Remembering Tony's 'Going Home'

(The following words concluded my sermon in memory of my friend and brother in Christ, Tony Scherg, who died in August 2018, following a very courageous medical battle. We remember, Tony.)

Tony wanted so desperately to go home.  He knew that he would pass from the home where he would be surrounded by the loves of his life to the home where he would receive the victor’s crown: the ultimate reward for those who keep the faith through suffering.

Jesus promised Tony, “To him who overcomes, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne.” (Rev. 3:21) The promise that became reality for Tony on Sunday morning is not just for him. It is ‘for all who long for the Lord’s appearing.’  It’s what you hope for that defines your death and your life.

Life is not defined by sickness, by cancer, the limits of medical science. Life is defined by the fact that the people who long to see Jesus face to face are promised that their pilgrim journey will finally bring them home.  In Anne Lamott’s book, Traveling Mercies, she writes about a story her minister told.  When she was about seven, her best friend got lost one day. “The little girl ran up and down the streets of the big town where they lived, but she couldn’t find a single landmark. She was very frightened. Finally, a policeman stopped to help her. He put her in the passenger seat of his car and they drove around until she finally saw her church. She pointed it out to the policeman, and then she told him firmly, ‘You can let me out now. This is my church, and I can always find my way home from here.’”

          

Corry, you brought Tony to this church. Through the three baptisms he witnessed, through the life he witnessed in you, this church became his home.  Mitch and the Praise Team brought him under their wing as he learned to praise God with his bass. And, in time, this church became his home.  And so it is proper that we bring Tony back here, to his church. Because Tony wanted to go home. And he knew he could find his way home from here.

You can too.  If you want to find your way home.

Baseball, Mud and Saving Lives

Ray Chapman died in 1920, hit in the head by the pitch of a slick baseball. That was enough to get the powers that run America’s Pastime to take action.  A baseball should not be a weapon that kills people. ‘Let’s find a solution’, everyone who mattered agreed.

No Major League Baseball player had ever died from getting hit by a baseball before. No one has since either.  When baseballs are manufactured they look nice and clean, but they are very slick. Pitchers can easily lose their grip, and that is what can turn a baseball into a weapon. The baseball authorities knew they could do better. They knew that they must find a solution.

They tried rubbing the new slick baseballs with all kinds of materials. Nothing worked the way they wanted it to until they discovered ‘miracle mud’ in the 1930’s. “Miracle mud’ comes from a one mile stretch of one river in the United States, a secret location, so secret that not even baseball’s owners know it.  But, since the 1950’s, it’s been the rule that this mud must be rubbed on every baseball for every MLB game, some 240,000 baseballs a season.

Pretty amazing, don’t you think. Someone dies.  The governing authorities decide they need to do something about it.  Not just lament Ray Chapman’s death; find a way to prevent the next one. Then, with the will to change in place,  the genius of the American mind works, experiments, until a solution is found. Then, that solution is written into the baseball rules. Everyone must follow the rules, because mud on baseballs saves lives.

The American mind, the American spirit. Creatively making life safer.

When there is a will, we find a way.

Hmmm.

(Source and credit: Sports Illustrated, July 29-Aug. 5, Stuck in the Mud, by Emma Baccelieri)

Community Picture

We came for the music. We stayed for the community.

The western sun brilliant in the cloudless sky. Thursday’s twilight approaching.  A sample of a local brew safely perched in the cup-holder in my blue fabric sling chair.  Some Gouda and Wheat Thins for in between sips.  Live jazz like you hear in the big city, right here in downtown small city.  The crowd was an eclectic mix of boomers and millennials, of X-ers and Z-ers, and whatever today’s toddler generation will be named.  No one asked who anyone loved, married, or didn’t. I couldn’t tell the citizens from the guests as a thousand folks mixed and mingled, danced and laughed.

I didn’t love the music. I did love the food. A buffet of food trucks to feed every appetite: Asian, Mexican, Greek, American.  We found old friends and we sat together, laughing about getting old, admiring how diverse our city had become. Where did all of these people come from, we wondered? These were the people our growing economy is bringing to town, giving them gatherings to entice and retain, we surmised. The future and the past all together, sitting in random rows, as dogs and babies entertained.  An unintentional intentional community had formed right around us.

A community drawn by the light; by the bread; by the wine; by the friends of many languages and nations. And by the music.

I asked my wife, only half in jest, ‘I wonder where all of these people go to church?’ The answer is that some 60% of them don’t attend.  And for the other 40%, they divide into churches of many tribes with many rules and admission tests, lest ‘impurity’ stain each other’s tribe.

I can only begin to imagine the joy on Jesus’ face as the community gathers on Thursday nights in the public square…all God’s children.  I can only imagine the quizzical frown on Jesus’ face as the Sunday community continues two centuries of failure to replicate that picture of Thursday’s community.

When did we decide that the people we party with on Thursday could not worship with us on Sunday? Talk about fields ripe for harvest.