Two Sermon Fragments

This afternoon I started working on a sermon on Hebrews 11:13-16. I’ve been behind this summer in sending the sermons out each week, mostly because of my travel schedule, and today I thought I could catch up a bit. After I wrote the first draft of the sermon, I decided it was too long. In fact, it doesn’t even contain an illustration from the life of Eric Liddell that I planned to use because of the Beijing Olympics. Maybe that will make it in next week. Plus I have a story about a video from India that my friend Benny Matthews showed me at the MEF conference in June. That didn’t make it either.

And then there are these two fragments, mostly personal ruminations . . .

1) Johnny Cash and Me

We are like resident aliens, living on earth with a kind of permanent green card that says, “You aren’t from around here.” Just as I wrote that, I remembered my friend Gary Olson who spent a lot of years in Texas. He told me that when a stranger walked up, the local boys would look him over carefully, and then they would say, “Now what part of Texas are you from?” Definitely not Amarillo or Fort Worth or Tyler or Pecos. I’ve gotten that sort of thing a lot in my life. During my years in Chicago, hardly a Sunday would go by without a visitor saying, “You’re not from Chicago, are you?” Well, no. My Southern accent pretty much gave it all away. But I lost part of it because I still remember the time when I went back to Alabama and my cousin Charlie told me, “You sound like a Yankee,” which was not a compliment. And just two weeks ago, when I spoke at Pinebrook Bible Conference in Pennsylvania, a number of people commented on my accent. On the last night a woman said, “Your voice sounds like Johnny Cash,” which I had never had anyone say before, and which I definitely took as a compliment.

Side note. After my sermon at Living Waters tonight, out of the blue one of the musicians told me that I sounded like Johnny Cash. That’s twice in three weeks. Maybe my voice is changing.

2) Madden 09 and Some Weird Gizmo

This section was sort of an illustration-within-an-illustration where I was discussing an essay by Peggy Noonan that discusses how our generation has lost any concept of a world beyond this world. Noonan says that despite the fact that life is easier now than it was 500 years ago, we are no happier. We are just “more attractive sad people” than we used to be. Why is that? 

Lots of reasons, it turns out, but mostly because we expected this life to give us happiness. We truly thought, we believed, we expected, no, we demanded of life that it make us happy. Doesn’t work that way. In fact, life tends to work in the opposite direction—toward increasing frustration. Not even the latest version of Madden 09 NFL (for the uninitiated, that’s a hyper-popular video game), “the first sports game that adapts to you.” What could be better than that? Easy. Madden 10 NFL, coming out a year from now. And then Madden 11 and 12 and however many more years John Madden has left on this earth—many more, one fervently hopes. It’s all very Ecclesiastes and philosophical, but the Bible told us about this a long time ago.

I’m all for video games and hybrid cars and new fashions and super-duper new laptop computers. I happen to use Google Reader to follow my favorite blogs (thank you, Stu Page), a neat little app that allows you gather all the latest entries from a ton of different weblogs. You go to one site and run down all the weblogs on your list, check the highlights and click on the ones you want to read. Easy. Somehow when I signed up, I clicked on Technology so now that’s the first category on my list. Usually the other blogs I follow show that I have a handful of new articles to scan for each one, but the Technology section always shows 1000+ articles. I’ll never catch up because technology moves so fast. Today’s list includes an article with the following headline: “Qingbar iPod Projector Puts Sub-Par Images on Upright Tray Tables.” The article carries a picture of something that I assume is the projector but looks like an expensive one-slice toaster. I have no idea what it all means. And so it goes. We want more, better, faster, cheaper, smaller, bigger, brighter, older, newer, and when we get it, it’s never quite enough. That’s roughly the point Peggy Noonan is making.

I am still puttering around on the sermon, but I hope to get it sent out before midnight (It’s 11 PM right now).