Abide With Me
by
Ruth Marris Macaulay

September 26, 2007

Abide with me. Stay with me. Be at my side at all times. Be within my heart, my words and my actions. This is what we ask of God in the well-known hymn that we will be singing later in the service. But it is also what God asks of us – stay with him too and rise to the occasion when he asks us to do difficult things. I want to talk about how God helps us to do difficult things this morning. I am not very good about difficult things myself. I put them off for all kinds of reasons and I suspect I may not be the only one. I’m capable of avoiding everything - from having a tough conversation with my daughter about her budget to grading a pile of handwritten papers that look as if a collection of crazed spiders had wandered across way too many pages. But I’m also talking about social responsibility – reaching out to others in need and doing what God expects me to do. Love my neighbors. As I’ve said already, and as I know you all know, it’s not always easy to do a good job with this. In order to succeed in some measure we have to get a handle on what we really mean by loving. We love our families, we love our friends, we love a book we’re reading, we love eating in restaurants, going to the beach, sleeping in, woolly lambs, spring flowers, our Mercedes Benz according to the TV ads – you name it – but how much do we love our neighbors, our fellow humans – and how much do we love God? We’re talking about several different categories of love here. The Greeks had three words for love – eros for desire – philos for affection, fondness, friendship which added to the word sophia, forms philosophy – a fondness for wisdom, and finally there’s agape which we recognize as the name of the early Christian love-feast but which in Greek means contentment. We complicate the word by using it for all three. We love our families and friends because they, most of the time, love us back – it’s a reciprocal love out of which we get something tangibly pleasant. The second category is that we love to see and hear, touch, taste and smell the things that give us pleasure – something we gain from them through our five physical senses that enriches our lives so long as we don’t do certain things to excess (another thing the Greeks had down – they believed in balance, and that all work and no play made Socrates a dull boy). But another category of love often involves something much more difficult – caring for people we don’t know or who aren’t easy is a challenge – and so is loving God when he calls on us to make sacrifices and do hard things for which we don’t always see immediate gain or pleasure for ourselves. Loving God and our neighbor means we have to be willing to serve. We don’t serve God when we ignore poverty of spirit within ourselves. We don’t serve our neighbors if we listen to rumors or make guesses about the reasons for their actions when they aren’t there to defend themselves. We need to abide with God. If we do he will challenge us constantly. If we can meet the challenges he offers we will allow our relationships with him to grow.

I read a book this summer called Abide With Me by Elizabeth Strout and stole its title for this sermon. Perhaps some of you have read it. It takes place in a small New England town in the late 1950s. The young minister’s wife has died and he is struggling to overcome his grief while helping his congregation with their problems too. He has two young children, one a baby being cared for by his mother, the other a five-year-old girl who has remained silent since her mother’s death and who remains with her father. The congregation of his church, who have always been patient and kind begin to question the minister’s leadership and his ability to raise his children alone – it is the 1950s remember. Anger and gossip lead to unwarranted accusations, but in his darkest hour comes a kind of redemption for both the minister and the congregation. I won’t say more because some of you might like to read it and I don’t want to spoil the ending. However, I found it thoughtful and moving and it led to some of the ideas I’ve been trying to get at in this sermon. In the book the wounded achieve salvation both because they are less important than they think they are and because they are more important than they think they are. This may sound contradictory but I will try to explain. People gain importance in his church because they’re either the deacons or the organist and because they have traditions of doing things in particular ways that are recognized by others. And don’t mistake me – the congregation in the story want to be good people – for the most part. But they’re human. The organist is bent out of shape because she hasn’t got the new organ she wants. The chair of the deacons has ignored his wife and is dallying with another woman. The teacher of the silent little daughter becomes angry with the child for not cooperating. In this way you see how the congregation is less important than it thinks it is. But it is not just because of their personal frailties. It is because they are not abiding with God. But the story gathers strength when it recognizes that changes can and do come about through God’s grace. It’s not as if everything is fixed by miraculous intervention. The shift is gradual. People hardly realize it to begin with. Gulfs are bridged by an understanding, that comes out of both observation and reflection. In the book the minister talks about what he calls “ The Feeling” – by which he means a direct experience of God – he struggles in seminary because he’s not sure he really has it – but at the end of the book this is what it says:

“ One morning he realized that what he had experienced [that] day . . . was The Feeling. This surprised him: It was very different from the times before, but that’s what it had been, The Feeling. O Lord [he prays] truly I am thy servant . . . and the son of thine handmaid; Thou hast loosed my bonds. He looked through the long window. The sky was the pale, sweet blue of a baby’s blanket. He understood again that his relationship with God was changing, as it would have to do.”

Now there are a number of things about this passage that I find significant. First of all he tells God he is his servant. Love comes through service. Then he tells us that God has loosed his bonds. Service has made him free – free to look through a new lens at the world he inhabits. A crisis occurs that changes the direction of his life for the better. It is unexpected. And his relationship with God changes, and the book says as it would have to do. I think there is a lot to be learned from this short passage – about serving God, about the possibility of his unexpected intervention to change our focus, about healing, and about a changing relationship with God as we experience life. Abide with me – God asks us and we ask God. We don’t do it to stay in the same stage of spiritual development. We abide with him hoping that our relationship will grow through our carrying out of his difficult tasks with love.

God is love, but how can love best be served? It is this question that it is our job to ask in every thought we entertain, every word we utter, and every deed we perform. Now I know I’m preaching to the congregation of the First Baptist Church in America – a very fine group of individuals whose love and kindness have been spread far and wide – but we are not the only star in the heavens. Are we perhaps less important than we thought we were – or, are we far more important than we think we are ? I believe we’d be inclined to say we don’t think we’re so important, we’re not excessively vain about our accomplishments as a people of faith, - but I think we have to look a little harder and deeper than this. We are both less important than we think and we are far more important than we think. Let’s unpack this idea a bit. How are we less important than we think? Do we really think we’re that important? Who is this “we” anyway? Are we a cluster of individuals where the whole is greater than the sum of our parts – or are we a cluster of individuals with a cluster of individual agendas and further clusters of competing claims on our lives above and beyond being members of a church ? Do we think we can answer the question of who we are and why we are here by rational thought? I don’t think we do – I’m pretty sure we can’t do too much without God’s grace. But what do we mean by “God’s grace” ? I know I’m posing all sorts of questions this morning and I expect some of you may have a much clearer understanding of God’s grace than I do – but I do believe that many of us feel that faith is a journey and for the most part we understand more as we progress along it – which is why we are more important than we think. Let me use an analogy to try to explain this further:

Among the key pieces of advice I give to aspiring young teachers when I work with them at Brown are the following:
a) plan backwards from your goals
b) reflect on your practice
c) observe and learn from experienced teachers

I think these ideas work just as well in a church.
a) If our goal is to love and serve God let us each make his or her own plan of how best to do that not just according to our time, talents and treasures but by stepping outside our comfort zones to reach out to our neighbors.
b) Let us reflect on how we’re doing at meeting that goal and do it at regular intervals through prayer, Bible study and discussion groups that are carefully directed and clearly focused on shared goals.
c) Let us listen to those who are further along in their faith journeys and see what they’ve learned and what we can learn from them.

All these things center on how we love. I often think that if an alien from another planet were to stand in a supermarket line and read the cover pages of all the magazines in the rack, he she or it would think we were a nation obsessed by erotic and/or romantic love. How to catch, keep, or can your man. It has little to do with concerned caring, or about the building of enduring relationships founded on trust, respect and loyalty. We are good at loving in the good times, but not always for better or worse. So, if it’s not always easy to love each other how well can we love God?

What led me to the reflections I’m sharing with you this morning was when I found myself stressing the need to reflect to my students this summer. It made me realize I needed to do some more reflecting - about loving God and my neighbor. In order to benefit from the more experienced, from the faith journeys of others, I wanted to share how difficult the journey has been for me at times in the past and still is - and will probably be in future too. I don’t expect it to be easy. Kierkegaard, my favorite philosopher whose ideas actually convinced me to regain my faith after losing it as a young adult said “ no one is born devoid of spirit, and no matter how many go to their deaths without spirit, it is not the fault of life”. We often hear that life is what we make it – and ultimately we are measured by this - in the world – but I think it is more than that. Life is doing what God calls us to do with it – and that doesn’t always mean success in the world’s terms. However it does mean doing all that we do in a spirit of love. Life is an opportunity offered to us by God. It is up to us to deal with all it offers - to look for the silver linings in the clouds and not to hog all the sunshine.

So much for theory – but what about practice? How can we, in our everyday lives, meet God’s difficult challenges? We could easily be overwhelmed. Need is everywhere. The world is not a peaceful place. Our society has serious shortcomings. Where do we begin? We begin by abiding with God and asking him to abide with us – and we do this with the expectation of changes, of difficulties, and through them, a growing relationship. Let me give you a concrete example or two.

I used to attend another church. During that time my marriage came to an end. I had difficulty fitting into the church in my new identity as a middle-aged single woman. People tended to gather in age groups for various activities or as couples. I liked the church and the minister but I felt like a lamp that had been unplugged. I’d probably only had a 40 watt bulb when I’d been plugged in. When Ken, who had sung for a time at my previous church, invited me to come to First Baptist I wasn’t at all sure what I was getting into. Baptist sounded not like my cup of tea at all. But I came because I had a very high regard for Ken. It took at least six months for me to recognize that Someone had been watching over me – Ken was sent to show me the new outlet and the 100watt bulb. Once I’d connected everything up I knew I’d found the right place. God moves in a mysterious way. Sometimes its so obvious you don’t see it. But, like the minister in the story, I felt my bonds were loosed and that I was free to love God and my neighbor in a way I’d never felt able to before. I’m not saying I’ve done it as well as I could or should all the time, but I have felt that my relationship with God has grown and changed – as it ought to.

That’s a personal example, but I expect many of you have had important moments in your faith journeys that you recognize afterwards rather than at the time. A new lens, a shift of emphasis, a sudden dawning. We need these times to keep us going. They don’t come regularly but they do come unexpectedly – so we can, if we believe that they have the potential to occur, be optimistic.

The other way we can serve God is in our working lives. By working lives I include mothers at home with young children as well as people who are retired. We all work. At least I don’t know that many people who sit and stare at the wall all day. In my case, I teach – teenagers and would-be teachers. Much has been said about the shortcomings of education in this country, and quite a lot of it by me – but I am also in a position to begin act locally in order to think nationally or globally. This week I read an article in Harper’s Magazine called Schoolhouse Crock: Fifty Years of Blaming America’s Educational System for our Stupidity. I found it very compelling – perhaps because it pointed out some things I agreed with – but also because it pointed out some things I wasn’t paying enough attention to. For example: in the USA we spend more per capita on education than in any of the other countries in the Western world whose academic achievements are higher than ours. Those other countries have, on average, larger class sizes. So what is going on? Well those other countries have national health care and other sophisticated social services so that children go to school well and well fed and do not live in such dangerous and violent neighborhoods as those that exist in American cities. Okay – so far I felt pretty pleased that what I believed is apparently borne out by the data. But what I was failing to remember was that America is a nation of immigrants and that the diversity in American schools, together with the number of children who speak different languages, is far higher than it is in the list of those higher scoring Western nations. I can’t begin to act locally until I look at the situation with more balance, more information. When God calls us to do difficult things it can be rather like this. We have to prepare ourselves well to do them well. It is all too easy to focus on the things that support our own agendas. Yes, I want to reach out to my neighbors in the area of education, but I need to be informed enough to do it effectively and not just be a strident voice or a bleeding heart. What I do each day gives me opportunities to love my neighbors and I’ll do it best with God’s guidance. Service means putting aside self – I don’t mean being a doormat – we all need to preserve self-respect - but if God’s willing to abide with me the least I can do is abide with him. The hardest part for me is paying attention when God is trying to get me to refocus. And now I’m beginning to sound like one of my own students!

This summer when I was observing Brown student teachers in the Brown Summer High School, which is a summer enrichment program for mostly Providence high school kids I met a shy Cambodian boy named Van. The theme of the class was the untold stories of history. Each student had to do a presentation on a topic of his or her choice. Since I was sitting next to Van he asked me if I knew anything about Cambodia. I said I did – in fact that the last unit I’d taught in the previous school year in my world history class had been on Cambodia. “ Oh!” he said “ they don’t teach about it in my school and it is my history. I don’t know my history”. Well, to cut a long story short I brought him in a short history of Cambodia I’d written for my students and a bunch of interviews with Khmer Rouge survivors. It was an extraordinary and wonderful moment to be able to connect him with his roots and it somehow made the fact that I’d decided to teach Cambodian history this year so much more valuable. It was so unlikely too – I mean, here I am, a middle-aged Englishwoman explaining to a teenaged Cambodian boy why his family ended up in America - but I see the hand of God in moments like this, infusing Van’s life and mine with unexpected meaning.

I’d like to close by saying thank you – to Dan for letting me clamber into his pulpit, to you all for listening to my thoughts and struggles, and to God for abiding with me. Abide With Me 365 days a year O Lord. Amen