First Presbyterian Church of Watertown

John 17

God, Gold, and Glory

The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry

May 4, 2008

One of my favorite movie scenes of all time is a funeral. The scene is found in a movie called Cousins; it’s the late arrival of an elderly man to his brother’s funeral. He’s walking up to a cemetery chapel when everyone spills out. He missed the whole thing. A grandson walks up to him, hugs him and then inquires about his tardiness, to which he replies, “When you reach my age you don’t want to get to close to an open casket.” And then he gives a line that no matter how much I try I can’t get out of my head- I just can’t. “Besides that,” he says, “God makes me nervous when you bring him indoors.”

It’s a strange way of saying it, perhaps, but this nervousness is pretty common. Invite the most hardened atheist or agnostic to church and their eyes will widen with fear; they will recoil into a nervous posture hoping an extemporaneous prayer and the laying on of hands will not sweeten the invitation. Yet, take those very same folks out into the woods, take them to a peak, or beside river at sundown and all of sudden they are talking like a theologian extolling the beauties of creation. Somehow, it’s the indoors part that really gets people nervous.

While a case could be made that such reservations are what happens when we add people and religion to God (this is where the trouble starts), I am unconvinced. There are problems here, but not the sort of stuff that makes people nervous. People may make things complicated, but you need something big to make you nervous. Probably the biggest image of God is the notion of glory. And when we start talking about glory, I get nervous.

Glory makes me uncomfortable. This came up the other night at the stewardship committee meeting. There was a call to have more of a celebration at the end of the campaign this year. This is good. We should celebrate. And we should have celebrated each of the last five years, but we didn’t; we don’t. Celebrations are a moment to glory, to enjoy a victory, and they just don’t sit right. Once a campaign is done I start thinking of the next one. I finish reading a book; I pick up another. Reveling, enjoying the moment, glory: not my cup of tea and I now like lots of different kinds of tea.

Part of this of course is the belief that a moment of glory is a moment of complacency. If you rest, even for a moment, you are losing ground; when you are not gaining, you are losing. Yet I believe my distrust of glory goes deeper. I can remember reading something Nelson Mandela spoke at his inauguration that helped me understand my unease with glory and greatness and victory.

His words don’t need a lot of introduction and maybe you’ve heard them before, but this is what he said after decades in prison speaking to a people fresh from the violence and degradation of apartheid. He said, our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

Meant to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. I will never forget the first time I read those words and thinking, yes. I am not afraid of failure or mistakes. Success, a big moment, greatness, and glory: those are much more frightening. The bottom is hard, but it doesn’t scare me. Glory, glory fills me with fear.

Recently I’ve been reading about two men that are as far from each other as the east is from the west. Their lives where lived in different continents, different centuries, and with truly much different stakes. Yet, what bound them together was glory and how difficult it is, and how uncomfortable it can make us feel.

The first was a biography of David Livingstone. After standing at his grave in London’s Westminster Abbey and traveling through “Livingstonia” the northern region of Malawi named after him, I realized I really didn’t know anything about him. The biography I chose was known to be balanced and fair. So as Livingstone’s life came through the pages he was not just a great man and he wasn’t the devil who brought on the Scramble for Africa. He was though a man who didn’t get along with his colleagues, was known to break some of the rules and bend a fair portion of the rest. At times he appears to be more of an adventurer than a missionary. And this was the charge of contemporaries.

Livingstone came to believe that the slow, steady work of preaching the gospel in one place to one tribe for a lifetime was not a workable mission strategy. (His most successful peer preached thirty years and made 30 converts. Livingstone didn’t believe this was a good model.) He believed that Africa had to be opened to commerce, and once there was a flow of trade Africans would stop selling their own into slavery. Freed from slavery by commerce they would also be freed to accept Christianity without the constraints of tribal relations. The Africa Livingstone first encountered was all based upon the chief of the tribe. Everyone believed what he believed and did, pretty much, what he said. This left very little room for the gospel, especially when the gospel came with the demand that the chief give up all his wives but one, a bit of sticking point. With trade and commerce, though, this would be overcome.

That this was a new strategy for missions in the 1850s is the most profound of understatement. So when Livingstone headed out to find a way of joining the west coast to the east coast utilizing the Zambezi River his fellow missionaries saw him as abandoning his calling and simply excusing his wanderlust with foolishness. He was a glory seeker, a wanderer, they claimed.

As each section of his life unfolds the claims of his fellow missionaries, whom he considered in just as a poor of light because of their complacency and lack of boldness, as each adventure unfolds its hard to tell who is right. For Livingstone, the risk of his family and their suffering, his suffering, and the dangers and risks were all for glory true, but for the glory of God. And this sounds good until you realize his wife died an impoverished and forgotten alcoholic in Scotland because, some might argue, he got caught up in the glory.

It’s hard for me, though, to criticize Livingstone’s theory too much, because it governs our actions today. Finding out why you believe what you believe and do what you do is always an awkward moment. There was an awkward nervousness as I came to see what we are doing in Malawi as the legacy of Livingstone. What he believed commerce would foster, we believe will be accomplished with the end of malaria, public education, empowerment of widows, and enough food to keep famine at bay. Our adventures are just as prone to critique as his were. And the critique always comes closer and closer to the specter of vainglory. It comes down to glory and that always makes me nervous.

The other life occupying my thoughts couldn’t be further from Livingstone. I recently read the autobiography of Lou Holtz, the football coach. On the cover of the book I discovered how little I know of college football. The cover has Lou Holtz wearing a Notre Dame jacket and hat. This is what I thought; I thought he was the coach of Notre Dame, only I thought he was still the coach. He left 12 years ago.

I feel a bit embarrassed by this as my father is a big Notre Dame football fan and I can see his look of disgust and confusion that any son of his would be so ignorant. Alas.

Now while some might consider leading Notre Dame to a national title with an undefeated season in 1988 is equal to the accomplishments of David Livingstone’s missionary efforts (especially since Livingstone only made one convert during his long career) I think Lou Holtz would concede the greater limelight to the man who was the first to cross the sub-Saharan continent. And while their lives and careers are not the same: Holtz did have to fight off the very restrictive recruiting practices of Notre Dame and still build a great team, and he did work for Woody Hayes and came out alive, I believe the persistent bouts of malaria and the months of hunger and near death escapades are on a different level.

Despite the differences, there is a key connection to the two: glory. Holtz, in his autobiography, uses the word more than a few times directly, but indirectly, was how glory defined his life and how it shaped the hundreds of young men who played football for him. What you did, how you did it, and unto what you aspired were all about glory. Glory to God, to school, to the team was a persistent demand he made of his student athletes. Twice Holtz made national news for suspending star athletes on the eve of big games because they had acted in a way that didn’t bring glory to themselves, their God, and their team.

Some might consider this quest for glory a consequence of a hard childhood. Holtz, like Livingstone, grew up in the kind of poverty that can create a person who is driven to never give up, to never fail, for failure is not an option. And this level of determination and the discipline that fueled it is inspirational as it reaches ever higher. Glory begets glory.

While sometimes the confidence Holtz used to describe his life could boarder on arrogance, or perhaps boarder is a bit generous; while his determination and rigidity at a football practice seemed trivial at times in a world of real problems, he did succeed where others failed; he rose where others stumbled. He dreamed dreams that were not confined to sleep.

This was a great read, but as I read it, like Livingstone’s story, it was glory that made me nervous. It just so happened that his dreams were to achieve greater and greater jobs, greater and greater ends with more and more personal success. Lurking behind the trust in God and how often he prayed with his family was a great sense of ambition. And that always makes me nervous. But can you seek to glorify God and not be ambitious? Don’t be too quick to answer that one.

Jesus on the night of his arrest, hours before he would be whipped and scourged as a shameful criminal speaks of glory. He prays for glory: he prays that the father would be glorified; he prays that the father would glorify him. At first glance this seems fine but it is actually a radical departure from the other gospels. In Matthew, Mark, and Luke on the night of his arrest when Jesus prays in the Garden of Gethsemane he doesn’t pray for glory, but that the cup of suffering would pass. He doesn’t speak of being glorified, but for the strength to accept the will of God as he sweated blood.

In the other gospels Jesus quiets the demons that say he is the Son of God almost as if such is too much to hear. Glory seems to be missing from the other gospels, where in John Jesus is telling everyone who will listen that he is the way the truth and life, he is the resurrection, he’s the vine, he is the name of God, and to the Samaritan woman: I am the messiah. Glory has a different place in John than in the other gospels. No matter what Gospel it is in, though, it makes me nervous.

Nervous or not there was a need to speak of glory. Perhaps John speaks of glory because the church was now experiencing the glory of God in worship and the redemption of life. Perhaps they were experiencing the power of the Gospel and it was frightening in what it could accomplish. A prayer for glory makes sense in a church struggling with victory, struggling to understand success and power.

And I can’t think of anything more threatening. The real danger to churches is not complacency or failure. Churches can tolerate enormous amounts of failure. Glory though is a different venture. There may be other reasons but my belief why this congregation grows in little bits and pieces, slowly, in what looks like patience, is that we are unconvinced we want to be a great church. It’s safer to be good; to be great . . . that makes us nervous.

All of this is reasonable until we hear the prayer for glory and ask is this our prayer? Do we seek a life that brings glory to God? Yes, glory can be found in the most humble, even mundane moments, even the most basic of events like the water of the Niagara going over the falls. But we are not nature; we are the children of God, meant for glory and a particular glory.

A national championship, the opening of a continent? Not for us. You can’t aim that high, think that big. We can’t as long as glory makes us nervous, as long as the glory doesn’t include us. Jesus prayed for glory, why don’t we hope to see it, to be a part of it, for the church to be a glory? Why does glory make us so nervous? Amen. `