Wasatch Prebyterian Church Sermons
January 8, 2012
Sermon: "By the Skin of Our Teeth "
Scripture: Mark 4: 1-11
Preaching: Rev. Scott Dalgarno
Description : That may be essentially what God is for us. God exists to give us hope of order in the face of the chaos of our lives. We all have our desert places. I see this every year at this time. January comes and the days are so short, so cold. People have muddled through to New Year’s, but wonder if they can make it to spring, which seems like such a long way off. Fuzzy thinking too often sets in.
We all have our fears. We may appear to have things together, but there’s the fear it all might just spin out of control. Most of the time we cope with that just fine, but then there are those hours in the night when we awaken and they have their way with us.
BY THE SKIN OF OUR TEETH
A sermon delivered by the Rev. Scott Dalgarno on Jan. 8, 2012
Based on Mark 1:4-11
In the little Oregon town of Scio in the 1850s there was a minister of a community church whose name was Joab Powell. One thing interesting about him was that he was illiterate, and it didn’t slow him down. His wife read to from the Bible daily and he committed much of it to memory and was revered for that. People came by the hundreds to hear this man declaim with no notes and one tremendous voice in the open air.
He was once asked to open a session of the Oregon legislature and is on record for giving the shortest invocation ever. Being completely without trust of any form of government he said, "Let us pray: Father forgive them, for they know not what they do." Then he got on his horse and rode home.
He's also is remembered to have done some 3000 baptisms in the local river. The only time he was ever known to bathe.
He was a 19th century John the Baptist. And that’s where Mark's story of Jesus begins. Not with any shepherds, no angels, no Magi kings coming from the east;
no manger and no Mary and Joseph. Just this odd prophet way way out in the desert.
Mark cuts right to the chase with Jesus as an adult except that everything begins way out, WAY out in the wilderness of Judea.
Visiting Israel 12 years ago I visited the site of Jesus' Baptism. It’s placed just at the southern end of the Sea of Galilee where the river Jordon begins.
There the river is relatively wide; the vegetation is lush and looks like the jungle ride at Disneyland.
John is dressed in camel's hair with a leather belt; his hair and beard that have never been cut. He looks like Fred Flintstone – as odd in his own day as he is in ours. He rages, and yet people come to him from everywhere.
Trouble is, everything I know about him makes me think I would not go out of my way to see the likes of him. He's much too much like one of those street evangelists who waves his Bible at you and says to repent because you are going to hell if you don't do just what he says.
Only there was one big difference between them and John.
Self appointed prophets tend to plant themselves right in your way so you can't miss them. They go where the people are -- city center, the downtown library, outside the student center at the U.
Not John. John set up shop in the wilderness and anyone who wanted to hear what he said had to go to a lot of trouble to get there, borrowing a neighbor's donkey, or packing an awful lot of water to get there on foot through bandit infested highways.
You have to wonder why someone from Jerusalem would do that; Jerusalem with its temple and rabbis and accumulated religious establishment. If someone wanted to hear from God, that was supposed to be the place.
Anyone who would turn away from all that had to be looking for something else; something the temple and Jerusalem couldn't or wouldn’t supply.
John had what the temple was missing, apparently. He had this sense God was about to do something new.
He had no details, himself. He didn’t know the name of the someone who was coming, or what he or she looked like. All he knew was that the old paradigm was ending, and something brand new was being born
It was a world that would be built out of new materials, not the rearranged stones of the old religion. The movement of God had all but been covered up in Jerusalem by all the pretend piety and temple taxes, and priestly hocus-pocus.
The holy flame there was burning very low, and John knew that in his bones. So, God moved it out into the wilderness, where the air was sharp and clean – out there, under the winter stars where it was fanned by the most socially unacceptable character anyone could imagine -- a celibate version of Tarzan looking as out of place then as he would today.
John carried a message and that message lit him up like a bonfire in the wilderness and everyone was drawn to it, like moths to a barrel of oil burning in the night.
He was like another John; Pope John the 23rd, who in 1959 was elected Pope and right away said his job would be to open the windows on a church suffocating in the dust and tradition of centuries.
John called his people to wake up, turn around and find the spark that ignited flame of faith in Christ in the first place; and quit pretending to be people they were not.
They had this heavy piousness they were carrying and he told them they could just toss it over board.
I love what the acerbic Baptist preacher, Wil Campbell says, speaking of the human instinct to institutionalize religion and make it as dry and boring as dust -- “All the trouble, between us and God began when we got too good to be with God out in the desert in a tent and began building churches trying to housebreak God.”
Henry David Thoreau once wrote --"In the wilderness is the preservation of the world.“ There a person can breathe free.
In the early years of Christianity Christians were often subject to oppression even death for their faith; funny -- the hotter the iron of oppression the more people turned to it.
Because of that – because sacrifice was at the heart of it, Emperor Constantine found he could not kill it. So knowing what you cannot beat you ought to join, he endorsed Christianity. He made it the state religion.
Many Christians, no doubt, breathed a sigh of relief. At least at first, but a question arose -- How do you become a Christian when the founder said, “Take up your cross and follow me,” and now the ultimate means of taking up your cross is no longer available to you??
At the same time, an Egyptian commoner named Anthony felt this very deeply. He asked the question: Why should Christians trust the people who were killing us just last week? He felt that the heart of the faith must be at risk, now.
So, at the same time that Emperor Constantine summoned Bishops from all over the Mediterranean world to hammer out a Christian theology and a creed, Anthony went out into the deserts of Egypt trying to rediscover the essential teachings of Jesus. Thousands soon followed and the monastic movement in Christianity was born.
John the Baptist was after the same thing. In order to move the Jewish faith forward he reached back to an ancient rite, baptism. He too went to the wilderness, like God’s people did in the time of the Exodus.
Baptism, like all ancient rites, has many levels of meaning: washing -- yes, but more. It’s also about death and rebirth.
Water, while necessary to sustain life is a dangerous commodity; wild as nature is wild.
There a rural places in Mexico the rite of baptism happens this way. A baby is brought into the sanctuary as the congregation sings a funeral hymn. On the altar is a coffin lined with pitch and filled with water.
The priest takes the child plunges it in the water saying, “I kill you in the name of God and raise you to life in the name of Jesus Christ.” The poor baby comes up sputtering and coughing, and the congregation them breaks into an Easter hymn. Pretty dramatic, I grant you.
This hearkens back to the idea of Genesis 1 that God is the organizing principle bringing order over the watery chaos. God is the agent of life in the face of the threat of death.
That may be essentially what God is for us. God exists to give us hope of order in the face of the chaos of our lives. We all have our desert places. I see this every year at this time. January comes and the days are so short, so cold. People have muddled through to New Year’s, but wonder if they can make it to spring, which seems like such a long way off. Fuzzy thinking too often sets in.
We all have our fears. We may appear to have things together, but there’s the fear it all might just spin out of control. Most of the time we cope with that just fine, but then there are those hours in the night when we awaken and they have their way with us.
At such times it’s good to remember we’ve been here before. This has happened and we have come through many times. That’s easy to forget.
Anthony of the desert is a reminder that we can come through, by the skin of our teeth.
In 1969, Lord Kenneth Clark wrote a book called, CIVILIZATION. It was a history of Western culture. The first chapter was on the dark ages and was entitled, “By The Skin of Our Teeth.” Civilization came through he says, because against the Barbarian hordes threatening Europe, some literate monks preserved ancient Greek and Roman texts up in the cold reaches of Ireland. They saved Civilization. What is worth preserving gets preserved, but it is almost always in out of the way places – the Sinai desert, the Judean wastes, the wilderness of Egypt, the prisoner of war camps in Babylon, the west coast of Ireland.
We almost always come through, and it’s often through the people we’d least expect to lead us. Think of Abraham Lincoln. He was, by any 21st century standard, an abysmal failure. Having served just one initial term in congress he lost his bid for re-election because of a stand he took against the controversial war of his day -- the war with Mexico.
He found himself walking in a political wilderness for fourteen solid years. He was repeatedly passed over for appointments.
He turned down the one he was offered, territorial governor of Oregon because he felt it would have been like being in exile. Imagine, having to live in Oregon. . . Then, in 1856 he was passed over for Vice President.
His fondest ambition was to be elected a United States Senator from Illinois. Being President was a thankless job to many. The best orators of the first half of the 19th century were all U.S. senators. Daniel Webster, Henry Clay. You know, if he had not failed at that, all we would have of Abraham Lincoln would be a few marvelous speeches in the Congressional record.
After losing the Senate seat to Douglas in 1858 he went back to his home in Springfield wondering if his public life was over. He asked for written copies of his debates with Douglas thinking they were his only legacy. But he waited and watched, and found that his failures were merely a foundation for something much larger.
The apostle Paul once said, "Eye has not seen, nor has ear heard, nor has the mind of the human being even conceived what God has planned for those who love God."
But I don’t want to leave you with something so , and a man so gifted it’s all just out of our reach. Instead let me leave you with the story of an acquaintance of mine named Steve. I won’t call him a friend because I never much liked him, which is the point of the story.
Steve drove me crazy. When he raised his hand to say something in class I always cringed. He just seemed kind of smarmy.
The professor in our class was a very charismatic fellow. But he was also going through some really difficult stuff in life. He’d had a bad marital breakup. He wasn’t sure he’d made a good decision to teach. He was in a mid-life crisis. Well, one day he had a kind of minor breakdown in class, He took something a student said horribly wrong. We all knew it. And he knew it too, but he let go a rage, and then broken, he went over to corner of the room and he knelt down on his haunches and he just sat there in the corner half his own size and the room was horribly, unbearably quiet.
And then 15 or maybe 30 seconds into that terrible silence Steve spoke up. I don’t remember a word he said. I just remember that this fellow who always made me cringe knew exactly what we all needed to hear, and in a tone we needed to hear it in to find a way together out of that hole. It was as if he gave a perfect hand up to our teacher and we all felt deep deep relief and gratitude.
It was a formative moment for me. It made me realize that every one of us has something to offer.
Even the people you write off as impossible are able to do things and heal people that you or I can never heal, just because, like us, they are unique.
These are perilous times we are living in. It will be interesting to see who God calls up in big and small ways, to set this world, this town, this church, a right.
Amen
