I want to begin my sermon today by saying that it has been wonderful for us, as a staff, and I hope for many of you as a congregation, to have the gift of Sara among us. It’s kind of interesting that she got to read scripture about Sarah dying at 127.  Maybe our Sara will get to 127.  We will see, won’t we?  I had heard a lot about her before she got here and all of it was wonderful, but her level of maturity is far beyond what 26 years might say. She has the ability to kind of size up situations and think on her feet. By the way, that is the one thing that will help you survive ministry, although I don’t mean to imply that it can be a difficult job or anything. Her sense of passion for the calling that she has is so evident.   As a middle age pastor of 21 years, one of the wonderful things about having someone fresh out of seminary, is that when you’re a young adult life hasn’t surprised you with as many bumps and your optimism, and your sense of life is so much more crystal clear. Sara has given Carol and I, as long term pastors, a gift of retaining that sense of optimism and hope in what we do. Actually Sara is going to make me a better pastor and you all should be happy about that. It has set me to musing some in the last month or so about what it was that I learned in some of my earliest experiences as a pastor. And to be quite honest, some humbling things that happened to me were some of the best lessons that I’ve had. I don’t know if other professions are like the ministry. I suspect they are. You go off to school and they teach you the perfect way to do everything.  By the way, seminary professors live in castles.  By that I mean seminaries are walled off.  So they are not so much in the real world.  Sometimes that perfect world of theirs only really exists in their offices and much less the classroom.

By the way, I was taught by great minds how to do the perfect wedding and the perfect funeral.  There was no other Christian way to do it except the way they taught me. They were wrong about that.  I remember my very first wedding after Id been taught the perfect way to do weddings; the proper way to put people through proper counseling so that their hearts were right at the perfect proper place when they made those commitments. I had just gotten out of seminary.  There was a couple who lived across the street. All I knew of them was that I would watch her as she swept her porch every day. They had some children.  Because this was West Virginia there was a steep hill close by. There was another couple up on the hill that had quite a few children. One day the wife from across the street came to me with the husband from up on the hill and asked me to do their wedding. They told me no other pastor in town would do it because they didn’t think what they were doing was right. I struggled over what was right or wrong about that.  I want to tell you the lesson that I learned from that was that we will go into our lives not knowing if we are doing the right thing. We  try to discern what is right; what God has called us to, but we’ve got to listen and discern the best we can and know that we live in God’s grace and not our own perfection. After some thought and prayer I thought ‘well the mess is already there. At least maybe it will give some stability to the kids.  I will go on and do it.’ Well, about two months after the wedding I was on my way to Kiwanis.  I was walking down the alley and came to Charlie Blankenship’s house. What I need to tell you about Charlie is that he was a multi-millionaire in this little town in West Virginia.  He had made a lot of money by working hard and being a very good businessman. For example, one day a storm hit and electricity went out all over town. He had stored up all these kerosene refills, and went door to door selling them to people who suddenly needed them. How he figured out he would be needing this kerosene, I don’t know. He was also the volunteer fire chief. When my chimney flew caught on fire, I went to get him. I expected him to save my house.  He said to me ‘You know Tim, it will either burn out or your house will burn down’. That was his answer to my problem. He was a great guy and he had a lot of integrity. So on to my story about going down the alley to Kiwanis. When I got to Charlie’s house the children from both of these families were sitting on the opposite sides on the fences. This is West Virginia, by the way, and there is a different way of handling conflict. Husband #1 and Husband #2 were in a fistfight. And their children were on opposite sides were cheering their fathers on to win that fight. And I’m thinking literally “Oh my God, what do I do! I’m the pastor. Should I fix this!”  It didn’t take long for the 6’2” inch Charlie to come out, grab both fathers by their necks and say some words to them that I won’t say to you in church; something about kicking something or other.  I don’t remember just what.  He told them that they needed to get their lives together. And he didn’t want to see any more of this nonsense.  And they immediately obeyed him. Only a month later, Husband #1 and his first wife were back together.  The man from the other family went back to his wife and family and I learned a lesson about the perfect wedding. Things I never was taught in seminary.  I don’t know how I would have ever learned that in seminary.

I remember another story.  This happened to me for the first time and has happened many times since. I was called at 2:00 in the morning to visit a 72 year old extremely abusive alcoholic man.  This man had been terrible to his family and terrible to his neighbors. There was not one thing that I knew about this man that said there was any value in his life at all. But he was dying. His family wanted to have some assurance that when he died things would be right between him and God. I went to the house and I prayed with him that night and I never doubted, because that’s how strong I believe in God’s grace.  I never doubted that after he prayed that prayer that what ever happened to him in the next life that he was going to be OK. But I want to tell you it set me to pondering things. It was a very sad moment for me. To look at a life 72 years long and to think what was the value of that life? What had driven this man to live his life on such a long track? What illusion had he lived in that kept him from understanding that we get a chance at this life once, and if we don’t live it as faithfully as God calls us to live it, that not only are we impacted but others are as well. His eternal destination wasn’t the question in my mind. The true question in my mind was what was the value of his life?

Now I’ve been preaching about Abraham and Sarah for the last few weeks and we’ve come now to the end of their lives in the story. Genesis tells us that Sarah lived 127 years. Bible scholars will struggle over whether that is a figurative term or a literal term. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. What matters is that Genesis makes clear to us that Abraham and Sarah did something that showed they received God’s favor in Hebrew text and that they lived a long life. And one of my favorite phrases in the Old Testament is the phrase that Sara read to you; that Abraham lived to a good old age. Abraham and Sarah had lived a good life.  What is evident of that good life is 3500 years later we are still talking about them. Now I didn’t say that they lived a perfect life. The thing I love about the story of Abraham and Sarah is that we see them being very human.  They made mistakes, maybe like one I made about a wedding, but the point I want to make to you is that God remained faithful to them throughout their lives. And they had the good sense that when they messed up to say they had.  They took responsibility for it and moved on. That is something we have a tough time with in the culture we live in. I know that because we have too many lawyers. Somebody else is always at fault when we mess up. It’s a spiritual issue, because until we can take account for who we are and what we do right and what we do wrong, we can’t really go to the place in our spiritual development that Wesley called sanctification. But I will just call it living the life that God has called us to live. That is another story somewhere.

What we see of Sarah and Abraham are lives touched by God. That’s partly because of God’s grace but partly for people’s willingness to open themselves up to that grace. My son and I just spent eight days back in West Virginia.  You should be happy about that because I had a wonderful time. I came back with a much better attitude than when I left and I might actually work better for you, so that is a good thing. But one of the wonderful things about being home, which is true for many of you too, when you go back to family you are nurtured and loved and sustained by that love. A part of my experience was to be reminded of how that love extends beyond just the people that are living in my life now.  I had a full blooded Cherokee great grandmother whose name was Bessie May Mitchum. She use to baby sit my sister and I when we were kids and we would rather have her baby sit than go into the big town seventeen miles away to go shopping. She loved me dearly and she had a wicked sense of humor. I realize now as an adult that she was going through a series of strokes and her mouth was pulled to one side.  But as a kid when I asked her what was wrong she told me that she bit a Willie worm when she was a kid. There was a glimmer in her eye but you see even in tragedy she saw humor and she loved me enough to salve the fear that I might have. She died when I was seven years old, and was the first person I loved deeply and had lost. I remember going up to the Mitchum family cemetery and watching her body go into the ground and understanding, at least in this life, that my grandma was gone. The last day I was back there my dad, my brother and I went up Algoma Holler, and went to the Mitchum family cemetery and cleaned off our family’s part of the cemetery, and I got poison ivy just to prove I’ve been there. And I planted two-day lilies by my great grandmother’s head stone. And the wonderful thing about doing that is that here I sat, thirty some odd years after her death, and understood how much she still impacts my life to this day. Bessie May had a good life like Sarah and Abraham and the way that I know that is that when she left this life she left a positive mark on other peoples lives. As we look at Greek tragedies they are the hallmark of that early period of civilization. The fact that we are still so intrigued by Greek tragedies only shows that they touch on something about our human existence that attracts us. Always in Greek tragedies there is a crisis, always a precipice. If you move one way or you move the other, there could be fatal consequences. By the way, I do also believe that’s why people like soap operas. Soap operas constantly create crises. Pretty silly crises but that’s why people are attracted to them. We all, everyone of us sitting here, know that whatever path we’ve led that God has called us to has brought us right to this moment.   There have been wonderful times of richness, and other times that we were on a precipice. There have been times of clarity about what was the right thing to do, and we did it and our lives went on and we were blessed. And other times when we have done really stupid things.  I’ve done stupid things. Have any of you done stupid things? Don’t lie in your church. What Abraham and Sarah remind each of us is that we too can live a good life. If we are open to God’s grace in our lives, that grace will be there and correct things even when we mess them up. Remember my first wedding? It wasn’t what I did that was wrong that was important in that story but it was that God sent Charlie Blankenship to straighten things out in a more direct way than I was willing to. Do you hear what I’m saying? And that not only were two families restored in that story but a young pastor learned a very humbling lesson about what it meant to be a pastor. All of us need to learn that humility and experience God’s grace in a way that sustains us even when we might not like it.

Now there are a few of you here that might be pushing your age a little, and you might be thinking that it’s time to sit on the rocking chair and just wait for the grim reaper to show up.  I hope you don’t do that. I hope you notice that in the story of Abraham and Sarah, up until the very end of their lives, were continuing to move on the journey that God had called them to. Some of their greatest events happened not when they were young but when they were older. I hope some of you that are sitting here today that are younger understand that our culture may put a lot of value on being young but that if you live long enough you're not going to be young anymore. And that you’ve got to value the limited nature of life here on earth. To put our trust in God through Jesus, our eternal destination, is not the question. The question becomes what have we done with the gift that God has given in this life? May all of you live the good life in the days ahead. May you be reminded that the steadfast love and faithfulness of our God is truly with you.  Amen.