Writings
The following remarks were shared at a Thanksgiving service which combined congregants from Temple Beth El, St. Hugo of the Hills Roman Catholic Church, and Kirk in the Hills Presbyterian Church. They were offered in response to a tribute bestowed upon Dr. Ritter commemorating forty years in ministry and twelve years of pastoral leadership in the greater Birmingham/Bloomfield community.
Let me begin with a couple who both appreciated the finer things in life and were comfortably able to afford them. When it came to travel, they went by the best means to the best places. That is, until their plane went down….suddenly….dramatically…..into the choppy waters of the sea. But the emergency exits opened (as engineered) and the inflatable slides were positioned (as instructed), meaning that virtually all were evacuated (as scripted).
After listing the title for this sermon in Steeple Notes, I discovered I had preached the same text under the same title in the late nineties. On that occasion, I took an entirely different bent, slanting the sermon toward a discussion of exorcism. Truth be told, there are but a handful of lines from that prior effort recycled in this text.
When I reached what I thought was my lowest point, somebody said to me: “Cheer up; things could be worse.” So I cheered up and, sure enough, things got worse.
That line did not originate with me. But it could have been written by this poor, unnamed man in Luke’s little parable. The man once harbored a demon. Then the demon left, or was expelled…. the story doesn’t say. The demon wandered the desert in search of lodging. Finding none, it returned to the man. In the meantime, the man had swept, scrubbed and tidied his soul. So the demon went out and collected seven demons worse than itself. Whereupon they entered in. And the Bible says that the man’s “last state” was considerably worse than his first.
