Living Large

Sermon

Back in the olden days, most sermons considered to be good sermons followed the form of three points and a poem. Once in a while it’s good to go old school, so today I want to offer three ideas, and see if I can braid them together, and maybe close with a poem. Or a quote. Or a prayer.

As I considered this week’s text from Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, three ideas came to mind: living as evidence of our faith, receiving salvation as a wide open space, and treating each other decently. The first idea—that how we live is evidence of our faith—was a result of having finished Tim Alberta’s excellent book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. The book is about the rightward move of evangelical churches in the U.S., as most recently evidenced by the Southern Baptist Convention’s statements on in vitro fertilization and women pastors. Gregg mentioned the book a few months ago, and I know some of you have read it. I highly, highly recommend it.

Now, Tim Alberta, the author, writes from the evangelical world; his father was a pastor in the Evangelical Presbyterian Church. He is casting an eye at his own people. He is also a journalist who does his research, and he traced this movement back to the 1980s when Jerry Falwell started the Moral Majority.

And all that was very, very interesting, and I must admit that I, a sinner, appreciated someone naming what I felt was so wrong about the power brokers in that world. Then the author went to visit his father’s old church and sat with the current pastor, who had made it through culture wars and COVID-19, and while many had left the congregation, there was a faithful remnant that allowed them to continue in their mission and ministry.

The author worshiped at the church one morning and shared the prayer the pastor offered at the end of the service. “Lord, I pray that we would not fall into the trap of thinking we know who the right or the wrong people are; that we would extend the mercy and grace, the forgiveness and the message of Jesus, to everyone. And Lord, may we be on mission to be a faithful presence to communicate the gospel, that all who hear may turn and be healed.”

I felt a little convicted by that prayer, because so often I act as though I do know who the right people and the wrong people are, theologically and politically. I make assumptions and then act on them.

So I’ve been working on removing the log from my own eye and wondering how the choices I make, how I live my life, show what my faith is. Where do I strive for power? Where do I hate my enemy? Where do I denigrate myself or others?

Back when Steven Covey’s book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was popular, there was this idea of writing a personal mission statement. At that time, and now, I think my personal mission statement is cribbed from the words of Jesus. I will love the Lord God with all my heart, soul, mind, and strength, and my neighbor as myself. Is that apparent in my living?

So that’s the first idea. The second comes from a note I jotted down in a journal thirty years ago. It’s the idea that in the Hebrew language, and throughout the Hebrew scriptures, salvation means like wide open spaces. Isn’t that lovely? Salvation is wide open spaces.

In our beloved 23rd Psalm, God leads us to green pastures. Or consider these verses from Psalm 18:

I called to the Lord, who is worthy of praise, and I have been saved from my enemies.

The cords of death entangled me; the torrents of destruction overwhelmed me.

The cords of the grave coiled around me; the snares of death confronted me.

[God] rescued me from my powerful enemy, from my foes, who were too strong for me.

[God] brought me out into a spacious place; [God] rescued me because he delighted in me.

The opposite of a wide open space is an enclosed space; we might think of being on the last row of an airplane, in a seat that doesn’t recline, and the person in front of us leans all the way back; that is being hemmed in, and it feels like anything but salvation. But when we’re in a wide open space, we have room to stretch out, to see beyond the tray table in front of us; we have room to twirl or dance. We have room for others to be with us.

That’s the second idea. The third idea comes from my worry about what this fall will be like, given the presidential election and the divisiveness that already exists in the U.S. How do we prevent our political leanings from turning into hate-filled screeds? I don’t know what your social media feeds are like, but mine contain a lot of angry, angry posts about Israelis, about Hamas, about Republicans, about liberals, about those people, about them. I am weary of it.

Two books are influencing my thinking about this. The first is Verified: How to Think Straight, Get Duped Less, and Make Better Decisions about What to Believe Online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg. The authors make a good case for not automatically trusting the media we’re receiving. I’ve also looked at that chart of bias in news outlets, and have added to my Oregonian app and my New York Times app the Associated Press app, as it is pretty centrist in its reporting. It’s so easy to get caught up in our own self-reinforcing loops and not to venture into a wider space of receiving information.

The second book is one that the Session is reading together. By esteemed author Jonathan Haidt, it’s entitled The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. While Haidt’s primary objective in the book is not about social media’s influence in adult American society, he does illuminate the way our brains get rewired when we consume so much social media. It makes me want to leave Facebook, but I don’t, because honestly, it’s an avenue of pastoral care.

I’m worried about how civilly we will treat each other in the coming months, not so much in the congregation but amid our neighbors and in the city and in the country. That’s the third idea.

In these three ideas—living as evidence of our faith, receiving salvation as a wide open space, and treating each other decently—I think we can see a case to be made for living expansively, as Eugene Peterson put it, or for opening our hearts, a closer translation to what the apostle Paul wrote.

Poor Paul. Those Corinthians were giving him and the apostles a heck of a time. These letters we call First and Second Corinthians are more likely a mashup of four different letters, parts of which have been lost. As happens, these wayward Corinthian children took more of Paul’s time than he might have liked to give them. The way they were living did not give evidence that they followed Jesus. They liked to hem each other in with their impatience, with their meanness, with their envy and boasting and arrogance and rudeness. They did not treat each other well.

So Paul visits them and he writes them again and again, correcting them, teaching them, encouraging them. We don’t know what happened to that Corinthian church; all that’s left are a few ruins and an archeological museum. We don’t know if the church in Corinth heeded his words, if they opened their hearts to each other, if they began to live large, not in the sense of accumulating wealth and gold jewelry and luxury donkey carts, but living large in the sense of graciousness to the world.

That’s where we come in. We had a great conversation about this text in our staff meeting on Tuesday, and talked about what it looks like to open up our lives, to live openly and expansively, as Eugene Peterson put it.

Gregg noted that for some, especially after the pandemic, living in isolation is easier than living in community. It’s easier to live small. Lindsey shared that when she was getting her divinity degree at Duke, the students were urged to read with charity, that is, to forgive the author for writing from their particular context, especially if the reader did not like it.

For me, living large, living expansively, opening my heart ties into the three ideas of this sermon. I want to give people a wide berth, in the best sense of that phrase. I don’t want judgment to be my first response to someone whose ideas I find abhorrent, weird, or wrong. I want to be able to put on my God-glasses, to see every single human being, especially those who are unlovable, as priceless treasures in the eyes of God and worthy of my respect because they are priceless treasures in the eyes of God.

Maybe living large is like everyone getting a free upgrade to first class, with flight attendants who know your name, with room to stretch out. Maybe living large is about listening before speaking, about listening before jumping to a conclusion. Maybe living large is about being humble enough to say, “I was wrong about that person, about that situation.”

I invite you to think about what it might mean to you to live large, to live expansively and graciously, to create wide open spaces not just for yourself but for others, too. So those are the three points, and instead of a poem, I offer these familiar words from Marianne Williamson. (This is not an endorsement for her as president!)

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” (A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course in Miracles”)

May it be so. To the glory of God.

The Reverend Beth Neel

Westminster Presbyterian Church

June 23, 2024