St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Strathroy, Ontario

The Threefold Cord

September 4, 2011

One of the funerals that I performed while I was off was for the Lysko family – Bill’s brother, Joe, took his own life, and he did it with no warning signs.  That is to say, the pressure that was building up inside him, leading him to this terrible and irrevocable decision, was shared with nobody.  Not his family.  Not his friends.  Nobody.  All these things, all the thoughts, all the problems, everything that was swirling and whirling in his mind, he tried to carry on his own, until he couldn’t do it any longer.

During the service, I likened this to a memory from my high school days:  we had one piano in our school, that spent most of its time in the Music Room but which occasionally had to be moved up to the gymnasium.  The route this usually took meant coming down three steps, rolling a short distance, then up three steps, up five or six more, a ninety degree turn, eight further steps, another ninety-degree turn, and then the last stretch of eight steps before getting to the gym’s level.  I don’t think we ever moved it with less than seven of us – it was an upright grand and weighed something like eight hundred pounds – we usually tried for about ten, and if each of us shared the load, it honestly felt like someone else must be bearing all the weight.  It truth, we were all sharing it.  If one or two had tried, they couldn’t have done it.  They’d have been crushed by the mass of the piano, or would have dropped it partway up the stairs and destroyed it or something like that.  But with many working together, the job was almost easy – almost;  it was still an eight-hundred pound piano being moved by ten burly guys who had to fit up those stairs, but it was better than someone trying to move it by themselves.

I mean, I’ve tried moving other things by myself before.  I remember a day not too long ago when I was removing the “pop fridge” that we’d acquired from a neighbour a few summers earlier – we were reconfiguring the room it was in and didn’t have the space for it, so out it was to go – and I decided that I could do it by myself.  I’m stubborn enough to do this job on my own, I said;  I mean, yes it’s a full-sized fridge, but it was about twenty years old and lighter than most of the ones that are made today.  I took the door off, emptied it of shelves and drawers, got it out of the room, down the hall, on its side, up the steps, and right to the ninety-degree spiral turn at the top of our stairwell when I suddenly realized that I didn’t have the leverage to get it up each remaining step and around the corner… and, of course, by the time I discovered this, I was in a position where I couldn’t even get it back down the steps in a controlled fashion.  Luckily, I expected Kathy home in about, oh, twenty minutes, so I stayed there, and when she came around the corner and saw the position I was in, I heard my full name, let me tell you!

But the Bible has, among its many truths, the assertion that we are not meant to be alone.  We are meant to be partners.  We are meant to share both joys and burdens with each other.  Even in the story of the Creation of Man, the second telling of it in Genesis 2, Man is created in the form of Adam, but God realizes that he had created partners for every other living thing and that the man was alone, and this was not good, and so Eve was created.  Now, I’ve said before that I’m not sure how literal a truth I take this story to be – it’s one of the things I’m hoping to take up with God after the Judgement, when I’m hopefully going to be allowed some questions – but the fact remains that the ancients who first told the story and then preserved it in the Hebrew Scriptures were very clear on that truth:  people are not meant to exist alone!  We are not supposed to be each of us in our own little bubble;  rather, we are part of a wider world, and we need to support each other in that wider world if we are to live as we are intended to by God.

One of the critical Scripture passages that I alluded to in Joe’s funeral service was from the fourth chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes.  Ecclesiastes is an odd book.  Tradition says that it was written by Solomon, but it’s a very different Solomon than the one who compiled the Book of Proverbs or lived the life recorded in the First Book of Kings.  This Solomon is older, and in looking back on his life he is seeing ways in which he more or less wasted some of the time that was given to him, so he sought to leave behind some advice that he hoped would make a difference in the lives of those who would read it after he was gone.  In the fourth chapter of the book, he wrote this:

⁹Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil.  ¹⁰For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help.  ¹¹Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?  ¹²And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

We are meant to exist together, to work together, to live together, to bear up, support and help each other when needed, to raise each other up when we are down, and to raise each other higher when we are up!  We can’t do anything that’s really worth doing all on our own.  Consider the greatest surgeon in the world – how good could he be without everyone else in the world taking care of the rest of the patient’s needs, and even his own?  A pilot may seem to be in sole control of a plane, but there are people watching the plane from the moment it leaves the ground, trying to make sure that it stays on the right track, not to mention the maintenance crew that makes sure it’s fixed up and ready to fly (or land!).  Or consider the Miami Heat from last season – everyone in Miami was all excited that they were going to have Lebron James and Chris Bosh, together with Dwayne Wade and the rest of the team, and a championship was virtually expected from Day 1.  Well, the championship didn’t come – they lost to the Dallas Mavericks in the Finals – and it became apparent at points during the season that there were struggles with proverbial “lack of I in team.”  If they ever do learn to play with each other, though, and with the other nine players who make up the supporting cast, well, they will be celebrating championships in Miami they way they did in Chicago in the 90’s.

 

Now, put this together with the psalm I was meaning to look at today.  Psalm 150, which reads,

¹ Praise the LORD! Praise God in his sanctuary; praise him in his mighty firmament!
² Praise him for his mighty deeds; praise him according to his surpassing greatness!
³ Praise him with trumpet sound; praise him with lute and harp!
⁴ Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and pipe!
⁵ Praise him with clanging cymbals; praise him with loud clashing cymbals!
⁶ Let everything that breathes praise the LORD! Praise the LORD!

Everything that breathes… you, me, all the animals, all the plants, the sea as it rocks and waves, the land as it rumbles and flexes… everything that moves and breathes and lives praises the Lord by its very existence, and we are called to further praise God with our conscious minds for what we have been given!  We praise Him in all times.

I love how this message came through in the movie Facing the Giants, where the coach is trying to change his team’s philosophy from one where winning is all that matters to one where praising God in all things is what matters.  The team gels around this new ideal, producing not just a closer connection with God for all of the team members, but also a string of wins that take them into the playoffs for the first time in years.  When they do lose a game, one of the team leaders turns to the rest in the locker room and says, “Remember what we’re supposed to do;  whether we win or whether we lose, we will praise Him.”  This theme was then repeated by the coach’s wife who, upon being told that her latest pregnancy test was again negative, turns her eyes upward and says, “In all things, I will praise you.”  That both the team and the couple received what they were hoping for was in a lot of ways simple feel-good movie magic, but the original sentiment is critical:  in good or bad times, we praise the Lord and place ourselves in His hands and trust in His Word to us.

 

Friends, the beginning of September is one of the two “new start” points in a year – the other being, of course, the 1^st of January.  Students are entering a new level at school, and many are shifting from one level to another.  Sports seasons are gearing up – I mean, the NFL season starts on Thursday, the NHL pre-season will be going very soon, and Kooper’s high school football practices begin Tuesday!  TV fans are waiting to see what is coming with the new season – what changes have happened to their old shows and what new ones are on their way.  Clubs start meeting after the summer hiatus – in so many ways, this is a time for new friends, new plans, and new experiences.  It’s also a chance for new resolutions – for instance, I made a weak resolution on January 1^st to be somewhat lighter by the time of my birthday than I was then.  It didn’t pan out quite the way I’d hoped, but in some ways I know that it’s because I pretty much counted on myself to make it happen.  If I’m going to lose some weight, it’s got to be more than me that makes it happen.  What I want to look like by Christmas is going to take some doing, but hopefully it can be done.

On the 18^th, we’re taking our third stab at a Fresh Start Sunday, where we invite some of our old members and adherents who haven’t attended in a while to make a new attempt to worship with us regularly.  Our theme for the week is going to be We Are Called (though our logo is not actually Jesus calling us on our cell phones!), with an emphasis on the “We.”  Faith doesn’t grow in isolation, either, but with the support of others.  We’re also going to be inviting the people from the neighbourhood around us, and everyone’s encouraged to invite anyone you know who might enjoy learning about Jesus Christ with the rest of us.  In standing together, we create a stronger church, but more than that we are creating a stronger kingdom.  If more people stood together with Christian principles guiding their way of living, with Christian faith in their hearts, imagine how amazing the world would be!

So, let’s be strong for each other;  let’s praise God with all that we have, joined with those around us;  and let us rejoice as we consider all that we have been given.

Amen.