Sermon delivered 

September 1, 2013 at Grace United Methodist Church in York, PA

Hebrews 13:1-8, 15-16 (NRSV)

1. Let mutual love continue.
2. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
3. Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them; those who are being tortured, as though you yourselves were being tortured.
4. Let marriage be held in honor by all, and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled; for God will judge fornicators and adulterers.
5. Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.”
6. So we can say with confidence, “The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?”
7. Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.
8. Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

15. Through him, then, let us continually offer a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of the lips that confess his name.
16. Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.
    
    
    This past week we celebrated the 50^th anniversary of the March on Washington culminating in the famous “I have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now, I am not quite old enough to remember that time, but some of you may remember what life was like at that time in this country. Maybe you remember hearing your parents discuss the events as you came home from grade school. Maybe you remember seeing the images on television of the riots that occurred in places like Birmingham and elsewhere as protesters were met with police water cannons. Maybe you remember praying for the souls of those young african american girls who lost their lives when their church was bombed on a Sunday morning.
    
    
    I can't speak of my experience in these matters, but I am aware that how we view those events fifty years down the road is very different from the way they were viewed at the time. To think of segregating society now is anathema, it is frowned upon, to suggest it is to ostracize yourself from all social circles, and for good reason. Ideas like that are, in my opinion and in the opinion of the vast majority of Christian denominations, are the opposite of what we consider to be true, Christian moral codes. But at the moment they were occurring, there was no consensus, had there been, history would no doubt tell a very different tale. What is true in one human age is not necessarily true in another human age. Cultures change, human moral principles shift. Life adapts to place and time. It is the story of human endeavor.
    
    
    Yet, this morning here we are. We gather to praise God. We gather to rejuvenate our faith. We gather to hold up that which God holds out to us, that is His Grace. If the author of Hebrews has taught us nothing else, it is that there is a distinction between what is perfect and what is not. There is perfection in this world, but that perfection is in Christ. That perfection is in the sacrifice and blood of God's own Son for our undeserving redemption. That perfection does not lie in us, nor can it, at least not in the present. It can only be obtained by an acknowledgment on our part of the gift of Christ in our lives. Yet, even in that acknowledgment, perfection is not yet attained. We must wait! We must act in life, knowing that perfection will be obtained, but at a time not of our choosing. We must act in life, secure that our redemption is bought and paid for, but without any receipt to ensure our entrance to the Kingdom. That is faith. Faith, as Hebrews reminds us is assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things unseen. We can not see our reward, we have no physical proof that it is in our future, but we have faith.
    
    
    Now, there is a tendency that we humans have that I will admit, I have had trouble with lately. We tend to look on the past through a different lens than we do the present. It causes us to see the past as a bit more pleasant than it actually was. I honestly believe that those who are my age and complain about the state of life now will look back on this time in 50 years and tell stories about how the good old days were so much better than now. We will talk about how the kids have no respect because they wear their pants above their hips instead of below. We'll complain about the violence in the news and how back in 2013 it was safe enough to have only one lock on our doors. Oh, and the music, we will complain about the music, remembering how we used to be able to understand every third word, but now we can only make out one word out of five. But, the reality of the past is usually not as pleasant as we remember it.
    
    
    I thought about that tendency this week, while at the same time recognizing that the past, our past, has been an experience that has drawn us closer to the truth, but in so doing, presented us with a struggle that has been, at times, violent, divisive and even deadly to some. Even if we overlook the not so pleasant realities of our past, they are still there.
    
    
    As we finish up our time with Hebrews, the author leaves us with the parting words that we read this morning. They are, in essence, THE essence of this epistle. They are the answer to our eternal question of “how.” How do we live to bring about the kingdom? How do we act for God in a world that seems to be Godless? How can we live lives of promise and service when all around us seems to be a world of service to self and broken promises?
    
    
    How can we change even the block of this city we come to every week to worship? The answer is before us this morning in this final exhortation of Hebrews. You see, when the author tells us things like, “Remember those who are being tortured as if you were being tortured.” What that means is that acting out a faith that is pleasing to God is not easy. Coming to church on Sunday, singing some old hymns, praying together and shaking each others hands isn't enough. You might say, that was enough fifty years ago, or even a hundred years ago. But, I am here to tell you it wasn't enough then, and it isn't enough today and it definitely won't be enough tomorrow. Living out this promise has always been not only difficult, but when done correctly it is truly dangerous. We ask, why should we remember those who are tortured as if we are tortured? Why can't we just remember them and pray about them, because in reality, that is what we do. But the point the author is making is that if you are truly remembering them, you are being tortured, because the church is larger than anything we can imagine. The church is one unified body of the living Christ. That means if you are part of that body, you are not separate from any other part of that body. So if you are remembering those who suffer, it is more than a remembrance, it is you suffering as well. If you are showing hospitality, it can only be to a stranger. Giving hospitality to a friend, to another member of the body, it is not hospitality, it is simply sharing the life force that we have in common. We are called to help each other, but at the same time we are called to bring others into the body. Showing hospitality is to those who are not of us, yet. Those we don't know, but who God does know and who God does love. If we are loving something so much that it takes precedence over any part of the whole body, then it can infect the rest. Like a virus festering in a sore that is broken open and travels throughout the body. Friends, brothers and sisters, and compatriots of this body of Christ, if our faith is easy on us, then it is not faith. And if it is not faith, it is not pleasing to God.
    
    
    So let me tell you a story of what this faith that I speak of really looks like.
    
    
    Mariah Watkins had delivered more babies than any other woman in town. But for all she knew about babies, she had borne no child of her own. Perhaps that's why she was willing to take in the stray boy who showed up one day at her barn.
    The boy she took in was a genius, but she couldn't tell it by looking at him. True, he seemed different from other children, more frail and sensitive. But Mariah didn't see what the entire world would someday come to know about George. She just saw a child in need of a home and was willing to give it to him.
    George had come to her town to go to school. When they wouldn't allow him in the white school where he lived, he traveled eight miles to attend an all black school located just across the street from the home of Mariah and her husband, Andrew.
    The next day, George told Mariah that he was lucky to have picked her barn to sleep in that night. But the woman said, “Luck had nothing to do with it, boy. God brought you to my yard. He has work for you, and he wants Andrew and me to lend a hand.”
    At lunchtime, George would hop over the fence to help Mariah with the laundry. Besides giving him room and board, she taught George about herbs, roots, and other natural medicines. She hones his cooking and cleaning skills and even taught him to knit and crochet. One Christmas, she gave him an old, tattered Bible and made sure he read it every day. Unlike most former slave women, Mariah could read – thanks to a slave named Libby who had taught her by lamplight in spite of the beating she could get for doing it. Libby was one of Mariah's heroes, and the times George stayed home from school sick, Mariah would tell him about Libby's selfless dedication to her people.
    It was during one of these storytelling sessions that Mariah spoke to George about his place in the world. Her words lodged deep in his soul and supplied the fuel for the innumerable contributions he would eventually make.
    “You must learn all you can,” she said, “then be like Libby. Go out in the world and give your learning back to our people. They're starving for a little learning.”
    George did get all the learning he could. He sucked up every drop of knowledge in the little black school in Neosho, Missouri, then he moved on throughout the Midwest in search of other schools that would take him. For many years, he made money any way he could and then entered Simpson College to study art. While George was there, a teacher noticed something special about him and encouraged him to transfer to Iowa State to study agriculture.
    This proved to be another divine intervention.
    At Iowa State, George took graduate courses under great professors who recognized his keen mind and mentored him in the fields of botany and mycology. Then as he was nearing completion of his master's degree, a letter came from the famous black educator Booker T. Washington, a man who was known throughout the country for promising to help Southern blacks rise from poverty. Washington offered George the position of director of the agricultural school and state agricultural experiment station at his famous Tuskegee Institute. He accepted the job, which was the turning point of George's life.
    In a letter of response to Washington, George reaffirmed the calling spoken over his life by Mariah Watkins. He said, “It has always been one of the great ideals of my life to be of the greatest good to the greatest number of 'my people' possible and to this end I have been preparing myself for these many years; feeling as I do that this line of education is the key to unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.”
    When George arrived at Tuskegee, the agricultural department consisted of a butter churn, several starving hogs, acres of worthless soil, and one old horse. So he and his students literally built their school from the ground up, using carved milk cartons, empty cans, and whatever else could be found to construct a working laboratory.
    For the next fifty years, George Washington Carver gave his learning back to hundreds and hundreds of “his people” and then, ultimately, to the world. He became as comfortable helping a local farmer as he was advising Ghandi on health issues for India. When the tsetse fly threatened the lives of their cows, George taught African missionaries how to feed people with peanut milk.
    His research on the peanut and other vegetables came from his prayer times, and he was famous for marrying the mysticism of religion with the logic of science. He is credited with more than three hundred products from the peanut including milk, cheese, butter, vinegar, coffee, salads, soups, printer's ink, shampoo, and wood stains. From the sweet potato, he created 118 possibilities, including rubber. From the hard southern clay, he developed paints and pioneered a new science called chemurgy – the industrialization of agricultural products, like wallboard from pine cones, banana stems, and peanut shells. He also created more than fifty dyes from twenty-eight kinds of plants.
    By the end of his life, the once-orphaned houseguest of Mariah Watkins had been showered with international acclaim as a botanist, chemurgist, researcher, painter, and inventor. He was a friend of Henry Ford and acquainted with three presidents. Throughout his life, Carver kept a strong faith by constant prayer and daily reading of the same tattered Bible that Mariah had given him as a boy. As a teacher, he sparked a bright hope in his people. And in a time of great unrest, he modeled for his race how to rise about injustice without succumbing to hatred.¹
    
    
    My friends, that is an example of faith. It is jumping out of our comfort to suffer with our people. It is the ability and desire to stand up and say, this isn't right and I am not going to stand for it anymore. True faith, of the kind Hebrews speaks, is what we see in Mariah learning to read from someone who only learned to read under a system that would have beat them to a pulp had they been caught. That is the faith we should aspire to. It is not a faith of empty words in hymns we sing because we always have but never stop to understand the words.
    
    
    If we come to worship hoping to find what we all know, then we have come for the wrong reason. If we come to worship to hear the same words we have always heard, we are not here for the right reason. If we come to worship to sing only the old standards and never the new age funk or even the great Gospel Spirituals that were written for that purpose, then we have not come for the right reasons.
    
    
    Our worship is a gift to God and only to God. If it becomes about anything else, then it is an offense to God. Our lives are a gift from God and to not use them as He commands, then we insult the giver of this greatest gift we know.
    
    
    Fifty years ago, a great preacher stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. His idea that day was to give a speech, but the people gathered were not aware they were about to go to church. That speech turned into a sermon the likes of which every pastor wishes he could give. It was a call to action based in the scriptural promise of freedom for all of God's children. We know the right way to be, we lack the will to be that way. Let us remember today and every day that in our faith, we have the conviction of that which we know to be true but cannot see. God gives us the glasses that help us see that promise even before it is realized. Let us put on those glasses today and give thanks that we have a God who is our helper. Let us give thanks that we don't have to be afraid, because if we are God's who can do any harm to us?!
    1Caron Loveless, The Words that Inspired the Dreams, (West Monroe, LA: Howard Publishing Co., 2000), 50-53.