The Rev. Dr. Jon Burnham preached this sermon from Romans 7:15-25a
on July 6, 2008 (OT14a) at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas
on July 6, 2008 (OT14a) at St. John's Presbyterian Church in Houston, Texas
George Burns, himself Jewish, describes a childhood experience that led him to a short-lived desire to join a Presbyterian Church. He begins:
Unlike my father, my mother was a very practical lady. Nothing ever flustered her. No matter what the problem was, somehow she knew how to handle it.
A perfect example happened when I was seven years old. I was singing with three other Jewish kids from the neighborhood. We called ourselves the Peewee Quartet. Now, there was a big department store, Siegal & Cooper, that threw an annual picnic, and the highlight was an amateur contest with talent representing all the churches in New York. Right around the corner from where we lived was a little Presbyterian church. How it got in that neighborhood, I'll never know; it certainly didn't do big business.
Well, they had no on to enter in the contest, so the minister asked us four boys to represent the church. We jumped at the chance. So that Sunday, there we were, the Peewee quartet--four Jewish boys sponsored by a Presbyterian church --and our opening song was "When Irish Eyes are Smiling." We followed that with "Mother Machree" and won first prize. The church got a purple velvet altar cloth, and each of us kids got an Ingersoll watch, which was worth about eighty-five cents.
Well, I was so excited I ran all the way home to tell my mother. When I got there she was on the roof hanging out the wash. I rushed up to her and said, "Mama, I don't want to be a Jew anymore!"
If this shocked her, she certainly didn't show it. She just looked at me and calmly said, "Do you mind me asking why?"
I said, "Well, I've been a Jew for seven years and never got anything. I was a Presbyterian for one day and I got a watch." And I held out my wrist and showed it to her.
She glanced at it and said, "First help me hang up the wash, then you can be a Presbyterian."
While I was hanging up the wash some water ran down my arm and got inside the watch. It stopped running, so I became a Jew again. (Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, 88-89, George Burns) Invite your friends to join us for Vacation Bible School which starts next Sunday evening. Perhaps they will want to join St. John's Presbyterian Church -- at least until their watch stops working.
A Jewish proverb says: "A mother understands what a child does not say." In The Teen Whisperer, Mike Linderman describes a conversation between a mother and her daughter.
The other day I walked into the kitchen, where my wife, Helen, and my daughter, Alicia, were having a conversation. They were just catching up on their day, and all was going well. Alicia was also leafing through a catalog. She turned the magazine to my wife and said, "This top is cute."
Helen looked at the photograph and said, "But where could you wear something like that?"
Alicia shrugged her shoulders. "Anywhere. Why?"
Helen pursed her lips and looked away for a moment. "It's just kind of, I don't know . . . . It's not something I'd think you'd wear, that's all."
"And just what do you think I'd be likely to wear? A frumpy sweater? A raincoat?"
"Alicia, honey, all I'm saying . . ."
"Jeez, mom, you don't have to tell me what you're saying. I KNOW what you're saying. You are so critical all the time of every single thing I do, I say, I wear."
"Please don't exaggerate. You always do this. You don't have to be so sensitive about every little thing I say."
'Oh, so that's another one of my faults?"
"That's not what I'm saying. All I'm saying is I don't think that top is cute, that's all. End of story."
"Why didn't you just say so?" Helen flips to another page, "I like it, but it's not anything I would want or wear."
"Have you thought about what you might want to do for your birthday."
"I have an exam in chemistry, and I haven't had a chance to review a single thing in the last chapter." (Mike Linderman, The Teen Whisperer: How to Break Through the Silence and Secrecy of Teenage Life, p. 208) This strained conversation reflects Paul's conflicted feelings in Romans, Chapter Seven, where he describes the struggle we all experience. We want to communicate one thing but end up saying something else..
In Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, Amy Lederman describes her relationship with her grandmother, Edna Wolf.
"Born in the small Russian town of Lust in 1887, Edna Wolf left Russia at eighteen months and sailed to America with her two older sisters, her brother and her father. Her mother was forced to stay behind because she could not leave her own blind mother alone. When she was finally able to come to America, she traveled with nothing but the clothes on her back. "But she tricked them," Grandma would tell me with a twinkle in her eye. "She hid our Sahibs candlesticks in the lining of her winter coat and never took that coat off until she landed in New York."
Those candlesticks were a testimony to a way of life; they were the triumph of a broken family fighting to find their way back to one another in a land that promised everything.
Grandma lit those candlesticks every holiday and each Shabbat. She would close her eyes and mumble while swaying back and forth in front of the dancing flames. As a young girl, I thought she knew everything, that the power of the world rested in those small, freckled fingertips that spread the warmth of the candle's light. I saw her as the source of our family tradition, the ultimate word on what we should all do and be.
I will never forget the day I visited her in the nursing home just a few months before she died. She had become diminished, not so much by age but by the bitter ironies of her life. She seemed happy when I told her about my two children, my home, my husband. But my law career and the many aspirations I had were of no real interest to her. She held my hand on the small sofa, and I stared at the big, brown freckles that covered her skin. She needed so much reassurance now, to know that her life had been meaningful.
I painted her fingernails while we talked, and she reminisced about the old days. Of her sisters and the hours they spent laughing together in the kitchen, sharing secrets, when they all lived together in the house on Fair Street. Of my father and what a "prince" he had been but how he never understood her anymore. I sensed in her ramblings that she was in another time and place entirely.
As I got ready to leave, she slowly got up from her chair. She walked towards me and then, changing her mind, headed directly toward the hutch that contained the few remaining items she kept from the old days. She took down the beautiful brass candlesticks that I had loved since I was a little girl. "My darling girl," she said with tears in her eyes, "you have always been filled with the love of your Jewishness. May you find joy and meaning in whatever you chose to do with your life. But remember, nothing you do will be more important than your family." She handed me the candlesticks and said, "It is only right that these should belong to you now."
It has been almost four years now since my grandma died. it seems that all I need is the scent of cinnamon or a jar of Ponds Cold Cream to bring her back to me. But I know that as time passes she will become harder to recall. I am certain this is why she gave me her candlesticks. For each time I light the candles, I feel her love for me gently burning in the flames and bestowing upon me the power and inner-strength to create a life of meaning and purpose. And in doing so, I have come to understand the legacy of her life and the meaning of her blessing. (Chicken Soup for the Jewish Soul, 204-206, AmyHirshberg Lederman ) "The mother's heart is the child's schoolroom," said Henry Ward Beecher. And I think we can add to that, "The grandmother's heart is the grown child'ssafe-house."
Growing pains begin when we make the journey through the birth canal and continue until make the journey into the world to come when our baptism is complete in death. In the meantime, from the cradle to the grave, we all experience growing pains. Jesus, himself a Jew, experienced growing pains. So did Paul, another Jew. So do you. So do I.
Growing pains are not fun and they do not make us happy. But growing pains are signs that we are maturing in God's grace. Live into your growing pains this week. Feel them. Acknowledge them. Confess them to God. Pray with Paul, saying: "Who will rescue me from this body of death?" Then rejoice with Paul, saying: "Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!" All things are possible with God. A Chinese proverb says, "There is only one pretty child in the world, and every mother has it." You are God's pretty child. The only one She has. Remember that truth and live on into your growing pains.
