The Cycle of the Saints

I hope you enjoy the sermon I preached last Sunday at New Covenant Fellowship Austin.

Old Testament Lesson: Psalm 121

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. The Lord is thy keeper: the Lord is thy shade upon thy right hand. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.

New Testament Lesson: John 14:18-23

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me; and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.” Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, “Lord, how is it that you will reveal yourself to us, and not to the world?” Jesus answered him, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.

Sermon: The Cycle of the Saints

Over Thanksgiving, Lucy and I took our son Rick to Dallas to visit her father. We call him Bumpa. Bumpa is a man among men. He is a devoted husband, father and grandfather. He was a high powered lawyer in Dallas until he retired and became the gentle neighborhood lawyer and public defendant in Salado. He is also a life-long Episcopalian. He is likely in the final season of life, staying in a memory care unit. He is what I call “old man crazy.” He’s still in there yet he often gets confused.

Last weekend Lucy told him that the daughter of a dear friend had lost her battle to cancer.

“That’s okay,” Bumpa said. “She’s just back in the cycle.”

That isn’t exactly what we would call a pastoral answer. It freaked Lucy out a little bit because she saw it as a sign of his mental decline. I, on the other hand, saw it as a sign of near spiritual perfection. Bumpa knows that the deceased is in the cycle just as he knows that he is in the very same cycle. A cycle that includes birth, death, and rebirth, though not necessarily in that order. Today, I’m calling it The Cycle of the Saints. That is the title of this sermon.

This morning I want to lift up two particular members of this congregation who are also in the cycle with us: Baby Owen and Don Davis. Owen’s birth and Don’s death have made NCFA feel like “a real church” to more than anything else that’s happened in years. So I want to reflect on their particular gifts as a way to showcase that God is doing exactly what God has promised to do, not just in an abstract cosmic sense but right here in front of our very eyes.

Our sermon text, Psalm 121, in one of exactly two psalms I memorized when I was a child. We read the King James Version this morning because that’s how Jesus wrote it. Just kidding. That’s the version I memorized. In passing, I’ll say that it is a good example of how the King James misses the meaning of the original text. It begins, “I lift up mine eyes until the hills from when cometh my help.” Since my spiritual home is in the mountains of North Georgia, I’ve always understood those piney hills to be the source of my help.

In more accurate translation, the psalm opens, “I lift up my eyes to the hills. Where does my help come from? It comes from the Lord.” Small change in the text. Enormous change in meaning.

The key to this morning’s sermon is Verse 8. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.” Hear that again. “The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”

God will protect all of our entrances and our exits from our beginning until our eternity. Don has just gone out of our material world. Owen has just come in. Both have always been and always will be under the watchful eye of God. That is the Cycle of the Saints. Do I believe it? Yes! Why? Not because I read it in Psalm 121. I believe Psalm 121 because I’ve seen God doing exactly what it says right here.

Don’s going out. Don was an impressive man. Smart as heck, of course. A highly respected academic. Extensively published. I’m not exactly sure how this worked, but in 2006 the Library of Congress published a 400-page Festschrift titled, “Historical Essays Honoring the Legacy of Donald G. Davis Jr.” I ordered a copy off of Amazon yesterday but it won’t be here for a week or so. I’ll bring it when it arrives.

Don was also a tenacious missionary. Where did he go to spread the Good News? Here, to New Covenant Fellowship. Don was one of the original missionaries that Covenant Presbyterian Church sent out into the world to start this church. And as you may have noticed, he is the only one who continued to serve this body on a regular basis. His funeral will be held at his mother church.

The most noticeable thing about Don is that he refused to act like an old man. Lucy and I were having lunch with him one day, when he said, “I like women.” Immediately I knew that we’d get along famously. Then he said, “I’ve got a sweetheart. Her name is Anita.” I’ve read all kinds of stories about promiscuity in old folks homes, so I didn’t know exactly what to think about that. As we have all come to know, this wasn’t some octogenarian fling. He loved her dearly. We prayed for her often in worship. She died recently and Don flew out to Colorado to presided at her funeral. Then he came home to Westminster Manor here in Austin and joined her in heaven the next week. It’s not at all uncommon for true lovers to leave this live soon after one another. The Lord preserved Don’s going out.

And thy coming in. Baby Owen. Do you remember the change that came over this congregation when Ari and Megan announced in worship that they were going to have a baby? The new life wasn’t just in Megan’s womb. There was new life in the church. The church prayed and prayed and waited and waited and one day he was born. One day we got to see him on ZOOM. One day we got to meet him in worship. One day this church will baptize him. We don’t yet know how God will use Owen to change the world in the future but we can already see how he has changed our blessed congregation.

A quick work about baptism. I love stories of Catholic grandmothers sneaking into their grandbaby’s nurseries in the middle of the night to baptize them without their parent’s permission. They think that is necessary for salvation, but that isn’t what our Reformed Christian Tradition teaches. We don’t believe salvation happens when you’re baptized or when you publicly accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. We believe and teach that Owen was called to salvation before the beginning of the world in eternity and that his baptism will be a sign that the church and his parents on his behalf recognize his sainthood and promise to do our best to live accordingly.

Yes, the Lord shall preserve thy going out and they coming in from this time forth and even forevermore.

I think that line would have been a excellent end to this sermon and I should probably quit while I’m ahead, but I want to get to the so what of all of this.

How, exactly, does God do this “preserving”? I suspect God does it in countless ways that we will never understand. And this morning, I want us to focus on one particular way. That is the church.

In our new testament lesson, Jesus promises us,

“I will not leave you orphaned … Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will

love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” God the Father will love those who love Jesus. That’s us. Those who love Jesus. The saints. “And we,” that is God the Father and Jesus the Son, “will come to them and make our home with them.” God preserves us by being present with us. How physically present is God in His church? Just as present as that loaf of bread and that cup of juice over there on the table. Meditate on that as you receive communion later in the service.

Here I want to prevent a likely point of confusion. When we talk about God’s Church, we are not just talking about the institutional church, as if our only chance for God to be with us in that particular way is in Sunday morning worship. The church is present wherever two or more of us are gathered in Christ’s name.

And this brings us to the challenge I want to set before us. In our passage from the Gospel of John, Jesus also says, “They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me.” There is a connection between being a part of the church, i.e. a part of the Body of Christ and obedience. That’s why, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven,” (Matthew 7:21). This is part of what it means to call Jesus the Christ, the Lord, the King of Heaven and Earth.

This is also the Good News. Because following Jesus isn’t hard. Christ did all of the hard work for us on the cross. That’s the point. This is why he says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light,” (Matthew 11:30). Here is my testimony for today. The more completely I have tried to follow Jesus, the easier my life has become. And I’m terrible at it. I fall short every day. And that’s why we confess our sins to God and to one another.

So I’ll close with these questions. How can we improve at being church for one another? Can we be more diligent in our prayers? Can we show up at worship a little more often? Can we study more together? Can we hang out more together? Can we really enjoy that potluck dinner after worship?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, Hallelujah and Amen.