October 19, 2025 - Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Rooted in God's Grace

October 19, 2025  Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Psalm 1:1-3
“Rooted in God’s Grace”
Douglas T. King

In the American version of the sitcom The Office there is a scene when Michael and Dwight are driving somewhere and they are using GPS to guide them.  At one point, with Michael behind the wheel, the GPS announces a turn to the right.  Dwight, seeing a lake to their immediate right, begs Michael not to make the turn.  Nevertheless, Michael does make the turn.  As they are heading straight into the lake, against Dwight’s protestations, Michael shouts out “The machine knows what it is doing, the machine knows!” And then they proceed to drive into the water and begin sinking.

We all have voices, authorities and perspectives in our heads, some we are consciously aware of and some not. They govern the decisions we make and the paths we take.  Some of them are helpful and lead us toward lives that are fulfilling and shaped by integrity.  And some of them are less helpful and lead us in directions that do not feed us in good ways.  

Today is the kickoff to our stewardship effort, “Rooted in God’s Grace” with its tagline, “They are like trees planted by streams of water.” This year’s theme is reminding us of our essential need to be fed by God’s law.  The psalmist tells us that we will be “happy” if “(our) delight is in the law of the Lord, and on God’s law (we) meditate day and night.”

This is all true. But I have some issues with the translation from the original Hebrew.  First of all, I find the word “happy” a rather limp and one-dimensional word.  It feels a little too flimsy for me.  The quest to be perpetually happy sounds like something from a knock-off self-help book on a rack at the supermarket checkout.  A superior translation would be “Blessed are…”  It is a deeper and richer understanding of the Hebrew and for what we can actually strive.  

But my bigger translation issue is with the use of the word, “law.”  In the Hebrew it is Torah, which is a far more complex concept than our English word law.  When we hear the word “law” we think of a set of rules that restrict our behavior.  The “thou shalt nots” run through our head.  And certainly the Torah includes strong ethical guidelines we are exhorted to follow.  But the Torah is made up of two distinct elements known as Halakah and Haggadah.  Halakah is the sum of legal restrictions found in Jewish scripture.  But Haggadah is the narrative, the story that plays itself out between God and God’s people.  And that story is considered just as important an element of the Torah, the law, as the list of rules it possesses.  That story is our story.  

Our story tells us of God forming chaos into a world of abundant creation.  Our story tells us of God fashioning us in the divine image and breathing the very breath of life into us.  Our story tells us God ever honoring God’s promises and blessing Abraham and Sarah and every subsequent generation.  Our story tells of God hearing the cries of the oppressed and freeing them from bondage. Our story tells of God sending the prophets to open our eyes when we have lost our way.  Our story, as Christians, goes on to tell us of God taking human form in Jesus Christ to teach us, heal us, and die for us, inviting us home to God’s everlasting ever-loving embrace.  Our story tells us of God’s Holy Spirit breathing passion and energy into those first believers that the church may be born and reborn in every generation.
 
When we find our place in this story, when we recognize that this story continues in us, we can experience ourselves as blessed.  We can be “like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not whither in all that they do, they prosper.”  We can celebrate each new day as a gift given to us knowing that God is the one who created us, this day, and all that is.  We can withstand the challenges of this life, knowing that the promises of God’s love for us are unbreakable.  We can face our failures and mistakes knowing that God’s forgiveness is always awaiting us.

As you heard several minutes ago, when I baptize a baby I always preach their first sermon to them.  “For you God created the world.  For you Jesus was born a babe in Bethlehem.  For you he told the story of God’s love. For you he died. For you he rose to new life.  All of this he did for you.  Although you know none of this, we promise to continue to tell you this story as you grow so that one day you may know it and make it your own.”  It is a message that needs to be continually whispered into the ear of every child and heard continually in our ears as well.  

When we recognize that each of our own individual stories is an essential element of the grand story of the ongoing relationship between God and humanity we are empowered to face every twist and turn life may present to us.  We are sustained and fed by participating in this story, which is our story.

At this point you may be wondering when the stewardship pitch is coming.  Well, here it is.  The story of God’s relationship with humanity is indeed about each of us individually and personally.  Everything God has done, God has done for Emma, and for each and every one of us.  But we are called to live out our stories with God together.  When the Holy Spirit descended into Jerusalem it was to create the church, a community of faith.  An essential element of each of our stories with God is that we share in the story together.  

The Christian faith is an inherently communal endeavor.  In that baptism sermon I say, “We promise to continue to tell you this story as you grow so that one day you may know it and make it your own.”  Well, here is the thing.  I did not share the entire journey with little Emma.  We never lose the need to be told the story, no matter how much we grow and learn.  The way we continue to participate and live in the story is by gathering together, worshiping together, serving together, learning together.  

If we wish to have this story truly sustain us we need to continue to participate in the story of our life together as the church.  And we must continue to tell the story to each other.  Without hearing the story from each other, with all we can continue to learn from each other, the story becomes flat and one-dimensional in our minds and our hearts.  The modernist poet Ezra Pound once thundered, “Go in fear of abstractions.”  And an abstract faith is rather thin gruel to feed us through life’s adventures.  

Rabbi Sharon Brous notes that in the entire first five books of the Bible, filled with all manner of difficulty and tragedy, there are only two times when something is proclaimed as not good.  In the creation myth, when Adam is the only human in the garden, God proclaims, “It is not good for a person to be alone.”  And then, when Moses is struggling in the wilderness under the weight of leading all by himself, his father-in-law counsels him on his solo leadership style, “It is not good what you are doing.” (Brous, p. 35)  

If we want God’s story, our story to sustain us, to lead us through our days, good and bad and everything in between, we need to share in it together as a church.  And if we are going to be the church together we need resources to do just that. When we make a pledge to the church we are making a pledge to God and to each other.  We are pledging to our God that we want to continue to share in the story of the Holy Spirit that set the church in motion all those years ago and continues to do so today.  And we are pledging to each other that we are doing everything we can to ensure that those around us in these pews have the opportunity to continue sharing in the story today and for generations to come.  

In the next few days you will be receiving a letter from our stewardship committee inviting you to prayerfully consider raising your pledge so we can continue to keep pace with rising costs.  As you pray about this decision, I ask that you remember how this story we share together sustains us throughout our lives and leads us forward in the most important of ways.

Or, I suppose you could let a computer GPS be the voice that guides your life. But the waters of this life can get pretty deep, pretty quickly and that did not work out all that well for Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute.

Thanks be to God.  Amen.

Brous, Sharon, the amen effect, Avery, New York, 2024.