Dr. William A. Ritter
First United Methodist Church
Birmingham, Michigan
Scripture: A “lover’s quarrel” with II Corinthians 5:8 and Hebrews 11:13
May 18, 2003
Every trade has its tools. And one of the tools unique to my trade is a good sermon illustration. Which is why, when a good one surfaces, it becomes an attractive target for thieves. Not that we preachers like seeing ourselves in that light. But when it comes to a good story, we’ll steal from anybody.
Whenever the subject of thievery surfaces in a preaching workshop, I suggest that the problem with most preachers is not that they steal, but that they lack the good sense to steal good stuff. Most preachers are like amateur cat burglars who break into houses and make off with all the aluminum pie tins.
Several months ago, when an esteemed local colleague was being tarred by his congregation…. tried by his denomination….and pilloried in the press for plagiarism (stealing “sermon stuff” from the Internet without adequate attribution)….I told Kris how much stuff there is out there in cyberspace, literally screaming to be scammed. So she said: “Let’s check it out. Give me a key word from one of your favorite stories and I’ll plug it into a search engine.” “The word is fork,” I said. “Type in the word ‘fork.’ Better yet, add the words ‘save your’ to the word ‘fork’ (as in ‘save your fork’).” She stopped counting the listings well into the hundreds….virtually all of them from sermons….with a few newspaper columns thrown in for good measure.
So how did I know the story? Because I had told the story. In fact, I had told it several times. But I stopped telling it two or three years ago. Not because I stole it from the Internet. Not because I read it in one of those “Chicken Soup for the Soul” books. But because Carrol Falberg told it to me and, until two or three years ago, I thought she and I were the only two who knew it.
So what was it? Well, it concerned this lady who went to a lot of public dinners…..church dinners….community dinners….charity dinners….you know the kind. There is a nut cup on a lace doily. Followed by a salad….a tossed salad….a small tossed salad (with one lonely cherry tomato). Followed by the dinner plate. We’re talking breast of chicken….simple sauce….sprig of parsley….scoop of potatoes….dollop of peas (maybe a few carrots). And, upon finishing your food, a server comes to pilfer your plate. From the right, I think. “Serve from the left. Remove from the right.” Right? You tell me.
Concerning such dinners, this lady said:
Been there. Done that. Know the drill. Don’t mind the drill. What bothers me is what follows the drill. For when the waitperson is removing my plate, I just hate it when he (or she) says to me: “Oh, by the way, save your spoon.” In banquet-ese, that means I am going to need my spoon for my dessert. But the problem is, I don’t like any desserts I can eat with a spoon. At least, I don’t look forward to any desserts I can eat with a spoon. Spoons are for desserts like tapioca, sherbet, or cut-up cubes of lime Jello. But praise God for those nights when the waitperson removes my dinner plate and whispers, “Oh, by the way, save your fork.” Because then I know the best is yet to be.
Well, if you are a preacher and you can’t figure out what to do with that story, then you better find yourself a day job. Because you are never going to send a kid to college on what they pay you to do from the pulpit. But if you’re smart, you will use that story in funeral sermons….at the close of funeral sermons….as the warmly wonderful (albeit “socco”) ending to funeral sermons….suggesting that the deceased surely died with a fork in his hand, given his (or your) faithful conviction that “the best is yet to be.”
Well, like I said, I used it (always giving Carrol credit for it). And, upon hearing it, you liked it….commented on it….complimented me for it….better yet, remembered it. Although a few of you professed a love for tapioca. And one of you said (rather defensively, I thought): “So what have you got against lime Jello?” Which only proves that, as sermon illustrations go, one size never fully fits all.
I only stopped telling the story when I learned how many others were telling the story….more than a few of whom were quoting me. And, in its retelling, the story got bigger and bigger….to the degree that some preachers claimed that folks were being buried with forks in their caskets. I mean, the whole thing was getting a little too cutesy. And when I heard a funeral director (not previously known to me) ask, “So, you gonna tell the fork story?”, I knew it was time to give it a rest.
Which I did. In fact, I forgot all about it. At least, I forgot about it until a couple weeks ago when, in a series of lectures by my North Carolina colleague, James Howell, I heard him reference “the fork story.” It seems he had been using it, too. That is, until he was preparing a funeral for a wonderful guy in his church, only to hear the widow suddenly say: “I sure hope you’re not planning to use the fork story.”
“Oh,” he said, “you don’t like the fork story?”
“No,” she said, “I hate the fork story.”
“Then I won’t use it,” he said. “But do you mind if I ask why you don’t like the fork story?”
“Because,” she said, “I was hoping he’d hang around and eat dessert with me.”
Now don’t get me wrong. I hold all the right beliefs. I believe (with Tony in West Side Story) that “something’s coming, and it’s gonna be great.” I believe that God’s promises will be true…. that God’s promises will be good….and that God’s promises will be ours. I believe (with Paul) that though this earthly tent in which we live be destroyed, we have a building eternal in the heavens….a house not made with hands. I believe (again, with Paul) that our eyes haven’t seen….our ears haven’t heard….and our minds haven’t begun to grasp (let alone imagine) the things that God has prepared for us. And I believe that the late, beloved pastor of Central Church, Detroit (Henry Hitt Crane) had reason for the twinkle in his eye when, in his second-to-last breath, he said to his caregiver: “At last, I’m gonna know.”
I preach that stuff because I believe that stuff. Even more to the point, I have less reason than ever before to doubt that stuff. But when that lady talked about her husband hanging around for dessert (here….with her), I knew exactly what she meant. Because I have felt exactly what she felt. I don’t want to rise from life’s table without my dessert. Nor do I want you to rise from life’s table without having your dessert with me. Which is why I love Edna St. Vincent Millay’s line: “I shall die one day. But that is all I plan to do for death.”
Yes, I know that there may come a time when I will feel differently. There comes a moment when it is not only time to let life go….and right to let life go….but it is important to allow others to let life go. I am talking about such moments with a couple of wonderful people right now. “Permission to die” is what we are talking about. Which is not a subject that frightens me. After all these years, I know a little something about telling time. Especially when it’s “that time.” But even then, I look for hints of regret, as in: “Gee, I wish I didn’t have to go.” Because regret about leaving is rooted, not in doubt about the next life, but in gratitude for this one.
Which brings to mind the very first Easter sermon I preached from this pulpit (April 3, 1994), the first two paragraphs of which read as follows:
Long before Leno and Letterman….and even longer before Donahue and Winfrey….there was a homespun, red-headed master of gab whose career spanned the late-great years of radio and trial-and-error years of television. This man played the ukulele, recorded the “Too Fat Polka,” and fancied himself as something of a “scout” for young talent. Before he disappeared from the airwaves, he gave the world the likes of Marion Marlowe, Julius LaRosa, and the never-to-be-forgotten McGuire Sisters (and there’s five free pounds of coffee for the first person who can name all three sisters at the close of the service). The man’s name was Arthur Godfrey. And while he wasn’t particularly great at any one thing, he survived for an inordinately long time by being pretty good at a lot of things. But the pair of things he most loved to talk about had nothing to do with the entertainment business. Instead, what he wanted to talk about was how he once beat cancer and how he presently loved flying an airplane. Cancer was how he nearly died. But flying was how he truly lived.
Still, he knew that time would eventually ground him. Which was what led to the conversation in the cockpit one particular night when he was flying back from New York City. Coming out of the northern New Jersey blackness, he suddenly looked down to see millions of lights from Manhattan bedazzling the sky. It was the city….his city….screaming with light in the midst of the darkness. Overcome with the grandeur and magnificence of everything he was seeing, he turned to the plane’s only other passenger and said: “It makes me so damn mad to think that someday all this is going to be here and I’m not going to be around to see it.”
I know the feeling. Every time Kris and I take a trip, I make a mental list of everything I liked and want to see again. Then I make a second list of everything I missed and look forward to seeing the next time. But then I need to fold in a third list, consisting of places I have never been and don’t want to miss. But I figured something out the other day. Those lists (added) are longer than my time (projected)….even should I live to be 90. My father died, six years younger than I am now. Meaning that as a time traveler (if not a world traveler), I am in virgin territory.
But as much as I understand Godfrey’s love of the world and his desire not to leave it, I find death unsettling, not on account of “what” I will leave, but “who.” Jack Lemmon’s character in the movie Tribute muses: “When someone you know dies, you lose a friend. But when you die, you lose all your friends.” In an Easter letter to my congregation, I once wrote that I didn’t cotton to the idea of dying because it sounded too much like having to leave the party early. I was 20 years younger when I wrote those words. But I feel the same today. I don’t stay at parties as long as I once did. My body isn’t up to it. I leave most wedding receptions between 9:30 and 10:00, given my need to be erudite and scintillating at the 8:15 a.m. service. But I like leaving the party at a time of my choosing, rather than at a time dictated by forces beyond my control. Most people, however, do not choose their exit from life’s party. Death, instead, has this funny way of telling us it’s time to go home.
I recognize a measure of childishness in all of this. But it is the child in me that recalls being told it was time to go to bed when, in different quarters of the household, others seemed to be doing more exciting things than sleeping. I thought that sleeping was “missing out on something.” Now that I am an adult, I have transposed my childhood dread into a new key. I no longer fear that I will fall asleep and “it” will go on without me. I worry that I will fall asleep and “they” will go on without me. And by “they,” I suppose I mean my wife and my kid….and, if I’m lucky, my kid’s kids….along with you and your kids….and your kids’ kids. Fred Buechner calls this “the dreaded separation from everything and everybody I hold precious and dear.” Leaving early has nothing to do with the “what” of the party, but the “who” of the party….given that the dominant fear of dying is not the fear of extinction, but the fear of disconnection. There will come a day when I will not have you….you will not have me….and we will not have each other.
I try not to be hard on other preachers. I actually like other preachers….listen to other preachers….read other preachers….rip off other preachers. But the preacher who upset me the most was the one who, when fate put me in his congregation for three or four funerals, upbraided me and everybody else for our mournful demeanor. Said he: “Let’s see some happy faces out there. This is not a sad day. This is a glad day….a graduation day….a going home day.” It was as if he was saying that faith (which can heal sadness) totally precludes sadness. But I wanted to say to him: “Can’t you offer me your glad hand without first slapping my sad hand?”
A woman, lamenting the disease that (even as we were speaking) was claiming her husband, said: “This is not what I envisioned for our years in the sun.” Already, she was anticipating “dessert denied.”
Ah, but I can hear my critics even as I speak. That’s because, in the scriptures that preceded this sermon, I encountered my critics even as I read. They were quite clear, as I recall. Do not become too attached to the things of this world….the people of this world….even life in this world. This is not home, they said. Lovely though this place may be, this is a strange place….a foreign place….a place of exile (Hebrews 11:13)….a place of “groaning” (II Corinthians 5:2).
“This is but a tent,” said Paul. And I don’t know about you, but to me, the word “tent” screams “temporary.” “Living here requires courage,” Paul went on to say. And he’s right. It does. But then Paul added: “While we are here (in the body), we can be in Christ. But only when we are no longer in the body can we be with Christ.” And, in Pauline theology, it is much preferable to be “out of the body”….and therefore “with Christ.”
Maybe so. Probably so. I can envision a day when I will feel that and say that…when I will long for the next world….even lean toward the next world. But that day is neither yet nor now. Which means that, for the time being, the Christian life….my Christian life….is as much about “enjoying” as it is about “enduring.” I can get as excited as the next preacher about being “bound for glory.” But if you tell me there’s a bus waiting outside in the circular drive, don’t be surprised if I head for a different door.
So I will close by offering you two forks….made of sterling, actually. Why two forks? One, for pie in the sky. The other, just in case this present life offers you something other than lime Jello.
Note: As mentioned in the sermon, I am deeply indebted to Dr. James Howell who is my colleague in the Duke Divinity School mentoring program. Even as I write, James is moving from Davidson, North Carolina to Myers Park UMC in Charlotte, North Carolina. As for Frederick Buechner, what can I say? No one talks about life so honestly or writes so movingly as this mentor of 35 years.
