Belmont Presbyterian Church (1980)

 

Rev R D Drysdale 

30th March 1980

Belmont Presbyterian Church, Belfast.

Palm Sunday

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Introduction

Hymn “All Glory, Laud and Honour”

Prayer / The Lord’s Prayer

New Testament Reading: Matthew c21 v1-9 Luke c19 v41&42

Hymn (Psalm 118) “Oh Set Ye Open Unto Me The Gates of Righteousness”

New Testament Reading: Mark c15v 21-39 

Anthem “Oh Living Will” (Stanford)

Prayer

Hymn “We Sing The Praise of Him Who Died”

Sermon “Palm Sunday”

Just above this church lie the Holywood Hills. There's a road that snakes its way up through them towards Bangor. At the top you get an arresting view of Belfast, lying sprawled out in the Lagan basin.

If you come on it at night driving towards the city, as I've often done, it's hard to resist the urge to pull the car into the side of the road and sit for a few minutes contemplating the twinkling lights below. There it lies, Belfast. What hopes, dreams and new terrors are being hatched down there in the darkness? Mind you, you won't be alone for long, for it's also a favourite spot on dark nights for courting couples, though needless to say they have other reasons for parking halfway into the ditch than the twinkling lights of Belfast.

But day or night, when you've time to stop and look without feeling you're intruding, from up there the city can hold a kind of magical and almost melancholy spell over you. It must have been something like that that pulled Jesus up short on that memorable day long ago, when topping the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem suddenly came into view lying below Him; And looking down at it he wept. 

“Oh Jerusalem, would that even today you knew the things that make for peace, but now they are hidden from your eyes.”

And there we have it, the supreme moment of irony, the contradiction within the heart of what we now call Palm Sunday. Everywhere the crowds jubilant and Jesus weeping. Jesus riding into Jerusalem and he knew even if the crowds didn't, what was waiting for him down there.

And all the palm branch waving and popular acclaim only served to heighten the real significance of Jesus' entry into the holy city. The backdrop of this scenario is death. Casting a shadow over it all is the Cross.

That's why I can't help feeling, you know, that often we get Palm Sunday all wrong in our churches, turning it into a kind of carnival, the religious season for making whoopee. But when we try to understand this incident in the context of Christ's passion, there's really nothing festive about it. Admittedly, Jesus did nothing to try and stop the adoring multitudes. And in fact, he rebuked the Pharisees when they tried to dampen the disciples' enthusiasm. “I tell you, if these were quiet, the very stones would cry out.” But even so, the irony is there. Right at the very centre of this apparent triumph, it's there. And it comes out nowhere more poignantly perhaps than that moment when at the very height of the public reception, Jesus suddenly stops and weeps. 

We who live in Northern Ireland should understand this irony of Palm Sunday better than most. For it's often been in our moments of apparent normality and even festivity that death has suddenly exploded into our midst. Who can forget La Mon? Our generation lives with the ubiquitous image of death. On our streets, we're all too familiar with the blanketed figure lying by the roadside or on the pavement viewed from a distance through the camera lens.

And not just here at home, but across our world, the grey spectre of public death has returned again and again to haunt us in our troubled times, giving us uneasy dreams. Our modern era has undoubtedly experienced a sharpened awareness of death. 

When an American TV reporter was recently killed in Nicaragua by a soldier nonchalantly raising his rifle and shooting him dead, we all sat and watched the incident brought into our living rooms by courtesy of television.

And a survey published some weeks back in the United States estimated that the average teenager will have watched about 18,000 murders enacted on TV programmes and films by the time he's 18. But there's a strange irony in all of this today too. Familiar with the public spectacle of death as we are, we're also apparently less able to cope with it than former generations, or even talk about it. It's our taboo subject. So much so that universities and colleges in the States have now introduced a new subject into their courses of education. “Thanatology,” they call it. The study of death. And books and articles roll off the presses in an attempt to meet the increasing demand for help in facing death, coping with death's legacy of bereavement, and meeting the harsh realities of terminal illnesses. And I know that as a minister, I'm struck at times by some funeral arrangements that often go to enormous lengths to try and hide the reality of death behind the burial or cremation rites.

Again, in the States, they've a phrase that sums it up exactly. They call it “beautifying the remains.” It's like waving palm branches in the face of the cross.

And it's here in this irony that I believe we touch the hidden root of so much of our contemporary anxiety, fear, and obsessions that accompany every reminder of death. The fact is that many of us today encounter the presence of death in the absence of God. Deep down in the heart of our Western societies, deep down in the soul of many of us who find ourselves trapped and shorn by current values, lifestyles, and secular materialism, deep down there, we stand before death without God.

As a contemporary writer puts it, “…the philosophy of this generation is that death waits for us as a cement floor waits for a dropping light bulb.” And so, before this cement floor, we crumble into neuroses of all kinds and try to hide if we can from the terrifying reality of the end, putting a festive mask on it, pushing it to a distance from us where it ceases to be a visible threat, until Holy Week reminds us about what we prefer to forget, where another victim lies bleeding, mangled on the wheel of our violent times, and then we stand again in the unavoidable presence of death as the enemy, the threat.

The Cross once more is centred in our modern world, and suddenly it's Palm Sunday all over again. 

It was, I think, in Auschwitz that a prisoner of the last war watched lorry loads of Jews taken every day to the gas chambers. The cries of the naked victims, often screaming for mercy, wouldn't leave him day or night. He prayed to God that if he existed, he must surely see all this suffering and put an end to it. But day after day, it went on. At last, sore and weary with prayer, he gave up. There could be no God. He was left with death in the absence of God. But when we turn to the New Testament, when we move, in fact, through Holy Week towards Easter, the whole scene changes.

We enter a different world. It's the world of faith, where death is encountered in the presence of God. And if it's true, if He's present, even when the Cross is set up in our own experience, if it's true, then all's changed, changed utterly.

There's a point in one of his letters, his first letter to the Corinthians, where the Apostle Paul, writing about death as man's last enemy, seems to stop in his tracks, gather himself together, and then goes on to say, in effect, that what death means for each of us depends upon how we meet it, in the absence or in the presence of God. And so, Paul is led directly into the meaning of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Death, every death, horrendous or natural, in war or peace, every death that confronts us outside the victory of Christ is the enemy, the destroyer, the foe that brings us to nothing.

We end it all like the light bulb smashing on the floor. But, and here's the crescendo of Paul's argument, indeed of his own experience of God, but if it be that God raised up Jesus Christ from the dead, then there's more to be said. Death is not the end, not necessarily the enemy, for the resurrection of Jesus must mean that “death has been swallowed up in victory,” to use Paul's own phrase.

Here, then, we touch on one of the subterranean truths of Christian faith, that there is nothing that can be ultimately against us, not even death, if God is in it. And what does holy week mean if it doesn't mean this? That in all our suffering and death, God is there. Even when, like Jesus himself, we cry out in the night, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” The cry of Auschwitz.

For in that moment, Jesus knew the pain of those lorry loads of naked people driven to their extermination, and the anguish of that prisoner who saw it all and felt God couldn't be there. Every dark night of the soul in a nation's life, or an individual's experience, is the same cry of dereliction that Jesus articulated on the cross, and that made him stop that day above Jerusalem and weep. 

But God was in it. He was there, and he was not silent. For beyond the blackness of the Cross, another cry was to be heard. He is risen.

In Rolf Hochhuth's play, The Deputy, set in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany, one of the scenes portrays a confrontation between the vicious camp doctor and one of the prisoners, a priest called Ricardo. The doctor is responsible for the assignment of prisoners, either for extermination or hideous medical experiments. In Ricardo, however, he finds someone whose faith in God troubles him. The priest has a disturbing influence on him, jagging whatever remains of the doctor's conscience. So, the doctor sets out to break him and to make him betray his faith, and admit that everything has to be faced without God. 

“Look,” says the doctor, “look around you. Since July 1942, for 15 months, weekdays and sabbaths, I've been sending people to God. And do you think he's made the slightest acknowledgement? He has not even directed a bolt of lightning against me.” And then sneeringly, he adds, “9,000 people in one day a while back, puffing up the chimney.”

And so the doctor goes on, promising Ricardo freedom if he'll throw in his luck with the camp authorities, and luring him with physical pleasures if only he'll acknowledge that when we die, we die without God. At last, unable to take any more, Ricardo brings to an end the doctor's unrelenting attack, and at the same time, pronounces the death sentence on himself. As in defiance, he shouts at him, 

“Your, your hideous face, composed of lust and filth and gibberish, sweeps all doubts away! All. Since the Devil exists, God also exists. Otherwise, you and the Devil would have won a long time ago.”

When on this Palm Sunday and living through our own community passion in our brutalised Ulster society, we can stand with Ricardo and say that, then we've been led through the Cross to resurrection, through death to life. We've been led beyond Palm Sunday and its terrible irony to Easter, alive with hope. Only then can we really wave the palm branches.

The pilgrimage of Holy Week is the invitation to make this great discovery of faith for ourselves. 

Death, Swallowed up in victory.

And may the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight, our Lord and our Redeemer.

Hymn “Ride On Ride On In Majesty”

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church (1979)

 

Rev R D Drysdale 

28th September 1979

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church, Belfast.

Announcing decision to leave McQuiston

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As you will all no doubt have heard by now, last Tuesday night I returned home after the Kirk Session meeting and learnt of the call by Belmont Church, a call which I have accepted, subject to Presbytery approval at their next meeting. I can only hope that you understand when I tell you that this is one of the most difficult moments in my life. To stand here and tell you that, after a relatively short ministry, I am now leaving you and I can only hope that those of you who feel most deeply hurt, disappointed, and let down by my decision will be able to find it in your heart to forgive me.

You have every right to ask me why. I don't imagine for a moment that I can answer that question to your complete satisfaction, but I owe it to you to try, even if only in the broadest and most general terms. 

Let me begin by making clear that while we have had several difficult winters here since coming in 1976, that is not why I'm prepared to leave.

Indeed the problems that we've had to face and the battles that have had to be fought seem to me at this point in time to have had an overall healthy result, though the tensions and the strains on personal relationships have left their scars. But in so many ways the church here has emerged stronger and a new spirit of freedom among many is clearly evident. Indeed at this moment in time I feel, rightly or wrongly, that McQuiston has never been more united and in better heart since my coming here than it is now.

So I'm leaving, it would seem, just when I would appear to be beginning to enjoy some of the fruits of the past three and a half years' hard work. Very hard work. Why then am I prepared to go? 

Well let me fill in the background to this Belmont call, which may hopefully help to provide something of an answer. Developments which obviously now I am at a liberty to disclose to you, and only now. However secretive I may have seemed, I had no alternative over these past weeks and months.

Over the past couple of years, and especially last winter, like it or not, I found myself with a feeling growing inside me that my style and emphases of ministry were perhaps not the ones best suited to the needs and character of McQuiston. We are all what we are, and this increasing awareness within me is much more an honest acknowledgement of my limitations than any criticism of McQuiston. But the plain fact is that I've not been at one with myself, or attaining the level of fulfilment that for me is at the heart of what makes me tick.

I recognise that I'm essentially a reflective person. McQuiston needs someone who is above all else an activist, an organiser, a go-getter, for in some ways I suppose the kind of role demanded here is that akin to a church extension ministry, for the great belt of nominal membership here is enormous. But for me, not to be able to have time to browse, to think through the deeper aspects of the Christian life in today's society, to engage in meaningful action across the narrow parochial boundaries of denominationalism, to ponder the realities and goals underneath and behind all the hectic busyness, without this kind of dimension to my experience, I lose my creativity, my sense of priorities, and so easily become lost in terms of what the church and ministry are all about.

Others, I realise very well, others whose temperaments are different from mine, don't have this same sense of need, this relentless questioning. Their strengths lie in other directions than mine, and directions which on balance are probably more suited to the nature of the work here. I also need time to cultivate deep and meaningful pastoral relationships, my own limitation again, because I relate to people slowly.

It takes time to get to know me, as you must have discovered, and for me to get to know others, and with our numbers that's a luxury we can't afford. Yet superficial relationships I find very frustrating. I don't and can't wear my heart on my sleeve, so the question would not leave me. Would a different thrust of ministry be better adjusted to the situation here than mine? And apart from me altogether, would that be for the betterment of McQuiston? 

Again, I am what I am. 

But over against all of this, at the same time, Hilary and I have been coming to appreciate and to value more and more the many fine and dedicated people that we have here. The sort of members churches would give their right arms to have, if churches have right arms... People whom we have come to trust and to love dearly, and whose fellowship and kindness we have enjoyed more and more. Our great sorrow is the terrible hurt we are inflicting on you; people who least deserve it.

But in the middle of all these conflicting feelings, and we often spent long hours into the night talking them through, in the middle of such conflicting feelings, at the beginning of this year, first one and then a second church approached me about considering a move. Approaches, I might add, completely out of the blue and unsolicited by me. In both cases, I said no.

Then towards the summer, I was approached by Belmont Church. What was I to do? Go on saying no, or allow my name to be considered. And in all honesty, in the case of Belmont, where we have often worshipped on holiday Sundays when at home, I found it impossible to reject the possibility outright.

There come crucial moments, critical points in all our lives, when we know we cannot let the possibilities contained in such times pass without serious consideration. Such a moment for me was this approach from Belmont. And where in all of this was God's hand? And what was being said to me? I decided to give myself time to consider the matter and to pray about it.

I immediately informed our Clerk of Session, Mr. Bell, about the approach that had been made and the dilemma I now found myself in. A dilemma only I could resolve. This was shortly before we went on holiday.

On returning from holiday, I agreed to allow my name to go forward and to let things run their course. How else could I gain any sense of guidance? I again informed Mr. Bell of my decision. Belmont accordingly shortlisted my name together with others. The Hearing Committee heard us, met with us, and the eventual outcome was the call issued to me four days ago. 

Throughout this very difficult period, and only Hilary and I know the full agony of it all, Mr. Bell, together with Mr. Knox and Miss Orr, have been our trusted confidants, whose understanding and compassion we have greatly appreciated. And at this point, let me also add that Belmont have had their agony too in all of this, as was made very clear when we met the Hearing Committee. They have been very aware of the morality involved in approaching a minister from a neighbouring church, and after only three and a half years. And in fairness to them, I think that should be said, for they have had to bear their dilemma too. But then every call, to a greater or less degree, contains this element within it, one congregation's sense of loss.

But in the end of the day, it's the minister himself who makes the final decision if a call is tabled. And he who above all must be prepared to shoulder the burden of misunderstanding, resentment, and hurt that his decision and his alone has created. This is his loneliness, and it has to be borne.

If life were less complicated and made up of neat black and white situations, then answers and responses would be basically simple. But life is not like that much of the time. We thread our way through a maze, with God's help, but recognising if we think about it at all, that few decisions are ever wholly right without also some element of wrong.

So we walk by faith, and especially at the critical junctures of our lives, we step out always into the unknown. And of course, throughout all of this, we have wrestled with the question, "Where is God in all of this? What is His will?" 

I have never found the confidence of those who can say with great assurance, this is God's will for me. Too often it seems to me a subtle way of opting out of accepting responsibility for our own actions.

Of this decision, therefore, I can only say, I believe this is God's will for me. And that circumstances seem to have so arranged themselves as to make this belief credible for me. Guidance, almost always it seems to me, is discernible only in retrospect. At least that is as much as my personal experience will allow me to say. But I believe God honours responsible action. To act responsibly, as responsibly and as honourably as one can, is to act and decide within the perimeters of God's will. And within those perimeters, all things work together for good to them that love Him. What does the agony of Gethsemane mean if it doesn't mean that? 

That's why I read those profound words from Paul's letter to the Romans earlier. There for me lies the essence of what we mean by "Providence." That there is nothing that can ultimately separate us from the love of God. "Nothing in heaven or on earth, neither height nor depth, things present and things to come." Providence for me, and I think from what I read in Paul's letters especially, does not mean that life is planned and predetermined for us in advance, and that guidance is getting into the right rut that enables this plan to unfold itself like an automatic machine.

No, faith in Providence is rather the conviction, confirmed by Christian experience, that because there is God, there is therefore a creative and saving possibility in every situation. Nothing can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord. There is nothing therefore that need prevent any of us from fulfilling the meaning of our existence.

To believe and trust that, is to know that in this sense there is a will of God for us, and that it cannot finally be thwarted if we lay ourselves open to it, and are prepared to take responsibility for what we do. Let that conviction lie at the heart of this moment that we share together, how differently we may view it. Let this conviction lie at the heart of this moment, and we will come to see that the Kingdom of God and the Church's mission is bigger than any of us and that in all our decision making we merely move within a space larger than we can imagine and whose boundaries we haven't drawn. Sufficient for us to know that nothing can separate us from God's love, and then, for right or wrong, to decide and act.

And now having said all that, and in an attempt to draw to a conclusion, let me now perhaps in lighter vein remind you all of this, and lest everything seem so far too melodramatic by half, that it isn't after all the end of the world. I'm too long in church life now to not to realise, even if you've forgotten, that every congregation has a great resilience, and in the final farewell will say, "The King is dead, long live the King!" and set about finding a successor. And let's be honest, there's even a certain sense of adventure and tingle of excitement about the prospect of getting a new man, once you've got past the Union Commission, that forbidding body and church house that must first give permission to proceed, but then we've now got friends in high places, for Miss Orr is a member of that august body!

The initial shock over, you, I know, will very quickly start forgetting today, and setting your sights on tomorrow. 

And let me finish with this. What eases my mind considerably is not just the heart and state of the congregation as it is at this moment, but also to know that in Mr. Knox I'm leaving you in hands well able to cope, hands every bit as capable of mine, if not more so, that I'm leaving you with him. That also, of course, is part of our agony, for we and our wives have enjoyed the happiest possible relationship, but I'm leaving you in good hands, and he's younger too! So what more could you want? 

Finally, let me say that we won't stand upon our going, but we'll be here for some time yet, and no doubt we'll have ample opportunity to share further with you our feelings and our hopes, as we and you face together whatever lies before us. Assured of this, "That neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities, nor powers nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord." 

And may he abundantly bless you all in weeks and months and years to come. 

Let us pray.

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church (1976)

 

Rev R D Drysdale 

10th October 1976 

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church, Belfast.

Harvest Sermon 

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Every farmer knows that his work depends upon a universal law of nature, that the sun will rise in the east and set in the west, day and night will come round every twenty-four hours and the seasons will follow one another in regular rotation. Though I suppose some of us may feel that summer got out of line this year, but still…

And so, the farmer puts out his cattle in the early spring when the grass begins to grow and brings them in again in the late autumn when the growth is over.

He plants potatoes when they're in seed and expects to find a rich crop when they're ready to be dug up. He sows his seeds of barley or wheat and looks for a plentiful harvest when it's time to reap and thresh. Every farmer, every gardener for that matter, relies upon this uninterrupted law of nature.

Things follow one another in regular sequence and without that law, we'd starve. 

Harvest, our Thanksgiving here this morning, is possible because in the words of our text, “Whatever a man sows that shall he also reap.” So, if a farmer sows seed, he doesn't expect if he's sowing grass seed to see daffodils.

If he sows barley, he doesn't expect to reap wheat any more than the gardener who plants flowers doesn't look for thistles. 

Well now, says Paul in that passage that was read to us in Galatians, the same law that operates and holds good in nature holds good also in the realm of human nature. “Whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.”

Every one of us, he says, every one of us has two sides to our makeup, two natures if you like. The one is our lower nature or what Paul calls the flesh. From it spring all our evil tendencies, violence, hatreds, prejudices, intemperance and jealousy.

The part of us that makes for problems and is hard to live with. The other is our higher nature, what Paul calls “the spirit.” From it springs our awareness of God and every noble ideal, our quest after truth, justice, love, mercy, faith and so on.

Now, imagine, says the apostle, that your life is a great field and into its soil we sow either the seeds of our lower or our higher natures. Sow the seeds of the flesh and we will eventually reap the harvest of corruption, the weeds of individual and community life that grow up to choke and destroy us. On the other hand, sow the seeds of the spirit and we can, in due time, expect to reap the harvest of love, joy, peace and everlasting life.

So, what's it going to be? Are we sowing the seeds of the flesh, both in our own lives and in that of our church and our community or the seeds of the spirit? The sowing determines the harvest. For the law we see at work all around us in nature applies to human nature too, to your life and to mine. 

“Whatever a man sows that shall he also reap.”

Let's think a bit more about that. 

There are many today who even while we give thanks at this time of the year for the harvest of the fields who are reaping a harvest they wish they'd never sown. And there are those who even now are sowing seeds that in time to come will bring only sorrow, bitterness and unhappiness.

Paul is not consistent throughout his letters in his use of this word “flesh” but here in these verses what he seems to mean is that the person who sows only the seeds of the flesh is the person who is out to gain only physical satisfaction in life. Let's for a moment home in on two major characteristics in our day that appear to me to illustrate exactly what we're being warned about here, pleasure and violence. Today we are seeing and are tempted and more than tempted to share this outlook… today we're seeing many who controlled by their lower nature are sowing the wild oats of a life dedicated to the selfish pursuit of pleasure.

I'm reluctant to put it like that because I can recall only too well preachers of my youth who seem to me to have nothing more positive to say in their Christian message than to express their opposition to all forms of pleasure. You know what I mean. Those whose summary of the Christian life seemed to consist of a string of don'ts and whose own personal testimonies were always a publicised list of the things they'd given up.

As someone remarked to me, “Why does Christianity always seem to be against the things that I enjoy?” And too often our Christianity does give the impression of being totally negative, but for all of that, we can hardly avoid the conclusion, if we read the New Testament at all, that while the gospel of Jesus Christ is not against the pleasure of living, its face is set against the life that lives only for pleasure, for the attainment of its own selfish ends. And that's just the seeds that are being sown all around us today. The advertising men thrive on it, for they know it has instant appeal.

It's not that pleasure in itself is wrong. Heavens, what would life be like if it didn't have its pleasurable elements? But things get all out of hand when life is reduced down to nothing but the selfish pursuit of pleasure. Existence then becomes that of the gadfly, flitting about here and there in the endless search for sensation, victims of our own insatiable appetites.

It's hard to talk like this without sounding like a reactionary old Puritan, but you know what I mean. Somewhere in our go-getting, swinging, dope and bed generation, an awful lot of people are losing their way, young and not so young. 

Did you see the aggressive trade unionist who was interviewed recently and who was advocating a £60 a week increase in wages for his members? 

“What is the huge increase for?” asked the interviewer.

“So we can get more...” was the reply. 

“More of what?” 

“More of everything!” 

That just about sums it up perfectly, doesn't it? But in our wild pursuit of nothing but selfish pleasure, of get and gain, of more of everything, the big deep searching question seems to remain unanswered, indeed even unasked, when the last drop has been drunk, or the drug bottle is empty, or the last penny lost on the horse that never came in, or the carnal relationship is over.

What then? What's left? An empty disillusioned life reaping the bitter fruits of despair, kicking against society, against itself, against God, against everything. When the life given to us by God has been treated as nothing more than a stone that's sent skimming across the water, sustaining itself for a time by dancing from wave to wave, but suddenly sinking into the darkness when the dance is over… What then? Perhaps few songs catch this mood of inevitable disenchantment better than these sad haunting words. 

“The party's over. It's time to call it a day. They've burst your pretty balloon and taken the moon away. It's time to wake up. Take off your makeup. All things must end. The party's over. It's all over, my friend.” 

“Whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” 

And there are others today who, controlled by their lower nature, are sowing the wild oats of violence.

These are the people who, regardless of the consequences, create strife, suspicion, and chaos, and will have peace for no one. We who live in Northern Ireland hardly need reminding of it, and that in the words of Hosea, “when you sow the wind, you reap the whirlwind.” We know only too well the nature of the harvest that has to be reaped sooner or later when the seeds of violence have been sown.

But have we really learned the lesson of our tortured history yet? I fear not. If the last two Saturdays in Derry is anything to go by, and the recently renewed bomb attacks… Just in the past few days I came across this leader in the Belfast Telegraph. It was headed, “Bitter Harvest” and described how a little ten-year-old boy had to come into court to give evidence against two men whom he had witnessed murder his own father.

The judge, in summing up, said to them, “Both of you have seen for yourselves some of the after-effects of your handiwork. You saw in court a little boy crying as he relived the death of his father at your hands.” The men sentenced pleaded guilty to the murder and expressed their regret and remorse for their actions. Theirs was the reaping of the bitter harvest that they sowed on that night when they took a man's life, and a little boy standing in court wept at the thought. 

And let's remember too, and this is what the New Testament says a great deal about, that violence can assume many forms, as well as that of gun and bomb. There's the violence of word as well as of action.

And even if we aren't out on the streets disrupting society by what we do, our violence can be just as insidious through what we say. The public figure who indulges in provocative oratory and the quiet gossip who goes about his or her deadly work spreading lies or fostering hatred, stand side by side with the gunman, for they share in sowing the same seeds. But again, there comes the same big deep and searching question. When the bullying, the shouting and the destruction is over, what then? When violence has had its day and those fostering it or committed to it have had their moment of glory, what then? When the seeds of violence, sown in the heat of the noonday with the crowds by our side, is passed and the harvest must be reaped in the cold of the night alone, what then? When the devastation of words and of actions is over and violence stands stripped of its power before the God of judgement, what then? Then, in the words of the poet Keats, 

“…then on the shore 

Of the wide world I stand alone and think

Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.”

“Whatever a man sows, that shall he also reap.” 

But the good news of the gospel is that there are other seeds, and so there can be another harvest.

Where do we find these seeds and how do we sow them? 

Through coming to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves to following His way, allowing His Spirit to dwell in us, converting us to God. It's all a matter of decision, of the renewing experience of worship, of belonging to the fellowship of Christ's church, of growing in faith and living out the life of faith in our community, and then finding that we're not alone, for God is with us, and things begin to change as a result. And so, among the weeds, something else begins to grow, both in our own personal lives and in our society, the fruits of the Spirit.

And here and there, another kind of harvest begins to be reaped. 

Let me be very personal just for a moment. 

Maybe you don't come to church very often… It's not that you have anything against it, but well, things have been let slip a bit in this direction. Indeed, maybe harvest is the only time that we see you. On the other hand, maybe you're the kind of regular attender that's here every Sunday… Either way, maybe you're acutely aware at this moment that you've been sowing the wrong seeds in your life and you're reaping the wrong harvest. This is the hour of decision for you. Now, Jesus Christ confronts you with Himself, and you can't avoid Him, for His Spirit is too active, too persistent for that, but He doesn't come to judge or condemn. We needn't feel uncomfortable, for He comes to save us. 

Now, at this moment, you can change your ways, radically alter your life. 

You can let this moment pass. Do nothing about it. Just another service, another show. Leave them laughing when you go…

Or you can start now, sowing a new life, a life hidden in Christ, helping shape a better home, a better community, a better world, and moving towards eternity with God. 

The alternative is another kind of life, another kind of home, another community, another world, another destiny. 

With bated breath, even the angels in Heaven await your response.

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church (1978)

 

Rev R D Drysdale

McQuiston Memorial Presbyterian Church

BBC Radio 4, Morning Service (16th July 1978)

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Radio Introduction

Welcome

First Hymn “From All That Dwells Below The Skies”

Prayer of Affirmation & Confession

The Lord’s Prayer (Sung)

Old Testament Reading: Psalms 130 & 121

Children’s Hymn “For The Beauty of the Earth”

New Testament Lesson: Philippians Ch 3 v6

Choir Anthem “Lift Up Your Heads”

Prayers of Intercession (Rev David Knox)

Hymn of Preparation “Come Holy Ghost, Our Hearts Inspire”

Sermon “Waiting”

A few months ago, our eldest boy eventually persuaded me to join him and one of his chums on a night out at a downtown cinema in Belfast. It was all really a very clever conspiracy, as I soon found out, for the only real reason for my being there was to pay up when we got to the box office and dawdled around the sweet counter en route to the Circle. From that point on, my services could quite happily have been dispensed with, except that the boys, I suppose, needed the transport home again, after James Bond 007 had got safely through an incredible series of adventures with voluptuous female spies, innumerable would-be assassins, and an enormous man with steel teeth.

But I hadn't been to the pictures for a long time, and so it was with just a hint of nostalgia that I set out. It wasn't at all as I remembered it. For security reasons in our city, the stalls were closed off. The place was generally grubby, noisy, and cold. Instead of the heavy curtain played on by coloured lights, there was just the blank screen, and even it was anything but white. A week after we'd been there, the place was blown up.

So, I suppose why bother about appearances when it's always on the cards that the terrorists might strike at any time. 

How different it all was when I was a youngster and sat most Saturday nights with the rest of the gang enthralled by the exploits of Flash Gordon or Roy Rogers and Trigger. Front stalls for ninepence, and if you whistled during the romantic scenes, you were thrown out.

But what I remember especially was the time of anticipation before the film started. Soft music lulled you into a sense of magic and excitement, until suddenly the lights dimmed, the curtain parted, and the film began. It was all eagerness and expectation, those five or ten minutes of waiting.

Indeed, the waiting was part of the total experience. 

Waiting, for me, has an awful lot to do with the whole experience of living. We wait anxiously for exam results, or the outcome of medical tests. We wait impatiently for the return of someone long overdue. We wait excitedly for the night of the party or the wedding day. We wait somewhat apprehensively for the coming on of old age and death. We spend much of our time waiting, don't we?

Because waiting is the result of not having, of not being fully in control of our destinies, of being able to see some things only from afar. And so, we wait. In the Old Testament Book of Psalms, we read a lot about waiting.

It came out very clearly in that Psalm 130 we listened to earlier. In this Psalm, the writer has apparently fallen into the depths of despair, where everyone, it seems, has forsaken him. And out of his emptiness, he cries to God. If only God would come and transform his darkness into light. So, he waits for God.

“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits. And in His word, I hope. My soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning.”

I think we can readily identify ourselves with those words, whether, like the psalmist, we're in the depths or not.

Because there's a sense in which our relationship with God is always one of waiting. Even if we have no conscious relationship with God at all, we're in a state of waiting for him, aren't we? Like the psalmist here, we too often have to wait for the Lord. Because we never possess God, can never say, “I believe…”  without having to add, “…help my unbelief.”

Like the Apostle Paul in that part of one of his letters that we also listened to earlier, the best that we can say of our spiritual maturity is that we press on but haven't yet arrived. Don't yet have all the truth, or at least fully understand it. We still see so many things, “as through a glass, darkly.”

So, we must wait for God. Sometimes, of course, we're lured into imagining that we do have all the answers, that we have arrived, God's in our pocket, as it were. Paul Tillich, a penetrating Christian writer, graphically describes those who don't wait for God. “There's the theologian,” he says, “who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in doctrine. There's the biblical scholar who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in a book. There's the churchman who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in an institution. There's the religious man who doesn't wait for God because he thinks he possesses him in an experience." But for me, God can't be reduced down to any of these things, to a possession. And those who imagine that he can, end up only with an idol of their own invention, not the "God for whom we must wait.”

And let's face it, very often we don't wait for God, simply because we have no time for him. When in our churches, we really come to terms with this biblical concept of waiting, then denominationalism, in the sense of thinking our own particular Christian tradition has a monopoly of the truth, will be knocked for six for a start, won't it? Our service of worship this morning is Presbyterian, though I doubt if many of you listening could have put a tag on it if you hadn't known.

And we love it, because that's the tradition most of us here have grown up in and become accustomed to.

But much more important is that our worship today should be Christian, an experience of waiting for God, shared with all, for whom Jesus is Lord. Simply because God is the one for whom we wait, he can't be locked up within Presbyterianism or any other-ism. Because God isn't a possession, he can't be enshrined in any one Christian denomination, but remains free, infinite, and above all our religious structures and historic ecclesiastical forms, present within them, no doubt, but limited to none of them.

Our God is too small too often, isn't he? I remember hearing a story about something that happened during the days of the British Raj in India. A group of English people set out on a week's tiger hunt. They were led by Indian guides and porters. When quite out of the blue, the Indians' downed tools, piled up the baggage in the middle of the jungle clearing and sitting down refused to budge another inch. The English party were at a loss to know what was the matter. Had someone offended them or did they want more money? What was the problem? Eventually, through an interpreter, they discovered that the cause was religious. The Indians refused to move for at least a day. "We must wait here," they explained, "until our souls catch up with our bodies."

We who live in Northern Ireland understand that very well.

We're waiting for our souls to catch up with our bodies, waiting for the spiritual and moral values of our community life to catch up again with the political and violent ones, waiting for the time when the past nine years will be a bad dream and our divided society can live in some semblance of peace.

And in the bigger world beyond our doorstep, we'll see the same need, the need to take time to let our spiritual and moral understanding of life catch up with our material and scientific advances. For example, what's going to be the eventual outcome if our racing industrialization completely outstrips our moral sense of responsibility for our stewardship of the earth and its resources? Or if we who live in the so-called developed areas of the world refuse to wait till our poorer neighbours come alongside? Can we who call ourselves Christians refuse such waiting, with all the enormously complex issues involved? For what is it but the social, economic, and political expressions in the world of our waiting for God? And what about you and me as individuals?

What does it mean for us personally when we stand with the psalmist crying out at times in sheer agony and frustration and impatience for God, waiting with an intensity more than watchmen for the morning, more than watchmen for the morning? What does it mean for us? Well, it will mean the skittling of every posture of self-righteousness, every stance of unwarranted dogmatism, the opening of locked minds and closed hearts.

It will throw us as individuals back upon grace; the grace of the God who holds us because we can't hold Him, the God who first seeks us before we can find Him, the God who calls us to wait for Him, but who through that very call confronts us with Himself, creating in us the faith that waits. And for us who live in A.D. rather than B.C., there's something more, something the psalmist didn't know. We wait for God, but not ultimately in despair, not in vain, not with only illusions for company, for we see Jesus.

Of course, there's a great danger in all of this. It's been lurking underneath everything we've said so far. In Samuel Beckett's famous play, “Waiting for Godot,” the action, if we can call it action, revolves around two old men who are sitting and idly passing the time, waiting for the arrival of their friend Godot. As the play moves slowly along, it begins to become clear to the audience that the old men's expectation isn't going to be fulfilled. Indeed, grave doubts begin to arise as to whether or not Godot really exists at all or is just an invention of the old men in order to give them something to wait for. When the curtain finally falls, they're still waiting for Godot.

Now, this isn't the waiting of Christian discipleship, though it is the danger. Where we merely move about a little, we talk, we contrive abstractions about our situation, we sit, the earth turns, but meanwhile we do nothing, only wait. In sharp contrast to Beckett's characters waiting for Godot, we who wait for God don't wait in idleness, but in a world where there's much to be done in God's name.

And we wait as those who, in seeing Jesus, believe that we have caught sight of God. And that vision moves us into activity, so that our waiting becomes not only an expression of faith, but also of love and of social concern. Our biblical text, therefore, isn't a prescription for pietistical laziness, no, no.

The waiting of the Christian, like that of the Apostle Paul, is the strange waiting of the pilgrim who hasn't yet arrived, but who's on the way.

Hymn of Thanksgiving “Blessed Be The Everlasting God”

Benediction

Organ Postlude (Jim Beattie)