Preached at Two Rock Valley and Tomales Presbyterian Churches, June 16, 2024
As many of you know, I had the joy of watching my son and many of his buddies
walk the stage for their high school graduations this past week.
It was surreal and beautiful.
For any of you who may feel weighted down by national politics, world events,
or your own person trials and tribulations,
please know that it is my humble assessment that we are in good hands
with this upcoming generation.
Such handsome souls I witnessed this week … a plethora of them.
70 or so at Tamiscal in Corte Madera and 350 or so at Archie Williams in San Anselmo. Talented and beautiful … Every. Last. One. Of. Them.
It was a joy to see the parents too.
I can’t toot my own horn, pastors are supposed to be humbler than that,
but I can applaud my friends.
And so many of them helped John and I so much over the years.
For example, I saw Bob and Kristin, a couple both of whom I just adore.
I hadn’t seen them in years …
maybe not since around the time when Bob coached John in little league.
It brought a great memory to mind …
the boys were particularly wild on one particular day …
They looked like a poster for The Little Rascals …
they were all turning their caps to different angles in some sort of game
of what hour is your hat pointing to …
That’s when Coach Bob got them to straighten up.
“Boys, your hat brim always points straight ahead …
at least if you want that ball to go where you want it to when you get up to bat.”
Well, … that took care of that.
It’s a good spiritual message too.
Face forward. Even when you can’t see where you are going.
The title of my sermon is Walk by Faith, Not by Sight,
which comes out of a companion Scripture selection to the two we just read today
(2 Corinthians 5:7).
I tend to follow what’s called the Common Lectionary,
which is a three-year Church Calendar that encourages pastors
to walk through the Bible somewhat methodically.
I like it, as many of my peers do,
because it gives an immediate starting place from which to focus and preach.
It also means that I am challenged to show up,
and thus help you show up, for our faith in a way that is Bible-led, not Pastor-led.
This is important, because it means someOne other than me,
and my little human whims, is dictating what you think about today,
and hopefully, if I do my job well, this upcoming week.
So today we heard King David’s call story in 1 Samuel
and about the mighty mustard seed in the gospel of Mark.
Good, good stories about small, unimposing entities
becoming great and impressive under God’s tutelage.
I like that. And it fits well with the larger calendar of our lives,
what with graduations and Father’s Day and Juneteenth this coming week.
Both the Scripture passages we read today are about vision;
God’s expert vision and our relative lack of it.
It’s not that we can’t see, or course,
but rather than our sight can lead us astray and that often we can’t see the big picture.
In the call story of King David, even the prophet Samuel
has trouble seeing what God is up to.
Directed by God to anoint a new king, Samuel is led to the house of Jesse,
a father with eight sons, one of whom God plans to name as the country’s new leader.
When Samuel saw Jesse’s eldest son, Eliab, he was sure that the search was over.
Eliab was striking and tall and seemingly a perfect fit for a king.
But God told Samuel:
“Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.”
In the end, the heart that made the cut was David’s;
Jesse’s youngest son who had been relegated to tending sheep,
rather than invited to attend the important family meeting with Samuel.
David’s a curious pick in my mind,
because the only thing we’re told about him is that he has a healthy, glowing,
handsome face and beautiful eyes.
Didn’t God just stress that outer appearances aren’t the deciding factor?
It seems clear to me that God sees something that we humans don’t
or can’t from our limited vantage point.
I read recently that sheep (which humans are often compared with in Scripture)
can’t see past the end of their noses.
Supposedly, and some of you sitting here can confirm or deny this,
they have excellent peripheral vision, but their depth perception is poor
and sight really isn’t their strongest sense.
We humans can be the same way, and as near as I can tell
it doesn’t much matter whether we need corrective lenses or not;
As an example, in one of my son’s and my most favorite movies
(at least it was a number of years ago),
Mary Poppins tells the story of a woman called in to care for the children
of a successful banker named George.
George is confident that he has his priorities straight,
but, over the course of the movie, with the help of Mary Poppins and his young children,
he becomes awakened to his shortsightedness.
Life can do this do us. Especially, I am finding, in middle age.
The number of things vying for our attention grows and grows
and before long we’re apt to loose track of what is important.
Children can actually be quite good at reminding us, if we let them.
In another childhood favorite story, The Little Prince,
who symbolizes the hope, love, innocence and insight of childhood says:
“Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves,
and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever be explaining things to them.”
Dads (and moms too, but it is Father’s Day),
listen to your children today … they might have an important message for you.
I suppose it is all a matter of perspective.
What we ‘know’ is dependent on what is important to us
and what we understand about our world.
Adults, at least some of us, understand things like
setting a budget, fixing things, operating computers, cooking meals, managing time, reading, and the list goes on.
Children, on the other hand, understand and know the importance of
smelling the flowers, playing, imagining, dreaming, creating art, & other such necessities.
Adults and children actually make a pretty good team,
even if it might take a bit of stretching to appreciate each other’s gifts.
It is however, imperative that we learn to do so.
At least if we hope to connect with loved ones …
we often have to agree to step into their world.
At the end of our service today we will be singing one of my very favorite hymns …
Guide My Feet.
We will do this because it is an African American spiritual
and this coming week is Juneteenth, a relatively new national holiday.
It’s probably long overdue in being recognized as it celebrates the freedom
of Africans in America, signified by the Emancipation Proclamation
read to enslaved African Americans on June 19th in 1865.
Several years ago, with the brutal death of George Floyd,
most Americans were reminded that we still have a long way to come in this regard.
But naming Juneteenth as a National holiday is at least a start
to lifting up a priority we Americans can at least hope to live into better.
There’s another reason we’re singing Guide My Feet, and it’s personal.
My water broke, announcing John’s birth, to that song.
It happened at the Presbyterian Church in Windsor, California
right after I stepped down off the chancel
having offered the closing blessing to my dear clergy friend Amy
who was being installed as the Pastor there.
Without going into too much detail, it was a confusing experience for me …
to be fair John was 3 weeks early, and I wasn’t prepared for his arrival.
But he decided he was coming, and the fact that I was singing Guide My Feet
did not lose its message on me.
I got it. Loud and clear. And he still does guide my feet.
Whether you go into this day celebrating your Dad or lamenting that he’s passed on,
Whether you rue the day that He was born and wish you’d had a different one,
Whether you have a plethora of African friends and are grateful our country
is trying to do something to acknowledge
the collective pain we inflicted on a whole race of people,
Or if you just go home not really caring about either Father’s Day or Juneteenth,
I invite you to consider that God is always talking with you …
through the experiences of your day,
through your loved ones, those you like and the ones that you don’t so much.
God is with you … God is with all of us.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
