Sermon by Lindon Eaves on Sixth Sunday after Pentecost July 13 2008

My grandpa Baggott is the only grandparent I really remember.  He was widowed and lived alone in a Victorian row house in Bloxwich, a small town in part of England called the Black Country.   I used to go and stay with him.   He used to sleep in the flannel shirt and long johns he had worn all day. I’m sure my mother thought it was disgusting.  He took me rowing on the lake in Walsall Arboretum, sailing my model yacht on Wallington Heath pool, fishing for minnows in Wolverhampton park.      He took me to Dudley Zoo, and to try my luck at the coconut shy at the annual Bloxwich wake.  He took me to London on the train to feed the pigeons.  You can’t feed the pigeons these days.  They’re “dirty”. I have a photo of me feeding the pigeons.   He introduced me to the Carnival Queen in Walsall.  I have a photo of that too.   Granpda bought me my first watch, my first Book of Common Prayer and my first record-player.   He gave me pocket money.

There were two things I didn’t really understand about grandpa till he came to live with us in the late 50’s.   The first was that he was “low church”.  This was not a problem until I got religion.  I caught “high church.”  Grandpa had no time for smells and bells.  He thought the pope was the anti-Christ.    The second was that he was Victorian.  This wasn’t a problem till I discovered sex, or more specifically Sue, in the early 60’s. When she came to visit and we sat on the sofa contemplating thise things that teenagers contemplate, grandpa would sit there pointedly reading the Birmingham post and acting as self-appointed chaparone.

Grandpa was Church of England, but of a strongly evangelical persuasion.  When he was younger, he used to play the cornet in the Salvation Army band and he taught Sunday school.  Women seemed to like him. I remember at least three.   

He bought me my first LPs.  I still have them.   This is one of them.  It is called “Hymns the Family Knows and Loves.”  It’s an American recording, made in Hollywood.   You can tell it American from the picture on the sleeve.  There is a picture of the perfect family: perfect father, perfect mother and three perfect children, in their Sunday best, clasping their hymn books with happy clappy smiles in what looks like the back pew of some generic non-conformist tabernacle.     The list of titles includes many of grandpa’s favorites.  “The old rugged cross”, “In the garden”, “Beautiful Isle of somewhere”,  “When the roll is called up yonder”, “Tell me the old, old story”.

Things would sometimes be a bit tense in the Eaves household in the 60’s. There was probably more than optimal alcohol and less than optimal money.  In that environment,  it was not easy shepherding a testosterone-laden teenager and an independent-minded (some would say “bloody”-minded) 80 year-old under the same roof.  

Sometimes, at the end of a tense day.  Grandpa would seize the Birmingham Post and march up the stairs to bed defiantly singing one of his favorite hymns.  “..and he walks with me, and he talks with me, and he tells me I am his own….”    “There is a happy land, far, far away…”    Now I look back, I can see it was Grandpa’s way of saying “up yours”.      Singing his evangelical hymns was an act of defiance.   It carved out his own identity and space in times and places where perhaps he didn’t always feel that welcome.     “…and the love we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known” “…there is a happy land, far, far away”.  

I am now about the same age that grandpa was when I first remember him.  As I have become “grandpa” in my own right, some things start to make a bit more sense.   It’s more than 50 years since I was confirmed and 40 years this fall since I was ordained.   I’ve stuck with it.  I’ve stuck with it in some pretty unlikely places.  At one level, it’s going through the motions.  It really is a matter of showing up.  I don’t feel much “God” much like some people do. Maybe you do.  Mayne you don't.    I feel something sometimes but it could be the medication.   “Feeling” is suspect.  But the trouble is, so is reason.  I can’t get very excited about the so-called proofs of God.  I wish I was as smart as the people who thought of them.  But the actual arguments seem iffy.  It seems like you have to believe the answer in order to accept the proof.    I’ve had my fair share of Christian hate mail from people who don’t like what I write or what I say.

So what can I say?  What can I hang on to?  Why am I still here in spite of all the silliness?  Why I am still here in a church where kindness seems to be squeezed out between homophobia at one end and sexism at the other?  

It is simply this.  There is no other place where I can go to sing the rich songs of defiance.  I have no place where I am known.   Where else is there to go?   “To whom shall we go?” say the disciples to Jesus.  “You have the words of eternal life.”  We have some really good stories to tell.   Stories of the saints. “You can meet them at work, or at school or at tea…”

I don’t reckon I understand much about the idea of God.  But like grandpa, here I can sing of a Garden where there is love.  Here is the dream of a beautiful Isle of somewhere.  Here we learn the stories, the traditions, of exodus and promised land.  Of death and life.  Of suffering and rebirth.   Here we have the audacity to hope.  Here we can dream.  In this Garden we can gather strength.  We can learn to forgive and be forgiven.  Here we are welcome.  Here we can be safe.   Here we can receive power to become children of God.

Here there is a “beautiful Isle of somewhere”.  Here there is a garden.   Here, with Martin Luther King “I have looked over and seen the Promised Land.  I might not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.  So I am happy tonight.”