friends to tie helium-filled balloons to its frame.
Clearly not an entirely crazy man—he took with him a six-pack of beer, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a BB gun—Walters figured that he would shoot the helium balloons one at a time when it was time to descend.
As the story is told and I cannot vouch for its veracity, Larry Walters assumed that the balloons would lift him about 100 feet into the air. He was caught entirely off guard when the chair took him straight into the middle of the Los Angels International Airport traffic pattern. At 11,000 feet, too frightened to shoot any of his balloons, he stayed airborne for more than two hours. LAX was forced to shut down all of its runways for much of the afternoon, causing long delays in airline flights all across the country.
An amazing story, right? Soon after he was grounded and he was cited by the police, reporters asked him essentially three questions. Are you ready?
“Were you scared?”
“Yes,” he replied.
“Would you do it again?”
‘No,” he said.
And then the question that caught my abiding interest. “Why did you do it?”
“Because,” he said, “you can’t just sit there.”
If there’s a clear point in James’ recollection of Jesus, or in the Old Testament words that preceded it, it’s simply this. We need to walk blamelessly and carry a big stick. The little sticks we swing don’t count for anything!
We say hello to a doorman and think we’ve done a good deed. Not enough. We pat a small child on the head and think we’ve contributed something everlasting. Not enough. We flip a quarter into the plate, or a kindness not too late, and believe that we’ve somehow fulfilled the demands of the Christian religion—whatever they are, to whomever they’re addressed. And don’t take into account that the good man, the righteous woman, the faithful child or friend is the one who cares deeply and completely for the uncared for while watching his or her own inner condition.
Texts like these wake us up because it’s so easy to be put to sleep.
Doing the right thing isn’t always easy.
When we do get time to relax, Nancy and I love to watch movies. When I come home from teaching martial arts lessons and classes in Sherwood or when we get back from our monthly ministry meetings with the Faithspring Community, meeting in Carson City, Nevada, we think there’s nothing better than to curl up on the couch in our living room and watch a movie.
One of our favorite movies is the 1991 film, “City Slickers,” starring Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Helen Slater and Jack Palance. Palance won an Oscar in the film for Best Supporting Actor.
To cut to the point of the film, these East coast boys—in the midst of their midlife traumas and temptations—find their way to great and wild west and join a dude ranch’s cattle drive for the defining adventure of the lives.
There, grizzled old cowboy Jack Palance asks the soul-searching Billy Crystal, “Do you know what the secret to life is?”
“No, what?” says Billy.
“One thing, just one thing,” Palance replies. “You stick to that and everything else doesn’t mean shit.”
“That’s great,” Billy retorts, “but what’s the one thing?”
To which Palance says, “That’s what you’ve got to figure out.”
James has a couple of ideas. We can care more deeply for the people within and outside of our community. We can keep ourselves spiritually healthy as well.
Those are his ideas. How about you?