The Narrow Way
Matthew 7.13-14
First Sunday in Lent - The Unobvious Series
Rev. Matthew M. Fry

As we continue to experience The Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Grant unto us now, almighty God, the ability to go beyond our limits, so that we might experience you more fully, in this time and into our future. May this time of preaching and hearing the Word Proclaimed infect our lives, and so alter our ways of seeing the world, and of being in it, so that we might live in your grace and love, and spread your mercy and care to the whole world. In the name of Jesus the Son we pray, Amen.

We are back in Lent, the 40 days before Easter in which we turn and orient ourselves again to the life of Jesus in his last days, and to the cross. This is a path we must take if we are to really experience the joy of Easter. It is ironic, that to know the light of Easter Morning, we must travel the dark road of Lent, of life and death.

To commemorate this, for the second year in a row, I am beginning a Lenten sermon series about things that I believe are essential to the Christian experience. Last year it was “The Gospel of…” series, and included “The Gospel of Wasting Time,” “The Gospel of Absurdity,” “The Gospel of Silliness,” “The Gospel of Joy” and on Easter, “The Culmination of the Gospels.” And while it would be a stretch to call those sermons somber, I would characterize them as serious, with the spirit of self-examination and spiritual re-direction.

I deeply enjoyed preparing and preaching those sermons, and found it as a good Lenten discipline for me, filled with a serious sense of self-examination and spiritual re-direction. The feedback I got from you was that you had a similar reaction. Which means that either you had a similar reaction, or that you are all really good at telling the pastor what the pastor likes to hear. So, in the spirit of either believing you, or of forcing your hand to really tell me what you honestly think, I am doing a similar series this Lenten season. This one I’m calling “The Unobvious Series” and it will be about a bunch of things that I believe to be important things to remember, things we know somewhere deep down, but have been able to conveniently forget because the world and often even things that call themselves religious or Christian have told us the exact opposite. These are the things I need to seriously remember to so some self-examination and spiritual re-direction.

There are so many, so so many things that clamor for our attention. I’ve been a kick about this lately, especially from this very pulpit. You’ve heard me talk about the noisy din that comes at us from all around us, and seems to have its own pulse. Having said all of it, and presuming that some of it has sunk in, let me illustrate it like this. This watch, my Sunday watch, my nice dress up watch, does not have a second hand. I got this watch a few years back. Before then, when leading in a couple of specific liturgies, I always used the second hand on my dress watch. We have two times where we do silent prayer in the service. The first is at the end of the corporate prayer of confession. When I had my second hand, this was always right around a 30 second time of silence. And the reason for this was that because this was a time for personal confession, 30 seconds was just enough for me to cover the sins of Sunday morning. If we were to wait for enough time to cover everything since last Sunday, well, we are supposed to get out close to noon. Seriously, I’ve always considered this time a point of training folks to be silent and perhaps a little uncomfortable in confession before God.

The second part of the service where we have quiet is during the silent prayer portion of the Pastoral Prayers. When I had my second hand, I always used to make sure this was a little over a full minute. Because I figured this was also a good training for people to be silent and hopefully learn to be comfortable in the presence of God. I figured that if people wrestle with each side, being comfortable and being uncomfortable in the presence of God, then we are really doing something.

Like I said, the total time for this was 90 seconds. But like I’ve also said, I don’t have a second hand, and neither does Chris. So, what we do now is listen to you. When the first one or two of you shifts, or coughs, or clears your throat, or makes some other form of noise, we understand that as the first sign of nervous jitters. Then, inevitably, several of you make some noise. We’re just glad when the noise is not snoring. That lets us know that the effectiveness of the quiet is done. And I’d wager we average 10 to 15 seconds in the confessional, and 30 to 35 in the Pastoral prayers. So, we get like 45 seconds of silence in the service.

How many times is that the only silence we get in a week? I don’t know my number personally, cause my prayer time is rarely silent, and I try to spend some time in quiet for a few minutes every day, just to clear my head and my soul.

The world around us is so loud, and not always with bad things. But the din of noise is so loud. Unobvious thing number 1, write this down if you want, Ignore Loud things and Listen for quiet things. Quiet things fill your soul. But you must actively listen for them. Unlike the loud things, which don’t need you to pursue them because the loud things pursue you, you will have to pursue the quiet things.

Unobvious thing number 2, I’m giving you 3 today, and they go together. Put aside obvious things, and seek out hidden things. If the quiet things take work, and they certainly do, so too the things of beauty are often hidden. Which is to say, how many waterfalls do you see a day versus how many strip malls? How many butterflies do you examine versus how many brake lights on cars in traffic? How much time do you spend looking at fine art versus how much time do you spend looking at your computer screen? When I was younger, I used to be able to spend 15 minutes just watching the rain. Now, while I am thankful for the rain, I hardly ever just sit in the garage or on our front porch and watch and listen.

So, it’s not actually that the things that feed the soul are hidden, but that we’ve grown accustomed to looking past them and we have made them seem hidden. And there is some good work ahead re-learning how to see the things that are not obvious. Which brings me to the third, and final one for the day, unobvious thing. The first was Ignore loud things and listen to quiet things. The second was put aside obvious things and seek out hidden things. The third is this; forget easy things and learn hard and ancient things. In the movie, A League of Their Own, about the All American Girls Baseball league during World War II, Tom Hanks plays Jimmie Foxx, which is not the name of his character, but the real person whom his fictitious character is based upon and Gena Davis plays the star player in the league. When Davis’ husband comes home from the war, she prepares to leave the team right before they play in the league’s version of the World Series. Hanks confronts her. Davis comes up with this excuse, “I guess it got too hard.”

“It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it. That’s what makes it so good, the hard.”

There are easy things in life, shortcuts, easy ways of getting by. I know I’ve done my share of easy things. I mean shortcuts, sure. But more than that I mean that I have long desired to get to a place where life was easy, where I had it made. Like Rooster and Miss Hannigan, I want to live on Easy Street. But when I look at my life, it is in the hard things that my soul grows. And the ancient things. We sing every Sunday. We do the contemporary stuff, which is really good. But as long as I have any say, we will always continue to sing traditional hymns. Even though, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” is almost 500 years old, and would never be mistaken for contemporary or popular, there is something that goes on inside me when we sing it. I am connected with the saints, like Martin Luther who wrote that particular hymn, and with saints who have sung it through the ages.

And its not just traditional hymns. My Gramma does not have a computer. She’s 91, she’s entitled to not have one if she doesn’t want too. She’s also very nearly blind, so a screen won’t do her much good. This means that when we want to communicate with her, we have to do one of the ancient things, picking up a telephone and calling, not texting, or sitting down and in very big script, writing a letter. Her handwriting is not only atrocious now, it has always been. Reading my birthday cards through the years has been an introductory to reading ancient languages or whatever it is that Bob Norman writes. But we write, back and forth. And there’s something about waiting for a letter to come in the mailbox that is neat, and is old school, and reminds me of the ways of old.

There are other things, less modern than even phones or post, and perhaps a little less worldly, like meditation, or fasting, or service or name your own. I agree with Richard Foster, who wrote in Celebration of Disciplineⁱ that “Superficiality is the curse of our age. The doctrine of instant satisfaction is a primary spiritual problem. The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”ⁱⁱ We’re not going to turn ourselves into deep people by loving the easy things. No, the hard and ancient things are the way to go. As an aside, I would love to do a Sunday School class or Wednesday night series on both his great books, Celebration of Discipline and Freedom of Simplicity.

So, Ignore Loud Things and listen for quiet things, put aside obvious things and seek out hidden things, and forget easy things and learn hard and ancient things. May we be given the strength so do to. Amen.