"Tide Riding"

Opening Prayer: Our Father, if you were to give us everything that is; if you were to give us the heavens and the earth; if you were to give us all those things that are in the heavens — seen and unseen; and if you were to give us all those things which are upon the earth — seen and unseen; if you were to give us everything that we can imagine, everything of which we have ever dreamed, everything for which we have ever hoped; if you were to give us all of these things and not yourself, then all other things are no longer of value to us. Our great joy, our great hope, our great peace, and our deep faith lies in the fact that Thou hast given Thyself to us. We rejoice in this. We are made whole by it. We offer this worship in the power of that gift, and in the name of that gift, even Jesus Christ, our Lord and our Savior. Amen.   

It's good to be back with you here in the Chicago area and other areas served by this program as well.

When the German forces were retreating from North Africa before the Allies, they tried to make the port serving the city of Eritrea unusable by the Allies. They did this by taking large barges, filling them with concrete, and then causing them to be sunk across the entrance to the harbor. The Allies faced quite a problem in trying to discover how they could remove those barges.

They solved the problem this way. They took great gasoline tanks — not the kind of tanks we have in our cars or our homes — I'm referring to those huge tanks, many times the size of a home, which we see in refineries. They took these tanks and sealed them and caused them to be floated on the waters until they were in a position directly above the barges. Then when the tide was out, they chained the barges to these tanks. When the tide came in, the tanks were lifted and they pulled the barges out of the sucking mud at the bottom of the bay and from that point it was a relatively easy job to remove them.

Now get the picture of what was happening here. The barges were chained to the tanks. The tanks were riding and tied to the tides. The tides were responding to the magnetic pull of the moon, and the moon was moving in accord with the great sidereal system: immense, unbelievable power. Such is the power of the tides. (sidereal: relating to stars or constellations)

Now Shakespeare acknowledges this power of the tides and adds another dimension to our understanding of the tides in the 4th Act of Julius Caesar. There he puts these words upon the lips of Brutus, who is trying to persuade Cassius to assist him. He says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men which taken at the flood leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in misery. We must take the current when it serves,” he says, “or lose our venture.”

Shakespeare speaks then not only of the power of the tides to take us places, but he also suggests to us that the tides are inevitable, that they are unstoppable, and that they are quite unrecallable. And if we miss them, we are left in the shallows and in misery.

Now in our thinking in the next few minutes, I ask you to come with me — not to a place at sea — but rather to a place thirty-five miles inland from the sea: a garden called Gethsemane. It is the same night on which Jesus was betrayed. And he goes to this garden with his friends. He leaves the majority of them at the entrance to the garden, but the three closest to him, Peter, James and John, he takes with him to a kind of inner glade. He wants them to pray with him. He then goes a bit apart and prays that the cup of suffering and death might be spared him by God. And having so prayed and committed himself entirely into God's hands, he returns to his friends for some encouragement. And he finds them asleep. “Could you not watch with me,” he says, “even for one hour? Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation. Your spirit is willing but your flesh is weak. Therefore watch and pray.”

Then he went back again to give himself to prayer. And the scriptures say that he prayed so intensely that his sweat came as if it were great drops of blood. You see the tide of the whole world hurt. The agony of all of history was flowing through the single channel of his great heart. And he wanted the encouragement of loved ones about him, but when he goes back for their words of support and uplift, once again he finds them asleep. And this time he does not waken them, but rather goes back and prays alone. And while he is praying, his enemies come, and they arrest him and take him away. And the disciples are left hiding in the bushes of the garden. Having missed the tide, they are caught in shallows and in misery.

They missed specifically the opportunity to grow in character. You know, all of us need to grow in character. Everyone within the sound of my voice at this moment, and surely I include myself, needs to grow in character. In a day when the behavioral psychologists tell us that character is nothing more than the influence of our environment, and in a day when the moral relativists tell us that there are no absolute standards by which character can be measured, and in a time when the pseudosophisticated laugh at and scorn even the idea of character — in such a time we certainly need to think about character and the development of it.

But we need also to remember that character cannot be developed at every moment. There are certain times (or tides if you will) which make character development a possibility.

I think of my first pastorate in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. The great United States Steel rolling mills were there. They made tube steel. Tube steel without seam or blemish — the finest tube steel in the world. Many times I stood at the great machines where they make those tubes, a squirming serpent of molten metal comes sparkling down into the machine. It is cut off. The machine grabs it by both ends and then begins to spin that bar of metal and spins it at such a speed that centrifugally the metal begins to open from the center out until it forms a perfect tube without seam and without strain or stain — the finest pipe in the world.

Now I have talked many times with those who run those machines and they suggest without exception that the principal ingredient in the success of that operation is the temperature of the metal. When it is molten, it can be molded into what they want it to be. Too hot, it will fly apart. Too cold, it will not shape itself. But at the right temperature, it will become what they want it to become.

Character is very much like that. There are certain molten moments which come to us in which time we can find ourselves developing. One of those times came to the disciples there in Gethsemane. Had they been awake and watched Jesus, they would have learned how to handle suffering. They would have seen before them enacted how to develop courage, and patience, and hope. They would have learned more about prayer, and endurance, and pity, and mercy, and fortitude. All of these things were there for their learning and their character development. It was for them a molten moment. To use the figure with which we began — the tides were running full — but they missed the opportunity. They slept through it.

I don't know what would constitute a molten moment for you, what kind of time is necessary for your character to develop. Maybe it's a time of personal suffering. Maybe it's the death of someone whom you love. Maybe it's the urging of some friend. Maybe it's the inner voice of your conscience. Perhaps it is the example of the living of another. Maybe it's a bit of scripture, a piece of lace that you find that used to belong to your mother, a letter from an old friend. Perhaps it's the words of a preacher — maybe the words of this preacher at these very moments. Whatever it is, don't sleep through it, don't miss the time when the tide is full for you.

Jesus said, “Could you not watch for even one hour? Watch and pray lest you enter into temptation.”

The disciples not only missed the opportunity to grow in character, but they also missed the opportunity to grow as the children of God. Anyone of us can strike a match or light a candle or ignite a bonfire. But no one of us or not all of us together can kindle the flames of the Holy Spirit of God. The Holy Spirit comes and goes as he wills, and the Holy Spirit was filling Gethsemane that night. The place was redolent with his hot breath. And the disciples slept through it.

And I think it very interesting to notice that while Jesus wakened them the first time that they slept, he did not waken them the second time. The 44th verse suggests that he let them sleep. In other words there are times when the Spirit is about us and we will catch those times, or else there may never be such a time again.

I often think of it in terms of our great space shots. Do you remember a few years ago when we sent that space vehicle out to take pictures of Jupiter and it traveled for many, many months, getting closer and closer to Jupiter all the time, and then at the point of closest approximation, it took those remarkable pictures of Jupiter and then sent them back to earth again? From that moment on, that space vehicle has continued out into space and it will never be so close to Jupiter again.

That's the way it often is with us and God. We come to a time of closest approximation when the Spirit of God is moving all about us, and if we miss that moment there is no guarantee that we will ever have such a time again.

Once when David Brainerd, the great missionary to the American Indians, was speaking to a chief — the chief was on the edge of making a decision but he couldn't quite decide. Brainerd jumped up and drew a circle in the earth about the chief, and said, “Decide before you cross this line.”

Now why this urgency and this passion in David Brainerd? Simply because he knew that in that moment the chief was close to the time of deciding and if he missed that moment, there might never be such an opportunity again.

I don't know where you are at the moment or what you are doing. Perhaps you are listening to me all alone. Maybe there are others in the room and my voice is just a voice in the background somewhere. Perhaps it is hard for you to see the picture your eyes are dimmed for one reason or another — maybe by tears. Maybe there's a friend sitting beside you or someone you very much love. I don't know what the circumstances are that attend you at this moment, but my sister or my brother, if you feel the Holy Spirit of God moving in you now, respond to that moment — ride that tide — don't sleep through it! You are at this time not far from the kingdom of God. You may never be so close again.

There is a story that comes to us out of the black tradition in this country. About how Satan on one occasion wished to send an emissary from hell to aid men in the ruination of their souls. And he asked the demons of hell to volunteer for the task those who wanted to do so. One slithered forward and said he would gladly go to earth, and Satan said, “What will you tell the children of men?”

He said, “I will tell them that there is no heaven.”

Satan said, “They will not believe you for there is written into the heart of every man and woman the hope of heaven. You may not go.”

Then another creature came forward and he said, “I will go.”

And Satan said, “And what will you tell the children of men?”

He said, “I will tell them there is no hell.”

And Satan said, “You may not go, for in every conscience there is a sense of right and wrong and the understanding that in the end right will triumph and wrong will be defeated. They will not believe you. You may not go.”

And then from the deepest and darkest place in hell, came forth one creature more loathsome than all the rest and he said, “I will go.”

And Satan said, “If you go, what will you tell the children of men?”

And he said, “I will not tell them there is no heaven, and I will not tell them there is no hell. I will tell them that there is no hurry.”

And Satan said, “Go.”

And that spirit has been abroad upon the face of the earth ever since. “There is a tide in the affairs of men, taken at the flood — it leads on to fortune; omitted — it leads to shallows and misery.” Wake up — if the tide is flowing for you, it may never so flow again.

The disciples also missed, that night there in Gethsemane, the opportunity to grow in friendship with Jesus. You know, it is in times of trouble that we feel the special need of our friends. It's when the hammer of hardship is battering us that we long to have someone walking beside us, shoulder to shoulder. That's the reason Jesus took with him the disciples and there to that inmost glade the three who were closest to him. The tragedy is that when they were with him, they fell asleep.

It is recorded that when Jesus went apart to pray, he threw himself out flat upon the ground. But when he came back from so praying, there was no one there to brush the earth from his robe. And when he went away again and this time prayed so that his sweat was like great drops of blood falling in a kind of crimson rosary at his feet, when he came back no one was awake to wipe away the perspiration or to give him words of encouragement.

And after praying that prayer, that prayer of such agony, “nevertheless not what I will but what thou dost will, be done,” there was no one to stand with him in his loneliness.

It's ironic, isn't it that Jesus, this one who healed the sick, who strengthened the limbs of the crippled, this one who looked upon the multitudes as though they were sheep without a shepherd, this one who was compassion personified, at the time when he needed to be uplifted and encouraged, there was no one to help.

Peter, who was with him that night, went on to become the prince upon whom the early church was built. James — well, he went on to become the leader of the church in Jerusalem, the principal church of the day. And John, he went on perhaps to write a gospel and certainly to write the last great book in our New Testament, the Book of Revelation.

No one of those three, Peter, James, or John, has ever been able to say or will ever be able to say, that at the moment when Jesus needed them the most, they were there. You see, they missed the tide.

Don't miss the tide to serve the Jesus you find in others. You and I both know today's date and we have been around long enough to understand that before this date comes again in next year's calendar, some of those whom we know and some of those whom we love, will be close to us no more. They will be separated from us by death or by distance. They will not be within the sphere of our influence any longer. And we also have upon our hearts and consciences, some of us, a sense of what we need to say to these people. Maybe it's a word of encouragement. Perhaps the expression of apology or plea of forgiveness. Maybe it's a word of rebuke or exhortation. Maybe there's a “no” that needs to be said or a “yes”, or a “please”, or an “I'm sorry.” If we don't say it now, who is to say that the tide will ever give us such a chance again. Don't miss the opportunity to serve in the spirit of Jesus.

You know, the greatest message that any minister can bring to any people, is that which addresses their souls. And I've tried in these moments to speak to you of growth in character and of growth as a child of God, and of growth in friendship with Jesus Christ. And everyone of these matters is a matter of the soul.

I've held before you Jesus as example, and as opportunity, and as the expression of need. Please don't say anything to me about tomorrow. If you can find one place in the Bible where the Holy Spirit of God says “tomorrow”, then I will step out of this pulpit and I will never step back into it or any other pulpit again in all of my life. TOMORROW is the word that the Bible does not know. The Bible speaks of TODAY — “NOW is the accepted time. TODAY is the day of salvation. NOW, if you will hear my voice and harden not your heart...” Don't say “tomorrow.” “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace and lights fools the way to dusty death.”

I am asking you to come to Christ today. I am asking you to grow in Jesus Christ today. I am asking you to spend yourself in the service of Christ today. I am saying to you, “Catch the molten moment, the tides while they are full, ride them in the name of the God who sends them singing and surging into your life.”

And may God bless to you this simple witness in his name. Amen.