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“For it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pressure”
Phil 2:13
I’d like to talk to you about someone really special to me - though I have never met him. You know him too, though you don’t know you know him and you have never met him. His name is Pastor Tim Zingale, a Lutheran priest in America. He weaves stories together to tell sermons in the most engaging way. There are probably five people who have really shaped and influenced my preaching - and Fr Tim Zingale is one of them. And I have never met him. I am guessing you have never met him either. Yet over the last six years that you have heard me preach you have heard his stories woven into my sermons, and his influence even more woven in there. You know him though you have never met him.
Tim Zingale had Polio as a child - and throughout his life he had disabilities that grew steadily worse. In his twenties he had to wear a leg brace.
Very little of his preaching is about himself - so it took me ages to find this biographical detail -
“When I was in the senior year of college, I began applying for teaching jobs. It was later that In entered seminary, but I graduated from college with a BA in elementary education. I had an interview on campus with a superintendent of a school system. It was a good interview and at the end he offered me a job teaching 4th graders. But he said that the school board would have to approve, but thought that would be no problem.
I left feeling confident that I had a job. My wife and I were engaged at the time and we planning a wedding as soon as I graduated. I had told the superintendent that I was going to my wife’s family for the weekend and he could contact me there with the final approval.
The phone rang, I answered and the superintendent told me that I did not get the job. He said the school board did not want some one like me teaching their kids.
His exact words were: “We don’t want someone like that teaching our kids”
Someone like what?
For he explained to them that I wore a long leg brace and used a cane for walking and they were afraid of my disability and would not hire me.
“If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. “ (Phil 2:1-2)
Tim certainly did not experience compassion and sympathy or consolation from love from that superintendent - yet he following the example of Christ he humbled himself and served the children in the school where he finally got a job.
Tim went on to be ordained - where of course in the Church he would find “encouragement in Christ, …. consolation from love, ... sharing in the Spirit, ...compassion and sympathy,.... be[ing] of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.” - wouldn’t he? Errr… no
Repeatedly he would be told by parishioners how the reason he wasn’t healed of his disability was because he didn’t have enough faith. Now I have seen a few amazing miracles in my life - and they are just that - miracles. It’s not because the person someohow earnt their healing through having the right amount of faith, or achieved their healing by using the right formula of prayer as if it were some sort of magical spell where you have to pronounce “Expectus Patronum” (2) in the right way or it will not work. I have also seen lots of people who were not healed. Tim was not healed.
But then Jesus - who was taunted “if you are son of God come down from the cross” (3) - Jesus who healed others -
“ emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form,
8 he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross.” (Phil 2:7-8)
Pastor Tim continued to serve his people in his little church of 150 people - and as his disability worsened, he began to have to use a wheel chair as he celebrated mass. Of course his church supported him. They were full of sympathy and compassion. Errr no
There is a phrase that’s often said which is sadly so true of us - “Christians shoot their own wounded”. The American Marines may have a motto “no man left behind” - but we Christians often display the opposite pattern. We don’t like weakness. Especially in our leaders. We worship the God who made himself vulnerable “even to death on a cross” - (Phil 2:8) - yet we like our leaders to be handsome good looking success stories who will appear perfect on the front cover of Time Magazine. This was Tim Zingale’s experience. When he began to have to use a wheel chair for mass, his congregation turned on him. He was forced into early retirement.
He began to help out at another church in the same town which had a better attitude to disability. Over the years his condition deteriorated. He struggled to breath and struggled to be able to speak for long periods. He was no longer able to preach out loud.
So from Dec 4th 2000 to January 26th 2009 he wrote a sermon on the lectionary readings and posted them online. (4)
That was when I met him. I was researching for a sermon I was writing as Vicar of Holy Trinity Barkingside and came across one of his on the website Sermon Central. It was beautiful. It was powerful. It spoke of God. It helped that the Lutherans use an almost identical lectionary to the Church of England. It helps that Lutherans have a similar theology of baptism and communion to us. But most of all it helped that like Jesus Fr Tim was a gifted storyteller who used every tales to convey the deep truths of God.
Now you might conclude from this sermon that Pastor Zingale’s sermons were full of reflections on his difficult life circumstances. Not at all - In all 334 of his sermons there is barely a mention. I only found out most of this from an article in a magazine about Christians and disability that I came across by accident. (5). There is no wallowing - just a humble getting on with the job of serving God, and preaching even when his voice would no longer let him do so.
“9 Therefore God also highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
11 and every tongue should confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.” Phil 2:9-11
The great irony is that when Tim Zingale worked in that church that chucked him out he preached to at most 150 people on a Sunday morning. When he turned to writing sermons online he had immediately had 300 people reading his sermons every week. By now most of his sermons have been read by more than 5000 people, and that’s not counting the priests like me who have read his sermons and taken his stories and told them to tens of thousands more people.
Pastor Tim Zingale stopped posting on January 26th 2009.I expect that he HAS “worked out his salvation with fear and trembling”, “fought the good fight, finished the race” and received the crown due to him.(6)
These were his final preached words -
“A Sunday School teacher illustrated this concept of hopefulness in life by drawing on the blackboard two pathways.n the middle of one she placed a large rock, covering the entire path.
At the end of the other path she places a stairway, going upwards, seeming over some obstacle and she continued the pathway on from the top of the stairs.
She pointed to the large rock "All right’" she asked ’’what’s the problem."
Hands went up over the entire class "Something is in the way," one answered, another, "If people run into it, they’ll get hurt," another, "It will turn people bock."
"Good," said the teacher, "and what about this", pointing to the stairs. The children thought a moment, then one said, "The stairway will let you keep on moving the way you want to go."
Another ,"The stairway will take you little higher than you were before."
And another said, "the stairs will let you move along one solid step at a time."
Jesus is our stairway across the brokenness of life. He is solid because of his authority and power. He moves us a little higher, closer to him, as we allow him to bring hope, power, authority, release, forgiveness, renewal, and cleansing into our lives.
Because he is the son of God our stairway over and around the brokenness of the world also moves us closer to heaven and the promise of salvation which is ours through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
In this world of words, there is one clear, loud, gracious word which stands out against all others, and that is Jesus word of grace in our lives,
"The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel." (7)
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(1) Sermon on https://theranch.org/2018/09/16/this-days-thought-from-the-ranch-this-weeks-sermon-95/
(2) Reference to Harry Potter
(3) Matthew 27:40
(4) On this site
(5) https://www.newmobility.com/2003/12/keeping-the-faith/
(6) 2 Tim 4:7-8
(7) https://www.sermoncentral.com/sermons/the-world-of-words-tim-zingale-sermon-on-miracles-of-jesus-131373
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