“A Back to School Sermon” / Rev. Gradye Parsons preaching / 8.2.26

Let us pray.

Holy one, as we open our hearts, open our hearts as we read and hear your word, transform our minds to match the humility and love of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray.

Amen.

Scripture reading this morning is a passage from Paul's letter to the Philippians.

Paul writes, Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, assuming human likeness.

And being found in appearance as a human, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.

Therefore, God exalted him even more highly and gave him the name that is above every other name, so that at the name given to Jesus every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father.

The word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

You know, when you drive around town or out in the country and you might drive past a bank you've never been in, but you know kind of what goes on in that bank, or you might drive past a dentist's office, and you kind of have an idea of what goes on in a dentist's office, and maybe you drive past a tattoo parlor, and some of you know what that goes on in there, but a lot of us don't.

But you know what you drive past most churches, and a lot of people who have never been in a church have some idea what goes on in a church.

According to a recent survey, 39% of Tennesseans are in church on any given Sunday, which of course means 61% are not.

But still, they have some idea what church is about.

And I used to think that was because we're in the Bible Belt, right?

And church is in the very air that we breathe, and it's on TV, and it's everywhere you look.

But I got a little education about that.

Kathy and I like to watch uh detective shows.

Um, and one of those detective shows was set in the southern French Alps.

It's called the Mountain Detective, and it centers around three characters: Alex, Tony, and Alonzo, who are three policemen serving a rural post in the Alps, and they solve most of their crimes through relationships and of staring really hard into the camera.

That seems to be.

But they have limits.

And in this one particular episode, some thugs or some criminals from the big city come to the come into their holler or their valley with a major military hardware, and they have to kind of run for their lives.

And they end up hiding in a remote abbey that is occupied by one solitary monk, Brother Frederick, who has come to that abbey to escape his years of being a soldier, and he just can't take that anymore.

Well, as you imagine, a pretty predictable plot line, there is a gun battle, and in that gun battle, Brother Frederick is killed while saving one of the policemen.

So even in secular France, as we tend to think of it, even in secular France, there's a basic understanding that sacrifice is foundational to being church, right?

Even in some place when they don't really have the understanding of the whole story of the gospel, they understand that sacrifice is part of what it means to be church.

Our passage is today is from the Philippians, and Philippians is based, of course, on the little church in Philippi, which is on the eastern edge of modern Greece.

But in Paul's time it was very much a Roman city.

After Julius Caesar was assassinated by Brutus, played by James Mason in 1953, the empire was torn into two groups, Brutus versus Mark Anthony, of course, played by Richard Burton.

There was a huge battle outside of Philippi in 42 BC.

Mark Anthony's side won, and he gave most of Philippi to his army to settle and also to protect his eastern flank.

So hundreds of miles from Rome and a very Greek part of the world, there's a Roman city with sort of a Greek undertone.

Philippi is also Paul's first church in Europe.

Remember the story of the man, his vision of a man from Macedonia bringing him over.

One of his first converts was Lydia, who was in the business of making and selling purple cloth, which is a luxury item.

So she was a well-to-do businesswoman.

She and her whole house later convert, and it becomes the first Christian church in Europe.

Paul runs into trouble later.

A servant girl is being used by her masters to tell fortunes in the marketplace.

And there were lots of those people in Philippi.

Paul cast out the spirit that gives her this supposedly gift, and her masters get mad at her, and Paul and Silas end up in jail.

Where at midnight, while they are singing, an earthquake happens, and the jail falls apart.

The prisoners could escape, but they don't because of Paul and Silas imploring them not to.

The jailer rushes in, fearing the worst, that everyone has escaped, but they haven't.

His family converts, and they all join the Philippi church.

All of these different people.

Frederick Biekner says that the church is made out of human beings, more or less the same mixture of cowardice and courage, of intelligence and stupidity, of selfishness and generosity, of openness of heart and sheer cousinness, as you would apt to find in any of us.

The reason Christ made his church out of human beings is, well, human beings were all there was to make it out of.

Still, it's a point worth remembering.

It's also a point worth remembering that even after Jesus made these human beings into the church, they seem to go have gone right on being human beings.

And that seems to be part of the struggle in Philippi.

Lydia lost some of her customers because of her conversion.

And she got drummed out of the Philippi Business Women's Club.

It is her house that the church meets in in her neighborhood, and they aren't too happy about these people coming to her house.

So she feels like she's made the biggest sacrifice of anybody to follow this new faith.

The fortune-telling girl used to be dressed in nice clothes and avoid a lot of jobs other servants had to do.

But now she's scrubbing floors and toilets like everybody else.

She can only get to Lydia's house of worship after her work is done.

She thinks she's made the biggest sacrifice of anybody there.

The jailer lost his job, of course, because she didn't lose the prisoners, but got a job as a night guard at City Hall.

He makes it to worship at Lydia's, but always has to leave early.

He thinks he made the biggest sacrifice.

And the prisoners, who were mostly pickpockets and burglars and con men, lost their livelihood, so to speak, and now are just day laborers.

They walk past houses and people they used to rob in Lydia's neighborhood on their way to worship.

They think they made the biggest sacrifice.

And Paul's letter with this beautiful passage in Philippians basically clips and pastes what was probably one of the earliest hymns of the church to remind them and kind of bring them, have a back-to-school moment, to remind them, all those that are listening, yes, you made sacrifices, but it's not a contest.

You made sacrifices, but it's not a contest.

Sacrifice is the pattern of thinking and of living, of faith, and it's counterintuitive to everything about a transactional life.

Sacrifice is very much a part of what it means to be church.

Jesus Christ willingly gave up more than any of you Philippians.

Jesus gave up more than his house, Lydia.

Jesus became more as a slave servant girl.

Jesus endured the worst the Roman legal system could get out, jailer.

And that way of very way of being that was in Christ Jesus is now in his body, the church.

And what it means to be the church.

Paul thinks in our sacrifices, I select us if we get into this sense that we're it's kind of king and queen of this mountain.

And the problem of being king and queen of the mountain is you end up spending most of your energy trying to protect yourself from anybody else that wants your mountain.

But humility connects, it puts others first, it makes room on the mountaintop for everyone and everything.

We are about to go back to school for those of you that are have children of that age.

It is, you know, we're still based on an agricultural timeline, even though most of the country does no longer do agriculture.

But it's important to remember that it is back to school time.

I came across this story in the autumn of 1931 in the county of McDowell, West Virginia, they hired a teacher named Alice Bowman to teach at a one-room school in the holler at the base of Spruce Mountain.

Alice Bowman was 24 years old and had just graduated, and she was eager and she was ready, but there was one problem: there was no road to the school.

The families in the hollow had always sent their children up and down the mountain on foot through the forest path.

Think about the footpath up to Greer Briar School.

And they never needed a road because they never had a teacher who came from the outside who needed to get there in a wagon.

Alice Bowman came from the outside.

She needed to get there in a wagon.

The path through the forest was not a wagon road.

When they asked the county, see if this sounds familiar.

When they asked the county for more money, the county said we had no money for the road.

And the county said Alice could walk the path like everybody else.

The fathers of the children in the hollow met on Sunday after church.

There were 22 of them.

A father named Caliph Hensley said simply they had hired a teacher, and the least they could do was to make sure she could get there, and that he was starting on Monday, and that whoever wanted to come help was welcome.

All 22 of the fathers came.

They built the road in 11 days by hand with shovels and pickaxes and mule teams and the knowledge of men who lived on the mountain their entire lives and who knew its rocks and its drainage and its grades the way they knew their own fields.

Alice Bowman drove her wagon up the new road on the 12th day.

The families were lined up on both sides of the road to watch her come in.

She stopped the wagon at the school.

She looked at the road, she looked at the 22 men standing in the field watching her arrive.

As you can imagine, she couldn't speak for a moment.

Then she climbed down from the wagon and she walked to Caleb Hensley and she shook his hand and said, I will teach your children as long as you need me.

And she taught at that school in that hollow for 31 years.

That's a great story about people who get the sacrifice that is the heart of building faith and building a community.

So look at the front of your bulletin because that's a that's a supposed picture of Alice Bowman there with the man who built the road.

Got it.

Now, if I could have a conversation with Miss Bowman today, I would have to share with her some hard facts.

That whether you're looking at preschool or homeschool or a public school or private school, whether you're getting a PhD or a certificate as a welder, there are people that want to shrink the path to education.

To limit it to those who for limit it to those who strictly want to get a kind of job and only certain kinds of people.

So they can, like the county court, say to the Spruce Mountain community, no, we're not going to spend any money on you.

And I'm guessing we are proud of our sacrifice too, that we have sacrificed, not given you any money.

Sound familiar?

Is that not where we are in our culture?

Miss Bowman, I would hate to have that conversation with her after all those years of service.

In the church, we have to continually school ourselves on what Christ's sacrificing means to us.

Today we made promises to Nellie Ann, just as we have to other children at the baptismal fount.

One of those promises is that at Westminster we're going to teach by word and deed that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ does not make the path more narrow, but makes the road wider in the love of God.

That the road to the font is not a narrow path, but it's a wide path because of Christ's sacrifice.

That the road to the table is not a narrow path, but it's a wide road because of the sacrifice of God.

That our road is not to this table is not uphill both ways in the accumulation of our own mistakes, but is cleared and leveled by the grace that we all receive in Jesus Christ.

That we, that we at Westminster, are committed to a wide road where education of the mind and the spirit walks side by side.

That whatever questions Nellie Ann may have about this thing that we call faith, how we practice it, what does it mean?

Who is God?

Who is Christ?

What is the Holy Spirit?

Whatever questions she has are acceptable here because we believe in the wide road.

Whatever struggle she may have in life, they're welcome here because of the wide road.

Whatever struggles you may be having in life are welcome here because of the wide road.

Because we believe that Christ's sacrifice didn't narrow what God wanted to do in the world, but widen what God wanted to do in the world.

We will love this road so wide that all of God's children can walk, run, skip, and hop together, not despite of who they are, but because of exactly who they are as God made them.

All of them.

And just like Caleb Hensley and the men of that church, there's a basic understanding that the purpose of those of us who are somewhere further down the road is to make sure the road behind us is just as wide as the road was in front of us.

That people don't have to walk in the snow uphill both ways, despite what our parents said to get to church.

Right?

They don't have to walk in the snow both roads, both ways uphill to get to church.

That God's love comes to them.

And because of that, and because of that, we can commit ourselves to Nellie Ann and to all these children to each other.

That we're gonna continue to build that wide road, despite all the obstacles, despite all the people who don't want it to be a wide road.

We're gonna commit ourselves, continue to commit ourselves to do that.

Because that's who we are as Westminster, but mostly because that's who Jesus Christ is.

Who thought it was worth the sacrifice to be a servant to keep that road open.

Amen.