No Safe Route

By Robert H. Linders

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. Pauls 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 todays 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 todays 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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475968873

Robert H. Linders

Robert H. Linders has served as Senior Pastor of St. Paul’s Lutheran Church in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. After graduating from Gettysburg College, he earned four graduate degrees. He has lectured or preached at Catholic, Princeton, Cornell, and Penn Sate Universities as well as at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.

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Copyright © 2013 by Robert H. Linders.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-6889-7 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-6887-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012924180

iUniverse rev. date: 01/10/2013

CONTENTS

Foreword

SERMONS

Water Makes Many Beds

Name That Baby Nehemiah

Dr. Levin’s Dilemma

Jabot’s Gift

Dumont 5-0016

Front Porch Religion

Improvisations on O

Departures

Lemons’ Law

No Safe Route

Balcony People

Longing for Home

A Son’s Tribute

Kathryn Reisch’s Funeral Sermon

ESSAYS

Secret of the Crocus

More Blessed to Receive

Manger Power

Strength to Strength

Familiarity Breeds Content

Exulting in Monotony

A Care Quotient

Exotic Turtle Soup

Bach Before Breakfast

No Freelancing Allowed

About the Author

FOREWORD

Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous . . . Negligent speech doth not only discredit the person of the Speaker, but it discrediteth the opinion of his reason and judgement; it discrediteth the force and uniformity of the matter and substance.

Ben Jonson, ca. 1600

We are on this planet for the briefest of moments. Bob Linders—my friend, confidant, and confessor—has used his time to think about and address the deepest of questions. For more than 45 years, his sermons have weekly crossed my desk, sermons that move at once backward, forward, inward, and outward, invariably revelatory, with hypnotic force, some might say with the power of the Spirit.

Describing his own work, master writer Ian McEwan tells us you spend the morning, and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip, that delights you. And you hope they will delight everyone else. And so it is with Pastor Linders.

He has no time for chit-chat, but no time either for leaving the heavy and difficult questions unasked. He faces up to painful memories and usually fights off self-indulgence. Unlike most clergy, he recognizes that in seeking theological truth less is often more.

Not included in this collection is a 2008 sermon in which Bob recalls a wise old preacher who advised, Preach every sermon as if it is your last—preach as a dying man to dying men… if you do so, there will be an intensity and urgency to your preaching that otherwise would be absent.

Intensity and urgency. His sermons are a piece of work, each one, in both the Shakespearean sense of something wonderful to behold (or hear) and in the more current sense of being, dare I say, a handful.

St. John Chrysostom, first of the Church Fathers to write on preaching (On the Priesthood, peri Hierosynes), recognized as the greatest homiletician since St. Paul and not equaled thereafter, had a mind both practical and idealistic. A well-loved pastor, the golden tongued one focused on practical aspects of the faith and hesitated not to challenge the evils and injustices of his time, the abuses of authority ecclesiastical and political.

Today, increasing human power has created unprecedented options for the enrichment or diminishment of life. We can alter the air we breathe, the children we engender, or the way we die. We can play fair with each other and our environment—or not.

If you have time to read but one of Bob’s sermons, I urge you to spend some time with that preached on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 2008, A Son’s Tribute—Ethel Linders’ Funeral Sermon. I suspect you then may well find time to read them all.

Alongside theology and exegesis, preaching today calls for the study of ethics and political philosophy, biology, law, history, and many other fields. The issues are essential in their own right, involving as they do questions on the meaning of life and death, our obligations to each other, and the virtues necessary to lead a good life.

It was Keats who wrote, And like a newborn spirit did he pass/Through the green evening quiet in the sun. On the edge of old age myself, I sense we may be newborn spirits at any moment, in a timeless ascent, growing ever towards more light. More love.

William C. Stubing

President Emeritus

The Greenwall Foundation

Advent 2012

SERMONS

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