Hilton Head Island, SC – July 15, 2012
The Chapel Without Walls
Hebrews 11:1-3,8-22
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth. – Hebrews 11:13 (RSV)
Ideas for sermons come to me from an eclectic variety of places. I will read something about somebody, and a sermon theme springs to mind. Or somebody will say something on a television news program, and suddenly a sermon idea cries out, demanding to be preached. In seminary we were told that all sermons should result from a reading of the scriptures. In my early days as a preacher, that was the way it usually worked. But as I got older, and read more widely, sermon notions began to erupt all over the place, and not just from the Bible.
What that meant, of course, is that if I first got the idea for the sermon, then I had to scout around to try a scripture passage which was at least tangentially related to it. Otherwise, as the teachers of preaching would scold, we would have a sermon pretext without a text. Such will be evident next Sunday when I will deliver a sermon called Has Technology Become a Religion? The Bible says nothing about technology, unless you might conclude it was a technological advance in weaponry for David to kill Goliath with a sling rather than just to throw a rock at the big galoot. So you’ll have to come and see what sneaky text I will find to try to answer the question posed by the sermon title.
I read an article by a rabbi which had nothing to do directly with praising past saints, but from it came the kernel of today’s sermon. Every one of us is who we are because of the influence of many people in our lives. Some of them are living, some have died, and some we never knew personally are long dead, but they all have had a major imprint on us nonetheless. The saints I will be praising today have all died; none is still living. When I was in my teens and twenties, the man who wrote the Fourth Gospel had a profound influence on my thinking. So did the apostle Paul. As time has gone on, however, the other three Gospel writers became much more ascendant in my thinking, especially Mark and Luke, and I turned more to the Old Testament as time went on. Revelation has always left me cold.
In seminary and for several years beyond, the first St. Augustine, the one from North Africa, loomed large in how I perceived Christianity. Through a ten-day pilgrimage to Assisi in Italy, St. Francis also had a profound effect on me, as did his contemporary in Assisi, St. Clare. Francis founded the Franciscan order, and Clare the order of the Poor Clares. Luther has touched my life more than Calvin, probably, although I prefer more aspects of Calvin’s thinking than Luther’s. But Luther the man is far more appealing than Calvin the man. Luther is strangely warm and fuzzy in his own peculiar Teutonic way, while Calvin is chilly and French.
I have read so many biographies of Abraham Lincoln that I feel I know him as though Ford’s Theater never happened and he is somehow my contemporary. Lincoln’s early years fascinate me as much as his later years. He had so many strikes against him, and he overcame so many flaws. His mental demons afflicted him for his entire life, but he was brilliant as President during the most tumultuous 4+ years of our nation’s history. Without him it is impossible to imagine what our country would be today. Whatever it would be, it might have had a government of the people, by the people, and for the people which could well have perished from the earth were it not for the angular Illinoisan. Never was there a more providential figure in our nation’s history than the marvelously melancholy man from Springfield.
Who are the people who have touched your life the most profoundly? Among historical figures or individuals you have known personally, whom would you most praise were you to deliver a sermon such as this one?
The writer of the letter to the Hebrews told of some of the giants of faith in biblical times: Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Esau, Moses, Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel. We have faith, you and I, in large part because they had faith, the writer declares. We are the inheritors of a faith passed down to us from people who lived before us, many of them centuries or millennia before us. “These all died in faith, not having received what was promised, but having seen it and greeted it from afar, and having acknowledged that they were strangers and exiles on the earth.” So are we all, Christian people, so are we all.
George Angus Fulton Knight was my Hebrew and Old Testament professor in seminary. He and his wife Nancy were born in Glasgow, Scotland. George nurtured an appreciation of the Old Testament in me which has served me well through all my adult years. It was through him that I was offered a position as a student assistant minister in the Glenburn Parish Church of Scotland in Paisley, a city just outside his native Glasgow. He also was the major factor for why I ended up in Bayfield, Wisconsin, in the first church I served as an ordained minister. He and Nancy had a summer home overlooking Lake Superior in Bayfield, and he convinced the pulpit committee in Bayfield that I was worth waiting for until I graduated seven months after they selected me as their nominee to the congregation. Talk about taking a pig in a poke; those folks were far more trusting than I would be! George Knight preached the sermon at my ordination in Madison, Wisconsin on December 19, 1964. Later I visited the Knights when they lived in retirement in Kirriemuir, Scotland, and later still when they were in Dunedin, New Zealand, where George served as the Moderator of the New Zealand Presbyterian General Assembly.
George Cameron was the pastor of the Glenburn Church. He was one of the most genuinely gentle souls I have known, although he also knew how to stand his ground if need be. He was a technological genius way before his time. Prior to World War II he assembled a television set when there was almost no one transmitting television to his patched-together TV. He put some electronic gizmos into the Glenburn Church for the sound system which are still used there fifty years later. He was an earnest preacher of the Gospel, an outstanding pastor, and he got along well with everyone in the parish, from the smallest of children to the most elderly. He was truly beloved by all who knew him. He was the sole of Scottish diplomacy, and his wife Mary was an extraordinarily assertive American whom he met when he was a student at Union Seminary in New York City. How they ever got together is one of the greatest matrimonial mysteries I have encountered as a lifelong observer of curious couples. Mary was very gifted, but she was a determined bull in a china shop, and happy to function in that in-your-face capacity.
In sermons I have frequently spoken of Elam Davies, the minister I shall always remember affectionately as “The Boss,” because he was pastor of the Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago when I served there as an assistant minister. But today I want to refer to his wife Grace. Grace Davies was as fine a minister’s spouse as ever drew breath. Grace always lived up to her given name. She got along well with everyone, and her personal faith literally glowed, though never in a cloying way. A couple of months ago, Lois and I had the high honor of scattering the ashes of both Elam and Grace Davies on a windswept hilltop overlooking Llandudno, Wales. They had served a church there before they came to America in 1951. Their only child had hoped to scatter the ashes herself, but because of increasing illness, Judith was physically unable to do so. As an expression of our deep gratitude to both of them, it was our privilege to accomplish for them in death a very small measure of what they gave us in life. I am sorry Lois knew them only in their last years, for they were singular saints in all the best ways.
Incidentally, it is a serious error to suppose that saints must be flawless people. No one is flawless, least of all true saints. In fact, it is how saints deal with their flaws that helps turn them into the finest examples of God’s chosen ones. My friend Abraham Lincoln was always a tad ribald and risqué, or as we might say today, raunchy, but maybe being married to Mary Todd Lincoln partially explains that. That he remained loyal to her throughout their troubled marriage is a testimony to the man’s sanctity, and all that despite his unswerving unorthodoxy.
Reba Staggs was one of the first two females to be elected as an elder in Chicago’s Fourth Presbyterian Church. Reba was the executive director of the National Meat Board, which was a trade organization for beef producers. She was a single lady who would have made a certain kind of man an excellent wife, provided that he had sufficient self-assurance and was, like Reba, a strong personality. She was from somewhere in the South, maybe Arkansas or Alabama, and she still had a southern accent after having lived in Chicago for thirty or forty years. I’m sure you’re familiar with the old expression that if you want to get something done, you should ask a busy person to do it. That was Reba. She had more ability in her left pinky than most of us have in our whole body. She was an outstanding church leader, and there could not have been a better candidate to shatter the glass ceiling in that formerly staid old Gold Coast congregation. Reba Staggs did not suffer fools gladly, but she was clever enough to keep her fools from knowing it. She was a wonderful Christian lady.
Perhaps a few of you knew Elizabeth Grant Little. She was an artist who lived on the island for 25 years or so before her death a number of years ago. She first was married to Ben Grant, who had been the executive editor of U.S. News and World Report, and after he died, she married Bob Little, who was a Ph.d. chemist who also had retired to the island. If anyone ever marched to the beat of her own drummer, it was Elizabeth Grant. She had a sharp, one might even say piercing, wit, and she loved to use it to deflate those she believed needed deflating. She too was decidedly unorthodox in her religious views. (I don’t know why I am so drawn to unorthodox people, especially since I myself am the epitome of orthodoxy.) Elizabeth had faith, but it wasn’t of a common garden variety. She reveled in all the colors of life, and she duplicated them in her paintings, many of which are scattered around the island, and a couple of which hang on the walls in our home. She did many of the watercolors in the Preston Center of the Cypress.
Now I want to turn to the past saints in my family of origin, of whom, until nine days ago, there were still three living. There were four sons in our family. The second son, Raymond, was the first to die. He was a career Army officer who went through ROTC at the University of Wisconsin and won nearly every major military award there they offered. Ray was seven years older than I, so growing up, he was on the periphery of my immediate orbit. He served in both Korea and Germany several years after the wars there, but he happened to be in this country at the time of my first wedding, and he was my best man, while my oldest brother was the other groomsman. My youngest brother, who likely would have been my best man had he been in this country, then was a career Army officer in Germany. Ray and I were most alike in interests. He was president of the student body at the Fort Scott, Kansas High School, and in many other extracurricular activities. He and his wife Ruth had six children, the youngest of whom was only nine months old when Ray was killed in 1965 in a freak parachute accident. He was the commander of a group of Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol soldiers (LRRPs, or in today’s terminology, special forces) who were going to Viet Nam. At his funeral service in Arlington National Cemetery, a general who knew Ray well said he certainly would have been a general had he lived longer. Since I could never refer to my brother the general, now I may need to count on my son the submarine commander to be my son the admiral. In our youth, Ray and I were more drawn to church things than the other two brothers. It isn’t that the others resisted, because that would have parentally pointless, but Ray always happily went to church, right up to the time of his shocking death.
My father was the next to die in 1988, and my mother in 1997. Nobody could hope for finer parents than our parents. Their values were exemplary. In personality Dad was more taciturn and Mom more voluble and volatile. She had hundreds of euphemisms or expressions which she could trot out to be used for all the proper occasions: “By the holy pink-toed prophet! Great Caesar’s ghost! You have more nerve than a canal horse! I’m going to give you your head and your hands and your ears to play with! Arise, and put your armor on!) Mom and her only sister were oil and water, yin and yang, or better, lighted match and open container of gasoline. Whenever we would get to within ten miles of Ingersoll, Ontario, where we went every summer on vacation, and where both parents had grown up, Dad would say, “Now Margaret, if you and Irma get into it, we’re going to turn right around and go back home.” And within an hour of our arrival they would get into it, and we never turned around and went home. Mom and Dad were the type of parishioners ministers would gladly give their right arm to have. I don’t say that because they were my parents; I say it because I’ve known thousands of parishioners, and they really were special. By no means perfect, but very special. Exemplars of faith, they were.
Then there was the oldest brother, Bob, who died just nine days ago, and was nine years older than I. Strangely, I became closest to Bob in my adulthood. In 1958 he and his wife Marilyn and their daughter Susan moved to Wisconsin from Kansas. I then started to hunt deer with Bob ( for any of you who particularly love animals, I hope you will overlook this horrendous deficiency), and every November from 1958 until 1973 when we moved to New Jersey, I spent a week each year with Bob and his family, and it was great. Then, in my second life, I started this pattern again, and did so from 1996 to last November. But come Nov. 17 of 2012, I will be with Bob’s son Rob (who came along 17 years after Susie), and Rob’s sons, and Susie’s husband Mike, and their three sons, and some of their sons and daughters. When Bob was a teenager, he was the sort of boy who could drive parents to drink. If Mom were not an excellent prospect for the WCTU (which she never joined), I suspect they both would seriously have taken up some sort of liquid excess to drown their sorrows over their first-born. But when he moved to the Badger State, Bob became a model citizen, an every-Sunday attender of his church, where he became an elder, and a friend to many other model citizens and also assorted reprobates. What I can say; the Badger State will bring that out in people. Bob was not the sort who would never allow a colorful word to escape his lips, and in fact in his last years he emitted increasing multitudes of colorful words. But he was a man of deep faith --- in God, in his country, in his family, and in things that truly matter – even if to me his politics were more than a little bit skewed. In my old age, I will miss Bob more than the other past saints in my family, because he died in my early old age.
Faith becomes visible in how people live their lives. It isn’t so much what they say; it’s what they do. And what they do is to pass faith along to the rest of us. Faith is taught much more than it is caught. For all of us, past saints have taught us how to nurture faith within us. We are all the benefactors of torch-bearers of faith we never knew, but whose influence lived in those who lived long after them. For each of us, however, the most effective saints were those to whom we were personally related, and who now rest from their labors. Praise God, for all the saints!