From his last Lenten Sermon Series

It is the job of religion to identify that deeply and universally experienced human hunger and to address it. It is what Christian faith is about. It is what the church is about. And so this brief series of Lenten sermons explores “A Full and Faithful Life.” We will be looking at and thinking about the Sermon on the Mount, a collection of Jesus’ teachings, the point of which was, and is, to help his disciples, his followers, to meet that deep hunger inside every human being, to get to that sense of wholeness, that “rapture of being alive,” to live a full and faithful life.

And then further on in the sermon–

A memory has haunted me for decades. I was seventeen years old. I was walking from my home to the high school. It was an early morning, the second Saturday in November, the day of the Pennsylvania State cross-country meet. I was on my way to the school to meet the bus that would take us to State College. We were one of the favorite teams to win the state championship. I was excited, nervous, and cold. It was a bitterly cold morning, snowing hard with several inches already on the ground. At the foot of the wooden footbridge over the vast railroad yard that divided the city in two, I saw a little boy, maybe five or six years old. He was just standing there by the bridge, shivering. What I remember is that he had no gloves on and he was very cold and it was 7:00 in the morning and his nose was running a lot. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have any money. Even if I did, I don’t know what he would have done with it. So I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped his nose and left him there standing at the foot of the bridge.

I don’t think I have ever told that to anyone before. But the truth is I think about him a lot. I wonder what ever became of him. Why couldn’t I have done more? Why didn’t I . . .?

I don’t presume that God put him there for me to wipe his nose, but I have come to believe that God used him to touch my heart, to teach me that religion is more than a lot of beliefs; that Christianity, if it makes any sense at all, is not about how precisely we memorize the creed or how long and ardently we can pray, but what we do about a little boy shivering in the cold at the foot of the bridge.

John M. Buchanan

March 13, 2011

Full Sermon

https://fourthchurch.org/sermons/2011/031311.html