North Star
North Star
Rev. Chandler Stokes Jeremiah 31:31-37
The Third Sunday in Lent February 28, 2016 Scripture Introduction We have named our Lenten theme THE BAPTISMAL CORD, saying: “In baptism it is as if a slender cord, so slender as to not even be seen—has been tied around our waists. And the risen Christ is at the other end of that slender cord—ever so gently, but insistently and continually, pulling us forward, guiding us to who and where we were created to be, pulling us through the tumultuous waters toward our Easter destination.” As with Isaiah, the text that began the service today, this passage from Jeremiah offers the same kind of promise made in baptism. Whether we are baptized or not, in this covenant God promises to see us through. Scripture 31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. 35
Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord of hosts is his name: 36 If this fixed order were ever to cease from my presence, says the Lord, then also the offspring of Israel would cease to be a nation before me forever. 37 Thus says the Lord: If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will reject all the offspring of Israel because of all they have done, says the Lord. *** Here in Jeremiah, as in Isaiah, and as in baptism, God promises to see us through. The other day I found my baptismal certificate. I was six months old. I don’t remember a thing about it. They tied that cord around my waist, and I was clueless. So are all the other infants we bring to this font. They don’t know this promise; they don’t know about the cord.
Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
North Star Mark Salzman was a teacher at a Juvenile Detention Center in Los Angeles. He tells a story about some of the young men in lockup. Their lives are chaotic; many of them were drawn into crime early on and were incarcerated in their teens. During one class, Mark taught his students about the North Star, about its steady place in the sky, and he asked the boys: Can you think of some aspect of your lives, some person, some idea, that never changes while everything else in your life seems like chaos? Do you have a personal North Star…? 1 For most of them the answer was simple: No. Not a thing. “Nothing ever stayed the same. There was no Star to lead them anywhere,” he said.2 Nothing to see them through. Kevin was one of those boys. After Mark left his teaching position, Kevin landed in prison under a life sentence. But Kevin stayed in touch with Mark and later wrote him a letter that included this poem: I’ve been sitting here bereft, Alone, locked down But now I have a window And see you every night. … No matter how far I travel I glance up, and there you’ll be. It’s good to have a friend like you At times you help me shine through. I still have a long journey to go But I'll be free again … Though the road may seem Long and far Eventually I'll make it Dear old friend, North Star.3 Kevin found a consistency in his life in that star, something to see him through turbulent waters. But there is a bit of a misconception in the North Star, right? Polaris is not in fact directly over the North Pole. With greater magnification than in the picture on the cover of today’s bulletin, its “path” actually makes a little circle near the North Pole. And, as many of you know, Polaris is actually a three-star system.
Mark Salzman, True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 255, cited in an unpublished paper by Karen Chakoian for the Moveable Feast: Austin—2016. 1
2
Chakoian, unpublished paper.
3
Salzman, again cited in Chakoian.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star Modern cosmology points out an even bigger problem. Galaxies appear to be moving away from us. In fact, the universe is expanding in all directions at once. All observers anywhere in the universe will observe a similar effect. So, even if the North Star were in line with the North Pole and were not three stars, any “fixed” point in our sky is illusory. That’s quite unlike the ancient language of Jeremiah. Writing 2,500 years ago in a pre-Copernican world, he assumes earth at the center and the stars fixed above. Listen to how unscientific Jeremiah sounds; he speaks of …the fixed order of the moon and the stars, and says: If this fixed order were ever to cease, then also the offspring of Israel would cease to be a nation…. He makes God’s relationship with Israel dependent on things staying fixed! We know the universe is static nowhere. Anything we might orient ourselves to in the physical universe is moving. And isn’t that our experience of life too? Everything changes: people come and go. Values shift. Jobs disappear. What really can see us through? But is immobility really the way we imagine our security in God? No. Say you want to get to Green Bay, Wisconsin, on foot, and you have no map. Let’s say, instead, like Israel in the wilderness, you are following a moving light to get there. (Israel had a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of smoke by day.) If the light you are following stays fixed right over the top of Green Bay, you can’t follow that light directly to the goal, unless you can walk on water. If the light is to lead you while staying in front of you—and not take you to the bottom of Lake Michigan but safely around the southern end—that light will need to move. It will at some point need to be west of you and then south of you and then west again and then north—four moves—in order to get you around that southern end of the lake and back up the far shore. Just because the light doesn’t stay fixed in one place, that doesn’t mean it can’t see you through. Sometimes the things that are most secure, helpful, and reassuring—sometimes, after they have helped us, they move. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t helpful or were lying or inconsistent. It means that they helped us for a time, and now we need a different help from a new angle, because we are in a different place. Last week we sent out a letter about my upcoming sabbatical. One of the things I’ll be reflecting on during that time is the story of my first conversion and later re-conversions to faith. In the first conversion, the story of Jesus and Pilate meant everything to me. That story changed the course of my life dramatically. However, today that story just doesn’t mean what it used to—not at all. It helped me for a time. And then it seemed to move. That help and subsequent movement suggest that the consistent help is in something that happens in between, not the object itself: not the story or the star, but the relationship. We began with Kevin’s somewhat naïve poem about the North Star, but there is a more famous poem about a star that elevates and nuances this notion of something “fixed” in our lives. Listen to Robert Frost’s Choose Something Like a Star. It leads us toward a similar sense of relationship. O Star (the fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud— It will not do to say of night, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’ But say with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend. Tell us what elements you blend. It gives us strangely little aid, But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats' Eremite, Not even stooping from its sphere, It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.4 The poem says a lot, but let me home in on what particularly applies: This star… asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed—when the cross-currents threaten to sweep us away… … We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. —…something to see us through. Frost is truly a more modern poet than Jeremiah. Frost knows the expanding universe. He knows the insecurity of physical objects and their illusiveness. So he stresses that this “star” is a metaphor—choose something like a star. He double-underlines it as a metaphor—to stay our minds on and be staid: something like a star that asks a little of us here, a certain height. Again the consistency, the security, the power is not in the thing itself, not in the star, not in the physical object, not in the Scripture, not in the specific text itself, but in the relationship to us, in its asking something of us, a certain height.
Robert Frost, “Choose Something Like a Star,” Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995). 4
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star I was a little unfair with Jeremiah, because Jeremiah gets this, too. Though the metaphors in the second half of the reading are about the “fixed order” and are, in our context, pretty weak, the opening metaphors are entirely about the relationship, about an intimate relationship wherein God asks of us a certain height. Jeremiah says, God writes the law on our hearts. So security is not some external, unsteady object, but it’s writ upon us… intimately. We’ve called this relationship the baptismal cord. We want something that will see us through—to Green Bay or to that far shore. So the tradition says, not “Look to the North Star,” but “Remember the truth in baptism.” OK, fine, but there are days when we can’t even glimpse that far shore. There are days when we don’t even know if there is a far shore. We get a peek one day, and then it’s gone. The waves get too high. The clouds cover the stars. The story doesn’t mean the same thing. Writ on our hearts? The metaphors, even the ones I use today, become empty. People come and go. The teacher that pointed the way to that shore moves away or dies. Sometimes—just as when I was an infant and that watery cross was put on my head—I’m still clueless. How do I know which way that cord is pulling or even if it’s there at all? I can’t see it. I was six months old. I don’t remember. Ted Wardlaw is president of Austin Theological Seminary in Texas and part of my study group, The Moveable Feast. This year he shared with us something of his somewhat awkward attempts across the years to remind his daughters, Shelby and Claire, of their baptisms. He said: When our daughters were growing up, I spent a lot of time endeavoring to immerse them in the theology of baptism—the notion that, in that cross traced on each of their foreheads, they were signed forever with the mark of their identity [like the law written on their hearts]. And so I endeavored to remind them often that they were children of God. When I would leave town for a few days, or when they went on a youth mission trip, or a summer abroad, I would trace again the sign of the cross on their foreheads, charging them, “Remember your baptism.” Once our younger daughter Claire came purposefully through the kitchen toward the garage on her way out on a Friday evening, with three of her high school friends in close pursuit, and said over her shoulder: “Bye Dad, Zephyr and Zoey and Devon and I are going to the movies and then to a coffee shop; but I’ll drive carefully, I’ll be in early, and I’ll remember my baptism!” Sometimes I think I overdid it a bit. On that fateful night when a young man with hardly any reason to shave came to the front door to take our older daughter Shelby on her first date, I filled with dread at the thought of her walking through that passage-moment, and as the doorbell rang, all I could think to say was: “Shelby, remember you’re baptized!” Later, my wife, a psychologist, sat me down in the living-room and looked me straight in the eye and said, “Is it really her baptism you’re worried about tonight?” And then there was that trip we all took together when we delivered Shelby to college. We rented a van, we drove, the four of us, together on that journey. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. You find the dorm, you help your child unload the luggage and all the transitional detritus from home. You go to Target and buy the trash can, the desk-light, the extra hangers, the rug. You do all of the moving-in, you find that special restaurant for the Saturday night meal, you notice that lump in the throat that is there all weekend. And then, on Sunday, the college officials in their
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star wisdom hold one more orientation meeting—the one where the entering class is in one large room and the parents are in another. And the message, given to the parents with as much kindness as is possible, is: “You’ve done your job. Now it’s our turn. It’s time for you to go home.” And so the four of us—Shelby, her mom, Claire, and I—walked grimly together toward the large parking lot where our rented van, along with all the others, was parked. It started to rain as we said our heroic goodbyes. We three got into the van, and Shelby headed off toward her dorm. When she got to the corner of a large multi-story building and started to make a left turn where she would walk on to her dorm— right before she would disappear from our sight—she stopped and turned around. She was maybe a couple of hundred feet away, but she fixed her eyes on mine, seated as I was behind the wheel. And she did this (the sign of the cross on her forehead). Then she was gone. She remembered. And, of course, I lost it. There were tears… filled with joy. She had remembered her baptism.5 How do we know that cord is there at all? Honestly, someone tells us. It may not be that the light moves four times to take us to Green Bay; it could be four people on the way: one west, one south, another west, and then one north. Once it was Isaiah, then Jeremiah. Each of them with a word for that time, each maintaining the Relationship for a season. Mark was there for Kevin (more important than that the star was there), asked of him a certain height, and then moved on. Each may help us for a time, but then we need different help from a new angle. As I said last week, this cord doesn’t just tie us to God, it ties us to everyone else. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. People come and go. And others come. And on Ash Wednesday or today, any of them might be the one to say, “Remember.” Friends, remember the truth in baptism and be filled with joy. Let the people say, Amen.
Ted shared the story at the meeting of the Moveable Feast in Austin and recounted it in a personal email to Bob Dunham on January 14, 2016. And Bob wrote in up in his sermon from January 17, 2016, at University Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 5
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 6 of 6
February 28, 2016
Rev. Chandler Stokes Jeremiah 31:31-37
The Third Sunday in Lent February 28, 2016 Scripture Introduction We have named our Lenten theme THE BAPTISMAL CORD, saying: “In baptism it is as if a slender cord, so slender as to not even be seen—has been tied around our waists. And the risen Christ is at the other end of that slender cord—ever so gently, but insistently and continually, pulling us forward, guiding us to who and where we were created to be, pulling us through the tumultuous waters toward our Easter destination.” As with Isaiah, the text that began the service today, this passage from Jeremiah offers the same kind of promise made in baptism. Whether we are baptized or not, in this covenant God promises to see us through. Scripture 31 The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. 32 It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. 33 But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more. 35
Thus says the Lord, who gives the sun for light by day and the fixed order of the moon and the stars for light by night, who stirs up the sea so that its waves roar—the Lord of hosts is his name: 36 If this fixed order were ever to cease from my presence, says the Lord, then also the offspring of Israel would cease to be a nation before me forever. 37 Thus says the Lord: If the heavens above can be measured, and the foundations of the earth below can be explored, then I will reject all the offspring of Israel because of all they have done, says the Lord. *** Here in Jeremiah, as in Isaiah, and as in baptism, God promises to see us through. The other day I found my baptismal certificate. I was six months old. I don’t remember a thing about it. They tied that cord around my waist, and I was clueless. So are all the other infants we bring to this font. They don’t know this promise; they don’t know about the cord.
Because sermons are prepared with an emphasis on verbal presentation, the written accounts may occasionally stray from proper grammar and punctuation.
North Star Mark Salzman was a teacher at a Juvenile Detention Center in Los Angeles. He tells a story about some of the young men in lockup. Their lives are chaotic; many of them were drawn into crime early on and were incarcerated in their teens. During one class, Mark taught his students about the North Star, about its steady place in the sky, and he asked the boys: Can you think of some aspect of your lives, some person, some idea, that never changes while everything else in your life seems like chaos? Do you have a personal North Star…? 1 For most of them the answer was simple: No. Not a thing. “Nothing ever stayed the same. There was no Star to lead them anywhere,” he said.2 Nothing to see them through. Kevin was one of those boys. After Mark left his teaching position, Kevin landed in prison under a life sentence. But Kevin stayed in touch with Mark and later wrote him a letter that included this poem: I’ve been sitting here bereft, Alone, locked down But now I have a window And see you every night. … No matter how far I travel I glance up, and there you’ll be. It’s good to have a friend like you At times you help me shine through. I still have a long journey to go But I'll be free again … Though the road may seem Long and far Eventually I'll make it Dear old friend, North Star.3 Kevin found a consistency in his life in that star, something to see him through turbulent waters. But there is a bit of a misconception in the North Star, right? Polaris is not in fact directly over the North Pole. With greater magnification than in the picture on the cover of today’s bulletin, its “path” actually makes a little circle near the North Pole. And, as many of you know, Polaris is actually a three-star system.
Mark Salzman, True Notebooks: A Writer's Year at Juvenile Hall (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 255, cited in an unpublished paper by Karen Chakoian for the Moveable Feast: Austin—2016. 1
2
Chakoian, unpublished paper.
3
Salzman, again cited in Chakoian.
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 2 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star Modern cosmology points out an even bigger problem. Galaxies appear to be moving away from us. In fact, the universe is expanding in all directions at once. All observers anywhere in the universe will observe a similar effect. So, even if the North Star were in line with the North Pole and were not three stars, any “fixed” point in our sky is illusory. That’s quite unlike the ancient language of Jeremiah. Writing 2,500 years ago in a pre-Copernican world, he assumes earth at the center and the stars fixed above. Listen to how unscientific Jeremiah sounds; he speaks of …the fixed order of the moon and the stars, and says: If this fixed order were ever to cease, then also the offspring of Israel would cease to be a nation…. He makes God’s relationship with Israel dependent on things staying fixed! We know the universe is static nowhere. Anything we might orient ourselves to in the physical universe is moving. And isn’t that our experience of life too? Everything changes: people come and go. Values shift. Jobs disappear. What really can see us through? But is immobility really the way we imagine our security in God? No. Say you want to get to Green Bay, Wisconsin, on foot, and you have no map. Let’s say, instead, like Israel in the wilderness, you are following a moving light to get there. (Israel had a pillar of fire by night and a pillar of smoke by day.) If the light you are following stays fixed right over the top of Green Bay, you can’t follow that light directly to the goal, unless you can walk on water. If the light is to lead you while staying in front of you—and not take you to the bottom of Lake Michigan but safely around the southern end—that light will need to move. It will at some point need to be west of you and then south of you and then west again and then north—four moves—in order to get you around that southern end of the lake and back up the far shore. Just because the light doesn’t stay fixed in one place, that doesn’t mean it can’t see you through. Sometimes the things that are most secure, helpful, and reassuring—sometimes, after they have helped us, they move. It doesn’t mean that they weren’t helpful or were lying or inconsistent. It means that they helped us for a time, and now we need a different help from a new angle, because we are in a different place. Last week we sent out a letter about my upcoming sabbatical. One of the things I’ll be reflecting on during that time is the story of my first conversion and later re-conversions to faith. In the first conversion, the story of Jesus and Pilate meant everything to me. That story changed the course of my life dramatically. However, today that story just doesn’t mean what it used to—not at all. It helped me for a time. And then it seemed to move. That help and subsequent movement suggest that the consistent help is in something that happens in between, not the object itself: not the story or the star, but the relationship. We began with Kevin’s somewhat naïve poem about the North Star, but there is a more famous poem about a star that elevates and nuances this notion of something “fixed” in our lives. Listen to Robert Frost’s Choose Something Like a Star. It leads us toward a similar sense of relationship. O Star (the fairest one in sight), We grant your loftiness the right To some obscurity of cloud— It will not do to say of night, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 3 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star Since dark is what brings out your light. Some mystery becomes the proud. But to be wholly taciturn In your reserve is not allowed. Say something to us we can learn By heart and when alone repeat. Say something! And it says, ‘I burn.’ But say with what degree of heat. Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade. Use language we can comprehend. Tell us what elements you blend. It gives us strangely little aid, But does tell something in the end. And steadfast as Keats' Eremite, Not even stooping from its sphere, It asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed To carry praise or blame too far, We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid.4 The poem says a lot, but let me home in on what particularly applies: This star… asks a little of us here. It asks of us a certain height, So when at times the mob is swayed—when the cross-currents threaten to sweep us away… … We may choose something like a star To stay our minds on and be staid. —…something to see us through. Frost is truly a more modern poet than Jeremiah. Frost knows the expanding universe. He knows the insecurity of physical objects and their illusiveness. So he stresses that this “star” is a metaphor—choose something like a star. He double-underlines it as a metaphor—to stay our minds on and be staid: something like a star that asks a little of us here, a certain height. Again the consistency, the security, the power is not in the thing itself, not in the star, not in the physical object, not in the Scripture, not in the specific text itself, but in the relationship to us, in its asking something of us, a certain height.
Robert Frost, “Choose Something Like a Star,” Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays (New York: Library of America, 1995). 4
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 4 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star I was a little unfair with Jeremiah, because Jeremiah gets this, too. Though the metaphors in the second half of the reading are about the “fixed order” and are, in our context, pretty weak, the opening metaphors are entirely about the relationship, about an intimate relationship wherein God asks of us a certain height. Jeremiah says, God writes the law on our hearts. So security is not some external, unsteady object, but it’s writ upon us… intimately. We’ve called this relationship the baptismal cord. We want something that will see us through—to Green Bay or to that far shore. So the tradition says, not “Look to the North Star,” but “Remember the truth in baptism.” OK, fine, but there are days when we can’t even glimpse that far shore. There are days when we don’t even know if there is a far shore. We get a peek one day, and then it’s gone. The waves get too high. The clouds cover the stars. The story doesn’t mean the same thing. Writ on our hearts? The metaphors, even the ones I use today, become empty. People come and go. The teacher that pointed the way to that shore moves away or dies. Sometimes—just as when I was an infant and that watery cross was put on my head—I’m still clueless. How do I know which way that cord is pulling or even if it’s there at all? I can’t see it. I was six months old. I don’t remember. Ted Wardlaw is president of Austin Theological Seminary in Texas and part of my study group, The Moveable Feast. This year he shared with us something of his somewhat awkward attempts across the years to remind his daughters, Shelby and Claire, of their baptisms. He said: When our daughters were growing up, I spent a lot of time endeavoring to immerse them in the theology of baptism—the notion that, in that cross traced on each of their foreheads, they were signed forever with the mark of their identity [like the law written on their hearts]. And so I endeavored to remind them often that they were children of God. When I would leave town for a few days, or when they went on a youth mission trip, or a summer abroad, I would trace again the sign of the cross on their foreheads, charging them, “Remember your baptism.” Once our younger daughter Claire came purposefully through the kitchen toward the garage on her way out on a Friday evening, with three of her high school friends in close pursuit, and said over her shoulder: “Bye Dad, Zephyr and Zoey and Devon and I are going to the movies and then to a coffee shop; but I’ll drive carefully, I’ll be in early, and I’ll remember my baptism!” Sometimes I think I overdid it a bit. On that fateful night when a young man with hardly any reason to shave came to the front door to take our older daughter Shelby on her first date, I filled with dread at the thought of her walking through that passage-moment, and as the doorbell rang, all I could think to say was: “Shelby, remember you’re baptized!” Later, my wife, a psychologist, sat me down in the living-room and looked me straight in the eye and said, “Is it really her baptism you’re worried about tonight?” And then there was that trip we all took together when we delivered Shelby to college. We rented a van, we drove, the four of us, together on that journey. Some of you know exactly what I’m talking about. You find the dorm, you help your child unload the luggage and all the transitional detritus from home. You go to Target and buy the trash can, the desk-light, the extra hangers, the rug. You do all of the moving-in, you find that special restaurant for the Saturday night meal, you notice that lump in the throat that is there all weekend. And then, on Sunday, the college officials in their
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 5 of 6
February 28, 2016
North Star wisdom hold one more orientation meeting—the one where the entering class is in one large room and the parents are in another. And the message, given to the parents with as much kindness as is possible, is: “You’ve done your job. Now it’s our turn. It’s time for you to go home.” And so the four of us—Shelby, her mom, Claire, and I—walked grimly together toward the large parking lot where our rented van, along with all the others, was parked. It started to rain as we said our heroic goodbyes. We three got into the van, and Shelby headed off toward her dorm. When she got to the corner of a large multi-story building and started to make a left turn where she would walk on to her dorm— right before she would disappear from our sight—she stopped and turned around. She was maybe a couple of hundred feet away, but she fixed her eyes on mine, seated as I was behind the wheel. And she did this (the sign of the cross on her forehead). Then she was gone. She remembered. And, of course, I lost it. There were tears… filled with joy. She had remembered her baptism.5 How do we know that cord is there at all? Honestly, someone tells us. It may not be that the light moves four times to take us to Green Bay; it could be four people on the way: one west, one south, another west, and then one north. Once it was Isaiah, then Jeremiah. Each of them with a word for that time, each maintaining the Relationship for a season. Mark was there for Kevin (more important than that the star was there), asked of him a certain height, and then moved on. Each may help us for a time, but then we need different help from a new angle. As I said last week, this cord doesn’t just tie us to God, it ties us to everyone else. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. People come and go. And others come. And on Ash Wednesday or today, any of them might be the one to say, “Remember.” Friends, remember the truth in baptism and be filled with joy. Let the people say, Amen.
Ted shared the story at the meeting of the Moveable Feast in Austin and recounted it in a personal email to Bob Dunham on January 14, 2016. And Bob wrote in up in his sermon from January 17, 2016, at University Presbyterian Church in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. 5
Westminster Presbyterian Church, Grand Rapids, MI
Page 6 of 6
February 28, 2016
