June 15, 2008    Romans 16:1-16, 25-27

    In a day and age when we take high speed internet, email, cell phones, and text messaging for granted, the circumstances of communicating by mail 2000 years ago might be easy to forget.  But even so long ago sending and receiving mail were  very real parts of life and  as important to people then as now.  As a matter of fact, many of my generation bemoan the loss of real letter writing, thinking despite its many advantages, email is a pretty poor substitute for a handwritten letter.  I have treasured letters written to me by my grandmother Warrener when I was a little girl.  I have the last letter my mother ever wrote to me only a few weeks before she died thirty-nine years ago.  These are precious treasures.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you, too, have a bundle of letters stashed away somewhere that have special and lasting meaning for you.  Somehow email just isn’t the same as seeing a handwritten note written on special paper and sealed in an envelope with your name on it - written just for you.  Letters still mean a lot, and they meant a lot to our brothers and sisters who lived 2000 years ago.

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — June 8, 2008
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text: Genesis 12:1-4;  Ephesians 4:1-7, 11-16

There is one body and one Spirit,

through all and in all. — Ephesians 4:4-6

We must grow up in every way… — Ephesians 4:15

According to most scholars, the Letter to the Ephesians was probably written not by the Apostle Paul but by a disciple of Paul.  Marked differences in language, style, phrasing, and viewpoint distinguish Ephesians from letters like Romans, Galatians, and 1 & 2 Corinthians that are unquestionably by Paul.  But whether Paul wrote it or some later disciple wrote in his name, there is no doubt as Chapter 4 begins that the reader is supposed to recall that Paul spent time in prison.  “I therefore, a prisoner of the Lord, beg you…”  We’re to picture Paul, sitting in prison, writing this letter.  It’s a Roman prison.  Paul is a prisoner of the Empire.  But the letter says instead, “I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord.”  Whatever the circumstances, the Lord is intimately involved in all of this.  For Paul isn’t out getting himself in trouble with the authorities because one day he got it into his head that he wanted to be a preacher.  No!  In a rather dramatic (and shocking) encounter on the road to Damascus, the Lord called out to Paul.  And in response, Paul changed… changed his whole life.

May 25, 2008    Matthew 6:25-34

    At this point you may be one of those, scratching your head and asking yourself, “Didn’t I just hear this scripture read and a sermon preached on it last Sunday?”  If so, rest assured. You aren’t crazy.   It was indeed the sermon text last Sunday as we sat under the tent on the front lawn and recalled God’s gift of creation.  Skip selected the passage as one most appropriate for the occasion.  In the meantime I had checked to see what the scriptures were for this Sunday when I would be preaching and discovered the gospel was Matthew 6:25-34, and I began preparation.   Of course, the irony was that as I heard the scripture being read, I immediately began to worry.  What was I going to do?  Am I going to have to change my plans?  Was the work I had already done for naught?  Was I now going to have to start all over?  I was all but wringing my hands.  Then I remembered the lilies of the field.  I remembered the vast richness of scripture.  And I thought about the possibilities for hearing the same text two weeks in a row.  Worry began to melt away, and, yes, I did listen to the sermon!   Needless to say, I  resolved to do exactly what we are doing today, hearing the same scripture two weeks in a row.

    Physician and poet Lewis Thomas once said that human beings have “always been . . . specifically anxious creature[s] with an almost untapped capacity for worry.”  He also says, “[Worry] is a GIFT that distinguishes [human beings] from other forms of life.”    To prove his first point, I am the perfect case. My worrying under the tent last Sunday is a good example.  My family reminds me, however, that if I have nothing specific to worry about, I’ll find something.  My husband calls it “throwing lions in the street.”   I worry about everything from what people will think of me if I have spinach on my teeth to whether I will make my connection in Phoenix when I fly to California next month to whether my grandchildren will love me if I’m too strict with them to whether the food in the refrigerator is contaminated

A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — May 18, 2008
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Texts:  Psalm 19;  Matthew 6:25-34

The heavens are telling the glory of God… — Psalm 19:1a

Look to the birds of the air… consider the lilies… — Matthew 6:26, 28

Wendell Berry is one of my favorite poets.  In his poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” he writes:

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come to the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light.  For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

Do you have such a place where you can go in stress-filled times?  Or if you can’t go there physically then perhaps you go there in memory—a special place to “rest in the grace of the world” and, at least temporarily, to be free.  I once asked the elders at a session meeting to share about such places in their lives.  Mine is a place I haven’t been to in more than 20 years.  It’s in the Jemez Mountains of Northern New Mexico, a high mountain meadow above 10,000 feet on the shoulder of Tschicoma Mountain, a sacred peak of the Pueblo people.  The place is called Ciénega del Oso—“ciénega” for the marshy area at the base of the steep meadow and “del Oso” because, I imagine, it’s a place bears have been spotted.  For me, it’s a sacred place of beauty and tranquility, a place of wholeness.