Thank you for the invitation to spend several Sundays a month with you for a while. I am deeply honored and very pleased.
This is a great church, one of the very important congregations in the PCSUA, whose continuing strength and faithful ministry is vital to the entire denomination.
My daughter and son-in-law were members of this church along with three of my beautiful, outstanding, brilliant, world-class grandchildren. Grandchildren, I have been told, find their way into my sermons. I have 13 of them, so be forewarned. I have worshipped with you and been in the pulpit before. I appreciate your Presbyterian worship and superb music and your faithful representation of Presbyterians in your community.
My friend, Blair Monie, is, quite simply, one of the best of us, respected and admired widely. It is an honor to follow him – and in some way, I hope, help you with the transition to your new pastor.
I’m delighted to be joining your wonderful staff, two of whom I know well and respect enormously.
Sue will accompany me on a few weekend trips from Chicago and is here this morning.
Leadership transitions can be creative and good times in the life of a congregation with regularly expressed gratitude for what has been and hopeful anticipation of what is yet to be.
Thank you for allowing me to be part of it here at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church.
Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
Danger! Giants Ahead!
July 13, 2014
John M. Buchanan

Have you noticed that on the eve of every great undertaking you begin to have second thoughts? A month ago we were remembering June 6, 1944, the 70th anniversary of D-Day. There were plenty of second thoughts. There were monumental risks with potentially catastrophic outcomes. It fell to General Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, to make the decision to launch the largest military invasion in history; weighing all the variables, among them unpredictable weather; and write out a press release assuming full responsibility in the quite possible event that the invasion would be repulsed and the undertaking a failure. It would have been easier to put it off, and a lot less costly to not go at all.
It happens a lot, in far les dramatic fashion. One time, long ago, we decided to take our young family – our five children ages 5 to 13 – to live in Scotland for the summer, in a Church of Scotland manse, in a small town in the Western Highlands. I was to be the pastor of the Parish Kirk, while the Scottish minister tended to my flock in Central Indiana. We scrapped together every penny we had, borrowed the rest, packed pretty much all our clothing into 21 pieces of luggage, and the night before our departure, after the children were in bed, Sue and I looked at each other and said, “What exactly were we thinking? Whose idea was this? We could have had a wonderful summer – the kids at the pool every day, cookouts in our back yard…Who knows what we are about to get ourselves into?” You’ve been there. Before every great undertaking there are second thoughts. The allure of the known, the familiar, the routine is powerful. The unknown is full of risk and frightening.
It reminds me of two of my very favorite incidents in the Bible.
Moses has led the people of Israel out of Egypt. They have escaped the pursuing Egyptians army at the Red Sea. Now they are out. Slavery – those years of oppression in Egyptian captivity – are behind them. They are suddenly, dramatically, frighteningly free, headed north into the vast, uncharted wilderness of Sinai. Moses, one of the great leaders of all time, has organized them, counted heads – that’s where the Book of numbers got its name – has put an administrative structure in place and a chain of command and an orderly plan for marching by day and encampment every night. It was exciting, exhilarating. They are free at last and a promising future beckons. And the first thing they do is complain about the food, the menu. They are subsisting on manna, a white, flaky substance they find on the ground every morning. it’s pretty boring, actually. They’d like a little variety.
“If only we had meat to eat! Remember how good we had it back in Egypt…fish to eat, cucumbers, melons, garlic – there’s nothing out here but manna.”
Moses takes the issue to God. Quails appear everyday. They have meat. The whining stops. But now they have come to the border of the land of Canaan. A disclaimer: This is not about Israel and Palestine today and who owns what part of that land. The issues there today are tough and complicated, and tragic and divisive. We need to be praying for Israelis and Palestinians, their families, their future. This not about them.
They are at the border. Moses sends out a reconnaissance party to see what kind of land it is. Are there trees in it? Does it produce fruit? And the people – what are they like? Do they live in cities? Are the cities fortified?
The reconnaissance party leaves, looks around for forty days and returns to report. It’s a good news/bad news report. The good news is that the land is fertile, flowing with milk and honey. They have brought samples of grapes with them. The bad news is that there are people in there – a lot of big, strong people. Some of the older translations called them giants. Giants ahead!
“We can’t do this. They’re so big and strong – we feel like grasshoppers.”
The word spread like wildfire through the encampment that night. “We can’t do this! No way! There are giants up there. Whose ideas was this anyhow?” They fretted and worried and wept all night. And then someone said, “I know where we will be safe. I know where there is plenty of food. Let’s go back to Egypt. Let’s go back to the security of slavery.”
The night of fear and weeping ends. In the morning sun two leaders, Joshua and Caleb, speak out. They repeat the vision of hope, the promise of freedom and announced their intention to proceed based on their trust in God.
The venture is a success. The giants were not all that big and strong after all, and the people discovered that they had it in them to become a lot more than grasshoppers.
It is one of the major themes of the Bible, from the people of Israel quaking in fear for the future, not just in this incident, but repeatedly during their long forty-year sojourn in the wilderness on the way to the Promised Land, right up to the early Christian Church, terrified at the prospect of persecution by Rome, the most powerful empire in the world, and St. Paul telling them they could do all things through Christ who strengthens them and that nothing would ever separate them from the love of God, promising that “there is no fear in love: love casts out fear.”
And, in the middle, another favorite of mine, a man lying on his pallet, his mat, for thirty-eight years, having given up on the idea of an alternate future, of health and wholeness and walking again and Jesus jolting him, “Get up: pick up your bed and walk.”
Thirty-years this man has been lying there beside the Pool of Bethzatha in Jerusalem. That pool, which archaeologists have discovered, complete with steps so that bathers could walk into it, was thought to have healing powers. It was fed by an intermittent spring, and when the spring activated and the surface of the water roiled, the people who had been sitting and lying, waiting, hurried to be first into the pool to receive its healing therapy.
That’s what this man has been doing for 38 years. It has become his life’s work…waiting. Four decades lying on his mat. Distinguished New Testament scholar Raymond B said that he’d be funny if he wasn’t so pathetic.
When Jesus saw him and understood that he had been lying there like that for 38 years, he asked a blunt, not politically correct question: “Do you want to walk?”
That’s not very compassionate. We ministers take classes to learn never to ask a question like that. We learn to say things like, “You must get discouraged lying there day in and day out, with no one to help you into the pool. Why don’t you tell me how you’re feeling about all this?” Never “Are you really serious? Do you want to be well?”
I want to make helpful suggestions. Why don’t you lie a little closer to the pool, keep one leg in the water all the time, build a little ramp so you can slide right in when the time comes?
Jesus sees through the game of victimhood the man is playing. he doesn’t attempt to problem solve, instead cuts to the heart of the matter: “Do you want to be healed?” And when the man starts to make excuses – I don’t have anyone to help me, I always get pushed aside, everyone beats me into the pool, Jesus becomes even more blunt: “Get up. Stand up. Pick up your bed and walk.”
And to his everlasting credit the man does it: takes the biggest risk in his life – stands up and walks away from his victimization, takes a huge step away from the familiar comfort of life on his mat, dependent on the generosity of others, takes responsibility finally for his own life. To be sure, it was risky. He might embarrass himself. He might fall down and injure himself. it took a lot of courage to take that first step.
I am sure that there is not a one of us who cannot identify – with the people of Israel, facing the danger of an unknown future and sensing the tug of the familiar and comfortable past, even if it meant slavery; and with the man who spent his life lying on his mat, going through the motions, but long ago having given up on an alternative and healthier future.
The late Rollo May, a psychiatrist and philosopher, and a pretty good theologian, in his book The Courage to Create, wrote:
“In human beings, courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. And assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality. The acorn becomes an oak, the kitten becomes a cat – automatically. But a man or woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. Human beings attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day to day. These decisions require courage.” (pp 4-5)
We know what it feels like on a deeply personal basis. It may be a new vocational venture – which means leaving something comfortable and familiar behind. It will mean leaving the security of home to go off to college for some. It may be and will be, a a four-year-old feeling the gentle pressure of a mother’s hand to step up, for the very first time, into the school bus. it may be facing the grueling ordeal of chemotherapy. It may be selling a beloved home, downsizing – or “right sizing” I have learned to say – moving to something smaller, and starting over. It may be retiring from a much-loved profession and facing a future without the safe comfortable and pleasant daily routine. And it may be, and surely, is the facing of final mystery and letting go of life itself.
The promise of these ancient stories, the promise of God, is that we can do this, whatever it is. From across more than two thousand years comes the voice of our Lord. “Stand up. Take up your bed and walk.,” and centuries before that, the voices of two brave and faithful men.:
“The land that we went through is an exceedingly good land. If the Lord is pleased with us he will bring us into this land…flowing with milk and honey…Only…do not fear…the Lord is with us.”
Thanks be to God.