Sermon By Rev. Dennis Lippart

Old preachers are like old baseball players and old gamblers.

They want to make one more bet or be in one more game. Old horse racers want to race one more time. We want to do one more sermon.

So, we agonize over what it is that we want to say to folks. Do we find the sermon that they need to hear and preach that sermon? Or do we find the sermon we’ve always wanted to preach and preach that sermon, or do we preach the one about the house of religions?

Like golf, you play it with other people, who keep their own score and nobody knows if you cheat or not, except you and God.

Then it occurred to me that I needed to take a chapter from my own book.

We are now all in English 101 at Mon University, and I had a group of students, not unlike all of you, that I started one of my classes by telling them that they were all poets. They’re all thinking, no, we’re not poets. We don’t like poetry. We don’t do poetry. And I said, yes, you are poets, and I can prove that you are all poets because I’m going to give you a poem and you’re gonna respond with the next line.

“Twinkle, twinkle little star…

“Up above the world so high,”

We are hardwired to see the world in patterns. Poetry is a pattern. You are all hardwired to be poets. Now, people have told you that you can’t do poetry. People have told you poems have to be a certain way. People have bored you to death with poetry. Teachers have made you memorize poems that you didn’t like. You’ve come to believe that you’re not poets, but you are.

There’s a huge amount of poetry in the Bible that we ignore because we’re not poets, so we don’t read the Psalms very often. We stay away from the books of wisdom. We don’t like to be inspired that way because it’s not who we are, but that is who we are. We are all hardwired as poets. Some people see their poetry in rhythm and sound, but we are all poets.

I am going to give you another line to complete, ready for it? “For God so loved the world…That he gave his only Son”

You are hardwired to love. You are hardwired to be the lovers of the world.

It goes back to Genesis when God creates men and women in his image. We have creation stories in the book of Proverbs, we have all kinds of language in the Bible about how God calls us to something. Jesus himself said, “Truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” (John 14:12)

Most of the people that Jesus talked to towards the end of his ministry, when he talked about whether there’s going to be a judgment or not, were people who didn’t even know they were doing it.

You are hardwired to be the lovers of the world, and people have told you your entire life that you can’t do that. You’re not young enough, you’re not wealthy enough, you’re not strong enough, you’re not intelligent enough, you’re not old enough. Sometimes you’re too young. People have given us reasons why we are not to consider ourselves to be created to be the lovers of the world.

I’m here to tell you that all of that’s untrue. Just like you are all poets and don’t know it. You are all lovers, and you haven’t found your way to love the world yet, but that’s what you’re made for. That’s what God has asked you to do.

One of the problems that preachers have is how deeply we wanna become scholars.

There was once upon a time when the only scholars in the community were preachers. Harvard University was founded because preachers were the most learned people in the community, and they wanted to get smarter.

I’ll tell you a conversation I had with one of the little old ladies in the church that I was telling them about something I’d found in the library, in the Pastor’s study. She said “Our pastors don’t read books.” And I thought, “I’m not gonna tell her that I write books.” If you don’t like pastors who read books, you’re certainly not gonna like pastors who write books.

There was something about being a scholar that became bad news at some point. We have to walk a fine line between how deeply we dive into the text. Because people don’t want to hear from scholars that they don’t know what’s going on in the Bible. Most people understand the Bible because they’ve been told their whole lives what it means. So they don’t pay any attention to what it says, which is the best reason for reading it as to find out what it actually says to us.

God created you to be lovers in the world. He did not create us to be in torment.

Sometimes the biggest tormentors in the world are simply other folks. Other folks who can’t be accepting, other folks who don’t understand, other folks who refuse to be loved or to love the world the way it’s supposed to be loved. God did not create us to be tormentors, and he did not create us to be in torment.

One of the gifts of the self-help programs is that in the first step of the program, you must come to believe that a power greater than yourself could restore you.

In our text today, we have a man who is insane. People don’t like others being insane, so he’s living out in the cemetery somewhere and a power greater than himself restored him to sanity. We don’t like to think that we’re insane, but the program makes us have two confessions. One is that there is a power greater than ourselves, and second, that we are not sane in the moment. We are not the lovers we are intended to be. We are not the people we are created to be. We’re not as whole as we want to be, and we need to be restored to who we are meant to be. But first we have to admit that we are broken, we are not whole, and we’re flawed. Once we make that admission, then healing is possible.

I wanted to point out that when I saw the title for today, and I never title anything, by the way. My editor titled all my books for me. When I saw the title for the sermon, I thought I could have written that book, but I didn’t. It’s not my title, it’s Rev. Kathryn’s title, but it speaks to the fact that we live in a world where we have somehow accepted being tormented as a normal state of affairs. And it’s not normal to be tormented or to be the tormentors.

One of the ways that we can be lovers in the world is to speak out when we see torment happening, either the people who are doing the tormenting or the people who are being tormented, and simply say, it’s not the way it’s meant to be. It’s not right. It’s not the blessed community. It’s not who we are as a people, because we are the people that God created us to be. And God so loved the world that He gave it you. There are days I like to think it’s working, and days I believe it’s not.

But God gave us each other. He gave us a blessed community where we could be more together than we are by ourselves.

May it be so. Amen.

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