August 14, 2016 – “Fearless Faith – Weathering the Storms of Life” from John Knox Kirk on Vimeo.

Fearless Faith: Weathering the Storms of Life

A sermon preached at The Kirk of Kansas City, Missouri, on August 14, 2016.
The first in a sermon series on Facing our Fears through a Life of Faith.

2 Corinthians 6:1-13
and Mark 4:35-41

The assignment was about memorization.

It was for an English class, sometime in middle school.
The Memorization was perhaps the main thing that worried me about it,
because I wasn’t then, and am not now, very good at reciting back.
Its one reason I work from manuscripts rather than memory:
I can capture dates and details,
I can analyze the forest or the trees, depending on what we need
but ask me to get the words right on a song I’ve heard a thousand times
or to relay the exact nuance of a voicemail message
well… not my strong suit.

But that middle-school assignment was to memorize a poem.
The Poem assigned to me: Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken.

So I took it home, and I worked on it
and read it, and read it again
and did some of those mnemonic exercises
of imagining myself at various stages of the composition
doing what it was doing, you know,
so I could remember how it worked its way along
and I got myself pretty worked up.

Not because I wasn’t trying. I was.
Not because I wasn’t succeeding. I was doing ok.
Maybe not as well as I wanted to
but I’d pass. One way or another, I’d be ok.

Not because I’d have to speak in front of class. That’s was all right.
But because I knew this was a particular weakness of mine,
and I’d be EXPOSED.

The date came,
and then third period I went to English class.

And I stood before the class and I recited the poem.
I didn’t get it all right, but most of it:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

///
Maybe the most beautiful thing about that whole experience
was how that poem has stuck with me
and sometimes I’ll pull it out,
butchered, of course, getting some detail wrong
since I can’t recite memorized things for the life of me
but the main points, the broad strokes, for sure..
the images, the texture of the poem
life as a journey—one we all have to take
there’s no stopping, not really
you’re on the road, not parked along side
and you’ve got to choose; you’ve got to take a path.

Thinking about the assignment: I think I got a B. Too long ago to remember. [Read more…]