Like a Good Book,
Life Has Chapters
Dr. Stephen D. Jones, preaching
Launch Sunday, September 9, 2007
Second Baptist Church of St. Louis
The author of the Gospel of Luke begins by stating that he “decided, after
investigating everything (about Jesus’ life) from the very first, to write an
orderly account for you…” (1:3) The Gospel of John concludes, “there are many
other things that Jesus did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose
that the entire world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
(21:25)
While the Gospel of Mark ignores the birth stories of Jesus, it begins this
way, “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. As it is
written in the prophet Isaiah, ‘See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who
will prepare your way; the voice of one crying out in the wilderness: “Prepare
the way of the Lord…” John the Baptist appeared…’” (1:1-4a)
Each of the four Gospel writers describe Jesus’ life in chapters. For
Matthew and Luke, the first chapter is the story of Jesus’ birth. But all four
Gospels use the prophet John the Baptist as a way of introducing Jesus. John
was a forerunner who proclaimed, “The one who is more powerful that I is coming
after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.” (Mk
1:7) John is the introductory chapter who prepares us to meet Jesus.
Like a good book, Jesus’ life had chapters. And so also are there chapters
in our lives. Our struggle is that we often can’t identify the chapters as we
experience them. It is only later, in reflection, as we look back over our
lives, that we can discern the meaning of our days.
A woman walked into the post office and said she wanted to purchase some
stamps. The woman behind the counter asked, “What denomination?” The woman
looked incredulously at the clerk and responded, “Oh, my goodness, has it come
to this? Well, alright, give me 5 Lutherans, 3 Baptists and 2 Catholics.”
We have to development discernment in order to make sense of life.
My first book was about the theory of faith development, arguing that faith
unfolds in stages, in chapters, and if we understand the universal sequence, we
can better nurture the faith of young people. My last book essentially
identifies four chapters in Jesus’ life as a teacher of peace.
The longer you live, I think, the more you might be tempted to understand
your life in chapters, to look back over your years and divide them into
meaningful segments. If we take our lives as a whole, it becomes more than we
can comprehend. For me, I can divide my life into the places I have lived and
make some sense of it. My Eldon years were my beginning, formative, pietistic
years. William Jewell represented my rebellious, young adult, venturing forth
years, and so forth. Each of the churches I have served and cities in which I
have lived have had a defining influence. They each can be set apart from the
others. I can also divide my life from my childhood years, my courtship years,
my early years of marriage with Jan, 11 years together, just the two of us.
Then our child-rearing years. And now our empty-nest years. In my sermon two
weeks ago, I shared my vocational journey and I can divide my life by chapters
according to my sense of call. My early career choices, God’s interruption, my
slow journey of coming to accept my call as a pastor, and finally my full
embrace of it.
Interestingly, when our daughter, Janelle, was here last week-end, we decided
to go up in the Gateway Arch. Jan had gone up in the Arch several times before
and she was sure that I had gone with her. But the moment I climbed into that
little claustrophobic cabin to make the upward journey, I knew it was something
I had never done before. On the other hand, my walk into the underground museum
triggered forgotten memories. I remembered walking down into the museum with
Jan and our two children, aged 5 and 1 and a half at the time. And we had
intended to go up into the Arch that morning but the lines were so long we gave
up, for we were vacationing in St. Louis for the day prior to departing on our
annual summer vacation to the beach in North Carolina, and that was the year,
1986, we experienced a tragic automobile accident, a story that occupies an
entire chapter in our lives. Our son, Brian was old enough to have memory of
our family prior to the accident, and after, and he speaks of how that marked
two separate chapters in the early years of his life.
How do you divide your life? How do you make sense of it all? Life is too
complicated to “take it all in” without differentiating, categorizing,
delineating. Your life has a story line and like a good book, it has chapters.
Have you ever “organized the story of your life” in your mind? I’m sure you
have. My uncle Howard wrote the story of his life and published it as a book
for his family, delineating the various chapters of his life beginning with his
childhood in Hardin, Missouri. But the whole genre of biographies and
autobiographies testify to an underlying human need to understand our lives and
to divide them into meaningful chapters.
How do you make sense of your life? This is what makes us human, what makes
human beings unique among God’s creation, and that is the universal human need
to make sense of our days. Life for human beings has to be more than one day
followed by another, in rote repetition. Occasionally, I’ll have conversations
with someone who claims not to be self-reflective, and he’ll begin by saying, “I
haven’t done anything extraordinary, I’ve just lived a normal life, nothing
anyone else would want to know.” But then, you coax the stories out of him, and
what unfolds is a marvelously unique, mostly untold set of stories that no one
has ever heard.
I have been heavily influenced by the writing of Frederick Buechner. You
will hear me quote him often. Buechner’s father committed suicide when he was a
young boy and I think that is what sent him on a life-long journey to make sense
of his own life. Perhaps that is what suicide is: a statement that we can no
longer make sense of our days, no longer find meaning there, no longer value one
season of our lives more than another. Lacking meaning, thus, we put an end to
it.
Buechner writes, “If I were called upon to state in a few words the essence
of everything I was trying to say both as a novelist and as a preacher, it would
be something like this: listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery
that it is. In the boredom and pain of it no less than in the excitement and
gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it
because in the last analysis, all moments are key moments, and life itself is
grace… Buechner argues, “There is no event so commonplace but that God is
present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or
not…” (p. 87, Now and Then)
Your life story is like no one else’s. Yours is utterly unique. You might
say, “Who cares?” Who cares what kind of life I have lived? Who cares about my
joys, my ecstasies, my tragedies, my struggles, my daily walk? But if your
story doesn’t matter, then neither does mine, and neither does any one else’s.
God created us as creatures in search of meaning. And when we claim that our
lives hold no meaning, we deny God as our Creator.
Janelle and I just visited the Ulysses S. Grant homestead, White Haven.
Prior to moving to St. Louis, I had no idea that the Civil War General and Hero
and two-term President had any connection to this city. I found it interesting
that as he married into the Dent family, it was the merging of a slave-owning
family with an abolitionist family. And Grant’s lasting contribution, the
abolition of slavery in the United States by leading the Union troops to
victory, was likely forged over the dinner table in feisty arguments with his
opinionated father-in-law, night after night, deepening his convictions and
honing his arguments. His story was in part formatively written at White Haven
and it became expressed in one of the most heroic chapters of our nation’s
story, the Civil War, and its emancipating outcome.
Each one of us has formative places, formative experiences, that set our
lives on a certain track. Think about Jennifer, and Meadow, and Will, and
Andrew, and Mitchell, and Kate and Rebecca and Courtney and our other wonderful
children and teens. We are their formative matrix, we’re setting the direction
for the rest of their lives. The good experiences we offer them, the love and
the nurture, will carry them through many a dark day in the future. When they
remember back to how their lives began, they will remember us. We are a part of
their life stories, an early chapter. On the other hand, there are people who
remember back to their childhood years, their early church experiences, and they
recall violation, and wrong, and pain, and hypocrisy.
I re-watched the movie, The Apostle, the other evening. It is about a
Pentecostal Holiness preacher who tries to live a saintly life but finds himself
being led astray often “by the Devil” as a self-confessed “womanizer.” Yet
when he discovers his wife in an adulterous affair, he is torn between his piety
and his inner rage at God. His passage from this chapter to the next is
tumultuous. He spends an entire night shouting at God in the upstairs bedroom
of his mother’s house. He is so loud that a neighbor calls his mother and says,
“It sounds like you got a wild man over there, carrying on and hollering…” His
mother calmly responds, “It’s my son. Ever since he was a little bitty boy,
sometimes, he talks to the Lord and sometimes he yells at the Lord. And
tonight, he just happens to be yelling at him.” The neighbor responds, “Well,
could you tell him to do it a little softer, do you know what time it is?”
(The Apostle, October Films, written and directed by Robert Duvall)
Sometimes, life’s transitions are just not all that quiet.
Before our church was even 30 years old, on April 21, 1861, Dr. Galusha
Anderson stood in the pulpit of Second Baptist Church and dared to deliver the
first sermon in St. Louis, a divided city but with strong Confederate
sympathies, in support of the Union and against slavery. He wrote later that a
hush fell over the congregation, that at pauses between his sentences, he could
hear the flicker of the gas lights. And his life, and our church, would never
be the same. Opponents stormed our church, shot a deacon, threw a brick through
a window during the next Sunday’s service and threatened Anderson’s life. One
of St. Louis’ newspapers printed the headline, “The Devil Preaches at Sixth and
Locust,” the location of our church at the time. Anderson was named one of the
ten on the Confederate’s most wanted list to be taken captive. In that early
chapter, you could already tell the direction we were going, the journey we
continue today. A person will never understand Second Baptist Church, unless
you know that Civil War chapter.
When I moved into the pastor’s office of this church, I encountered a pile of
papers, books and documents about four feet in depth. I haven’t had time to
rummage through all of it, but I discovered a bound book by Leon Robison, the
pastor who led you from your Kingshighway location to this campus. He is
remembered as one of the truly great pastors of this church, and he wrote a book
about his years at Second Baptist Church beginning with the chapter in 1949 when
he was disfellowshipped from the St. Louis Baptist Pastor’s Conference, and
Second Baptist Church was disfellowshipped from the St. Louis Baptist
Association and the Missouri Baptist Convention, and Rachel Robison, the
pastor’s wife, was disfellowshipped from the St. Louis Baptist Ministers’ Wives’
organization. It seemed nobody by the name of Baptist much wanted to hang out
with us!
These are our chapters, this is our story, and they explain our
distinctiveness today.
It was Socrates who said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.” And he
said that in the Court of Athens just before he was sentenced to death. (399
BCE, Apology 38a) If you don’t try to make sense of your life, your life
won’t make sense. Every one of us, at times, struggle as to whether we have
any purpose, any value, any meaning. No one escapes that struggle and no one
avoids that question. Your life has chapters, there are seasons to your life.
How do you make sense of it?
I am certain that God is in life’s transitions. As the pages turn from one
chapter to another, God intervenes. For that is when we are most vulnerable in
these seasons of change, and more open to God’s intervening Spirit.
Buechner writes, “What quickens my pulse now is the stretch ahead rather than
the one behind, and it is mainly for some clue to where I am going that I search
through where I have been, for some hint as to who I am becoming or failing to
become that I delve into what used to be. I listen back to a time when nothing
was much farther from my thoughts than God for an echo of the gutturals and
sibilants and vowellessness by which I believe that even then God was addressing
me out of my life as he addresses us all. And it is because I believe that,
that I think of my life and the lives of everyone who has ever lived, as not
just journeys through time but as sacred journeys.” (p. 6, The Sacred Journey)
Surely, we are on a sacred journey together as we enter a new season or
chapter in the great story of Second Baptist Church. Even though there may be
only one or two members who remember the past before our church was located on
Clayton Road, you cannot remove that grand heritage from our communal genes. We
all carry it.
The arrival of a new pastor typically does begin a new chapter in a church’s
life. A new climate is established, new possibilities emerge, and people respond
not just to the pastor but to each other in new ways. As I listen to you, I
hear a rising hope. Downstairs this morning, we considered new visions for our
future. If we implemented a handful of those visions, it would delineate our
next chapter in startling ways.
God is in this season of change at Second Baptist Church. And God is in the
chapters and transitions of your life and mine. And our stories are bound
together.
I
I am here to help you write a new chapter in the history of Second Baptist
Church. May they look back upon these first days we share together, ten years
from now, 40 years from now, a century from now, and say of us, “Surely this was
a season of new beginnings!” May it be so. Amen.
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