6/15/25 Sermon

Here’s one way to start a Father’s Day sermon that’ll get your attention: My dad is the worst.”

Okay—maybe not the worst. But he has a real gift for giving the kind of advice that sounds more like a riddle than an answer.  That’s the problem with people who studied philosophy in college.  They’re horrible advice givers.  You ask my dad a question and you want some straight forward answer and you get the most surprisingly vague and cryptic answer you could possibly imagine.

I’ll give you an example.  My freshman year of college didn’t go so well.  And by not going so well, I mean that I’m pretty sure I set some academic records my first semester.  I even failed Argentine Tango.  How do you fail that?  I’d tell you but I never went to class.  So, I’m pretty sure that’s how you fail it.  I mean, I failed everything but my music class.  So, the college suggested I might want to take some time off and reconsider the whole thing.  I asked them what would happen if I didn’t take the time off and they said they wouldn’t allow me back. So, I decided to take some time off.

It really was the best thing for me. During that time off I really did some soul searching.  I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from them.  And about midway through the summer, decision time came up for whether or not I wanted to request to go back to school in the fall.   Now, I had to write to the school and basically re-apply and explain why I now thought I would be ready.  Understandable, but it was a tedious process.

So, I was living in Chautauqua and I drove home to my parents’ house and told my dad I wanted to talk to him.  I needed his advice.  Because I didn’t know if I could actually handle going back to college. I mean I thought I could, but I didn’t KNOW if I was up to the challenge.  If I could actually hack it.  So here I am walking around the back yard of my parents’ house with my dad.  My DAD.  The guy who has all the answers.  The guy who has everything together.  And we get to the lilac bushes on the side yard.  And I finally get up enough courage. And I stop and look him dead in the eyes and say, “Dad, I think I want to go back to college.  I want to go back but I’m scared I’ll fail again and I don’t know what to do. What should I do, Dad?”

I mean I poured my heart out and put it all on the line right there.  And the man just stood there for what felt like a  few good minutes and starts walking again.  And so I asked him if he heard anything I’d just said to him over the last few minutes.  And he turns to me.  And all I wanted was a simple “Yes.  You can do it!” or an “I don’t know about this one Son.”  Just some simple direction.  And the man looks at me and says this:  “A journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.” I felt like Batman trying to decipher the Riddler.  What does that even mean?

Dad’s riddles didn’t stop there. He’d say things like “Don’t worry about doing the next right thing.  Just do the next thing right.”  or “It’ll build character.” I’m not sure that last one actually means anything. I tell my kids It’ll build character just to get them to do things they don’t want to do. So, I shouldn’t have been surprised when my dad and I were sitting on my porch the night before I was marrying Beverly and in one of those quiet moments, he leaned over to me and gave me one of his most famous pieces of advice: He said to me, “What’s going to be the most important question you can ever ask yourself from this moment on is this:  Do you want to be happy or do you want to be right?”. Another line I had no idea what to do with. Years of marriage have clarified its meaning.

Slowly I realized his proverbs shared a beat, a deeper refrain: Who are you becoming? Every choice chisels character. Circumstances roar and swirl, but you decide—again and again—how you’ll walk through them.

Paul’s after the same question in the fifth chapter of Romans. He writes to a collection of believers in the empire’s capital, people as beaten and bewildered as any of us: and he writes “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in hope of sharing the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”

Karl Barth — the pipe smoking Swiss theologian who loved his coffee black and his sentences long — reads those opening words and hears a trumpet blast: “We have peace with God.” Full stop. The treaty is signed, the rebellion over, not because we surrendered correctly but because Christ, the true Son, laid down on our behalf. Peace isn’t a mood we cultivate; it’s an accomplished fact we step into.

Across the Rhine, Rudolf Bultmann — the master of Greek verbs and existential sighs — salutes the same line but insists that it has to travel the last eighteen inches from brain to heart. A treaty still means nothing until a frightened soul believes it. Peace becomes real the moment an anxious person dares to trust the word forgiven. Objective gift, personal awakening: two sides of one bright coin. Grace is the ground beneath our feet; faith is putting our weight down on that ground.

Then Paul turns uncomfortably practical: “We boast in our sufferings.” That’s not exactly a verse you embroider on a baby blanket. Barth calls this “the Yes hidden in the No.” Because Christ absorbed sin’s worst blow, every wound we endure is already cradled inside resurrection light, even if we can’t see a glimmer of it yet. Bultmann pushes the same truth into the inner life: when everything collapses and you still cling to God, you discover a self no longer shackled by fear. Suffering, endured in faith, forges a self sturdy enough for hope. Paul draws the chain like a blacksmith: suffering leads to endurance, endurance to character, character to hope. Hope is not helium optimism floating above pain; it is steel braided through pain, tempered in the furnace.

Many years later in 1948 in Burgundy, France, another voice joined the conversation, this time an atheist. The novelist Albert Camus spoke to a group of Trappist monks still haunted by Auschwitz. “Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a place where children are tortured,” Camus pleaded, “but we can reduce the number of tortured children. And if you do not help us, who will?” An unbeliever, begging believers to live their creed, shamed the church into remembering its own script. His challenge exposes why Paul’s chain matters. The gap between pew and pavement is fear — fear we’ll lose comfort, fear we’ll say the wrong thing, fear we’ll fail and be called hypocrites. Yet Paul insists fear is precisely the furnace in which hope is forged. Hope that doesn’t disappoint can afford the risk of love, because even failure cannot bankrupt it.

Presbyterians love big words like polysyllables, so let me introduce two worth keeping: Justification and Sanctification. Justification is God’s one-time verdict: You are forgiven, you belong—not because you earned it, but because Christ claimed you. It is a declaration of your standing, not a description of your behavior. You don't work your way into God's grace; grace meets you first, and calls you beloved.

Sanctification is what happens next. It’s the lifelong project of letting that verdict seep into every corner of your life. It’s the Spirit reshaping your desires, your habits, your instincts. It’s the process of becoming who you already are in Christ. Some days it’s bold transformation. Other days, it’s choosing patience when you’d rather snap. And sometimes, it’s being awakened to pain that isn’t yours — but still matters. Grace is free but it’s never cheap. The Spirit who whispers “You are loved” also nudges “Then go love others - even those you don’t like or agree with”—again, and again, and again.

Sanctification turns us outward. It opens our eyes to injustice, to suffering, to need — not as abstractions, but as sacred encounters. It teaches us that faith doesn’t live only in our hearts or our heads but in our hands and feet. We begin to see our neighbors not as burdens but as fellow bearers of God’s image. And slowly, we understand that love isn’t a feeling we cultivate but a movement we join—a movement that leans toward the vulnerable, the excluded, the poor. That’s where sanctification takes us.

That Spirit-led transformation doesn’t stay abstract — it takes shape in the real, raw world we live in. That nudge brings us to poverty—economic and spiritual. Scripture references care for the poor more than two thousand times — more than prayer, more than heaven. Hunger lines snake through Lake County; eviction notices flutter even in postcard neighborhoods. That’s economic poverty. Equally lethal is spiritual poverty: measuring worth by bank accounts instead of compassion, scrolling celebrity drama while ignoring children in cages, accepting racism or gun violence as “just how things are.” When Christians shrug, Camus’s prophecy moves closer: Christians may live, but Christianity will die.

Which returns us to my dad’s maddening proverb: one step. Take one. Write Congress about child hunger. Volunteer at the pantry on Central Avenue. Visit the neighbor whose grief makes you squirm. Speak up — kindly but firmly — when a racist joke breezes through the room. No single act will fix the planet, but hope’s arithmetic multiplies loaves and fishes. One voice joins another and then another.. and then another until its the millions Camus imagined—and the earth tilts.

And maybe that’s the wisdom my dad was trying to pass along, cloaked in riddles and old sayings. Maybe the journey of a thousand miles isn’t just about perseverance — it’s about trust. Trust that the next step matters. Trust that grace goes with us. Trust that even when the world is hard and the answers are unclear, we are not walking alone.

Paul reminds us that hope isn’t a wish or a dream. It’s what happens when grace roots itself so deeply in us that it reshapes how we live — how we endure, how we care, how we hope. And hope does not disappoint. Because the love of God has been poured into our hearts, and it spills out — not just in what we believe, but in how we live.

So take the step. Then one more. And then another. And trust that the Spirit who started this journey in you will be faithful to see it through.