October 3, 2011
Apple Valley Church of the Nazarene
Dr. Tom Taylor
"A Bridge over Troubled Water"
The analogy of this sermon to a memorable song of the sixties is intriguing and helps the listener connect. Pastor Tom is a preacher of the first order. Please allow a personal response to this sermon. As stated, the guardrails on the bridge are there to protect us as we cross but staying in lane may be difficult if we focus on the guardrails and the dangers out there. Guardrails do provide some safety but hitting a guardrail will be a negative experience in itself. This is real life, a familiar starting point, but like all analogies this one has it's limits.
Likewise, we set in place in our lives guardrails that seem to promise protection from life’s hazards. The guardrails are social, religious, economic or all of the above in varying degrees. We are all different and we all choose and value guardrails differently, but we all have guardrails. Membership in a family or group may offer protection. Partaking of a religious mission may bring a sense of community beyond the individual. An education that empowers one to a sound financial future may seem to be the safest way to navigate this life. There is nothing inherently wrong or sinful with these guardrails because the hazards of life are out there and they are real.
The message from Dr. Taylor to his people is for all of us to look for true safety elsewhere. Yes, be wise in how you live by being aware of the guardrails but look elsewhere, look down the road. With a vision that is down the road, we are more apt to stay in lane with what God really wants from us. Even with the proper long term vision, spiritual smugness about how well we’re driving can pose a greater danger than guardrails themselves. People and Church, how are we doing or driving? Are we living smugly? Are we looking down the road or building higher guardrails? Each person or church must answer for themselves but one clue is evident, a clue that Pastor Taylor missed.
Are not the social, religious and economic divisions in the church a predictable result of the church’s overemphasis on the guardrails that divide the fellowship? This list of Christian divisions is enormous. We are divided in dogma, thought, gender, practice, priorities, income, race, ethical norms, architecture and language. The list goes on. Do our divisions not advertise a scardy cat church that wants and prioritizes another higher guardrail? Try as we do, there is one hazard that has no guardrail for we all shall one day die, be dead and gone. Gone where? Subtilely the church would have us believe the answer to this question is about heaven or hell or some other humanly imposed guardrail. Not so.
The Scriptures, St. Paul and Jesus in particular, each teach that authentic spirituality is about vision down the road. A vision that fosters unity rather than divisions, God himself is about the fruit of unity, that humanly abused definition of love. Are we as a people defining the concept of love according to God’s definition? Most of us, no matter how pious, prefer our divisions, our guardrails. We could pull out innumerable Scriptures to rightly define love but the life of Mother Teresa may be more instructive. She lived most of her life eyeing the religious guardrails, fulfilling admirably the expected requirements of her calling. Frustrated with the tidiness of her life, she had a Pauline midlife crisis that drove her into the streets of Calcutta to proclaim the love and unity of God to the dying human refuse of the city. Did she ask about church membership, dogma or a confession of faith from the dying? No, with a long term vision she communicated by her presence the everlasting love of God.
The breakdown of the analogy is most glaring because of that little word “over” in the song title. To be accurate to real living, the song title should be “A Bridge through Troubled Water”, for there is no easy out from the chores of life and the troubled waters that will come to all of us. God does not act on our behalf to take away trouble, they will always come and go. The troubles may be different but they will still be troubling. However, with a long range vision, God will turn them into possibilities.
Central to each of our possibilities is a mission for others to help bring reunification to this world system that has been distorted by our selfishness. God calls us to live not by our humanly constructed guardrails but with a long range compass setting through life’s troubled waters. May we look down the road.
Thank you Pastor Tom.
G.Goslaw
Victorville, Ca.
