The Rev. Neale L. Miller

Sermon for February 5, 2006

Texts: Deuteronomy10:12-22/2 Corinthians 2:14-3:3

Title: “The Love Letter”

              I’m not a serious betting man, but if I were going to place a wager on today’s big game I wouldn’t have to go with the Pittsburg Steelers.  I have my opinion; however, it is not what you might call an “informed opinion.”  “Informed opinions” are founded on a lot more than a guess, a wish, or intuition.  The statement that the Saints will not will a Super Bowl until they have a new owner is what I would call an informed opinion.  The key word, of course, is “informed.”  And how do we know when that designation fits?  We know it fits when the person offering such an opinion has regularly proven to be correct on prior occasions where his opinion has been sought.  If and when that person has won our trust as someone who really knows what he is talking about we call him an authority.

              There are certainly a fair number of people who have earned the title of “informed” insofar as football is concerned; I’m not one of them.  Though I enjoy the game, it would take an informed fan about two minutes to establish the limits of my football knowledge.  I have opinions about football.  I have an opinion about who will win today’s game.  It’s just that my opinions are not well informed. I am not close to being a football authority.

              For approaching two thousand years the church has turned to the Apostle Paul as a man of authority, an informed voice, on matters relating to Jesus, God, the faith.  His letters are among the most influential Christian documents ever composed, the life he led the very model of Christian discipleship.  Paul was a godly man.  Yet the respect and esteem we accord him today masks another reality with which Paul had to contend.  You see, in his own day Paul’s credentials did not appear nearly as impressive as history has proven them to be.  The recognition that Paul was a reliable spokesman on matters relating to God and his Son, Jesus, was slow to form among a very important segment of the society in which he lived and preached.  In fact, there were people with whom Paul associated who thought his credentials were at best second rate.  Let me explain.

              At about the midpoint of the first century (51-52AD) Paul wrote a letter to the Corinthian Church, probably not First Corinthians, but some other letter. That letter caused a stir in Corinth.  Based on the contents of that letter, some members of the Corinthian community, persons who deemed themselves to be apostles, began to put out the word that Paul lacked the credentials to be a church leader.  After all, had anyone examined his letters of recommendations?  Did such letters exist at all?

              It was one thing for Paul to say that he was an apostle, but to his detractors Paul’s words barely registered on the credibility scale.  It is one thing for me to say that I am called by God to apostleship, quite another to expect other persons to validate that call.  This raises a very practical issue in the Presbyterian Church for we understand a call to ministry, whether that ministry is undertaken as pastor, elder, or deacon, to be something that the individual congregation and presbytery must validate.  The candidate in preparation for ordained ministry may fulfill all the course requirements the seminary sets for ordination, but ultimately the community the candidate hopes to serve must agree that he or she possesses the necessary qualifications to serve in church leadership.  In the view of a vocal group within the Corinthian church Paul lacked qualifications.

              Paul was pressed to validate his call for his detractors.  In the lesson I read earlier Paul sets about doing just that.  Imagine yourself in Paul’s shoes.  Consider the available options you might have in proving your credentials.  What words might you use in defending your status? 

              I have heard persons describe their call to ministry in many ways. Some want to relate the details of a sudden conversion experience, their call coming in the form of a life-changing encounter with God.  Identified within the faith autobiography that led others to ministry is a persons, or persons, they met along the way whose words or example permanently changed the course of their lives.  Still others talk about their call to ministry as being slow to evolve over time, no one single factor looming above the others.

              As you know, Paul’s call to ministry came by way of a radical conversion experience on the Damascus Road, but it wasn’t to that experience that Paul pointed in his letter to the Corinthians.  How, then, DID he defend his call?  It wasn’t through a packet of letters of recommendation solicited from people in high places.  Instead, he writes to the Corinthians, “You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts.”

              What was it that validated the Apostle Paul’s ministry?  “You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us.”  So confident was Paul of his apostleship that he felt under no compulsion at all to compile an impressive resume to demonstrate that he was a worthy candidate to wear the mantle of leadership.  No, his credentials were not paper.  His credentials were living flesh.

              Authority is as authority does, and Paul carried himself as an authority.  Distinguishing himself from those who peddled God’s word as if it were some sort of commodity, Paul was bold to declare that he was a person “sent from God and standing in his presence.”  Audacious, of course, but the man could back it up.

              The church gained a foothold and grew in what must be regarded as a very hostile environment, but not because its message was self-evident or convincingly elaborated in the writings of Paul and others.  The whole ideal that the teacher, Jesus, tried and crucified by the Romans for sedition, had risen from the grave and was alive, was challenging, radical stuff.  But there was more.  People like Paul were claiming that this Jesus was God’s own son, the Christ, the “anointed one” come to save the world from their sins.  Not only that, Paul and the other apostles, claimed to be speaking on Jesus’ authority as if Jesus was himself was God.

              The message Paul proclaimed was radical stuff, earning Paul and others in the early Christian movement, jail time, beatings, and worse.  Yet Paul retained confidence that the message he was given to delivering could not be suppressed.  There were those, of course, who said the man was deluded, that his message had not carry power.  How did he defend himself?  He could point to letters, written not with ink, but letters written on the human heart by the Spirit of the living God.  Love letters.

              Did you eve write a love letter?  Sure, you have.  It is at one in the same time the easiest and the most difficult correspondence people like us ever compose.  It is the easiest correspondence because our love for the person to whom we are writing gives us many, many emotions to tap.  Yet a love letter is difficult because we hold ourselves accountable to the highest standards in that composition.  A love letter is not something you sit down and dash off in five minutes on the back of an envelope.  You compose it word by word, line by line, carefully editing each and every phrase so that each word is as perfect as you can make it.

              The Apostle Paul was meticulous in crafting his love letters, meticulous in teaching and equipping people to carry Christ’s message of salvation to the world.  Though those Corinthians were by no means the brightest lights in God’s heavens---they could be a cantankerous and disagreeable lot---Paul could yet say to them, “you are a letter of Christ prepared by us.”  No, not just any letter, mind you, a love letter [a love letter] meticulously prepared to be a very special gift to the recipient.

              Paul has given the church a special way to think about its ministry.  So what is that special calling?  The church’s special calling is to equip the people with whom we connect to so appropriate the message of Jesus that each of them becomes, in effect, a love letter from Christ addressed to the world.

              We may not always show up as well as we might, that is for certain.  The church today is every bit as cantankerous and disagreeable as the churches Paul founded.  Yet the church for all of its faults and failings is the vessel through which God’s Spirit acts.  Our actions may occasionally deflect attention away from the mission Christ has given us, we might become preoccupied with agendas that carry us far afield of where Jesus would have us be, but through the good times and bad our mission remains the same.  We exist as a church with the other churches in the kingdom to prepare love letters to the world, deliverable in the name of Jesus Christ.

              We prepare letters but we also receive them.  Today we are in receipt of a special letter, its origin the Venice Presbyterian Church in Venice, Florida. The letter in this case is of the flesh and blood variety.  We welcome Burke and Eleanor Johnson into our midst.  Burke, a retired Mennonite pastor, Burke is parish associate at the Venice church.  Burke and Eleanor are here to express their church’s solidarity with our church, to give visible expression to the tie that binds us with them as brothers and sisters in the body of Christ.

              Venice was one of the first, if not the first, congregation to offer us assistance after the storm.  Extremely generous financially, the church has remained in regular communication with us, assuring us of their continuing support. Even as Paul nurtured the Corinthians to be a love letter of Christ to the world, so the Venice church has embraced that mission in its beautifully composed letter to Lakeview Presbyterian Church, a letter to which new lines are being added each day as our unity strengthens.  

              As a Christian congregation we are privileged to send and receive love letters.  That is what we do, for that is what this whole enterprise of the Christian faith is all about.  That is what we are all about.

              Asked to defend the claims he was making that we was an apostle of the Lord, the Apostle Paul did not present letters of recommendation, a license, or a seminary diploma, or anything else to certify his apostleship.  Instead he wrote to the Corinthians, “You are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tables of the human heart.”

              There are strategies aplenty for doing ministry in the world, and owing to the challenges we currently face in New Orleans we may exhaust every available strategy in the book, and then some, as we attempt to minister in a wholly new context.  But in the end, if we are to be the presence in this community we are called to be, it will be because we have gone about the task the old fashioned way. Yes, love letters.

                True change comes as hearts are changed.  The human heart aflame with the Spirit of Jesus Christ is the most powerful agent for good the world has ever known.  And, friends, we are gathered at the very source of that power, the church of Jesus Christ. Day by day, month by month, year in and year out, we gather to learn and grow in faith, our ministry validated through letters, love letters, “prepared by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of the human heart.” Amen 

PRAYER

              O God, whose open arms enfold us, whose compassionate spirit ever attends us, you call us to represent you to the world with open arms.  You call us to embrace the forlorn, calm the anxious, and strive with the oppressed to end injustice.  You have formed us as your own, O holy one, your son, Jesus Christ, the world’s greatest gift, for in him your hopes for the world are realized.  Called to labor in your vineyard, may we do so with the ardor and commitment the task requires.

              As we approach each new day, O Lord, prepare us to claim from the experience of living all that you have placed there for us to enjoy.  And when we become jaded or cynical, or are bogged down under the burdens of life, lead us once again to the restorative streams of living water.  When doubts or frustration assail us, embolden us to confront them, and through your grace, defeat them.

              Lord, our Lord, we thank you for the Apostle Paul and the great contributions he made to the up building of the church.  We thank you for all the sacrifices he made that the congregations he founded might grow and flourish. His letters to the churches reveal a faith that was vital and compelling.  They portray a man whose love for you was boundless, a man who would go anywhere and do anything that your name might be honored.  O God, as you claimed Paul, so claim us.  With the gifts you have given comes the expectation that we will faithfully use them. May Paul’s example of servanthood be a goal to which this ministry aspires in all that we do. 

              As a congregation deprived of its place of worship, we give thanks once again for our Carrollton brothers and sisters who have so generously welcomed us into their midst.  We are grateful for acquaintances that Sunday by Sunday are becoming friends, and other acquaintances that have traveled great distances to express their support and solidarity. We thank you, O God for Burke and Eleanor and the congregation they represent, grateful for the time we are privileged to share together, grateful for the common faith to which we and they subscribe, a living that nurtures and supports us.

              Grant strength to your church and its witness, that no division over dogma or doctrine may fracture our unity. Be with those at work to forge ecumenical understanding today, those whose vision for the church is global.

              Living God, whose mercies never end, may your presence be experienced wherever women and men are exposed to danger or live deprived of hope.  We pray for those in our world who live under the burden of warfare and neglect, who scrape by not knowing the source of their next meal.  We pray for prisoners of conscience who have been deprived of human rights, and petition you, O God, on their behalf that their ordeals may soon end.  We pray for relatives and friends of those lost in a ferry tragedy. We pray for news correspondent Jill Carol that she may be delivered safely from the hands of her captors.  We pray for TJ Peirce and his family as they continue to mourn their loss.

              Lord Jesus, reigning head of the church, hear these our spoken prayers and those prayers we pray in silence, for we pray in the strong confidence that you hear our prayers and act.