First Presbyterian Church Charlotte, North Carolina Roland Perdue, Interim Pastor February 6, 2011

He Couldn’t Spell “Cat” if You Spotted Him a “C” and a “T” Matthew 4:12-17

Like a spent or wounded dove, the spiraling football thrown by settled gently into ’s outstretched hands. Thousands of faithful begin to cheer wildly. Pittsburg Steelers fans began to groan.

“He dropped it!” yelled the play-by-play announcer. Dallas coach rolled his eyes heavenward, as if looking for some football god of second chances. There were no second chances in 1979’s XIII.

In the hype leading up to the game, Dallas linebacker “Hollywood” Henderson, in typical Cowboy bravado, said that , the quarterback for the Steelers, was so dumb he could not spell “cat” if you spotted him a “c” and a “t.”

Bradshaw threw four passes and was named MVP of the game. The Steelers won Super Bowl XIII 35-31. It was a great day for Bradshaw.

But it was a terrible day for Cowboy Jackie Smith. He lived in St. Louis with his wife Gerri where he spent most of his football career as a St. Louis Cardinal before being lured out of retirement at age 38 by the Cowboys. And most of the time, Smith is remembered, if at all, as a five time selection a member of the prestigious National Football Hall of Fame.

Then Super Bowl week comes along every year, and the dropped pass is thrown around all over again in the hype building up to today. And Jackie Smith is once again the “goat-story” of Super Bowl XIII. Jackie’s wife Gerri once asked the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1996 to relay this message: “Leave Jackie alone. Leave my family alone. We’ve had enough.”

For years at Super Bowl time, Jackie Smith felt as though he wore a sign which said, “I Dropped the Ball.”

We have all dropped the ball and have our own unique signs to live down.

I. The first movement of the text from Matthew depicts John the Baptizer and the sign he wore. “Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested …”

John was arrested, stymied, thrown off course and forgotten. It was over for John. The once popular wilderness preacher had fallen victim to the prevailing political arrangement. He would languish in the dark until he lost his head. That was the kind of sign he wore.

1 During an interim pastorate in New York City, I repeatedly saw on Madison Avenue a man seated with a cardboard sign hanging around his neck which read: “My days are as dark as my nights. Please help me. God bless.” A crumpled upturned hat was on the sidewalk next to him. Most people looked the other way even though the man’s milky, sightless eyes would never see them. Some pretended not to see him at all. Was it pity? Maybe. Guilt? Perhaps. But he disturbed me for another reason. I think he wore openly the sign most of us wear only in secret.

A lot of us are wearing signs in secret these days. Haiti has moved from the top of newscasts to near the bottom, replaced by Egypt and the falling dominoes of the Arab world. But the concerns in Haiti today are as crucial now as they were over a year ago. However, as T. S. Eliot said, we can only stand so much reality. And tragedy only holds our attention for so long. Many of those of us who are older have been drawn into providing for our adult children as the job market continues to lag, unemployment soars, and emotions tighten and threaten to snap. We all have dear friends suffering from one thing or another. We are all either undergoing one thing or overcoming something else. And some of us are doing both at the same time!

I worry a bit that in our darkness we spend time looking around for someone else to blame, rather than uniting to fix it. Many of our friends are experiencing the death of a spouse. And strangely they blame the doctors or the hospital staff. It seems we have forgotten that dying is just something we all do. No one is to blame; people just die and sometimes even of natural causes. But, in the darkness of death, we search for someone to point the finger at. Or on another level, Democrats blame Republicans. And Republicans blame Democrats. And the Tea Party blames both. Rather than light candles to see in the dark and find creative ways into the light, we point fingers. We point fingers as the ball slips through our hands. Like John, too often we become arrested, stymied, blocked out of the light.

II. The second movement of the text reminds us that life goes on; it does not stop with being arrested or stymied.

“Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee … He made his home in Capernaum by the sea, in the territory of Zebulun and Naphtali, so that what had been spoken by the prophet Isaiah might be fulfilled …” – Watch it! Here comes the pass into the end-zone. Don’t, for God’s sake, don’t drop it! – “ ‘… Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali … the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and on those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned!’ And from that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Turn toward the future, for God’s kingdom is near!’ ”

I hope you caught that! It makes all the difference, for it sets a new and expanding context in which we can joyously live! Jesus makes his home in Capernaum , in the vicinity of Zebulun and Naphtali, that neighborhood of darkness, those dank and depressing parts of town. Jesus takes up residence right where Israel was defeated more than 700 years before and marched off into slavery. Into the land of gloomy memories and darkness Jesus moves and God’s Light of the World shines.

God has, in Jesus, taken up permanent residence among us, lives with us, within us, and never lets crisis destroy us.

2

I think we are being challenged by Christ’s Spirit to describe ourselves again as a church for Christ in the City of Charlotte, a light in the midst of life’s darkness and fear. We are being asked to describe ourselves again. I am reminded of the time I was asked on an application I was filling out to “describe myself as a human-being.” And I wondered, “What should I describe myself as; a salamander?”

How would you describe the sign we are wearing in the face of our unmet pledging needs? Are we dropping the ball? This is an extra-ordinary time requiring extra-ordinary commitment from all of us. For instance, your beloved church has balanced the 2011 budget. However, the “balance” is much lower than needed. Oh, we will get through this year without greatly harming our mission for Christ in the heart of Charlotte. But next year when we hope to have a new called and installed pastor? That’s iffy. We simply have to do much better – in the neighborhood of 12% to 15% better to retain our present staff, essential programs and benevolence levels. This is not a game in which we can drop the ball.

The light of Christ shines upon all of us who lived in some shadow or another or who wear one secret sign or another. And Christ comes to us that we might be the ones through whom he comes to others. What Jesus has done for us, he will do through us as we get up, dust ourselves off and seize the kingdom right at the end of our fingertips.

Let me tell you of someone Christ sent our way, someone who kept the light of Christ burning for us. Jane taught 7th and 8 th graders at St. Leo’s School in the dark and dreary inner city of Detroit, Michigan. The school was in the scarred and burnt-out section where Detroit’s Riots of 1967 started. Today it still looks like a war zone. The neighborhood was not safe; police did not like to come there, and the Big Three of America’s Auto Industry had long since moved out leaving the neighborhood sinking as the vacuum was filled with drug dealers and the kids upon whom they preyed.

St. Leo’s took children who were left behind, gave them scholarships and tried to save them from their environment of drugs, disease, guns and basketball shoes for which they would do almost anything. The school, a Roman Catholic school, was virtually free to neighborhood children. It was a mission of the church which also fed 300 homeless or jobless people each day in their soup kitchen. Not only is a mind a terrible thing to waste, but so is a city. And at least a part of any church’s mission is to not let either happen.

Jane had a rough time for the first few months. We lived in one of the wealthiest suburban communities in Michigan and, indeed, the entire nation. Birmingham, Michigan had a stellar school system, and Jane was from the South and had taught in the best of schools, private and public. Executive level management from the Auto Industry made up a sizable part of the Session and the church I served as Senior Pastor; none of which endeared Jane to her students. But then it happened. And it changed everything.

A high school student whose cousin was in Jane’s classes at St. Leo’s called and asked Jane if he could speak to her class. His cousin was being picked on and had no friends in the school. Jane said yes and he came. He was a star high school football player, and was being offered

3 scholarships at all the major universities on both coasts, and in-between. He told her students that he had been heavy and uncoordinated when he was younger, and he decided to study hard and play the one sport he thought he could excel in; football.

He told them he knew they were being offered hundreds of dollars from gangs to run drugs and be lookouts, but it was not worth it. To escape the desperate and mean streets they needed to study. And then he did something unexpected. He turned to Jane and said to her students, “And you better listen to your teacher. That woman knows more than you think!” He, the high school star, gave Jane instant credibility and from that day on, Jane had very few discipline problems and her students showered her with affection and Jane became totally committed to teaching in the inner city and trying to make a difference.

We watched that young man move from the hard streets of Detroit to Notre Dame and then to the pros. became a spiritually significant person to us and a reminder that Jesus has taken up permanent residence in our towns during this, or any other crisis with which we are faced. We all have our signs to live down, but we also have new signs of hope and commitment to put on, signs which describe us as Christ’s followers. Don’t let it be said of us that we dropped the ball.

Amen.

4