PROMISES TO KEEP Jobn M, Buchanan
I fohn 3:14-18 Broad Street Presbyterian Church

November 13, 1983 Columbus, Ohia

The late Tom Dooley was 3 young Navy surgeon in the 1950's who resigned
his commission to practice medicine in the mountains of what was once Laos, He
established hospitals, trained midwives and aids, taught hygiene, raised money,
and badégered government officials and business executives and religious leaders
all over the world. He was instrumental in the organization of Medico and became
a well known and somewhat glamorous figure with the American media - Life Maga~
zine, Readers’ Digest, Saturday Review. Dooley expressed an idealism, an altruism,
a self sacrificing dedication which inspired a lot of people in the late fifties and
early sixties. VISTA, the Peace Corps, the Civil Rights Movement were expressions
of that same high idealism and vision of a better world for all people. And then,
at 32, Dooley had cancer. After surgery he returned to Lacs, fully aware that
his disease was terminal, He worked frantically, literally until he droppea two
years later. At his funeral, a Requiem Mass in St. Louis, the presiding Bishop read
several lines from Robert Frost's "Stepping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” because
the poem had been a favorite of Dooley's.

"Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though:

He will not see me stepping here

To wateh his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness belis a shake
To ask if there is same mistake.
The onty other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep.

And niles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before | sleep."

The Bishop said Dooley loved that poem, that he had miles to go before he
slept and promises to keep. The Bishop said Dooley had kept the promise. I have
never forgotten Tom Dooley. His life expressed for me two great truths: that
the meaning of our humanity is somehow established when we put our lives in the
service of sorme great cause, and, that each of us decides, in these terms, to live
fully or not to Hve fully. No one can decide for us. It is for each of us, a personal
and urgent matter. Both of those meanings are, by my lights, at the heart of the
Christian faith as well.

Iam told that those lovely, dark, deep woods which sound so welcoming in
Frost's poem can be read as a metaphor for death. The moment then becomes
critically important - a fierce struggle between two alternatives: to drive inta
oblivion, or to live. And the resolution is one of brave intentionality. “But I have
promises te keep and miles te go before I sleep..."

The first is about a shepherd whe leaves 99 sheep in the wilderness to search
for one who is lest. The second story is about 4 woman who turns her house upside
down Icoking for one lost coin, The final story is about a man who had two sans.
it is a story about.grace.

What this story is not about is a prodigal son. It is a misleading designation.
Prodigality means to be wasteful in a reckless way, fa squander, or if can mean
to be generous or lavish. In both cases the character who is prodigal is the father,
and a close second is the fatted calf. The sons I would submit simply act like people
usually act.

Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest who writes novels about grace, turned up
last Sunday in the magazine section of The New York Times in a new feature, "For
Men Only.” The topic was “Fathers and Sons." Capon observes: “It is a tribute
to the indestructibility of human nature that males can spend some 18 years in a
paternal presence that is by turns mute and explesive, tyrannical and charming,
aloof and meddling, heartless and sentimental, omnipotent and fragile - and still
not have to be carried out feet first." (NYT Magazine, 9/18/83, p. 10)

The sons in this story ~ the fellow ont spending the family fortune in sin city,
and the sour martyr working overtime in the field, are acting normally. The father
is not. He is prodigal: he is unusual, Bill Cosby does a routine on his own experience
as a son and a father which illustrates. He confesses to abiding skepticism about
the accuracy of the George Washington story involving the cutting down of a cherry
tree, George's honesty about his culpability and his father's marvelous even-handed
acceptance and refusal to punish George. Fathers, Cosby notes ~ don’t act like that.
Any father he knew would at least ask the boy what he was thinking about - and
muse out loud whether the boy was capable of rational thought.

The parable of the man and two sons is about God and a love so extravagant
it borders on the foolish, The parable ja about a love so unusual, so without conditions,
that it comes to have a power of its own. Something was working on that young
boy. as he slopped the hogs in a far country, and experienced a hunger so deep he
contemplated eating the stocks he was feeding te the pigs. It was more than physical
emptiness. When he remembered a full larder and place at the table - what he remem-
bered truly was a love which was still loving him, and a place at the table still being
held for him, and even though he constructed that homecoming speech and rehearsed
it over and over, he knew he'd never have to say it, never get to say it. He knew
when he came to the brow of the hill and looked across that valley ~ he'd see his
father there, waiting. And alk of that, more than physical hunger, turned the son
around and brought him home, The name for it is grace.

It is what is unique about the Gospel of dJesua Christ. Religion is mainly a
human device to persuade God to love us. The idea is simple. God has rules, If
we obey the rules God will love us, treat us generously. Lf we disobey the rules Gad
will hate us and we will be treated badly. The name of the process by which we
define, describe, and enforce the rules is “religion,”

The abiding power of that dynamic is always a surprise. I stopped for gas early
this morning ~ sometimes prodigal sons leave it on enmpty - and as I stepped up te
the window with my collar on a man buying cigarettes, obviously on his way home
irom an all-night celebration, said, "Oh, oh, Father ~- you caught me. Guess I better
go to church this morning." That's religion,

“je

being forgotten; living only for ourselves and then feeling unneeded; being uncon-
cerned about others and wanting no one to be concerned about us; neither laughing
nov being laughed at; neither crying for another nor being cried for by another."

With a small illustration Soelle helps us understand how subtle and Hfe-denying
materialism can be. One of her neighbors, an elderly gentleman, called her over
to inspect some minor damage to his property caused by playing children. He was
very distressed: he said - "This house is all we have left." Soelle chserves: "He
is already a dead man."

To the question of the ages, "How can we live? What must we do to lve?"
the Gospel of Jesus Christ says, "love: love the brethern - love the people God
gives you to love; love the community of which you are a part; love your family,
your school, your friends; love particularly your brothers and sisters in Christ. The
power of that derives from the fact that it was not conceived in the quiet detachment
of the ascholar's study, but in the humdrum and dangerous world of the first century,
by Christian people who had the interesting responsibility of trying to describe
their experience as disciples of Jesus in an environment that vasciHated between
total indifference to them and all-out hatred. They were alternatingly ignored
and burned to death - and the words they chose became, in this context, stunning!
"We know," one of them wrote, "that we have passed out of death into life hecause
we love the brethren." That's an astounding assertion: if you want to Hve you
have to love. if you want to move from death to Hfe you have to make some choices,
some affirmations about yourself which have to do with the pragmatic business
of loving those people Gad has given you to love. It sounds so simple. It sounds
almost too simple to be useful in the complexity of the life we lead. Of course
it isn't simple at all, It surely isn't easy. History has brought our generation to
a turning point: a point of important choices. “How shall we live? How shall we
proceed?" And to even the most cynical, the imperative to love, to somehow find
the key to justice and peace and the end of hunger - as an expression of love ~ loams
as our last and best and only hope. Years ago a New Testament scholar wrote words
about this passage, which are, | am sure, more relevant today, "Love is a requirement
which the universe itself imposes on man. Ethical love is not an option, nor an
invention of priests and moralists, nor an evolutionary sport. Love confronts {us}
as a Christian categorice: imperative from the heart of reality." (Paul Hoon, The
Interpreier's Bible, vol. 12, p. 260)

That's the broad view. History has brought us to the divide, We must decide
to love one ancther and our nation and brothers and sisters in other nations ~ if
the life we hold in trust for future generations is to survive. There is a more modest,
more personal perspective, of course. In the context of cur own lives each of us
must decide to Hve, to be, to affirm life. For us, on a personal level that is a faith
decision. It often is cast im religious or theological terms. I: always is a decision
to affirm onesel? by loving someone or something else.

Soelle writes: "There is indeed a God who must be experienced over and
over again. We find him not in storm, earthquake or fire...but in ower decisions
for him." (op. cit., p. 2}

wih

But that far country, wherever it is, is not our home, And the fact that on
occasion we know it with a terrible clarity: the fact that we do experience the
"essential homelessness"-ta which the theologian referred, the sin-sick heart for
which there is a Balm in Gilead of the old Gospel hymn, the homesickness of a young
boy in a far country, is evidence of the power of God's grace pulling at us, relentlessly,
always, never giving up on us.

There is a power at work in us, reminding us who we are - making us restless,
homesick, calling us home. The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thonypson called it and
wrote beautifully about God's relentless pursuit down across the labyrinth of the
years. Divine activity in Hfe, the Christian faith contends, is strong, subtle, and
relentless, It is a love that does not let us go.

The Christian Gospel calis out of us a confession of dependence on God that
most of us are reluctant to make, We want to find God, net be found by him. Grace,
someone said recently, sounds unAmerican. We want to understand God, not he
understood. We want to feel that our religiosity is a mark of our goodness, our piety,
our faith, not a gift from outside ourselves. The final symbol of grace is a stumbling
block,..the cross of Jesus Christ. What it means is that God's leve ultimately dies
for us, heals us by laying dawn Hfe itself. It is unlike anything that has ever happened
or will ever happen.

The respanse then is not grim piety and humorless morality. The only response
left is the joyful banquet of homecoming, the party thrown by the prodigal father.
Again, let Robert Capon describe it: (the father) "wants his son home, not so they
can spend their days in the confessional box, but so that, having gotten past that
tiresome preliminary, they can both get on with the lavish party which is the speciaity
of their many-mansioned house.,.Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding
alt the non-celibrants in the world...shouting its way through the streets pounding
at every door...until the prodigals come out and the elder brothers take their fingers
out of their ears.” (op, cit., p. 73)

The purpose is to welcome us home. It is to open us ta the healing, redeeming
love of God that can Hterally make us into new people, can Literally give us each
day as a new and unexpected gift, can Literally remake us so that, home at last,
each person, each relationship becomes a precious treasure, a surprise, a good gift
of God.

One of the joys of maturing is to understand more and more about the dynamics
between that father, running down the road to welcome his son, and that particularly
unloveable child. The older you get, the more plausible grace becomes, I find, The
cider you become the more you realize that it's a miracle of grace if anyone loves
you. The time does come when most of us finally see the truth, namely that good,
human love is always grace: that it has to do not with our merit, our attractiveness,
our loveableness - all very transitory conditions ~ but with the grace of that person
- that woman or man or child who somehow finds it possible to continue loving us,
putting up with us, tolerating us, hoping with us, standing with us to the end, The
time does come when we see, at last, that God's grace, in Jesus Christ, calis us hame,
then welcomes us home, and that we are finally, in Karl Barth's famous metaphor
“left with the great humility, the thankfulness of the child presented with many
gifts." Thanks be to God for that. Amen.

And it is not without cost - for it would be far easier to cut back, say no to all
the appeals for assistance, shut it all down, But before we do that we should stand
for just a moment before the intense power of Elijah Pierce's work, “Feed My Sheep"
and sense that this is the way to live ~- to be - to leve.

Psychologically, we are learning that each person decides to be and that the
decision to be is often synonymous with deciding to love. “We love and will the
world as an immediate, spontaneous totality. We will the world, create it by our
decision, our fiat, aur choice..." is the way Rollo May describes it. (Love and Wil,
p. 324)

Where does it come into focus for you? What miles do you have yet to go?
What promises do you have yet to keep? What choices for life, what decisions
to love are you not making because thay are too risky? The surprising message
of Christianity is that God wants you to be all you can be: that God the creator
calls each of us to choose Hfe: and that the context for that decision more often
than not will be the opportunity to love,

The Good News is that God shows the way, enables the way - by loving us.
The Good News is that Hfe, our life. has heen affirmed by this: "that he laid down
his own life for us." The Good News is that in faith, in trust, in choosing - we do
"pass from death into life because we love." Amen.