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The following message for the moment is delivered by the Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "Are you a part of your problem or of its answer?" The scripture reading of the morning is 1st Samuel, chapter 28. We begin the

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reading at the verse numbered 7. "Then Saul said to his servants, 'Seek out for me a woman who is a medium, that I may go to her and inquire of her.' And his servant said to him, 'Behold, there is a medium at Endor.' So Saul disguised himself and put on other garments and went, he and two men with him. And they

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came to the woman by night. And he said, 'Divine for me by a spirit, and bring up for me whomever I shall name to you.' The woman said to him, 'Surely you know what Saul has done, how he has cut off the mediums and the wizards from the land. Why then are you laying a snare for my life to bring about my death?' But Saul swore

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to her by the Lord, 'As the Lord lives, no punishment shall come upon you for this thing.' Then the woman said, 'Whom shall I bring up for you?' He said, 'Bring up Samuel for me.' When the woman saw Samuel, she cried out with a loud voice. And the woman said to Saul, 'Why have you deceived me? You are Saul.' The king said to her,

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'Have no fear. What do you see?' And the woman said to Saul, 'I see a God coming up out of the earth.' And he said to her, 'What is his appearance?' And she said, 'An old man is coming up, and he is wrapped in a robe.' And Saul knew that it was Samuel, and he bowed with his face to the ground and did obeisance. Then Samuel said to

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Saul, 'Why have you disturbed me by bringing me up?' Saul answered, 'I am in great distress, for the Philistines are warring against me, and God has turned away from me and answers me no more, either by prophets or by dreams. Therefore I have summoned you to tell me what I shall do.' And Samuel said, 'Why then

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do you ask me, since the Lord has turned from you and become your enemy? The Lord has done to you as he spoke by me, for the Lord has torn the kingdom out of your hand and given it to your neighbor David. Because you did not obey the voice of the Lord and did not carry out his fierce wrath against Amalek, therefore

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the Lord has done this thing to you this day. Moreover, the Lord will give Israel also with you into the hand of the Philistines, and tomorrow you and your sons will be with me. The Lord will give the army of Israel also into the hand of the Philistines.' Then Saul fell at once, full length upon the ground, filled with

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fear because of the words of Samuel, and there was no strength in him, for he had eaten nothing all day and all night. And the woman came to Saul, and when she saw that he was terrified, she said to him, 'Behold, your handmaid has hearkened to you. I have taken my life in hand and have hearkened to what you have said to

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me. Now therefore you also hearken to your handmaid. Let me set a more parcel of bread before you and eat, that you may have strength when you go on your way.' He refused and said, 'I will not eat.' But his servants, together with the woman, urged him, and he hearkened to their words. So he arose from the earth

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and sat upon the bed. Now the woman had a fatted calf in the house, and she quickly killed it, and she took flour and kneaded it and baked unleavened bread of it, and she put it before Saul and his servants, and they ate. Then they rose and went away that night." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading

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from his word. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. When you were a young man or a young woman and you were going out, did your mother ever say to you, "Are you wearing clean underwear?" I was often asked that,

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and when I would say why, the reply would immediately be, "Well, you might be in some accident and you wouldn't want to be in such a situation with unclean underwear." You know, I've never been able to figure that out. I would get a picture in my mind of myself having been in an accident, and I'm on the table in the

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emergency room, and the doctors and the nurses all gathered around me, and my mother is out in the waiting room wondering whether I have on dirty underwear or not. Or I could imagine the doctor preparing to assist me and then looking at me saying, "He has dirty underwear on. Let him die." I read an

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article in the newspaper about a woman who was hit by a car, and she was taken into the emergency room of the hospital, and the last thing she said before she lapsed into unconsciousness, she said to her doctor, "Doctor," she said, "the car hit me so hard it tore my underwear." Now you see, there are some problems that really

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aren't problems. They can be, to say the least, grossly exaggerated. Now let me introduce to you a woman from the first congregation it was my privilege to serve. I shall call her Liz. Liz had a wonderful husband who lived a long life and who was very prosperous, and when he died he left her adequately cared for.

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But from the day of his death until her death many years later, she was, everywhere she went, dragging behind her a tale of misery and sadness. She had given herself over to constant moaning about every circumstance in life. The only chronic health problem which she had was indigestion, and I talked with

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her physician on one occasion, and he said it was probably principally because of her attitude. Everywhere she went she was surrounded by a cloud of tears with thunderstorms of trauma, so no one wanted to be around her, for she would always rain on their parade. Every time I would go to visit Liz, I would think to myself

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of a sentence that Joe Louis, the heavyweight boxing champion for so many years, uttered. Joe Louis said on one occasion, "I felt sorry for myself because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet." Liz would not have understood what he was talking about. Now let me introduce you to another person. This

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person's name I shall not change. The Right Honorable Lord Mathers, KTPCDL. Lord Mathers stood six feet two inches tall, ruddy complexion, white hair, white mustache. He had a handshake like a bear trap. He had been born in poverty. He had only the earliest years of an elementary education. He went to work for the

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railroad when he was a very young teenager. He continued to work for the railroad, and at that time railroad unions were being formed for the first time. He joined the union, and eventually he was elected president of it. And during his presidency, he was beaten both publicly and privately by the railroad

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police on one occasion or another. He decided to run for the House of Commons, and he did, and he lost. And he decided to run again, and he did, and he lost again. And he decided to run again, and he did, and this time he was elected. And he had a career in the House of Commons which was so distinguished that eventually

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Queen Elizabeth II elevated him to the rank of Lord, and he became part of the House of Lords. He said to me that the highest honor he had ever received in that area of responsibility was to be Lord High Commissioner to the Church of Scotland. Here was a man who loved his faith and who loved his country, and I

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was sitting talking with him in the lobby of the Athol Palace Hotel in Picloughbury, Scotland, and I asked him, "With all the troubles and the difficulties that you went through in your life, how did you ever manage to get where you are?" And he replied with a sparkle in his eye, with four lines of

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poetry, "Oh, troubles an ounce, or troubles a ton, or troubles just what you make it, it isn't the fact that you're hurt that counts, but only how did you take it." Two people, Liz and Lord Mathers, both of them knew some difficulties, his far more extreme than hers, but you see, she was part of her problem while he was part of

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his answer. He saw problems as stairways on which one could climb and make progress. He would have agreed with that conversation between two characters in a novel of George MacDonald. One character said, "I wish I had never been made," and the other character responds, "You haven't been made. You're in the process of being

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made by your problems right now." Mathers understood problems as an opportunity for growth, while Liz, on the other hand, was consumed by self-pity, which is but another form of self-love. He saw problems as the rungs on a ladder which moved closer and closer to truth, but she utterly denied the possibility of finding

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truth in such a way. And Saul was just like Liz. For the last weeks we have been thinking together as a congregation about the life of the first king of Israel, Saul. In rather broad strokes we have painted his story, a man uniquely gifted and called by God to a position of high honor. But Saul was one of those

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who always managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and we approach him this morning as he comes to the last dark and shadowed hours of his life. Now here is a man who has refused to be loyal to the royal in himself. He has not developed the gifts that God has given him. As he has become progressively

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weaker, having failed in his obedience to God, he seeks to gain support by yielding to every caprice of the crowd. And when that does not work, he tries to make a go of it simply by the assertion of his own will. He makes a double mistake of thinking on the one hand that the majority is the mob, and thinking on the

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other hand that the majority is one. The true majority that rules is always three— father, son, and Holy Spirit. Now so inwardly defeated was Saul that he became angry and hostile even toward those who were trying to help and assist him. He came to hate David and to hate his own son Jonathan and his daughter

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Michael. He railed against them and tried on more than one occasion to kill them. He had lost, you see, all inner peace. And now today he makes one last pathetic effort to bring his life under control. He goes to seek a witch at a place called Endor. I say that this was a pathetic attempt. You see, earlier in his kingship

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Saul had ordered all witches, mediums, to leave Israel. But now he was going in search of the very ones whom he had ordered away. When he ordered them away, he was acting in obedience to God's will. But when he went looking for a witch, he was surrendering to his own self-pity. One moment, "Arr, witches be gone!" The next

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moment, "Find me a witch." He had started being a part of his problem and not of its answer. You see people like that all around us today. Here is the individual who deplores the carnage on our highways and yet consistently drives without a seatbelt or beyond the speed limit. Here is the person who cannot communicate

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with his or her children and laments this fact and yet makes no effort to spend more time with the teenagers in order to be able to communicate with them. Here is the individual who is very unhappy with his country and has all kinds of complaints about the nation but would never think of entering into the

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political process and sometimes does not even bother to vote. Here is the person who is opposed to the church, who doesn't like its program, who doesn't like its budget or its ministers or its members. But all these things that are not liked are not matched by any effort, any proper effort, any responsible effort on the

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part of that individual to do what being a member of the church minimally requires, to worship God, to serve with your brothers and sisters in the corner of the kingdom which is yours, and to tithe of that which God has given you. Each of these individuals that we have looked at claim that they're for the

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right thing but each and every one of them is part of the problem and not of the answer. We have, you see, this ability to blow a kind of psychological smokescreen in front of ourselves and to conceal the real nature of what we're doing. That's exactly what happened to Saul. He knew that what he was doing was

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illegal. It was a violation of the standards given him by God but he did it anyway. He tried to disguise who he was, though the Bible says that he was head and shoulders taller than anybody else in Israel, and he took some of his royal guard with him. The woman immediately knows who he is and when he asks her to

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bring up a spirit she says, "Oh Saul, forbid such a thing," and he says, "No harm will come to you," and she understands, of course, that the only person who can make a promise like that is the king, so she knows she's dealing with Saul. So she starts into her regular performance as all of these fake mediums and witches do,

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only this time she's in for a surprise because God sends the spirit of Samuel into their midst. Her fakery is evidenced by the fact that suddenly when the real thing appears, she shrieks with horror. She's never seen anything like that before. And Saul, asking Samuel for guidance, gets the news that his end is

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near, all because of the failures which have been his. What he has done, you see, is attempted to deal with his problem by becoming part of it. Now compare that with a woman I know named Louise. Louise suffered from heart palpitations. She thought she had serious heart trouble. She was very much frightened by this. She

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went to her physician on a number of occasions and he could find no difficulties with her heart. He began to talk to her and he learned in the conversation that she had begun to have this problem within a few weeks after the death of her mother. So the doctor thought to himself, "What this woman needs

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is a good counselor." And he gave her the name of a Christian psychotherapist. And she went to see this Christian man who knows how to untangle the knots in the spirit and the mind. And he quickly discovered that this woman had a mother who was very hard and unloving. She was so much this way that her daughter,

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Louise, had on more than one occasion wished that her mother was dead. And then her mother died. And she immediately felt guilty because of what had happened. She felt the witches of guilt and fear and anxiety within. She thought she was going to have a heart attack and die and appear before God who would judge her

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and separate her from himself forever because she had had such thoughts with regard to her mother. She had surrendered, you see, to a kind of inner cauldron, bubble, bubble, toil, and trouble. But this Christian man, highly trained in his art, brought her to a confrontation with Jesus Christ, brought her to face-to-face

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reality with the one who forgives all things when they are genuinely repented of. And she made that repentance. She entered into that act of cleansing. And as a result, she could say, "All witches be gone!" And they were. And her life took on a new vitality and her heart problem disappeared entirely away. Here was a

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woman, Louise, who was very much like Lord Mathers. She dealt with her problem. She did not become a part of it. And dealing with her problem, she was, by the grace of God, enabled to rise above it. Now, of course, when we do this, when we rely on God to make us part of the answer to the difficulties in our own lives, he will

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accede to our request, for he desires happiness in all of his children. But we must remember that it's very easy to slip back into that cave. I call this the Saul syndrome. It's very easy on one occasion to say, "All witches be gone!" and then when some other difficulty confronts that seems to be overwhelming

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to suddenly say, "Find me a witch!" That's the reason it's so important that we not only come to Christ to be forgiven, but that we stay with Christ, that we stay with the Word of God lived in Christ and written in Scripture, that we fill ourselves with it so that there will be no vacancy into which the fears and the

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anxieties and the guilts of earlier days might slither once again. It is in staying close to him that we discover not problems, but possibilities. Do you know why it is that those great steel ships don't capsize in the seas? Well, have you ever seen one of these children's toys, a balloon? It's like a clown usually,

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and the clown hits it and it goes down, but it immediately pops up again. That's because there's a weight in the bottom and the bottom is round, and as it's pushed down, the weight rolls over and pulls it into a vertical position once more. The ships operate the same way. They have a round bottom, and down in the

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very bottom of that ship are hundreds of thousands of gallons of fuel and also of water. They call this ballast, and when the ship tilts toward one side, all of the ballast runs to the other side and pulls the ship into an upright position. Again, fellowship with Christ through the Holy Spirit and putting into ourselves

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the Word of God, memorizing it and making a part of our lived lives, that kind of spiritual ballast enables us to get through the storm without ever thinking of going to caves where witches are. It was about 60 years ago now that Roland Hayes, the great black baritone, was to make his first recital appearance in

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Berlin. He was to sing in the Beethoven Festspielhaus there, and the newspapers came out very strongly against his appearance. They said that the Beethoven Hall was not an appropriate place for music as simple as spirituals. Actually, of course, they opposed his coming because Hayes was there in the rising

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days of Adolf Hitler, and he taught the German people that they were superior in every way, that the Aryan race was the race that stood above all other races, including the black. It was because of prejudice that they didn't want Roland Hayes to sing. He went to the American Council and asked for his advice, and the

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council said, "If I were you, I wouldn't show up for the performance." His advice, you see, was to go into that cave with that witch to become part of the problem and not of its answer. But at 8 o'clock p.m. on the night of the recital, Roland Hayes stepped out onto the platform. He was immediately greeted with a chorus

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of boos and hisses and heckling calls. As was his custom, he bowed his head for a word of prayer. But even as he did that, the uproar on the part of the audience continued. He looked at them, and they continued to heckle him and berate him and ridicule him for one minute, three minutes, five minutes, eight minutes, eleven

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minutes. And finally, at the end of eleven minutes, exhausted by their own rage, they fell into a kind of quiet. And the moment that that quiet began to come, Roland Hayes, without taking his eyes off that assembled audience, said in a voice soft that his piano accompanist could hear, "Thou art my peace." And the accompanist

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took from the stack of music that beautiful song of Franz Schubert, "Thou art my peace." And he began to play it, and Roland Hayes, clear baritone, traveled out floating above that crowd with all the clarity and the beauty that was part of it. And by the end of the concert, he received a standing

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ovation. Now Roland Hayes was a man who in the early days of his life suffered terribly from stage fright. He also had profound feelings of self-doubt, but he became a Christian. He left that problem in the cave a long time before. He had become no longer part of the problem, but now part of the answer. My friends, never

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forget that Jesus was born a Jew in a world that hated Jews. He was born on the wrong side of the Roman curtain. He was born in a small town where there was no caravan route, and he grew up in a town just like that, on the wrong side of the tracks, because he was from a low-income family. He had no friends who were VIPs

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(very important personages). His friends were fisher folk and sick people who wanted to become well, and whores who wanted to become ladies, and crooked politicians who wanted to become honest. And interestingly enough, never once is it recorded that Jesus ever called any of these people sinners. He was executed

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when he was 33 years old, and he was buried in a borrowed tomb, just like at his birth he was laid in a borrowed crib. He left no estate, but he did leave some promises. He promised that nothing he ever touched would remain a defeat, but that it would instead become a victory. And he made that hideous instrument on

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which he met his death, the cross, into an object of beauty and reverence. And he took death itself and transformed it into the wonder of resurrected life. And what he did in touching these ugly things and making them beautiful, he promised to do and has always done in the lives of his obedient disciples.

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There's never any reason for a Christian to go to the witches, to go into the dark caves with difficulties, because the Christ who transforms life can make cowards into spiritual patriots who become not part of the problem, but part of the answer. And so this morning I invite you to head not for the darkness,

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but for the light. Did you hear about the two Englishmen that came to America? They lived here for a number of years and one of them decided to become a naturalized American citizen, the other refused to do so. And on the day after the one had become an American, he met his still English friend and his English friend

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said, "Now why did you do this? It hasn't made any difference. You look the same, you talk the same, you dress the same, you're working at the same place. What difference is there?" To which the former Englishman, now an American, replied, "Oh, there's a great deal of difference, because you see, yesterday the American

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Revolution led to my defeat, but today the American Revolution gave me a victory." You can turn a defeat into a victory if you will bend the knee to no flag but his. Don't be a part of your problem, but with Christ be a part of its answer. Say once and forever, "All witches be gone!" and live from now on in

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the brilliant purity of the light of the Son. Let us pray. Oh God, take this witness and do with it as thou wilt. All in it that is true, I pray that thou will plant into hearts that are frightened and anxious and

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burdened with guilt, and that thou will renew and refresh those who already have thy spirit within, but who need reminded lest they fall back into the caves, the dark caves of their despair. And if any word has been said, Father, which is not in accordance with thy will, which is not what thou would have it be, drop that

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word into the deepest seas of our forgetfulness. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. You