Church on Morgan
Saying No in Order to Say Yes
[MUSIC PLAYING] From Church on Morgan, a United Methodist congregation whose desire is to be a reminder of the beauty of God and each other. This podcast is a collection of Sunday teachings inspired by the revised Common Lectionary and recorded weekly in Raleigh, North Carolina. And now a moment of silence before this episode begins. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Good morning. My name is Tim Russell, and I am delighted to be with you. And as I always say, each time I'm up here, one of the great joys in my ministry has been serving with Church on Morgan. It's been a wonderful, wonderful pleasure for the last couple of years. One of the things that I am responsible for is congregational care, which means, in a congregation this young, I just get to hold a lot of babies. So we are not yet grandparents. And so I don't take that for granted. So I went to see Sam yesterday at the hospital, and I was visiting. And finally, she said, would you like to hold him? And I was almost in tears. I was like, can I? Is it OK if I do? And so I got the whole little Finnegan. And I get the whole-- I hopefully get the whole Felix. I'm going to come see Felix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, don't mean to shop. Don't mean to point at you and totally embarrass you. Felix is one of the babies I've been visiting at Duke. And we've had him in our prayers, and we continue to have him in our prayers, as well as his parents. So sorry about that. Pointing people out. So yeah, I think probably now it's time to read the scripture. I was like, I know I'm supposed to start my sermon. No, I'm supposed to read scripture for her. So the scripture reading is from Mark chapter 1, verses 29 through 39. After leaving the synagogue, Jesus, James, and John went home with Simon and Andrew. Simon's mother-in-law was in bed sick with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once. He went to her, took her by the hand, and raised her up, the fever left her, and she served them. That evening at sunset, people brought to Jesus those who were sick or demon possessed. The whole town gathered near the door. He healed many who were sick with all kinds of diseases, and he threw out many demons. But he didn't let the demons speak because they recognized him. Early in the morning, well before sunrise, Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer. Simon and those with him tracked him down. When they found him, they told him, everyone's looking for you. Jesus replied, let's head to the other, in the other direction to the nearby villages so that I can preach there too. That's why I've come. He traveled throughout Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and throwing out demons. And this is the Word of God, given to us the people of God. Thanks be to God. Would you pray with me? Let's O Lord, the words of my mouth and the meditations of each of our hearts, for you are our strength and our redeemer. Amen. In 2015, it's just a couple of years away from turning 60. And I said to my wife, I'm gonna try things, I'm gonna try a couple of things I've never tried before. 'Cause I do believe that, especially as you get older, you need to continue to stretch yourself and try things and try new things. And so she was training for a 5K. Now I've played tennis for years and years and years, but I've never really been a runner. So I said, I'm gonna train for the 5K with you. I'm gonna run a 5K with you. Well, while I was training for the 5K, I tore my meniscus. So I didn't complete a 5K that year. I did complete a 1K, which is about what it cost me. It's about, it cost me about $1,000 after all was said and done. But I, and I went to get the X-ray and the young woman doing the X-ray said, "Sir, I need you to put your knees and ankles, "stand with your knees and ankles together." And I'm so bow-legged, I said, "Man, I can do one or the other, but I can't do both." Like, "I can do my ankles or I can do my knees, "but yeah, it's not gonna work with both." So the doctor saw it and he said, "Which one's your bad knee?" And I said, "My right one." He said, "Well, that's funny 'cause your left one's "in horrible shape." You're gonna need knee replacement in the next decade. 2015, that was 2024. Yeah, I'm kicking that can down the road as far as I can, but I'm looking in the knee replacement pretty soon. So anyway, so I did eventually heal. I did eventually run a couple of 5Ks with Pam. I did complete some 5Ks. And so, but I also said to her, "You know, I'm gonna try out for community theater. "We live in Clayton and Smithfield has a wonderful "little community theater and they were doing one "of the great plays in the American Playbook." And so I said, "I'm gonna try out." I'd never done theater, never taken an acting class, but I've been a preacher ever since I was 20 years old. So I do sort of know how to stand in front of people. I do know how to talk. I can deliver lines. I think I can memorize lines. We're about to test that theory, but I think I can figure that out. So I said to Pam, "I'm gonna try." And I said, "You know what? "The audition, just doing the audition is a win for me "because I went back and forth and I was nervous." And I thought, "Nah, I'm not gonna embarrass myself. "I'm gonna humiliate myself. "Nah, I'll never." So, it came time for the audition was in February. The auditions, the play was in April, I think, and so the auditions went February. I got ready to go that night and started snowing. The snow got heavier, the closer I got to Smithfield. And I did think to myself, I thought, "Timothy, "maybe the Lord is trying to tell you something." But no, no, no, I stuck it out, went to the audition. I was auditioning for "Death of a Salesman." So I decided to start my theater career with a light comedy. If you know "Death of a Salesman," it's one of the great plays. I love Arthur Miller, but it's a dark play. I read once that everybody who's ever played the lead in that on Broadway had to go to therapy after that. In fact, Philip Seymour Hoffman, the rest of the piece did a wonderful job. Dustin Hoffman's done it, all kinds of people have done it. But anyway, anyway. So a couple of days later, I get the email and they say, "We'd like to offer you the part "of Stanley the waiter." I even had lines, Stanley even has a speaking role. Now, if you said to me, if you said to me, "Now, Tim, what is "Death of a Salesman about?" I'd say, "Well, you know, from my perspective, "it's the story of Stanley the waiter." He's actually the main character. He's not on stage long, but you want to keep your eye on him when he's on there, 'cause if there is any comedic relief in Death of a Salesman, it's Stanley the waiter. I did have some good, funny lines, so. Anyway, as you know, I don't want to give it away if you haven't seen it, but Death of a Salesman is about a salesman and not to spoil the plot, but he dies. I mean, you're like, "Man, alive. "I was gonna see it this weekend "and you just spoiled the whole thing for me." Well, I mean, not to give it away, but it is the story, as you probably know, of Willie Loman. Willie Loman's one of the, again, one of the great characters in the American playbook, but also he's a sad, tragic character, because Willie Loman is one of those people who sees himself as everybody's friend, but he's so busy being the life of the party. He's so busy talking that he never really stops to listen. And so the truth is, he has all of these shallow relationships but he doesn't have any real deep friendships. And he tells his sons throughout the play, he says to his sons, "Now, when I die, "the governor's gonna come, "senators are gonna come." He pulled me lined up around the block. And of course, at the end of the play, when he does die, there's a handful of people, his family and a couple of neighbors at the grave. Willie Loman is one of the sad characters because he just never stops to really engage with people. In the scripture reading I read a moment ago, Jesus has gone away by himself to a deserted place or some versions say a lonely place. He has just healed his mother-in-law, he has been pressed on by all sides, and so he gets up very early in the morning before the sun rose, and he goes out by himself to a deserted place, to a lonely place. And then Mark tells us that Simon and some of the disciples track him down. Now, that's an interesting phrase, isn't it? That's an interesting... Mark does not say and they ran into him, they happened to stumble across... How about that, Jesus, how are you doing? I'm doing fine, fine, no. They tracked him down. There is implicitly at least a turn of the phrase that there was a very deliberate, like they didn't run into him somewhere. They tracked him down. We know how that is. You're at the house and you're looking for somebody, your spouse or one of the kids and you can't find them and you look in the bedroom and can't find, you look in the attic, you look in the basement, you look in the call their name, call their name, and you're like, finally, you track them down and you're out of breath, you're sort of in a panic, and what's the first thing we always say? I've been looking everywhere for you. That's not true. There's at least one place you hadn't looked for me yet, which is where I was, right? But when we're frustrated, when we're perhaps a little frightened, we tend to exaggerate. We tend to get excited and exaggerate, don't we? We were in the Parsons at Ritesville Beach and I had something on my mind, who knows I was looking for a tool or something and I wasn't even paying any attention. I came around the corner and Pam had a basket of laundry and I scared her. I surprised her, she dropped the laundry and she said, you literally just gave me a heart attack. And she didn't think this next part was as funny as I did, but I said, honey, we need to talk about the word literally. Like, I didn't literally just give you a heart, you're perfectly fine. I scared you, I'm sorry for that, but literally, no, just a little bit of an exaggeration, right? So the disciples come across Jesus and they say, everyone is looking for you. Well, that's not true. They said that, but that can't pop. Everyone in Capernaum was not looking for Jesus, right? I guarantee you there was a guy out in his garden that was worried about his onions that weren't growing. He wasn't worried about Jesus. There was a lady hanging her laundry. She wasn't looking for Jesus, but when we're excited, when we're frustrated, when we've tracked somebody down, what we say is, because we exaggerate, what we say is everyone's looking for you. And Jesus says, everyone? Really, everyone's looking for them. Well, then I'll drop what I'm doing and come back. But that isn't what he says, isn't it? What he says is, yeah, I'm not going back there. I've got to go to the next village because I have to preach the message there as well. I've got to move on to the next people because that's why I came. Jesus said, no. Why would Jesus say no? We don't hardly say no to anybody, do we? We don't ever say no. And this isn't, believe it or not, this isn't the part of the message where the old guy says, you know, you young people, you're always on your cell phones, you're always, yeah, because my day, when we had dinner, we just, and you're like, yeah, grandpa, because in your day, the phone was on the wall and had a cord on it, fair enough. It's not about generational, it's about we all do it. It's just too easy in our culture to feel like we're engaging with all kinds of things when the truth is often, we're not truly engaging with anything. Because we're texting and we're checking ESPN for scores and we're trying to talk to somebody and we're trying to read a book and we're watching a movie on TV and all of those things, all of those things cry out for our attention, but we're actually giving our attention to none of those things. You know, I had to, and this is probably just me, it's probably just my problem, but I had to stop going, I had to stop meeting people at lunch at sports bars with those 5,000 TVs. Because somebody be talking to me and all of a sudden, I'm interested in a billiards match in Germany. I don't care about Germany or billiards, but all of a sudden I'm like, what, they just hit the five pocket? And it's, I don't even know what they're talking about, right? But that's, it's just easy to do, isn't it? Because it's easy to be distracted. And so what happens is in trying to say yes to everything, because fear of missing out is a real thing, isn't it? And that's not generational, it's true for all of us. It's just, it's the, it's the culture we live in. It's the society we live in. We're always afraid we're missing out. And so we're trying to experience everything, but the problem with trying to experience everything is if we're not careful, we actually wind up experiencing nothing. We actually wind up engaging with nobody, because we're trying to engage with everybody. Jesus knew that sometimes in order to be fully present, we have to be fully absent at other times. No one, not even Jesus could be present 24/7. And so there were times in the gospels, fairly frequently in the gospels where he goes off by himself to a lonely place. He goes off to pray, he goes off to meditate, he goes off to recharge his batteries, so that he can be fully present at other times. He removes himself at times so he can be present at other times. Perhaps it is that we are, we say yes to so many things and so many people that, like Willie Loman, we have a bunch of relationships that are an inch deep. They're wide and we have a lot of relationships, but they're an inch deep because we don't really engage or listen to anybody. All of us know intuitively, I hope. If not, I'm going to shock you again this morning, all of us know intuitively. I don't care how many people wish you happy birthday on Facebook, you don't really have 150 friends. Yeah, I don't want to be the person to break that. Nobody has 150 friends. Jesus only had 12 and one of them denied him. And the other one betrayed him, so really we're down to 10 at this point, right? I mean, if you have two or three or four good friends, true friends that listen and you listen and you engage and you're engaged in these others' lives, you're a blessed person. You're a very fortunate person. Sometimes, so perhaps like Willie Loman, we're so trying to be everything to everybody that we're actually nothing to nobody. Sometimes we're so engaged with people. We say yes to so many people. Yes to our spouse. Yes to our parents. Yes to our grandparents. Yes to our children. Yes to everybody that if we're not careful, we get burned out. And then the next step with burnout is we get bitter. We get angry and sometimes it's quiet. Sometimes we don't even tell anybody, but we begin to get frustrated and we begin to get angry because everybody's asking. The truth is we're the ones saying yes, but everyone's expecting this of me. Everyone's wants me. Everyone needs me. No one can give to people 24 hours a day. Even Jesus couldn't do that. Even Jesus once in a while had to go off to a lonely place. So where is your lonely place? Where is that place where you go to recharge your batteries? Or maybe it's the beach. Maybe it's the mountains. Maybe it's your backyard. If your mother of young children is probably the bathroom. Right, but wherever it is, find a place. To take a break and take a breath and find a way to say no. It's okay to say no. It's okay to say no to your spouse. It's okay to say no to your children. It's okay to say no to the PTA. It's okay to say no to the church. Because the church asks as much as anybody does. It's okay. It's okay to say no. I can't do that now. Maybe later, maybe another time. Maybe a season in my life, but right now I can't do that. I wasn't always good at doing that. If there's any profession that encourages people to say yes all the time, it is the ministry. A lot of reasons for that. Some of my own ego. Some of my own ego. I'm quite sure of that looking back. But early on, I used to say yes every time somebody asked. And so we would, for instance, we'd plan a family game night and the phone would ring. And at the Parsonage, I answered it and said, "Preacher, can you come soon?" I said, "Yeah, yeah, I'll be there." But you know what I learned? And I suppose every vocation has this. There are times. There are times in the ministry when you need to say yes. Somebody's had a heart attack and they've been rushed to the hospital. And people aren't there. I'm not sure if they're going to make it. Of course. You say yes and go there, right? But what I learned was the vast majority of the time. I could simply say, "I can't do it right now." How about tomorrow? That tomorrow will be fine, preacher. That'll work. I don't know what the comparable thing is in your vocation, but I suspect it's the same. I suspect all of us have ways of saying not yet. And I'm saying no, never. I'm saying not now. Maybe tomorrow. Somebody will say to you, "That'll be fine, preacher." Eugene Peterson, who's best known for the message, the paraphrase of the message was one of my heroes as a preacher. And he wrote in one of his books one time. He said, "This was back in the days when I literally kept a calendar." He kept it like by hand. He said, "Just calendar in time, family time." So that when somebody calls and you say, "Can I see you tonight?" And you've promised one of the kids, "You'll take him to dinner and to the movie." You just say, "No, I've got an appointment tonight." Well, I thought that was pretty clever, right? So I said, "That was telling a bunch of young clergy that one time." And one young woman raised her hand and she said, "I have a question." I said, "Sure, what's your question?" She said, "Why don't you just normalize being with your family?" Wow, but that's a good question. Just tell people you're with your children. Why are you trying to hide the fact you're with your children? Why are you trying to hide the fact that you've made a promise to your children? You're going to keep that promise. When our kids were little, they were about three and 18 months, I guess. We were serving the church in Tabor City. Tabor City is on the South Carolina border and some of you know Tabor City because it's on the way to Myrtle Beach. And so you thought, "I wonder what that little town is like as you bypass us." But that's okay. Stop at the hardies there or something. We had four good years in Tabor City. Tabor City was a wonderful appointment for us. It was a sweet little church. When we got there, the church was averaging 60 people in worship. And four years later, when we left, it was averaging 90 people in worship, which is no small feat. I mean, I was kind of proud of that, right? It's not a small growth. But my point in saying that is not about the church, the sweet little church. 90 people. We weren't averaging 900 people in worship. We weren't averaging 9,000 people in worship. We were averaging 90 people in worship. I know now, looking back, if I'd taken the whole summer off, they wouldn't even have known, right? But at the time, I thought that that was the center of Christendom. And that the whole Christian faith relied on me. And so that we had a chance to go to the beach with family and friends. And I said to Pam, "Now you all go. You take the kids and go and have a good time." I got so much to do here. I've got, I've just, I'm swamped and swamped. 90 people and swamped. Whole town was only like 1,000 people. I could have ministered to the whole town and gone on vacation. But so they went for a week. I was out working in the yard when they came home, pulled in the driveway. And our oldest had barely gotten unbuckled from the car seat. And you know, the beautiful thing about toddlers, three-year-olds, is they're enthusiastic about everything, because everything is new to that, right? And so they jumped out and said, "Oh, Daddy, Daddy, you would not be..." We played in the waves and the waves tickled John John's feet and he laughed and he giggled. And we saw, we saw porpoises and, and we, and we collected, oh, I, and I've, I've got a surprise for you, except as a three-year-old, it was a list, but I've got a surprise for you. I said, "Do you have a surprise for me?" I do. And they brought their hand from behind their back. And in their hand was this very seashell. And they said, um, I said, "Is that for me?" And then you can see the doubt in their face and they said, "Well, maybe we could share it." So we've shared the seashell for 32 years. It's, it followed me from Tabor City to Wilmington to Ritesville Beach, back to Wilmington to Raleigh to Clayton. And in every office I had, I put this seashell on the shelf. Because I wanted it to remind me of this truth that I share with you, especially those of you who are young parents. We shared the seashell, but you know and I know what we should have shared was the adventure that went into finding. Learn how to say no. It's okay to say no. Because in saying no to some things, you're more fully able to say yes to other things. There were plenty of times when Jesus said yes. I'd say most of the time Jesus said yes. But the gospel writer reminds us there were also times when Jesus said no. Because Jesus knew this truth. Sometimes you need to say no to one thing in order to fully say yes to a better thing. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, amen. Thank you for joining today. If this episode has been meaningful to you, would you take a moment to share it with a friend? To support this ministry or learn more about our community, visit us at churchonmorgan.org. [Music] (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
A sermon on Mark 1:29-39 by Rev. Tim Russell.