The Last Sermon
From the Series: Non-series
Speaker: Dick Foth
Date: May 25, 2008
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Transcript
Good Evening. It is terrific to be here. In two weeks from today, Ruth and I will be driving to Colorado, to a place called Fort Collins, which is one hour north of Denver. 15 years ago, I had been President of a small college out in California for 14 years, I was 50 years old, and I was tired, and Ruth and I decided to take a sabbatical, a self-funded sabbatical for one year. So we came east, and during that time, I was invited to come meet some folks here in Washington and I came to meet them because I had an interest in Washington, and I understood that they worked behind the scenes, one on one and in small groups throughout the city and Capitol Hill and other places, primarily but not exclusively with public people, public figures, and they invited us to come and be with them. There was no title, no salary, no position, no office, that sort of thing. Very creative moments when you don’t have any of those things, you can do anything. This was the position description: Why don’t you come and share your gifts in your group of friends and together let’s try to be light in a dark place? So for the last 15 years, we’ve been working at that, and it is not unstructured but it is rather amorphous in a lot of ways because it is quiet and invisible most of the time. I’ve told you that my mother, who will be 98 in just a couple of months, she was in her late 80s then and she would call me for the first two years and say, “Dick could you tell me one more time what it is you do? You used to be my son the College President and now you just have lunch with guys.” So that didn’t seem like it was very purposeful for her, but it has been a wonderful experience. And during that time, Mark and Laura came and helped to take this congregation from 12 or 15 people over in the school to this location and others and it has been wonderful to be part of it with them, and we will continue to be part of it as we go to Fort Collins. Our purpose in going to Fort Collins is to stay in the work that we are in, so we’ll be back in DC four or five times a year, but there are little groups of people all over the world, little groups meeting in parliaments all over the world, groups of business men and women in cities around the country who are working on their journey at growing in their faith and their trust in Jesus and trying to be in His Spirit one with each other. So our purpose would be to help fan that flame across the country and the reason we are going to Colorado is we have three grandchildren in Missouri, four in Oregon, and three in California, and it is not quiet a mid-point but we are hoping to be a magnet for 10 grandchildren. In the course of our time, we will just be going back and forth across the country doing similar kinds of things to what we’ve done here. We have loved the association with you for the last 12 years, and for Mark and Laura, we deem them dear friends and servants of the Lord in many, many ways. So I was given a title. Usually, I’m not given a title when I come here, and it was rather ominous, if this were your last sermon. I’m saying that’s not a good title. When I was a freshman at Cal-Berkeley in 1959, they had the whole last lecture series going, but it is interesting because it gets to the heart of what a person thinks or believes. So I was thinking about things that had been said to me over the years that were kind of essential, if you will. My father-in-law, when I first went into pastoring at age 24, I was in California heading for Urbana, Illinois to do a church plant near the University of Illinois with Ruth, and I told him I was leaving. I had been Youth Pastor there, and he, he always called me Foth, and he said, “Foth, three things you need to know. You are going to turn around a couple of time and be an old man with white hair, so whatever you are going to do for God, you need to get with the program. Secondly, if you are going to be a pastor, you need to have a spirit that is sensitive to God and a hide as tough as leather. Thirdly, in dealing with people, never back someone into a corner so they have no way out, because if you do that, there is only one way they can come out, and that’s fighting, and we don’t need anymore of that.” So I’ve thought about, could I say something kind of essential, some word you could remember as we go on our way, and I hadn’t been able to do. I’ve been grappling with this all week, saying why can’t I just talk about dinner or something like that as opposed to something deep. But there are things that I’ve spoken to in our time here, loving God, loving your neighbor, trusting God as a child, kingdom life, Jesus as the Gospel, Jesus as the Resurrection. But I’d like to call my subset of thoughts tonight ‘Thoughts on the Journey’. Whatever else life is, it’s a journey. You even have a group here called Journey I think. We are all going somewhere in some fashion with some others. That’s just how it is. Some of you when you were 10 never dreamed that you would be in a setting like this tonight. Some of you even two years ago never dreamed that you would be in a setting like this tonight. That’s part of the journey. Every journey has a starting point and it has a destination, and when you read the Gospels, it is clear that Jesus understands that this is a journey. When He talks to his disciples in what we call the Great Commission, He says go into all the world and preach this good news to all creation, or make disciples and teach them to observe what I have taught you. When He speaks to his disciples just after the Resurrection, they are scared, they are hiding out, and He shows up in the room in John 20, and at one point He says: As the Father has sent Me, that’s the way I’m sending you. Then it says: He breathes on them and says: Receive the Holy Spirit; and secondly, He says: Whomever’s sins you forgive will be forgiven, whomever’s sins you don’t forgive will not be forgiven. That’s a thought and a message for another day, but the fact is that He was equipping them for the journey. There was movement, there is dynamism, there is the kingdom of God, the whole piece, the whole theme of Scripture, especially in the Gospels and Acts is this idea that we are going somewhere with Jesus. We are not going somewhere for Him, that may be a piece of it, but we are essentially going with Him. I have a friend who served in Africa for 35 years, he said, “It was a great day in my life when I woke up in Africa and found out that I was working with God, not for Him”. It changes the whole dynamic. I have a friend who is now with the Lord, he was Chaplin of the Senate for many years, Richard Halverson [?Sp] When I first met him, he said, “Ya know, one of the themes of my life is to understand that Jesus is out there doing things and I wake up every morning and say ‘what is it You are out there doing Jesus and can I go do it with you?” Just that little prepositional flip makes all the difference in the world as to whether we see ourselves as employees or as friends. So in coming to this message tonight, I though instead of trying to leave you with one word, cause the way I usually teach is I usually give one thought and then say a whole bunch of things about it, a bunch of different stories to try to make that one thought stick when you walk away. Tonight I’m not going to do that, but what I’m going to give you is a template from the Scripture that has to do with journey. If you have your Bibles, turn with me to Acts the third chapter. Jesus had selected 12 out of many, many followers, He had selected 12 and from those 12, He selected three that were close to Him. They happened to be fishermen, these three. They were young guys, all of their growing up years they had fished, so with their fathers, two of them with their dads in the boats from the time they were small, that’s how historically it is done in agrarian economies or in vocational and the trades, you just brought your little boy along, or your little girl, you just brought them with you. So these were still young guys. Jesus would have been 33 when He died, He had just been killed, and now this is occurring in Acts the third chapter, and this is how it reads: One day Peter and John were going up to the temple at the time of prayer, at 3:00 in the afternoon. Now a man crippled from birth was being carried to the temple gates called Beautiful where he was put everyday to beg from those going into the temple courts, and when he saw Peter and John about to enter, he asked them for money, and Peter looked straight at him, as did John, and then Peter said, “Look at us.” So the man gave them his attention, expecting to get something from them. And Peter said, “Silver or gold, I do not have, but what I have, I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk.” And taking him by the right hand, he helped him up and instantly the man’s feet and ankles became strong. He jumped to his feet and began to walk and then he went with them into the temple courts walking and jumping and praising God, and when all the people saw him walking and praising God, they recognized him as the same man who used to sit begging at the temple gates called Beautiful and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him.
I’d just like to go through this text for a few moments and break it down and just look at the parts because this is not a metaphor for the journey, it is the journey. Look at how it starts, one day, Peter and John were going up to the temple. This is the essential theme of the kingdom, whatever it is, do it together. The world is about alone, the world is about focus on me, it’s me-centered, the kingdom is not me-centered, it is others-centered, and to the degree that I walk with someone, there is power in that. This week, on the spur of the moment, Ruth and I flew to Colorado in one day and bought a house and flew back on the same day. Now there are a couple things about that that are pretty interesting. One is that Ruth hates to fly, not just hates it, terrified of flying. She’s like the old grandmother who said, “If God had wanted us to fly, He wouldn’t have made trains.” One of those, and she did two trips, to and from Colorado on the same day. We got up in a driving rainstorm on Tuesday morning and went out there. Along the way, she turned to me and said, “I feel so close to you. There is something about what we are doing that make us in sync.” It’s really interesting that phrase in Scripture that says how wonderful it is when brethren dwell in harmony together. I had a friend, I’ve mentioned him here before, who was one of the greatest analytical chemists of his day at the University of Illinois, his specialty was spectroscopy, which is the use of light for scientific measurement, I didn’t even know how to say that word, let alone spell it, until I met Howard Momstead [?sp] as a friend. But one day I was in his lab with him and he said, “Dick we are using that ruby laser to track positive and negative ions across the kidneys of frogs.” And I said, “I knew that.” I said, “How does a laser work?” He said, “A laser is just taking light,” light is here, as it is going through the room like this 186,000 miles per second, it is just ripping through here in all different directions and you’ve got artificial light, you’ve got outside light, you’ve got all kinds of light. He said, “When you take light and you get it in sync, what you get is a laser.” So when Jesus looks at the disciples and says, “You are the light of the world, you have the capacity when you are together to destroy the works of the enemy. You have the capacity when you are together to bring healing. That is what light does, that’s what lasers do. And here it says Peter and John were going up to the temple. When you think about the epistles, people say Paul wrote that letter to the Thessalonians. Really? That’s not what it says in the letter. I Thessalonians says Paul, Silvanus and Timothy. II Corinthians says Paul and Sosphinias [?]. Phillipians says Paul and Timothy. The power comes out of the unity. So when we talk about one prayer for the church that you are going to be praying, Jesus had a prayer for the church in John 17, that his people, his disciples, his followers would be one. There is something about this together business, not just some touchy feely holding hands singing Kum By Ya, it’s this idea that they were together. I don’t think until I came to Washington D.C. that I took that seriously, but in the last few years, I take it very seriously. Jesus says where two or three are gathered in my Name. Why doesn’t He say six or eight? Have you ever tried to get six or eight people together? I mean really together? Any married couple here knows how hard it is for two to be together, in symphony, in agreement, agreement, I don’t mean physically being together, I mean agreement in spirit and in emotion and in focus. That’s huge. So, my question to you is – do what degree do we buy it, that we should be together? Or is it simply quaint? Is it simply nice, is it simply comforting? I would suggest that it is simply essential if the kingdom is going to show up.
Secondly, they went up at the time of prayer. They were in this habit of going up to the temple and praying every day. And it was a focus outside of themselves. I’ll come back to that point. It is a focus outside of ourselves. In a consumer designer oriented culture, when we have a focus beyond ourselves, people sense that just being around us. I met with a young man this morning in Boston at the airport, a friend of a friend of mine, and he said, “I just wanted to get this hour because I have concerns about justice issues and the poor.” I got excited just listening to him because here’s a young guy who has his whole life in front of him and he is looking out there and saying ‘what can I do out there?’ as opposed to ‘what can I do for me?’ This idea of others-focused is captured in something like prayer, because prayer says a couple of things. One is – I’m praying to Someone, and secondly – I trust that Someone. Communicating with God and trusting Him with that communication is the essence of the kingdom. Together is the essence of the kingdom. They went every day for a time of prayer, and the trust that is expressed in prayer is the essence of the Gospel. I have a friend with whom I began reading the Gospels years ago, off and on, we didn’t read every week or anything, but I don’t think he had been raised reading the Gospels and one day I just asked him, I said, “What is your sense about what you are getting from the Gospels?” and he thought a moment, he is a very bright person, he is a brilliant person, well-connected at the highest levels of this government, and he just looked at me and said, “It’s all about believing isn’t it?” And he hasn’t gone to seminary or anything, he just sat down and read the Gospels and his conclusion was – it is all about believing.
Some years ago, five young missionaries were speared to death on the Curaray River down in Ecuador, 1956. They were in their 20s and early 30s, all married, some had kids. One of them was named Jim Elliott. Jim Elliott had been an All-Star wrestler at Wheaton College back in the early 1950s. NCAA small college wrestling record, never pinned in four years of wrestling, never lost a match. He studied Classical Greek, he stood in the cafeteria line and memorized Scripture, he got in trouble for playing like he was drunk and falling through the hedge in front of the Dean’s house. He was a Renaissance Man. So he had all these pieces, but he is the one who said, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot loose.” His wife, he had been martyred, she had married a seminary professor, he had died of cancer, she married again, and when I was college President, she came and spoke at the college one day and I asked her after the chapel service, she was in my office, I said, “Elizabeth, what’s the essence of life in Jesus?” And she just looked at me and said, “Trust. What else is there?” That’s it. Trust.
So they are going up to pray, which is the expression of trust, the expression of the kingdom. It says here they were going at 3:00 in the afternoon. The thing that fascinates me about that is they always had prayer at 3:00 in the afternoon. It was just routine. I would submit that most of our lives not only are routine but they have routine. Get up in the morning, shower, brush our teeth and do all this in a certain sequence, we eat this for breakfast or we don’t eat breakfast, we know our mother is watching, all that kind of stuff and we go off and we have these routines. It’s what the human animal, if you will, does. We get stability from rhythm. This was just an ordinary day, this wasn’t high-drama. This was just a regular old day. They are going up to pray at the temple. It wasn’t contrived, it wasn’t dramatic, it was just what they did. What I like about this is what appears to be a chance encounter is in fact divine appointment. In 66 years of living, I get to tell you that I have had lots and lots of “chance encounters” and I put that in quotes, that turned out to be divine appointments. Not because I said it but somebody else said it, or I was the receiving person from such an engagement. There is a man crippled from birth being carried to the temple gate called Beautiful. They brought him there every day. He had his routine and he had his friends. Their routine was they brought him to the gate Beautiful. It’s kind of an interesting juxtaposition. There was a man crippled from birth that is being brought to the ‘beautiful’ place, put there to beg. If you’ve ever been to certain kinds of countries, there are beggars by the thousands. They will chase you down the street, they will surround you, they will touch you, they will pull on your clothes, and here this setting was no doubt like that, lots of beggars, generally begging. And as they get close, he asks Peter and John for something, and Peter and John turn to him and gives him a directive, “Look at us, right here,” and it says the man fixed his attention on them, and then Peter says this wonderful thing: Silver (you can see the guys hand come up) and gold I don’t have, but what I do have, I give you. Principle of life, you all know it, you cannot give what you do not have. You can’t. You computer guys here, you guys who know how to boot it up and do the programs and do all that and fix it and turn it inside out and use the language, I can’t do any of that, I just want you to do it for me so it works, that’s all I care. You know that it is garbage in garbage out. If you put in bad stuff, you get bad stuff out, it’s the law of sowing and reaping. Peter and John articulate that on this day, and it is a template for life, you can’t give what you don’t have. So my question to you is – what do you have? What do you want to have going along the journey? I submit to you that if you hang out with people who are focused outside of themselves in the person of God and you have a routine together, that your interior life will build in such a way that when there comes a moment that you need to give something away, you’ve got something to give. That’s just how it is. And then it says: he took him by the right hand and he lifted him up and as he was lifting him, his ankles and legs got strength. Now he’s a guy who has never walked. Atrophied legs are stick legs. I don’t know whether his legs took on muscle, I don’t know. If he went from stick legs to thunder thighs all in a moment, I don’t know. But what fascinates me here is that God is doing a miracle but he lets us, in this case Peter and John, be a part. It says he took him by the hand. It’s like when Lazarus had died and Jesus got there late, according to Lazarus’s sisters, and He calls Lazarus out of the tomb and he is all covered with the grave clothes and He says: Unwrap him. Their part was to unwrap him, His part was to give him life. And here He lets us participate in this divine powerful thing. He could do it all by Himself. He could just go around zapping people but He lets us, not only lets us but He wants us to be part of the process. We have a piece, we may only be 1% and He is 99% but that 1% is huge in our lives because otherwise, we are zero, we are nothing. Just the fact that he touched them. If you’ve ever been in a culture where there are beggars, people really do walk on the other side of the street. I have a tendency to walk on the other side of the street. I’ve only had surgery a couple of times, but I love that part. I don’t like the surgery, but I love that part where the pre-op nurse comes in and she asks questions and while she asks questions, she is patting your shoulder, saying, “It’s going to be alright,” and I say, “You think?” There is something about the touch that is just raw power. Peter reaches out and takes him by the hand and stands him up and all of a sudden, he has never done this in his whole life, all of a sudden, he can walk. And it says that he starts walking and jumping and praising God. Well that’s going to draw a crowd. I know that the essence of this however, is this – what he says to him is in the Name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, in that authority, walk. Peter is not doing that, John is not doing that, even together they are not doing it, it is in the authority of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that he walks. You’ve heard me say this quote many times and since this is my last sermon here, at least until the next time, I’m going to say it again, I love the quote by Dorothy Sayers:
To do them justice, the people who crucified the Christ, did not do so because he was a bore, quite the opposite, quite the contrary, he was too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with the atmosphere of tedium. We have effectively pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified Him meek and mild and made Him a household pet for pale priests and pious old ladies.
First time I read that, I said, Man! I wish I had thought of that! But the fact is that when you turn Christ the Lion of Judah loose, or Christ the Tiger loose, and He is loose among you, by the way. Part of the reason I love being in this congregation is that He has not in fact had his claws pared or clipped but that He is alive and well among us. But it is in his name, his authority, that things work. It is not just a talisman that if I say Jesus, it works, but I’m here to tell you that there is power in the name of Jesus. I live in a town, you live in a town of words. There are millions of words, spoken here at the highest levels of land every week, millions. When you insert Jesus into the conversation, it changes the whole conversation. Now you can insert Christian in there and it will stop the conversation, trust me. It is true. There is a whale of a lot of difference, we talked about this when I talked about the Christian elephant some months back, but the fact is when you bring Jesus into the conversation, it is not a conversation stopper. Some years ago, Ruth and I were in Scotland checking out our roots and we found a guy named Charlie Blakely who was, Ruth’s a Blakely, and she always made me get on the phone because I’m the talker but she is pulling the strings, and we go over to this guys house and he offered us a big glass of single malt, something, when we first walked in and we declined, but he had several so he was getting kind of garrulous, let me use that, he was garrulous, and he was getting obnoxious and he had said that he was an English teacher and I was trying to get him to go a different direction. And at that time, our daughter Jenny, who used to be in this congregation, she lives out in California now, at that time Jenny was teaching English to medical students in Penom Penn, Cambodia, and so he said he was an English teacher, so I said Ahh, I’ll jump right in there and I said, “We have a daughter in Cambodia,” and I didn’t get a chance to say she teaches English, and he whirls on me and says, “Cambodia! Cambodia my word, what a conversation stopper! The next time I’m at the pub and I want to change the conversation, I’ll just say Cambodia!” Jesus is not a conversation stopper, He is a conversation starter. When you bring Him into the conversation, amazing things can happen. And I’m not saying you have to take a deep breath and say, “Jesus” in a low, slow voice. Just say Jesus like you say pizza and it’ll be ok. But there is this thing about his name. When you read Acts 9:15, the apostle Paul has been struck down on the road to Damascus, he is a killer, he is on his way to put people like you and me in prison or kill us, and God confronts him on the road, smacks him down. We say he fell off his horse but there is nothing in Scripture indicating he had a horse, but he went down. There is a man in Damascus by the name of Ananias, you can read this in Acts 9:15, and God comes to him and says, “I want you to go to Saul and I want you to tell him because he is my chosen instrument.” Listen to how it reads: Acts 9:15: The Lord says to Ananius, Go, this man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel. I will show him how much he must suffer for my name.” He is saying the name is where the power is. That’s where the authority is. There is power in the name of Jesus. I don’t know how that works. I don’t know how it works, but I do know that it does. The name focuses people, I’ll tell you that. It is Peter and John saying look right here, it’s not some amorphous thing, it is very specific. It is all about Jesus, naturally, fundamentally, permanently, eternally, not a cartoon of Him, not something we add to Him to dress Him up, it is about the person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth that changes people’s lives. It says that he went with them, walking and jumping and praising God. The result of an ordinary day, a “chance” encounter, focused attention, looking beyond ourselves, results in amazement and wonder, because when you walk with Jesus, He goes ahead. He leads. He knows the need. That’s just how it is. When He is the center, it orients people in a way that they would never otherwise be oriented. At noon today, I flew out of Logan Airport in Boston, spent overnight in Boston, and as the plane took off, I remembered something. In 1993 before we came here, I was Minister in Residence at Gordon-Conwell Seminary in Boston up north about 20 miles, built on the grounds of an old monastery. On top of the chapel they have a lighted cross, lighted from the inside, and one day just before I got there, the FAA at Boston Logan Airport Tower called Gordon-Conwell Seminary and said, “Did you know that the light in your cross was out?” And they said, “We didn’t know that.” They said, “Yes, we noticed that in the last couple of nights, what you don’t know is that when we have planes stacked up waiting to land, sometimes in bad weather, we send them out and have them circle out north of the city, and they use the lighted cross as their point of reference, and when they can’t see the cross, they are not sure where they are.”
On your journey, your ordinary, everyday journey, when you walk with Jesus, it may seem routine, but it never is. But when you have a routine that focuses beyond yourself in Him, anything can happen and everything can happen. There is an old gospel song that says if Jesus goes with me, I’ll go, anywhere. Well He does, you can count on it, you can act like it, you can be loving it.
So what’s your last message? I’ve given you mine, what’s yours? I would say your last message is the one you left with the person you encounter at the gate Beautiful just on your everyday journey. That’s the last one.
Since Mark is not here and I’m taller than Chris and I don’t know exactly when we’ll be back next time, I would like to take the opportunity to pray for you and just ask God’s blessing on you as a group and individually going forward. Would you bow your hearts with me?
Father, this is Dick. Thank You for all these years that You have led, even when I’ve wandered, You’ve come and found me in the silliest, saddest places and tagged me and said you’re it, and I believe You mean it, I know You do. I stand here tonight with these wonderful friends, most of them, if not all, younger than I. I pray your blessing, your anointing, your power, your peace, your courage, your presence in their lives. Help them to realize everyday that the good news is not something about You, but the good news is You. And when You are in each of our lives, everybody wins. I pray that as National Community Church, as a group of brothers and sisters, continues to grow, that your Spirit will always be real, that the cross will always be central, and that your resurrection life will always be felt. I pray Lord Jesus that any person that walks into this place or any theater location, they will instantly know that this is something different. For the one tonight who struggles, might be in anguish or feel disconnected, I pray that You will wrap your arms around him or her and hold them with a grip like all eternity. That as they walk from this place, they will know that Jesus Christ is in fact Lord and that it is in his name that we have any meaning or authority at all. So here we go Lord, adventuring one more time. We give You honor and praise for this moment, in Jesus Name we pray, Amen.
Ministry Transcription
Margaret Salyers
606-706-5006
margaretsalyers@gmail.com
