A Sermon
Presented by Rev. Merlin T. Batt
Intentional Interim Pastor
St. Matthew’s United Church of Christ
Maiden, North Carolina
Fifth Sunday in Lent
March 25, 2007
Scripture Lesson: Isaiah 43:16-21
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Last Sunday morning Adele and I worshiped with the congregation and guests of St. John Lutheran Church in Roanoke, Virginia. Their beautiful, modern sanctuary was filled to capacity for the 8:15 a.m. Service of Word and Sacrament. The guest preacher was the reason for the extraordinarily large congregation, and in fact the reason for our presence, Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright of Durham, England, the world’s pre-eminent New Testament scholar.
We had arrived almost an hour before the service began to be sure we had a seat. We sat near to the front of the semi-circular shaped sanctuary, near to both the pulpit and the free-standing Communion table. Being near to the front, we were among the first to go forward to receive Communion. That meant there was a good bit of time for us to meditate and pray as others in the large congregation slowly made their way forward to the table to receive Christ’s gifts.
During that prayerful time I was overwhelmed with a feeling of gratitude to God. I was grateful for more things that I can recall now or put into words, but important among them was my gratitude for the opportunity to spend several days with Adele in the Roanoke area listening to Bishop Wright’s series of five lectures and a sermon on the Resurrection of Jesus and its implications for the world, the church, and Christian discipleship.
As I sat in the pew and thanked God for this opportunity and for the ministry of this godly and learned bishop-scholar from England, I remembered how very close we came to having the trip end prematurely, and thus to missing out on this extraordinary experience. You see, Thursday morning, getting ready to leave for Roanoke, we were about to back out of our garage to start our journey when I remembered one more thing I had to do. So I set my wallet on top of the car in order to take care of the last minute chore I remembered, but when I returned and slipped in behind the wheel, I forgot having put my wallet on top the car. Maybe something similar has happened to you, too, I hope not!
Well, I backed out onto our street, paused momentarily, then put the transmission in drive, and we were on our way to Roanoke, full of anticipation and excitement, not suspecting for a moment that my wallet was on top of the car.
About a half hour later we pulled off I-40 at Statesville to get a cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts before we headed north on I-77 to Virginia. My cell phone rang. I thought it was Christa calling from the church office about some matter I had forgotten to tell her. I answered the phone, and a voice with a thick Hispanic accent said, “Are you Merlin Batt?”
“Yes,” I said suspiciously.
The voice continued in broken English, “I have your driver’s license.”
“You have what?” I said incredulously. “That’s impossible. It’s in my wallet.” And just at that moment I remembered what I had done, where I had put my wallet, containing my driver’s license, credit cards, money, personal documents…on the roof of the car. “Oh, my God!” I said as I pulled off to the side of the road, stunned by my carelessness.
The man on the phone told me he was driving in Newton when he saw a wallet on the road, its contents spilled out. He stopped and gathered them up. He looked through the wallet and saw among other things my cell phone number which he called…as it turns out, moments before I would have reached for my wallet to pay for 2 coffees, and not finding it in my pocket or in the car, I would have panicked.
To make a long and painful story short, we hurriedly returned to Newton where we met the kind man who called me. He met us just where he said he would, in the parking lot of CVS near the Justice Center on 321. Right on time, he was there in his old, beat-up, iridescent green Oldsmobile, with the driver’s side door left wide open as a signal, just as he promised.
He handed me my wallet, the black leather looking worse for wear. I looked through it quickly and discovered that all my identification papers, my credit cards, my bank card, my gift cards, my stamps, my medical cards, all were accounted for. I thanked him profusely and rewarded his kindness with a gift of money. He said his name was Jesus (Hay-suss). “That’s Jesus in English,” he said. How appropriate, I thought to myself!
As we resumed our journey to Roanoke, still badly shaken but relieved and grateful, I thought again and again about what might have happened if my wallet had been lost in the tall weeds along the road, or if Jesus or someone else had found it and taken what was valuable and thrown away the rest. I know for one thing, our travel plans would have ended right there. Under such circumstances, there’s no way I could have gone away and given my attention to a series of lectures, even ones by Bishop Wright which I had looked forward to for a year.
I’ve wondered since, what prompted Jesus to call me, to go out of his way to meet me, and return my wallet? He was obviously a poor man, a fellow with little education, barely able to speak English, and to make matters worse, a man without a job. I thought a lot about this as I sat quietly in the pew while other worshipers filed forward to receive the body and blood of Christ. There I thanked God for prompting Jesus to extend such kindness to me and, thus, make it possible for us to continue our journey and have such a wonderful learning experience and time of spiritual refreshment.
Now I ask: was it all merely a matter of good luck that Jesus happened along Startown Road at just that moment and saw my wallet and its contents spread out on the side of the road, found my cell phone number, and called me before I discovered my wallet missing and panicked? Was it just good luck that Jesus decided to extend himself in an act of uncommon kindness? Were we just lucky that our trip could resume?
There may have been a time in my life I would have been content to call such an unlikely event a matter of incredible good luck and leave it at that, but as I have grown in faith, and lived many years, and heard the life stories that people feel free to tell their pastor, I prefer to call such amazing happenings “God moments” – times when God in his great mercy acts to bless his people and get done through them what He wants to have done.
If there were time enough now, I would ask you each to turn to your neighbor and share with one another a “God moment” in your life. I suspect there is no one here today without something quite amazing to share in this regard – undeserved blessing, unimaginable good timing, the right person arriving unaccountably at the right time, a word spoken out of nowhere to guide and uphold you, an answer to prayer, a flash of insight, an inexplicable intuition, a powerful prompting, a most unlikely turn of events. Alas, we tend to keep such “God moments” to ourselves for fear that some people will think we’re crazy.
Such unlikely happenings in our lives do raise an important question: Do we live in a world where God lives, where God intrudes, acts, intervenes, moves, speaks, blesses? If that’s the case, then we’re not crazy at all, but rather in touch with an aspect of reality of which many in the modern world are sadly unaware, and therefore describe as mere coincidence, chance, or good luck. But if not, that is, if we answer that we do not live in a world where God speaks and acts, then our interpretation of these amazing events in our lives is bizarre, if not insane. So which is it?
There’s no question where the inspired authors of the Bible come out on this important question. Take Isaiah, for example. He was writing to the Jews in exile in the 6th century B.C. For a generation or more they were forced to live far away from their beloved homeland in Judea under the oppressive rule of pagans in Babylon, modern day Iraq.
In their forlornness and entrapment in a foreign land, God spoke to them through his prophet Isaiah He called to their minds the story of their ancestors who were slaves in Egypt. God reminded them that He liberated their forebears by a mighty hand in the Exodus. Then God said, “I am about to do a new thing…I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people, the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.”
In other words, God promised He would again act in history on behalf of his people to free them from their bondage and bring them home. Here God addressed a people who had no way out if there is not a God who not only cares for them, but also acts on their behalf. And here’s a text, one among many in our Scriptures, which says that our hope in life, in death, in life beyond death, is that our God lives, speaks, and acts, creates, intervenes, and moves among us doing things in this world and in the lives of His people.
There’s much in the world today which discourages us from seeing God at work in the small and large events of human life, in the personal, the communal, even the global aspects of life. In our secular education, we are encouraged, rather, to conceive of our lives as a random, pointless, series of events that, taken as a whole, constitute the twists and turns of our lives. We are taught to speak the language of chance and luck to describe the events of our lives.
What we need to teach one another in the church is the discipline of not using the word luck when we encounter some event which brings blessing upon us, for when all is said and done, we Christians don’t really believe in luck or chance. We believe in God. We believe in the working of an intruding, providential, active, loving and resourceful God, who is not far removed from this world in some spatially distant heaven, but a God who inhabits a dimension of reality which exists, so to speak, behind the thin veil separating our space and God’s. We live in a God-created, God-infused world, a world the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as “charged with the grandeur of God.”
So, Lord, give us eyes to see you at work in the world, at work in our lives. Give us ears to hear your word and a quickness to obey. Give us hearts to respond to your blessings with deep gratitude, and grant us to serve you well, praying for your Kingdom to come on earth and working faithfully to that glorious end; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
