Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scriptures: Psalm 121, Romans 16:1-5
May 9, 2004
My daughter is home and here this morning. This is my soon-to-be-married….even-sooner-to-be-thirty….daughter. Where did they go, these days of our lives? I don’t remember growing older. When did she?
This is a short visit. A thirty-six hour visit. An “I can’t take another day off work, but I’ve got a million things to do before the wedding” visit. So she flew in on the “red eye” yesterday and will be back in San Francisco when the sun falls into the bay tonight. But in between, she will have checked on the hall, the flowers, the invitations, the registry and the wardrobe. Everything but the church. But, then, she has no reason to believe that the church (on her wedding day) will be anything less than perfect. For when it comes to the church, it really is more about who you know than what you know. And feel free to interpret that any way you like.
This being Mother’s Day, Kris is happy she’s here. Look in our refrigerator and you will see five bean salad, pasta salad and a sausage casserole (all favorites of the girl child). There’s everything there but mac and cheese. But, then, I didn’t look to the back of the shelf.
Concerning the cost of the wedding, my male friends who’ve been there tell me: “Don’t ask.” But as I wrote in Steeple Notes several weeks ago, I figure we can always scale back the entrée at the reception….to meatloaf. Just yesterday I asked the chef at Oakland Hills whether he had ever heard of“Meatloaf Helper.” His look told me he hadn’t.
So where does a sermon start? That’s a question I tried to answer in a couple of seminars for forty Duke divinity students last Monday and Tuesday. “With a stone,” suggests John Donne. That’s one way. “With a text,” say the scholars at Duke Divinity School. That’s a better way. With a story, an experience, or a slice of conversation. That’s a third way. Or maybe with a dream, a vision or a whisper of the Spirit. Still another way.
This sermon begins (and ends) with a word….the word being “help.” Things need help….like meatloaf. People need help….like me. I loved it when the Beatles sang “I get by with a little help from my friends.” That is until I heard them sing the next line: “I get high with a little help from my friends.” Anne Lamott, who my Tuesday women are reading currently (and to whom this sermon will return momentarily) claims that the two best prayers she knows are:
Help me, help me, help me.
(and) Thank you, thank you, thank you.
But where help is concerned, there are times we find it easier to give than get. When my grade school teacher asked for a helper….to pass out the books, collect the test papers, carry messages to the front office, wash the blackboards, or (and this was the best ever) beat the erasers against the brick wall of the building….Billy’s hand was the first to shoot skyward. But when that same teacher stood over my desk and said, “It looks like you could use a little help,” my initial response was that “I would rather do it myself.”
Trust me, I’m over that now. Humility, when coupled with stupidity, does wonders for receptivity. Throw in a little vulnerability and it becomes easy to join Anne Lamott in her “Help me, help me, help me” prayer. Most of us can pray that prayer at least once a day and several times at night.
Someone once said that the psalms read like one long cry for help. They aren’t. Trust me. There’s other stuff in them. But helplessness threads its way through them. We love to recite:
I lift up my eyes to the hills
from whence cometh my help.
Which, when read that way, sounds incredibly confident. But if you look carefully, the second line does not end with an exclamation point, but with a question mark. As if to read:
I lift up my eyes to the hills (asking)
where can such help be found?
The psalmist, perhaps surprised by both the candor and the irreverence of his question, quickly counters with the expected answer that his “help will come from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” Which is followed by that cryptic word about the Lord being a shade on his right hand (sort of like a parasol slathered in sunblock) so that the sun will not smite him by day, nor the moon by night. Which makes little sense until we remember that people once believed in the existence of separate gods of the sun and moon, and that neither was the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Joseph. For that reason, people feared both sun and moon. To which the psalmist said: “There’s no longer any need to.”
But this psalm, like many others (including Psalm 23), is a traveler’s psalm, meaning that people sang it as they went from hither to yon, or from yon back to hither. For it was when they journeyed that they felt vulnerable. And it was on such journeys that they acknowledged their need for help. It’s not only in baseball that “safe at home” is a desirable state of affairs. It’s while we are running between bases that we feel insecure.
In our other text, Phoebe, who is a friend of Paul’s from the church in Corinth (“Cenchreae” being the port of Corinth), is traveling to Rome. And given that Paul knows Phoebe from Corinth, yet also has friends in Rome, he writes:
She’s coming.
She’s done good work where she’s been.
She’s done God’s work where she’s been.
She’s helped a lot of people, me included, where she’s been.
But when she gets to Rome, she will need help.
So give it to her.
You can be safe at home. But when you go on the road, you’re gonna need a little help.
Except that some people need help at home, too. Anne Lamott was raised by parents who believed they had a moral obligation to save the world. Which left little time to save their marriage. Or their children. And which left daughter Anne….brilliant daughter Anne….wise, witty and wonderfully-verbal daughter Anne….to drink far too much booze, sniff far too much cocaine, and sleep with far too many men (including a pair of married men at the same time). Eventually, she called a suicide hotline, only to hang up when someone answered. “Heaven forbid someone should think I needed help,” she said. “I was a Lamott. Lamotts give help.”
But she both needed and found it in the dust and grime of Marin City….a wartime settlement outside Sausalito, and a small Presbyterian church which was largely African American in population and liturgy. It was the robust singing of the St. Andrew’s parishioners that brought Anne through the door. And it was the warm caring of those same parishioners that brought Anne to the Lord. Which is a wonderful story. But you can read it, or wait until I tell it some other day.
But the story of Anne’s life at St. Andrew’s is not the story of her first round of help, but her second. Namely, the help she needed (and received) in raising her son, Sam. Who, as I do the math, is now 15. But who was a baby when Anne first brought him to church, only to watch as one surrogate mother after another waited in line to be the next one to hold him.
As fathers go, Sam had one who supplied seeds, but no support. So, when it came to parenting, his mother was forced to make it up as she went along. In a marvelous chapter entitled “Why I Make Sam Go To Church,” she writes:
Two reasons. I make him go because I can. At this point, I still outweigh him by nearly 75 pounds. But that is only part of it. The main reason is that I want to give him what I have found….which is a safe path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want….which is purpose, heart, balance, gratitude and joy….are people with a deep sense of spirituality and a great sense of community.
When I was at the end of my rope, the people of St. Andrew’s tied a knot in it for me and helped me hold on. The church became a home in the old meaning of “home”….that it’s where (when you show up) they have to let you in. Well, they let me in. And then even said “You come back now.”
My relatives all live in the Bay area and I adore them. But they are all as skittishly self-obsessed as I am, which I certainly mean in the nicest possible way. Let’s just say that I do not leave family gatherings with the feeling that I have just received some kind of spiritual chemotherapy. But I do when I leave St. Andrew’s.
Parenting is hard….and getting harder. For while I see no decline in the passion that leads to baby making, I sense a rising anxiety when it comes to child rearing. Several weeks ago, I told you that denominational labels now mean next to nothing when it comes to church growth. Churches do not grow because of the name on the sign out front. Churches grow to the degree that they supply satisfactory answers to the questions people are asking.
The most important question being: “Can you help me find meaning for my life?” But the second question is so close to the first, so as to overtake it in some communities (like this one). That question being: “Can you help me raise my children?”
My first introduction to the power of that question came one church back, and fifteen years ago. We’d hired a new director of Children’s Ministries who, for a number of reasons, was not cutting it. So a group of parents, then in their mid-to-late thirties, asked if they could have a meeting with me. One of them (an articulate professional and, to this day, a good friend) presented me with a list of particulars and then summarized the feelings of everyone at the table by saying:
Bill, we love this church and we love you. We want to stay here, and would greatly miss this church were we ever to leave it. But our kids are everything to us and we will not let anything, including our friendship, get in the way of what we feel we owe them and want to provide for them. So either we see some action on these particulars or we will begin looking elsewhere.
I am happy to say that we saved the day, the staff person, and the friendships involved. But that was the day I knew that this was no longer “church” as I had known it….and that loyalty to place and pastor was increasingly going to depend on performance by place and pastor.
But what I really heard around that table were voices of anxiety concerning parenting. They were saying: “Bill, it’s harder than ever. The obstacles are greater than ever. The stakes are higher than ever. And we need help.”
I’d like to believe that we, in this place, have answered that call without catering to that fear. Classrooms for children and youth were the first (in this place) to be refurbished. Budgets for children and youth were the first (in this place) to be increased. Staffs for children and youth were the first (in this place) to be super-sized. And all of that happened long before anybody even thought about building the CLC. We have not always gotten it right, nor done it perfectly, but Mother’s Day seems as good a time as any to say to parents that help was on the way….is on the way….and will be on the way for years to come.
A mother recently wrote to Mark Swarthout (Mark being a certified lay speaker in our church, but also a certified karate instructor in our church):
Since my divorce, our lives have been upside down and my son has lost all interest in friends, school and pretty much everything else. Until, that is, I enrolled him in your karate class. Which took a lot of doing on my part. But now he loves it….loves you….and has begun taking an interest in life again. Your class is the one fixed point of stability in our still-turbulent lives. How can we thank you?
Which led me to recall last Thursday’s conversation with Chris Hall as we were talking about next Sunday’s twenty-minute “Mass in G” by Schubert….that will be sung in Latin by sixty of our middle and senior high school kids, accompanied by an eleven-piece professional orchestra. Our kids are really into it. Which led Chris to say: “Given the restrictions that schools now have to place on choral repertoire, where would a kid ever have a chance to do something like this, if not here?”
You’ll hear stories like those in churches that are making a difference. And we will make an even greater difference, assuming we don’t rest on our laurels or sit on our….visions.
Recall, in closing, the seven year old who got lost one day. Up and down the streets of the city she ran. But she couldn’t find a single landmark. Frightened and exhausted, she sat down on the curb to cry. Whereupon a policeman stopped to help her. But unable to get her to stop crying long enough to tell him where she lived (or wanted to go), he put her in the passenger seat of his patrol car and began driving her through the neighborhood. Block after block yielded nothing but more tears and nods of negation, until she saw her church. Which she pointed out to the policeman. Then, with a big smile, she said: “You can let me out now. This is my church and I can always get home from here.”
Help me, help me, help me.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Note: I am heavily indebted to Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. The story with which the sermon concludes also comes from that book, but must be attributed to Anne’s preacher at St. Andrew’s. Her name is Veronica Goines.
