Sermon 614+January 31, 2010

Sermon 614
4 Epiphany
January 31, 2010
719th Week as Priest
545th Week at St. Dunstan’s
180th Week at St. Matthew’s in-the-Pines

You Are Accepted.

Peace be to this place, and to all who dwell in it. Amen.

A Block of Ice.

When I was a child growing up in Auburn, the world was a very different place from what it is today. People still used iceboxes instead of refrigerators, and an icebox required a weekly trip to the Auburn Ice Company located just across the railroad tracks next to Spencer Lumber Company. I recall a trip in the worst heat of summer. My brothers and I were riding in the back seat of the Tiger, an orange 1958 Chevrolet coupe with lots of chrome and no air-conditioning. A very tall African American man brought a block of ice to the car with a pair of tongs. There was straw sticking to the frozen block, and I remember he placed it carefully in the back seat right in front of me. Back then, long before Rainbows or Tevas or Toms, we went barefoot in the summer or wore flip-flops that cost 19 cents at the A&P. I put my feet on that cold cold block of ice and thought I was in heaven.

Going to the Picture Show.

There was a drive-in movie on the way to Opelika, about where Panera Bread is located, across the highway from what is now Colonial Mall. We never went to the drive-in movie and I never knew why. However, my five brothers and I did go to the Tiger Theater on Saturday mornings. The seats were wooden, and all the kids would stomp on the floor until the picture show started. The first feature was usually a Flash Gordon or Batman serial, followed by a couple of Bugs Bunny cartoons, and then the main attraction, something like The Absent-Minded Professor  or Son of Flubber  starring Fred MacMurray, or That Darned Cat with Dean Jones and Hayley Mills. I won six Zero candy bars, the only thing I ever won, and I gave five of them to my brothers. The price of admission was six Royal Crown bottle caps and a Golden Flake potato chip bag. My oldest brother Mike always robbed the Coke machine at the Amoco station to get the RC bottle caps, and my mother bought the chips in those little individual bags for our school lunches.

Squeezing the Sugar Cane.

Once in a while we would have to go to Opelika. There was a department store named “Thrasher-Wright’s” that carried Wrangler blue jeans. Mike and Wick would get three new pairs of jeans, and the rest of us would have to grow into their old ones. But by that time, the knees were all blown-out and holey, and they needed patches. I didn’t have a new pair of jeans until I was a teenager.

There was a back road that now leads to Tiger Town, or you could take the Opelika Highway. I remember a gas station on the way that had restrooms marked “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.” They also had two water fountains. The signs read “White” and “Colored.”

Before you got to the drive-in movie, there was a drive-in hamburger place called the Hungry Boy. It was the only such place in Auburn or Opelika, and it was always busy. We never went there as a family, but occasionally my brother Mike would take us to the Hungry Boy for two Hungry Boy burgers, French fries, and a Coke.

Past the drive-in movie was a curb market that sold vegetables and watermelons and boiled peanuts. An old mule walked in a big circle around a machine that squeezed the juice out of sugar cane. My dad would sometimes bring us several stalks of sugar cane and cut it up with a machete, and peel off the outer bark, and give each of us a piece to chew on. It was good.

Throwing Newspapers.

All of the Warren boys carried newspapers except Andy, who was still just a baby. We rode our bikes all over  … up town to pick up our papers, to the City Pool to swim, and of course to the Tiger Theater. My route was 32 papers from Southside Grocery, where Amsterdam Café is now, to the top of Woodfield Hill and back, and wound up on Camellia Drive near Wrights Mill Road Elementary. Mr. Montwell was the newspaper manager. He chain-smoked Kent cigarettes and drove a silver Buick Riviera. His wife had blue hair and lots of jewelry. Each Christmas, Mr. Montwell would give us a silver dollar for each year we’d worked for him, and then my brother Mike would buy our silver dollars from us for a dollar and a quarter. He still has a large horde of silver dollars, and they are now worth more than a million dollars.

If it rained on Sunday morning, our father would take us on our paper routes, but it was hardly worth it. You still got soaking wet, and you had to run non-stop to deliver your papers and keep up with a moving car. There was a haunted house at the corner of Wrights Mill and Samford, and sometimes you saw the witch sitting on the front porch in the dark and the fog. We would ride fast past the witch’s house and the old cemetery on Armstrong.

I spent most of the money I made throwing newspapers at the Kopper Kettle and Southside Grocery. You could get two chocolate-covered doughnuts and a 6 oz. Coke for about 50 cents.

Kidnapped by Methodists.

 I was a cradle Episcopalian who had been kidnapped as an infant by a roving band of Methodists and raised as one of their six boys. I knew this because my brother Wick had always assured me that I was “adopted” because I looked nothing like anyone else in my alleged family. I wore thick glasses and had a large egg-shaped head. I was bony and thin, and at least six inches shorter than any of my brothers when they were at the same age. I knew something was wrong, I just couldn’t figure out what it was.

We went to the First Methodist Church of Auburn every Sunday morning and to MYF every Sunday night. My mother made spaghetti for hundreds and fake tea and blond brownies with cream sugar icing drizzled on them. We went to Toomer’s Drugs between Sunday School and church, and my best friend Johnny shoplifted Mad magazines and candy and plastic army men. I could never bring myself to steal anything. Well, once I did take a pack of Wrigley’s Spearmint gum which cost five cents. I slipped it into my pants pocket at the lemonade counter and walked to the double glass doors. I froze there, trembling with fear and shame. I stumbled back to the cash register, placed a dime on the counter, and fled for the Methodist Church. My life of crime ended there.

We sat in the balcony during the worship service and tossed spit balls onto the crowd below. I can still see one I threw; it landed in Mrs. Goggins’s beehive hair-do.

One time Chris Beck brought a Phillips-head screwdriver to church. During the minister’s sermon, Chris dismantled the book rack on the pew in front of us. Just when Dr. Jones reached his third and final point, the book rack and hymnals fell to the floor with a loud crash. We fled in every direction, leaving Chris Beck stranded. Dr. Jones stopped his sermon, pointed into the balcony, and called on Chris Beck to stand up, which he did, still holding his Phillips-head screwdriver. Shortly after that, we started skipping church altogether and went to the basement of Samford Hall to buy cigarettes from the vending machine.

I had never smoked before, but Johnny knew all about it. He had been smoking rabbit tobacco in the woods for years. I smoked a couple of Winstons and didn’t feel very good. After carrying trays at the War Eagle Cafeteria, I went home and lay down on my bed. Just as I was drifting off to a fitful sleep, my mother woke me up to come into the kitchen. She had washed a big load of blue jeans with a pack of Winston cigarettes and was looking for the guilty party. I guess my green complexion and queasy expression gave me away. That completely ended my career as a juvenile delinquent.

The Psalmist said, “In you, O Lord, have I taken refuge; let me never be ashamed.” I can’t imagine feeling the scorn and disregard that I felt for the church back in those days. Sure, there were moments, but they were few and far between. Mostly I was just clueless about it all. Mostly I was thinking about how I hated wearing glasses and a crew cut. “For you are my hope, O Lord God, my confidence since I was young.” Any grace I received, any blessings that happened to come my way, were surely the actions of a loving God.

Jeremiah wrote that he knew God had formed him in the womb to be a prophet to the nations. I had no idea what I was doing from one day to the next. I was a confused, self-conscious, insecure, weird little kid. I knew nothing of the love of Christ. I was nothing. But God’s love for me was patient and kind, never arrogant or rude—even when I was. And I was forever being arrogant and rude and irritable and resentful. Somehow, for some reason, which I still don’t understand to this day, but which I gladly and gratefully and fully accept, I was brought out of the despair of my own sad self. I was sustained and strengthened, even when I wasn’t aware of it.

Surprised that I lived past twenty-four, and then unbelievably thirty, I am now pushing sixty, and I realize that I am blessed beyond all measure and all imagination. I have a great life as a priest and pastor. I love the people of my congregation at St. Matthew’s in-the-Pines, and the students and friends of St. Dunstan’s. I love my wife and family. I love my Border collie and my perfectly excellent grandson John Wells (not necessarily in that order). I love the church and all of its liturgy and hymnody, prayers and propers, architecture and nomenclature, tradition and spontaneity.

I am one of those rare people who has come back home after such a long time, and I have been welcomed and treated with rich and undeserved honor. I don’t deserve, but I certainly accept it. What I am talking about is that wonderful gift that is called God’s grace.

This past week in EFM we studied Paul Tillich, a German theologian from the World War II era. Tillich escaped Hitler’s grasp and came to New York, where he taught at Union Theological Seminary. In one of his best sermons, Tillich wrote this about the gift of God’s grace …

You Are Accepted.

Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of meaninglessness and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we feel we have violated another life, a life which we have loved, or from which we were estranged.

Grace strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage.

Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!”

Amen.

2,023 words