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“Prayer and Potatoes”
This may come as a surprise to you, but the only magazine to which I have subscribed on a continuous basis for the last forty years is the Readers’ Digest. When I am between books, when I have a doctor’s appointment and need some light reading, or when I am floating in our pool and don’t want to get the book I am reading wet, it is to the Readers’ Digest that I turn. Several years ago, there was an article in the Readers’ Digest called “Mama Hale and Her Little Angels.” The article told about a woman named Clara Hale who at the time was 79 years old. She was a tiny, birdlike woman with nut-brown skin and a curling halo of white hair. The article was introduced with the following words: “The baby will not stop screaming. On the fifth floor of a brownstone in New York City’s Harlem, a woman holds the two-week-old infant in her arms. The little body trembles and twitches with pain, but Clara Hale has no medicine to offer against that agony, unless you count love. In an old bentwood rocker, she soothes the hurting child. “I love you and God loves you,” she promises. “Your mother loves you too, but she’s sick right now, like you are.” She coaxes the baby to nurse at a bottle. She bathes the child, croons softly, tries a little patty-cake game. “After a while, maybe you get a smile,” she tells a visitor. “So you know the baby’s trying too, you keep loving it…and you wait.” It was a moving story which told about Clara Hale spending a lifetime caring for other women’s children. In a fifth-floor walkup, she raised 40 foster children as well as three of her own. Most of those foster children were babies who became addicted to heroin while still in their mothers, wombs. As she explained to one of her visitors, “The baby craves something he doesn’t understand and it may take a month before he is cleansed of the addiction.” Mama Hale would understand our scripture lesson from James today. She put it into practice. I don’t know if you are aware of it or not, but we preacher types walk a pretty thin line between two statements from the Gospel. Should we preach only about “salvation by grace through faith”, or should we sometimes remind our church family it is important that we not only profess our faith with our mouths. It is just as important that we profess our faith with our lives. It is not always a comfortable place for us to be. We Presbyterians – although we give much credit and credence to the words and wisdom of John Calvin – actually began our journey through the life of Martin Luther. Do you remember him? He is the one who spoke out against the Roman Catholic Church with his 95 Theses. It was in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome that Luther, the good but exasperated monk, found his home. The home he found was in grace. He had formerly believed that he could only be accepted by God if he did everything right: if he kept his vows as a priest; that he was the right kind of pastor; that he was holy in every way. The trouble was that he could not do all those things, at least not perfectly or as well as he thought he should. The confessions he made didn’t seem to him to be enough to cover up all the mistakes. Then Luther discovered Paul’s letter to the Romans, and the concept of grace, saved by grace alone. All his striving, all his working, all his trying to please God, his superiors, his conscience – none of it was the important thing; grace was the card which trumped it all. Luther was a scholar, and he knew this letter of James. The only problem was that when he read it through the lense of grace, he saw it as a dangerous letter. He was afraid that people would see faith as something which could only be made good by working hard and trying to be perfect. It was a futile faith, in his mind. People would never measure up. As I put Paul’s letters and James’ letter side by side, I wonder if it really has to be an either/or choice. Can’t it, instead, be a both/and situation. I mean, certainly the writer of James had a slightly different angle from which he came at faith, but aren’t different angles good? James writes from the Wisdom tradition in which a righteous person is one who does righteous things. In that tradition, faith is visible. But that isn’t all. There is something else. Listen to what the writer of James does not say. He doesn’t say that you must work to have faith. What he says is that “faith without works is dead”. I really don’t know how we can disagree with that. If we come to church every week – if we pray at every whipstitch – if we proclaim our belief in Jesus with our mouths – it doesn’t seem to mean much to us or anyone else unless we do something with it. As I was thinking about what I might share with you today, I kept remembering a poem I heard in one of my college courses. Now as many of you know I went to college in my late thirties, and the school I attended was a Christian Liberal Arts College. So I guess it isn’t surprising that many of my classes included a lot of Christian literature. The poem which kept coming into my conscience was one I read for a social work class. It is called “Prayer and Potatoes” and it is from that poem that the title of my sermon today was derived. The poem written by John Tyler Pettee goes like this: “An old lady sat in her old arm-chair, Your faith is alive when you sit by the bedside of a sick or dying loved one. Your faith is alive when you send a group off on a mission trip to create a play ground for children in Belize. Your faith is alive when you listen to someone whose heart is broken. Your faith is alive when you do things that you faith leads you to do. If you never do anything with your belief, than your faith dies. A living faith is one which looks to the neighbor and is shared in concrete ways with energy, intelligence, imagination, and love. May it be so for you and for me. Amen.
“Prayer and Potatoes” |
