The Sixth Sunday after the Epiphany

February 11, 2007

"Are You Sitting on Your Faith?"

Jeremiah 17:5-10

Luke 6:17-26

Preached at Providence Lutheran Church in Holland, Ohio

By Pastor Dennis R. King

The Grace and Mercy of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you all. Amen.

During this morning’s sermon I would have you think about the question - Are you sitting on your faith?

There is a story told about a young girl who went to Hong Kong. She was there to visit friends and she was running out of money. She decided that she needed to go home, bought her ticket and went to the airport to catch her plane. Then there was a moment of frantic and tears and frustration. She had spent the last of her money for her ticket and now her ticket was gone. She felt like a sinner who had been saved and then all of a sudden her salvation was gone. How would she get home? How would she get back to her loved ones and friends? What would happen to her? Would she have to eke out a meager living somewhere in Hong Kong? Then to her surprise and amazement, she got up and discovered that she had been sitting on her ticket.

A farmer made a meager living on the few acres that he had. An oilman came to his door one day and asked to survey his land for oil. The oilman felt pretty certain that somewhere in that area there was an oil deposit of great value. The farmer told him, “No.” He was a farmer at heart; he would always be a farmer. He didn’t want oilmen tearing up his land. Every year for nine years that oil man came back and knocked on that farmer’s door. On the ninth year it was farmer’s wife that answered the door. The farmer was in the hospital, and they were just barely making it. She told the oil man that that he could drill. It took the oil man three days to make the farmer and his wife millionaires. They had been sitting on such a valuable resource, and yet they struggled with living.

A century and a half ago a poor man was living in Massachusetts, lounging around the house getting in his wife’s way as men seem to do when they don’t have anything else to do, feeling sorry for himself. One of those days when his wife chased him out of the house, he walked down to the bay. Along the bay he found a soggy shingle, and he started to whittle a wooden chain. His children that evening, quarreled over it, and so he had to whittle a second one. While he was whittling the second one a man said to him, “Why don’t you whittle toys and sell them? You are such a good whittler. You could make money at that.” “I don’t know what I would make,” he said. “Just ask your children.” So he asked his children and they were all excited. His daughter said, “A doll. A doll washstand. A doll carriage.” Her list was a mile long. It would take him a lifetime to make all that she wanted.

So after consulting his children, he took some of the firewood that he had, for he had no money to buy lumber, and he whittled. Soon those strong, unpainted Hinghum toys became known all over the world. I guess we could say that that man had been sitting on his hands not making use of the gifts that God had given to him.

What is God’s will for His children? What is God’s will for you? Are you sitting on your faith? Or are you using it, incorporating it into your life so that your life could be fuller, more exciting, more adventuresome bringing peace and joy to other people and feeling blessed as Jesus talked about in the Gospel? Blessed is the man who uses the gifts that God has given to him, the opportunities and the potential to be a blessing to the rest of the world.

Each of us has our own definition of what success really is. Some would say it would be to raise their children to be responsible citizens. Others would day it’s to write a piece of music or paint a picture, write a book or maybe it’s to plan out ones retirement and enjoy the life that God has given to them. Each of us has our own dreams. It’s interesting though, statistics would say that 10% of the people of this country never set out to accomplish anything and oftentimes commit suicide along the way. Another 10% except defeat, and turn to drugs and alcohol. Another 10% actually do succeed using all the gifts that God has given to them while all the rest simply endure life. It is not God’s will that we should just endure. It’s not God’s will that we should endure lives of quiet desperation as the poet expressed it. Remember in the Gospel John 10:10, Jesus came that we might have life and more abundantly. It’s God’s will that we have abundant life. It’s God’s will that we have dreams and we achieve those dreams. That is not to say that sometimes along the way that our dreams might need adjustment. We could say that about someone like former President Jimmy Carter. When you dream to become President and you become President then what do you do? You have to change your dreams. He changed his dreams to one who works for peace in the world; to dedicate his time to build homes for the poor with Habitat for Humanity; to teach Sunday School and even to work along with his wife to write six books since 1981. Rosland Carter writes, “If we have not achieved our early dreams, we must either find new ones or see what we can salvage from the old. There is clearly much left to be done and whatever else we are going to do, we’d better get on with it.” God has provided us with so much. He has given us the means to accomplish our dreams. But too often we find ourselves sitting on it. Sitting on the very faith that would reassure us of God’s presence and give us the strength and the courage to reach out and accomplish something that seems beyond us.

There was a couple who were, some would say, border-line cognitively disabled. They were very much in love and so they were married. People worried about them. They worried what would happen to this couple. Would they become wards of the state? Would someone else be paying for their existence for the rest of their lives? Not on your life! They had faith. They had assurance that God was with them. They were determined that they would make it. They took a job as a part time custodian in a little church that paid them $100.00 a week. They worked very hard. They did everything that was asked of them. The pastor was most pleased with their work and even recommended them to some other congregations. That couple soon had a job working at 4-5 congregations making an annual income of well over $20,000. That was a number of years ago when that was actually a respectable amount of money. They were essentially their own bosses. They enjoyed one another’s company and took pride in their work to be the best that God would have them to be.

God has so constructed His world that there is a niche, indeed, for everyone. That is why each of us has his own respective talents and gifts. But are we sitting on our faith? Are we missing opportunities because of it? Are we failing to trust in the God that has created us? If we are sitting on that faith, woe to us, “Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord,” writes Jeremiah, “whose confidence is in him. He will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream.” The crucial ingredient in achieving our dreams is confidence of faith.

Erma Bombeck once wrote in one of her columns that it takes a lot of courage to show your dreams to someone else. They might laugh. They might not understand. Worse, they might take it out of the box and drop it. Where would you get another? Dreams are fragile. Some people in desperation give up their dreams and sit on their faith. Certainly we can understand fear and apprehensions. And yet how we admire Mother Teresa, Krista McAuliffe, Helen Keller. They had faith and they lived it to the fullest. They followed their dreams and God blessed them.

Where do you get courage to reach for your dreams? For many of us it comes from faith. We need to quit sitting on our faith and start living our faith. Like a tree by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes, its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit. That is a description of what each one of us is to be. We are to be trusting in God. We are to be living our faith not sitting on it. No longer bottling up our hopes, ambitions, and dreams but achieving all that God has given us the opportunity to achieve. Let us get that faith out from under us and actually use it to guide us. Amen.