Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Matthew 13:18-23 at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston on July 13, 2008
There has been so much death this week in this church and this community. On Monday, Abel DeSouza died. On Tuesday, the father of one of the children on my son's baseball team died. The father was about my age and his son was in the 3rd grade. On Friday, I conducted a memorial service for a beloved church member, Ruth Davis. Today, I read in the Houston Chronicle about the death of a beloved physician in Houston. Dr. Michael Ellis DeBakey, internationally acclaimed as the father of modern cardiovascular surgery — and considered by many to be the greatest surgeon ever — died Friday night at The Methodist Hospital in Houston. He was 99. It's been one of those weeks when it is hard to catch your breath. Yet, even in the midst of grief, there is reason for hope.
Have you hard the story of Teddy Stallard? Teddy Stallard certainly qualified as "one of the least": disinterested in school musty, wrinkled clothes, hair never combed; one of those kids in school with a deadpan face; an expressionless, glassy, unfocused stare. When Miss Thompson spoke to Teddy he always answered in monosyllables. Unattractive, unmotivated, and distant, he was just plain hard to like.
Even though his teacher said she loved all in her class the same, down inside she wasn't being completely truthful. Whenever she marked Teddy's papers, she got a certain perverse pleasure out of putting Xs next to the wrong answers, and when she puts the Fs at the top of the papers, she always did it with a flair. She should have known better; she had Teddy's records and she knew more about him than she wanted to admit. The record read:
1st Grade: Teddy shows promise with his work and attitude, but poor home situation.
2nd Grade: Teddy could do better. Mother is seriously ill. He receives little help at home.
3rd Grade: Teddy is a good boy but too serious. He is a slow learner. His mother died this year.
4th Grade: Teddy is very slow, but well-behaved. His father shows no interest.
Christmas came and the boys and girls in Miss Thompson's class brought her Christmas present. They piled their presents on her desk and crowded around to watch her open them. Among the presents there was one from Teddy Stallard. She was surprised that he had brought her a gift, but he had. Teddy's gift was wrapped in brown paper and was held together with Scotch tape. On the paper were written the simple words, "For Miss Thompson from Teddy." When she opened Teddy's present out fell a gaudy rhinestone bracelet, with half the stones missing, and a bottle of cheap perfume.
The other boys and girls began to giggle and smirk over Teddy's gifts, but Miss Thompson at least had enough sense to silence them by immediately putting on the bracelet and putting some of the perfume on her wrist. Holding her wrist up for the other children to smell, she said, "Doesn't it smell lovely?" And the children, taking their cues form the teacher, readily agrees with "oohs" an d"aahs."
At the end of the day, when school was over and the other children had left, Teddy lingered behind. He slowly came over to their desk and said softly, "Miss Thompson ... Miss Thompson, you smell just like my mother ... and her bracelet looks real pretty on you, too. I'm glad you liked my presents." When Teddy left, Miss Thompson got down on her knees and asked God to forgive her.
The next day when the children came to school, they were welcomed by a new teacher. Miss Thompson had become a different person. She was no longer just a teacher; she had become an agent of God. She was now a person committed to loving her children and doing things for them that would live on after her. She helped all the children, but especially the slow ones, and especially Teddy Stallard. By the end of that school year, Teddy showed dramatic improvement. He had caught up with most of the students and was even ahead of some.
She didn't hear from Teddy for a long time. Then one day, she received a note that read:
Dear Miss Thompson:
I wanted you to be the first to know. I will be graduating second in my class.
Love, Teddy Stallard
Four years later, another note came:
Dear Miss Thompson:
They just told me I will be graduating first in my class. I wanted you to be the first to know. The university has not been easy, but I like it.
Love, Teddy Stallard
And four years later:
Dear Miss Thompson:
As of today, I am Theodore Stallard, M.D. how about that? I wanted you to be the first to know I am getting married next month, the 27th to be exact. I want you tom come and sit where my mother would sit if she were alive. you are the only family I have now; Dad died last year.
Love. Teddy Stallard
Miss Thompson went to that wedding and sat where Teddy's mother would have sat. She deserved to sit there; she had done something for Teddy that he could never forget. (Author unknown, Submitted by Bertie Synoweic and Chuck Dodge to A Second Helping of Chicken Soup for the Soul, 216-128)
Miss Thompson found the secret of joy through serving children in her role as a teacher. She became a mentor to her students after her experience with Teddy Stallard. in regard to Miss Thompson, Jesus said: "This is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty." (Matthew 13:23)
We tend to think when good things happen to us we are happy and when bad things happen to us we are sad but Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert disagrees and claims to have evidence that proves otherwise. Here is what he says in his book, Stumbling Upon Happiness:
Forget Yoga. Forget liposuction. And forget those herbal supplements that promise to improve your memory, enhance your mood, reduce your waistline, restore your hairline, prolong your lovemaking, and improve your memory. If you want to be happy and healthy, you should try a new technique that has the power to transform the grumpy, underpaid chump you are now into the deeply fulfilled, enlightened individual you've always hoped to be. If you don't believe me, then just consider the testimony of some folks who've tried it:
o "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally, and in almost every other way."
(JW from Texas)
o "It was a glorious experience." (MB from Louisiana)
o "I didn't appreciate others nearly as much as I do now." (CR from California)
Who are these satisfied customers, and what is the miraculous technique they're all talking about? Jim Wright, former Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, made his remark after committing sixty-nine ethics violations and being forced to resign in disgrace. Morese Bickham, a former inmate, made his remark upon being released from the Louisiana state Penitentiary where he'd served thirty-seven years for defending himself against the Ku Klux Klansmen who'd shot him. And Christopher Reeve, the dashing star of Superman, made his remark after an equestrian accident left him paralyzed from the neck down, unable to breathe without the help of a ventilator. The moral of the story? If you want to be happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise, then skip the vitamin pills and the plastic surgeries and try public humiliation, unjust incarceration, or quadriplegia instead.
Uh-huh. Right. Are we really supposed to believe that people who lose their jobs, their freedom, and their mobility are somehow improved by the tragedies that befall them? If that strikes you as a far-fetched possibility, then you are not alone. For at least a century, psychologists have assumed that terrible events--such as having a loved one die or becoming the victim of a violent crime--must have a powerful, devastating, and enduring impact on those who experience the. But the fact is that while most bereaved people are quite sad for a while, very few become chronically depressed and most experience relatively low levels of relatively short-lived distress. Indeed, studies of those who survive major traumas suggest that the vast majority do quite well, and that a significant portion claim that their lives were enhanced by the experience. I know, I know. It sounds suspiciously like the title of a country song, but the fact is that most folks do okay when things go pretty bad. That fact is that negative events do affect us, but they generally don't affect us as much or for as long as we expect them to. (Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert, 165-168)
Country Music star, and Texas icon, Willie Nelson, says: "Sixty years ago, if I'd had the opportunity to lay out my life just the way I wanted it to happen--whatever I would have planned would have paled in comparison with what's actually happened. And all I can say about that is . . . 'Fortunately, I wasn't in control.'" (Willie Nelson, The Tao of Willie, 93) Well said, Willie. Fortunately, you weren't in control of your own life. And fortunately, neither are we. Some folks think we should pray because we need to change God's mind. Wrong. We pray because God needs to change our mind. And one of the things God needs to change our mind from is the idea that we are in control of our lives. Not only are we not in control of our lives, we are not in the world. Once again, that distinction belongs to God alone. What a relief it is when we finally realize that we are not God and we are not in control of our own life and we are not in control of the world.
We don't always understand why things happen. Why does a young child lose his mother or father when he is in third grade? Why do so many people die from cancer? How can a widow ever recover from the death of a beloved spouse? In the face of such hard questions, Jesus speaks the parable of the good soil. Good soil bears fruit. Good soil represents a fertile inner life in which the seed of God's Word takes root . As Jesus put it: "This is the one who hears the word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and yields, in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty." The good fruit is the fruit of the spirit that grows inside us: Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, and self control. The irony is that when we treat others with love and respect the fruit of the spirit grows within us.
No matter where we are in our lives today, even in our times of grief, we trust that God is still in control, and believe the grace of God is still at work in us. As Jesus said in another parable, "A seed cannot grow unless it dies and is planted in the ground." May the grief that we all experience plant a seed of hope within our hearts. For as the Apostle Paul put it: "Whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord." There is more to existence than our physical bodies. We don't know the half of it. Whether we live or whether we die, we belong to the Lord. This is not a mushy religious sentiment. This is a fact.
