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"Visionaries – What They Can Teach Us” Meditation Delivered By Reverend Richard E. Stetler – January 1, 2012 Centenary United Luke
2:22-40 This is the
season when many of us verbalize our hope for a better future. On a
personal level we make New Year’s resolutions.
We enjoy learning about predictions of the future. Any of us
whose eyes occasionally wander to the horoscope section in the
newspaper know of what I speak.
All of us are curious about the future to some extent. This
has been true for every generation. For example, in
the Book of Samuel, King Saul became fearful of the size of the
Philistine army with whom he was about to engage in battle. He
ordered his officials, “Find me a woman who is a medium, and I will
consult with her.” (I
Samuel 28:7f) Kings
routinely surrounded themselves with prophets whom they believed
could inform them of the will of God before making crucial
decisions. One of the
scripture lessons frequently associated with Epiphany Sunday is the
story of the three Magi that visited the new family.
Most likely these astrologers
came from today’s
What is
interesting is that around the time of Jesus’ birth, 7 BC, there was
a rare alignment of the planets Jupiter and Saturn with the Pisces
constellation, an event that would have evoked considerable
speculation among astrologers.
Their interpretation was that a new ruler had been born in
the west that would become a powerful king of the Jews in the
future. They came with their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh.
The Book of Acts
describes a time when the Apostle Paul and Silas came upon a woman
who could predict the future during one of their missionary
journeys. She was
earning a lot of money for her handlers.
She accurately identified the mission of their ministry.
Paul, however, became so
agitated with her that he healed the woman of what he claimed was
an evil spirit. When her
owners realized that their money-making days were over, they had
Paul and Silas arrested. The Roman authorities actually had them
severely beaten and put in prison.
(Acts 16:16f) Passing through
Advent, we reviewed the prophecies that were always pointing to a
future where God would act decisively to save humanity.
Some pastors design Christmas Eve services around the motifs
of the fall of humanity in
Genesis, the prophesies of Isaiah about people seeing
a great light, of Micah’s prediction of a day when people will
hammer their swords into plows and of Gabriel’s telling Mary that
her pregnancy would be used by God for a specific purpose. In our lesson
today, Mary and Joseph were observing the Hebrew Law by taking Jesus
to Later that day,
an 84-year old woman named Anna told her listeners that “This child
is the one that one day will bring freedom to his people.”
Luke is the only Gospel that mentions these two visionaries.
What is a visionary? Visionaries are
the people who have become the
heart and soul of our sanity because they remind us to keep hope
alive every moment of life.
Visionaries are not specially gifted people.
They are people who
have sharply focused their lives on seeking what is not yet known.
They are literally the
creators of tomorrow by being the
mothers and fathers of
innovation in every field. As we enter the
New Year, what can visionaries teach us?
This morning we are going to examine briefly three areas
where these people can make a difference in our lives.
First, they teach us to keep focused on
our future.
How many of us do that?
People tend to remain more preoccupied with their past and
present. All we can do with
the past is to give a creative purpose to what happened.
With respect to the present, we need to remind ourselves that
the present is always filled with change.
Remember that
marvelous definition of faith in the Book of Hebrews, “To have faith
is to be sure of the things we hope for and to remain certain
of the things we cannot see.”
(Hebrews 11:1)
This is true as we focus our hope in what will eventually dawn in
the future. As we get older,
a number of us feel we have
paid our dues and now it is time to encourage the younger people
to step up and make their contributions.
If we find ourselves backing away from being fully involved
in life, we may be driving
into our future by looking in
the rear view mirror.
We should never take our focus off the future. Eula Weaver was
81 years old and was waiting to die.
She could not walk more than one hundred feet before finding
herself gasping for breath.
Her circulation was so poor that she had to wear gloves
during the heat of summer just to keep her hands warm.
She had high blood pressure
and degenerative changes to her heart and joints.
A physician put her on a very
mild form of exercise that he increased over the months and years
that followed. He
literally reversed her symptoms.
With a better diet and increased vigorous physical training
four years later, Eula Weaver won the gold medals in both the half
mile and the mile races in the Senior Olympics held in Listen to the list of people who chose to live by remaining focused
on the future. Galileo
was still publishing his writings at the age of 74.
Michelangelo was 71 when he was appointed as the Supervising
architect of St. Peter's church in To feel vitally alive we need
to be walking toward new horizons.
We need to be looking forward to how God may use us tomorrow.
Duke Ellington was passed
over by the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Committee at the age of 66.
When he heard what they had done he said, "God does not want
me to become too famous too early."
The German poet, Goethe, wrote
Faust when he was 80.
Mary Baker Eddy founded
The Christian Science Monitor
publication when she was in her mid 80s.
George Bernard Shaw fractured his leg at 96.
He fell out of a tree he was pruning.
These people never gave in to the passing of time.
They never underestimated what they could do. Secondly, visionaries teach
us that we should use our imaginations when we are making plans for
the future. Too many people become pessimistic and depressed about the changes
happening during their experiences of the present.
We forget that when
life is not working for people, change is on its way.
Consider what has happened in
just this past year in One of the reasons I find the World’s Stock Markets so fascinating
to follow is that they are a gauge of how much faith people have in
the future. There is little that evokes more fear in people than how
to manage their investments or savings.
They want an investment
that is safe. People
forget that such a strategy was used by the third servant in Jesus’
parable of the talents.
That servant buried it for fear of losing it.
Faith in the future
implies risk-taking. When we use our imaginations,
we can anticipate the future with absolute certainty.
Doomsayers say that such a prediction is impossible.
They claim that there is no way anyone can anticipate the
future. What we do know is that populations are expanding very
rapidly. There will be increased demand for everything from housing
and clothing to food and energy.
Unimaginable technological advancements occur with such speed that
they are surpassed within eighteen months. The
product pipelines of most major companies are filled with life
saving medications, improved building materials, better fibers,
quality seeds that will improve crop yields, more efficient fuels
and safer cars. We are living in the golden
age that, for centuries, people have longed to see.
In fact, change is accelerating at a pace that staggers the
imagination of even the most gifted visionaries. What is abundantly
clear is that more countries are participating in our global growth.
Thousands of years ago, the prophets predicted quite accurately that
a new world was on its way. Who could have imagined that astronauts from the People who use their imaginations defeat fear every day of their
lives. What happens to
us is that we feed ourselves a
steady diet of information about high prices, tsunamis,
earthquakes, armed robberies, and murders.
There are nearly seven billion people living on our planet
and for every one person engaged in activities that sabotage their
life, there are 100,000 people working to improve the lives of
everyone by what they do.
While cultures may not
call it by name, the spiritual growth of people all over the earth
is evolving. Henry Nouwen, the Jesuit priest who was a professor at the Boston
University School of Religion once wrote:
“In
God's sight, the things that really matter seldom take place in
public. The people who remain unknown to the rest of us are praying
and working in silence.
They become the visionaries who make the difference in God's
creative patterns.
Perhaps the greatest saints
remain anonymous!”
The third thing visionaries
can teach us is to have faith that the global community is evolving
on schedule toward the
future that is so magnificent there are simply no words to describe
it.
The prophet Micah had a
vision of world peace 700 years before Jesus was born.
It has taken all this time for many old ideas to die and
better ones to be born.
We
have become a generation that wants gratification of our desires
immediately. God’s love and
infinite patience allows our species to mature in its own time. Jesus was far reaching into the future when he said, “Love your
enemies.” During Jesus’
lifetime, few gave his teaching a second thought.
They must have thought, “How ridiculous! We will all die if
we do that.” What
happens to the message of Jesus when we reframe all his teachings
into being descriptions of how life will be lived in the future?
He gave us
a road map for world peace, for wealth creation, for a global
community and for ending hunger all over the world. I will conclude with a piece most of us have heard at one time or
another. It is good to
remind ourselves of what Simeon and Anna were seeing in the spirit
of that little boy named Jesus.
This verbal portrait
tells us what God did patiently to enhance the quality of human life
through three years of one person’s life thousands of years ago.
He was born in an obscure
village, the child of a peasant woman.
He grew up in still
another village where he worked in a carpenter’s shop until he was
thirty.
For three years he was an
itinerant preacher.
He never wrote a book.
He never held an office.
He never had a family or
owned a home.
He did not go to college.
He never visited a big
city.
He never traveled more
than 200 miles from the place where he was born.
He did none of the things
one usually associates with greatness.
He had no credentials but
himself.
He was 33 when the tide
of public opinion turned against him.
His friends ran away and
he was turned over to his enemies.
He went through the
mockery of a trial.
He was nailed to a cross
between two thieves.
While dying, his
executioners gambled for his clothing, the only property he owned on
earth.
When he died, he was laid
in a borrowed tomb provided by the kindness of a friend.
Twenty-one centuries have
come and gone.
Today, he is the central
figure of the human race and the visionary of humankind’s progress.
All the armies that ever
marched,
All the navies that ever
sailed,
All the parliaments that
ever sat,
All the monarchs and
regimes that ever ruled
Put together have not
affected the life of humanity on earth as much as this one solitary
life. |