High school junior Eris Miller thinks she's having a bad day when her roommate's boyfriend catches her stepping out of the shower wearing nothing but a towel. Then she gets abducted by scaly six-armed aliens with a strange fondness for the color blue, and her day suddenly gets a whole lot worse. Trapped on a spaceship bound for the slave markets of Sirius B, Eris fears she'll never see her home again. But then fate whisks her away from her reptilian captors and into the arms of Varrin, a fast-talking space pirate who promises to deliver her safely back to Earth. He claims to have her best interests at heart, but Eris soon discovers that her charming rescuer has a hidden It takes a gifted speaker to turn the philosophical into the practical, the theological into themes for daily living. Author Robert H. Linders has done just that for more than thirty-five years as the pastor of St. Paul's Lutheran Church in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In No Safe Route, he shares a collection of his sermons and other essays gathered from throughout his career. For Linders, most subjects are fair game, providing spiritual guidance on everything from novels, fathers of the Church, poetry, popular movies, a visit to his college-town diner, and the current political landscape. In these sermons, the Bible and today's news sit side by side, and humor illuminates ancient biblical truths. "Bob Linders addresses the concerns of living in a world that tries to do without God" -Donald Mathews, former librarian and preaching instructor at Gettysburg Theological Seminary "In the Land of Linders, Bible hermeneutics meet today's news, and memorable jokes confront philosophical wisdom in such rapid succession that one needs at least a good week of conversation at home to sort them out" -Robert C. Williams (PhD, Harvard), Pulitzer Prize Nominee in Russian History Lovell, Maine. agenda. As they race across the galaxy, outrunning a villainous

No Safe Route

By Robert H. Linders

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2013 Robert H. Linders
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-6889-7

Contents

SERMONS.............................................1Water Makes Many Beds...............................3Name That Baby "Nehemiah"...........................8Dr Levin's Dilemma..................................14Jabot's Gift........................................20Dumont 5-0016.......................................25Front Porch Religion................................30Improvisations on "O"...............................35Departures..........................................41Lemons' Law.........................................46No Safe Route.......................................50Balcony People......................................56Longing for Home....................................62A Son's Tribute.....................................67Kathryn Reisch's Funeral Sermon.....................73ESSAYS..............................................77Secret of the Crocus................................79More Blessed to Receive.............................80Manger Power........................................82Strength to Strength................................84Familiarity Breeds Content..........................86Exulting in Monotony................................88A Care Quotient.....................................90Exotic Turtle Soup..................................92Bach Before Breakfast...............................94No Freelancing Allowed..............................95

Chapter One

WATER MAKES MANY BEDS

In a lovely poem, Emily Dickinson says, "Water makes many beds." She wrote the poem in 1877, so obviously she wasn't thinking about waterbeds. Yet water was surely on her mind and rightly so. Odysseus, Noah, the Baptism of Jesus that we celebrate today—wherever you look in poetry, literature or song—water is primal. Perhaps it is not strange then that this old source of life and inspiration should be a topic of much discussion in the 21st century.

I think it's fair to say that without clean water and its equitable distribution, we will not survive this century. Some think the problems in the Middle East and much of our present economic woes are all about oil! Maybe so, but even more basic is our need for water.

I don't know about you, but I've always been a "water person." When I was two, I ran my walker into Lake Stockholm in Sussex County, New Jersey. Fortunately, my father, a world-class sprinter only a few years earlier, was able to dash to my rescue.

Ten years later we had a cottage on Highland Lakes, a few miles from Lake Stockholm. For some reason, I had a hard time learning to swim. My parents took me to the YMCA in Hackensack, New Jersey, where the instructor sent me out on a diving board holding a long bamboo pole and asked me to jump. After that experience, it's amazing I ever learned to swim. The great learning took place in Highland Lakes at the age 13, and ever since, swimming has become one of the great joys of my life. I have hardly any interest at all in swimming pools. I find as I get older the chlorine dries out my skin and hair, but to swim in a clean lake or ocean—for me this is a foretaste of heaven. This is why you hear me mention so often from this pulpit Kezar Lake in Maine or Eagles Mere or Paradise Falls here in Pennsylvania. Lake Kezar is even on my car license plate!

When we were at Highland Lakes, one of our neighbors had a hand pump on the front lawn. Often I would walk to the pump and bring home the cool water to drink. At Kezar Lake in Maine, there is a pipe a few feet off the Bridgeton Road that runs day and night, year after year. It's pure spring water, and I have taken delight over the years in bringing this water home to drink.

Of course not all my memories of water are so tranquil. Thirty years ago I was caught in a hurricane half-way across the Atlantic Ocean. Fortunately the Gripsholm was a very large ship with gyroscope and stabilizer, and we were never in any real danger. I was seasick once in a little fishing boat off the coast of Belmar, New Jersey, but like most of you, I've been spared—solely by an accident of geography—the horrors that hundreds of thousands of our fellow human beings have experienced when water destroys their homes.

The same water that inspires poetry and song is also able in an instant to destroy all we love and cherish. How strange is life? Do you remember Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

    Alone, alone, all, all alone,
    Alone on a wide, wide sea! ...
    So lonely 'twas that God Himself
    Scarce seemed there to be.

It is terrifying to be lonely. After a tragic tidal wave in Asia, there was an editorial in the New York Times that read,

The underlying tragedy of this story is the overpowering, amoral mechanics of the earth's surface, the movement of plates that grind and shift and slide against each other with profound indifference to anything but the pressures that drive them. Whenever those forces punctuate human history, they do so tragically. They demonstrate, geologically speaking, how ephemeral our presence is.

Ephemeral. It means "lasting for a brief time, short-lived." But there are moments—you have felt them and I have felt them—when we don't feel ephemeral. I have in mind those sacred moments when we feel that we belong to something greater than ourselves that will not let us go. There are times when we have these "intimations of immortality," when, as Wordsworth wrote,

    Hence in a season of calm weather
    Though inland far we be,
    Our souls have sight of that immortal sea
    Which brought us hither ...

There are such moments when we are alone, but not lonely—moments when with the poet Yeats we can say,

    ... always night and day
    I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
    While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey, I
    hear it in the deep heart's core.

What do you make of that? Is your vision of an "immortal sea"? Is what you hear in your "deep heart's core" imaginary? Is it delusional? Is it merely wishful thinking? Or, is it possible that, as Frederick Buechner has written, "Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it"?

In today's Gospel we read, "When Jesus had been baptized, just as He came up from the water, a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, in whom I take delight."

What we have here is the good news of the Gospel—not just that God takes delight in Jesus, but that he takes delight in us! When I baptize an infant at that font, what I'm saying in the baptismal liturgy is something like this: "Little child, for you Jesus Christ came, He struggled, He suffered; for you He endured the anguish of Calvary, for you He triumphed over death, and you, little child, know nothing of all this. But in this sacrament is confirmed the word of the apostle: `We love God because God first loved us.'"

Then in baptizing the child, I state the name and say, "I baptize you in the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, Mother of us all." And remember, as Luther said in his catechism, it's not the water alone that saves us. It's water and the Word, which signifies that the...