Sermon

March 12, 2006

A Sermon Preached at St. Stephen’s on March 12, 2006, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

A southern governor used to tell this story on himself. He and his wife took a road trip back to the part of the state they had come from, someplace they rarely visited. They stopped for gas and the governor was amazed to see his wife blush and avoid eye-contact with the gas station attendant. His wife didn’t say a word about the incident, so about an hour later, back on the road, the governor brought it up. “I couldn’t help wondering,” he said, “if you and that gas station attendant once knew each other.” The governor’s wife admitted that they had. “And,” went on the governor, “it seemed to me that there might have once been something romantic between you.” She admitted there had. “I guess you were thinking,” the governor suggested, “how different your two lives have become. Why, if you stayed together, you’d be married to a gas station attendant. Right?” “Well, no,” said the governor’s wife, “I was just thinking that if we’d stayed together, HE’D be the governor by now.”

The ways of God are quirky and unpredictable, something we ought to remember in Lent. If we have chosen to observe Lent with any kind of self sacrifice at all—whether by taking on some worthwhile project, or by undertaking any kind of discipline of study or giving up something, if we have chosen to observe Lent with any kind of self-sacrifice, we ought to be prepared for surprises. The things we think we’ll never be able to do, may just be exactly what God has in mind for us, and the things we think we can do easily may turn out to be surprisingly difficult.

Our Hebrew scripture reminds us this morning of Abraham and Sarah and the quirky turn their lives took in their old age. They were in their nineties, the story goes, when God appeared to Abraham and Sarah saying they were going to have a baby. You may remember the story: Abraham scoffed at the news, and Sarah laughed out loud. But God, it appeared, was serious. And so began the people of Israel . The story is more than a genealogical legend; it is a reminder that God’s ways are just plain different from ours. In the hands of a loving God, each of us can do more than we think possible. If we depend on our own strength alone, each of us will probably be less successful than we think.

Last summer, the Washington Post ran an odd obituary—so odd, in fact, that a friend sent me the clipping. The headline read: “Thomas Cannon Dies; Postal clerk lived like a pauper to help others.” In the great scheme of the world, nobody but his close friends would ever have known much about Mr. Cannon. He and his wife raised two sons, but he never made more than $20,000 a year from his job with the Post Office in Richmond , Va. When he retired in 1983, he and his wife lived on a pension barely above the poverty line. A very modest life, you’d say. Except for Mr. Cannon’s unusual hobby: he liked to give money away. He called himself “a poor man’s philanthropist,” and in his lifetime gave away more than $150,000 to people experiencing hard times, and to people who had been unusually kind and brave. Over the last 33 years of his life he gave to a low-income woman who had started a youth center in her apartment complex, to a couple who wanted to return to Vietnam to see their hometown again, to a teenager who had been abandoned as a baby, but who grew up to be Virginia’s Youth of the Year. Mr. Cannon’s checks were usually for $1,000. Those checks didn’t come easy. “We lived simply,” he told a reporter shortly before he died last July, “so we could give money away.”

On the surface of it, Thomas Cannon’s story is impossible. Retired postal workers eking out a living don’t have the means to be philanthropists. But God’s ways are just plain different from ours, and Thomas Cannon managed to do an amazing amount of good. We can, too. If you haven’t signed up for a Lent-a-Hand project, it is not too late to do it. There will be a display at coffee hour and each of us can sign up to do something that changes the world. It is not too late to join St. Stephen’s Bible study—and you don’t even need to leave home to do it because the Bible study’s on-line at our website.

But be prepared for surprises. The first surprise might be that Lent isn’t just about giving up chewing gum anymore. There are a lot of things to choose from. The second surprise is that one of the many options might be appealing. The third surprise might just be that with God’s help, our Lenten discipline might go better than we thought. It happened to Abraham and Sarah. It happened to Thomas Cannon. It can happen to us, too. AMEN