The Result

The message below is dedicated to Kelly Kraft, 2011 United States Amateur Golf Champion, and, as always, to the wonderful people of First Presbyterian Church, Denton, Texas!

Text: Psalm 105:1-6, 23-26, 45c
Theme: “M10: The Result” (10th in a Series)
11th Sunday after Pentecost
August 28, 2011
First Presbyterian Church
Denton, Texas
Rev. Paul R. Dunklau

IN THE NAME OF JESUS

This morning, even as we speak, far away from here in the cooler climate of Wisconsin, a golf match is being played. This is no real surprise. Quite a few people skip out on church and hit the links on Sunday! But the two golfers aren’t weekend warriors. They aren’t playing to decide a friendly wager. They are not vying for a local club championship. Instead, they are teeing it up, over 36 holes, to decide the winner of the 2011 United States Amateur Golf Championship. Some of you know that one of the contestants, Kelly Kraft – a two-time Texas State Amateur champion and winner of the 2011 Trans-Mississippi Tournament (one of the historic amateur contests in the country), is from Denton, Texas and a graduate of Ryan High School. A little closer to home, Kelly Kraft also happens to be the grandson of our own Lou and Louise Kraft.

I don’t know if he has done so, but I wonder if Kelly has ever spoken with our own Gene Finlay. Gene is the niece of the late Harvey Penick, who, arguably, is one of the greatest teachers of golf that the game has ever produced. Two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw and U.S. Open champion Tom Kite were two of Mr. Penick’s prize students.

All of these individuals I’ve mentioned – Kelly Kraft, Mr. Penick, Ben Crenshaw, and Tom Kite – love the game of golf. And, regardless of the outcome of today’s match, they have all enjoyed high achievement.

Before I go on, please know that today’s message is not about golf. I only mentioned a few people who play the game to illustrate a point: they love what they do, and they seek to achieve on a high level.

Whether you play or not, my question to you is this: do you love what you do? Given what you do, do you seek to achieve on a high level? It has been said that “What you spend the most of your time doing is what you’re going to get good at.”

Although the outdoor temperatures might not say so, the summer of 2011 is coming to an end. And this morning, I’m presenting to you the final installment in a series of sermons on the mission of the church. For two and a half months of summer Sundays, we’ve pinpointed the mission-oriented passages of the appointed Scripture readings. Together, we’ve highlighted aspects of the mission of God in the world. Sometimes we say that the church of God has a mission and then wonder what exactly it might be. But it’s better to say – and far more accurate to say – that the mission of God has a church, and First Presbyterian Church in Denton is part of it, warts and all. When we, as individuals and as a church, see ourselves as part of God’s mission in the world, the results will speak for themselves.

This morning we look at the result of mission itself, and we take our cue from Psalm 105. The psalmist gets right to the point: “Give praise to the LORD, proclaim his name; make known among the nations what he has done.”

There are two ways to look at this from a mission point of view. First, even when we’ve determined that we’ve completed a task in keeping with God’s purposes, there’s still more to do, more praises to offer, more proclamations to make, more declarations to deliver emphasizing what God has done. The mission of God is its own reward. When we achieve some things big or small, it almost always opens doors to continue to achieve things big or small. The problem comes when we start compartmentalizing our lives and begin to think that the mission of God is just one element among many in our busy, all-important schedules. In some respects, we’ve made an idol of our schedules – and we worship at that altar quite regularly. But mission-minded people know that the mission is not the servant of the schedule. The schedule is the servant of the mission. This is to say that everything we are involved in is oriented to mission. We see our lives oriented to mission. Everything in our lives – including our rest and leisure -- is oriented to mission.

There’s a second way to look at the first verse of this psalm from a mission point of view. The writer says: “Make known among the nations what he has done.” The things God has done are spoken of in the past tense. There is no talk here about what God is doing now or what God may have planned for the future. There is, instead, the encouragement to make known what he has done. For you linguists out there, the verb is not in the active voice. It is in the passive voice – the “divine passive” as it has been called. In other words, when God gets it done, it’s done. When Jesus said, “It is finished” as He hung dying on the cross, it was done. The Easter Sunday angel was almost astonished at the grave visitors. The angel declared: “Why do you look for the dead among the living? He is not here. He has risen – even as He said.” There’s no undoing it. But there is the proclamation of what God has done; that’s the ongoing, active thing.

It’s the ongoing, active thing to proclaim that life has won out over death, that light beat down the darkness, that forgiveness has triumphed over sin, that service won the battle against self-centeredness, that hope has triumphed over despair, that substance is victorious over the meaninglessness and nihilism that seems to pervade our world. All of it has been done in Jesus Christ, and all of it is worthy of our best efforts in every area of our lives.

Statistically, it would appear that the church – or, at least, the Presbyterian part of it – has thrown in the towel. Numbers are down; attendance is down; giving is down. The denomination is beset with strife and controversy. Some, in the shrinking enclaves of Presbyterianism, have rather gloomily asserted that being part of this church is like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. It is said that the church is stuck in yesterday; it’s too bureaucratic or too political. Or worse, it doesn’t know what it believes anymore. Whenever I hear such flim-flam and gobbledygook, I’m going to start making it a moment for mission. I’m going to tell these folks what a mess I was. I’m going to let them know that our loving God, through the mission and ministry of the Presbyterian Church, picked me up, dusted me off, and reframed my mind and heart and soul. It loved me back into the realization that God wasn’t finished with me yet! And, after a year among you, the great people of First Presbyterian Church in Denton, I’ve never been more excited to be a minister of Word and Sacrament than right now.

Most if not all of you remember Brian Grassley. He was your pastor before yours truly showed up. You might recall that he hurt his leg pretty bad when he began his work here. He was confined, for quite awhile, to a bed and a chair. Well, I “friended” him on Facebook some time ago, and, lo and behold, I come across his “status” on Facebook yesterday. Brian Grassley wrote this: “This morning I completed an Olympic Triathlon here in Boise. I swam a mile in an outdoor lake, biked 25 miles (very hilly) and ran 6.2 miles. Ha! Take that, bilateral quadriceps tendon tears of 2009. I finished second to last, but I finished.”

I started with a golf story, and I can’t help but end with one. On February 2, 1949, a man survived a head-on collision with a Greyhound bus east of Van Horn, Texas. It wasn’t the first terrible moment in his life. As a boy, he watched his father commit suicide. This accident, however, left him with a double-fracture of the pelvis, a fractured collar bone, a left ankle fracture, a chipped rib, and near-fatal blood clots. He was in the hospital for 59 days. If anyone had a set of reasons to throw in the towel, it would be this man. The doctors told him he would never walk again. This man may have heard the doctors while sitting down, but he didn’t take it sitting down. Eighteen months later, this man, Ben Hogan, won the United States Open Golf Championship at Merion. Three years later, in 1953, he won his first and only British Open golf championship. When it was said and done, he signed over all of his winnings from that tournament to his church. And he himself never mentioned that, but others did.

Make known what God has done! God’s mission is its own reward! How wonderful it is for you and me to have our part in it!

Amen.