7

In this Lenten sermon series we have looked so far at six ways that we encounter Christ and in the daily sermons this week, we’re going to look at six more Christ Encounters. But before we dig into today’s text, I want to say a few words about Holy Week.

I was blessed as a child and young person to be raised in a single Presbyterian church and, from the age of six on, I had only one pastor. I was baptized and nurtured in Sunday school and youth groups and confirmed and married and ordained all in the Rose Hill Presbyterian Church in Kirkland, Washington. That kind of upbringing gave me a profound sense of belonging to a Christian community for which I am deeply and abidingly grateful. At the same time I realize that in our increasingly mobile society, my experience is less and less common.

But despite the many blessings of being raised in a single church, there were a few disadvantages, one of which was a lack of diversity in certain Christian practices. If it didn’t happen in my home church, then I didn’t know about it until I went on to college and eventually seminary. One of the things I didn’t learn was the importance of the Christian year. For example, I didn’t know anything about Advent. Christmas? Yes, of course, but nothing about the days and weeks of preparation for Christmas. I must have heard something about Lent but it was sort of a vaguely Catholic thing and, unfortunately, my mother was pretty anti-Catholic. Now the Chancel Choir at Rose Hill always did a special cantata on Good Friday and, of course, there was Easter Sunday. But Lent leading up to Holy Week and Maundy Thursday and Good Friday and Easter giving way to a season of Easter … well, these were just unknown to me.

That may be why, after I went to seminary and began my ministry and started to learn about Lent and the other liturgical seasons, they became so important to me. They were not at all a part of my Christian growing-up years but have become a very big part of my Christian ministry years.

Then there is this crazy, increasingly fast-paced society we live in. I have learned that this makes it almost impossible for most Christians to sustain significant spiritual discipline through the forty days of Lent or even the four weeks of Advent. So we arrive at the high holy days of Christmas and Easter spiritually unprepared. Oh, we celebrate them and probably have some special feelings about them. But I think we miss the power, especially of Easter, because we are not sufficiently ready. So I began to ask if our societal context makes it difficult to sustain preparation through forty days of Lent, can we at least do it intensely for a week? And I’ve found that the answer is yes. So for twenty-five years now, I have tried to make a big deal about Holy Week. And here we are.

We’re going to worship tomorrow night and again on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday evenings. On Good Friday we will join together at noon with other Christians from around Sudbury at the Martha Mary Chapel to remember Jesus’ crucifixion and the seven last words of Christ. Then on Holy Saturday at nine o’clock, the Great Vigil of Easter, my favorite service in the whole year.

The Great Vigil is the first service of Easter. It always begins after dark on Saturday night, preferably in the early, dark hours of Sunday morning — but I’ve never found Presbyterians willing to do the vigil at midnight or 1:00am and then watch and pray through the night with me. Maybe some day!

But what thrills me about the Great Vigil is that many of its traditions go back to the earliest days of the Christian church, literally to a time within decades of Christ himself.[1] So when we observe the Great Vigil we are joining an almost two thousand year-old Christian witness. During the vigil we hear again the whole story of salvation and in response renew our baptismal vows. I know you will be blessed by being present, as much as possible, throughout this Holy Week.

Many Samaritans from that city believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I have ever done.” So when the Samaritans came to him, they asked him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days. And many more believed because of his word. They said to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the Savior of the world.”

This text, the concluding paragraph of the story of Jesus and the woman at the well, not only brings that story to a close but serves as a perfect pointer to this Holy Week into which we now enter. For the whole story is about revelation: the revelation of Jesus the Messiah to the most unlikely of persons — a Samaritan and a woman — and her gradual coming to faith. Then on the basis of her faith and her witness, others are drawn to Jesus so that by the end they can say, “We now know that he is the Savior of the world.” Jesus Christ is being revealed to the world. That’s why this sermon is called an “Expanding Encounter.” And the whole point of Holy Week — remembering those final days, remembering the last supper and the crucifixion, remembering the empty tomb — is so the revelation of Jesus can continue to expand to embrace the whole world.

In other words, Christian faith is always personal but never private. It is not just for ourselves. The Samaritan woman didn’t keep her encounter with Christ a secret. She made her encounter public. She had to share it and on the basis of her sharing, others came to Christ. When we encounter Jesus Christ, we begin to be change and the change is not just our interior, private selves. The change affects our outer selves, our public selves, who we are before the world. So let’s reflect for a moment how an expanding encounter with Christ changes who we are in the world.

First, an encounter with Christ changes how we talk and talking, by its very nature is public. Notwithstanding that sometimes we talk to ourselves, speech is communal and encountering Christ changes our public talk. Here’s a negative example and a positive example.

I was in a nasty car accident Thursday night. It could have been much worse. I didn’t need an ambulance and, obviously, I’m here. I was on my way home from church a little after six o’clock, heading up Route 27, and right in the middle of Acton. The car in front of me stopped, waiting for the car in front of it to make a left-hand turn. I stopped. The guy behind me, who said later he was answering his cell phone, didn’t stop. As far as I can tell — there are no skid marks — he never touched his brakes. So his slamming into me slammed me into the car in front of me. I’m still a little sore but basically okay. My car is probably totaled.

In an email to Sid, I joked that even if my car was gone, maybe I could get a sermon illustration out of it. So here’s the illustration.

In the moments after the accident I was frightened and angry and probably more than a little dazed. And I jumped out of my car and ran back to the guy who hit me and shouted some really unkind things. I knew they were unkind but they came out anyway.

Then we had to wait. Someone called the cops and while the police were sorting things out and we were waiting for the tow truck to arrive, we three drivers ended up talking. And I kept thinking about the unkind things I had said. Even though the guy who hit me was completely at fault and even though I was still angry at him, what I said was wrong. It was unchristian and so I said to them that it was unchristian and I apologized for what I said.

When we encounter Jesus Christ our speech should become Christ-like. My speech often is but it was not in that crisis moment. I regret that.

A positive example of Christ-like speech is told in a wonderful book entitled Testimony by Tom Long. The Explorers group here read and discussed this book during January and February. Tom Long is a master preacher and storyteller and one of his stories is about Grace Thomas, a gentle Christian woman raised in the Southern Baptist Church. She was the second of five children born to a Birmingham, Alabama streetcar conductor and his wife. When Grace married in the late 1930s, she moved to Atlanta and worked in a sate government office. She developed an interest in law and politics and enrolled in a local law school that offered night classes.

After many years of part-time study, she finally her law degree and her family wondered what she would do next. They were shocked when Grace announced that she had decided to enter the 1954 race for governor of Georgia. There were nine candidates for governor that year — eight men and Grace — but there was really only one issue. The U.S. Supreme Court had declared that racially “separate but equal” schools were unconstitutional. Eight of the gubernatorial candidates spoke out angrily against the court’s decision. Only Grace said that she thought the decision was fair and just and ought to be welcomed by everyone. Her campaign slogan was “Say Grace at the Polls.” But not many did. She finished dead last and her family hoped she had gotten this out of her system.

But she had not. Eight years later, in 1962, she ran for governor again. By then, the civil rights movement was gaining momentum, and her message of racial harmony was hotly controversial. She even received death threats and eventually finished last again on election day. But her campaign was a testimony to goodwill and racial tolerance.

One day, Grace made a campaign appearance in the small town of Louisville, Georgia. In those days, the centerpiece of the town square in Louisville was not a courthouse or a war memorial but an old slave market, a tragic and evil place where human beings had once been bought and sold. Grace chose the slave market as the site for her campaign speech, and as she stood on the very spot where slaves had been auctioned, a hostile crowd gathered to hear what she would say. “The old has passed away,” she began, “and the new has come. This place,” she said, gesturing to the market, “represents all about our past over which we must repent. A new day is here, a day when Georgians white and black can join hands to work together.”

This was provocative, even dangerous talk in Georgia in 1962, and the crowd stirred. “Are you a communist?” someone shouted at her.

“Well, then,” continued the heckler, “where’d you get those gall-durned ideas?”

Grace thought for a minute, and then she pointed to the steeple of a nearby church. “I got them over there,” she said, “in Sunday school.”[2]

Grace’s public speech remained Christ-like, even in crisis, even under pressure. For the more we encounter Christ, the more it changes how we talk.

An expanding encounter with Christ changes not only how we talk abut also how we think. Do we think first of all about ourselves? Or is our first thought about others? A while back a friend of mine sent me a cute story that makes the point.

One night a man’s car broke down as he was driving past a beautiful, old monastery. He walked up the drive and knocked on the front door of the monastery. A monk answered, listened to the man’s story, and graciously invited him to spend the night.

The monks fed the man and led him to a tiny chamber in which to sleep. The man thanked the monks and slept serenely until he was awakened by a strange, amazingly beautiful sound. The next morning, as the monks repaired his car, he asked about the sound that woke him. The monks said, “We’re sorry. We cannot tell you about the sound. You’re not a monk.”

The man was disappointed, but eager to go. So he thanked the monks for their kindness and went on his way. But during quiet moments afterwards, he always pondered the source of that alluring sound.

Several years later, the man was driving in the same area. He stopped at the monastery on a whim and asked admittance. He explained to the monks that he had so enjoyed his previous stay and wondered if he might be permitted to spend another night under their peaceful roof. The monks graciously agreed and the man stayed. Late that night, he heard the sound.

The next morning he begged the monks to explain the sound. The monks said, “We’re sorry. We cannot tell you about the sound. You’re not a monk.”

By now the man’s curiosity had turned to obsession. He decided to give up everything and become a monk if that was the only way to learn about the sound. He informed the monks of his decision and began the long and arduous task of becoming a monk.

Seventeen years later, the man was finally established as a true member of the order. When the celebration ended, he humbly went to the abbot and asked to be told the source of the sound.

Silently, the old monk led the new monk to a huge wooden door. He opened the door with a golden key. That door swung open to reveal a second door of silver, then a third of gold and so on until they had passed through twelve doors, each more magnificent than the last. The new monk’s face was awash with tears of joy as he finally beheld the wondrous source of the mysterious sound he had heard so many years before …

Too often we are tempted to treat Christian faith as a delight just for us and even when we know the wondrous source of our delight, we keep it to ourselves. Better to think of others first. Better to be like the Samaritans who shared their faith because they knew that Jesus was the Savior of the world.

No real conclusion today other than to say we’ll continue our Christ Encounters throughout the week, shifting our focus now from John’s Gospel to the book of Hebrews. Mystery, Redemption, Hope, and Perseverance. These will be our next encounters and then next Sunday on a glorious Easter morn, we come to the end and a Worship Encounter. Thanks be to God.

[1] See Thomas J. Talley, The Origins of the Liturgical Year, 2nd ed., (Collegeville, MN: The Liturgical Press, 1986) 25ff.

[2] Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2004) 133-135.

[3] This story, which apparently has circulated around the Internet, was emailed to me by a friend on December 16, 2003.