Sermon preached January 25, 2015
Texts: Jonah
3:1-5, 10; Mark 1:14-20
Warren
Zevon, “Lawyers, Guns and Money” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lP5Xv7QqXiM
Later
in the song, as the story of this person’s troubles continues, the singer will
sing, “Send lawyers, guns and money… [life] has hit the fan.” He uses a more crude term, one not
appropriate for this morning.
Lawyers,
guns and money. Some of you have met
with Val Walker from the Minnesota United Methodist Foundation. Thank you for taking time to do that so Val
can make a good recommendation to our church council about a capital
campaign. When I met with Val, she told
me that if we move forward, I will need to preach a couple of times about this,
so why not today. “Lawyers, guns and
money” sounds like a good capital campaign sermon, doesn’t it? I hope you know that I am kidding!
But
life does hit the fan. Things go
awry. Good plans fall apart. Unforeseen events derail us.
Most
people acknowledge this. How can you
deny that things can go wobbly? Then
comes the response of some. When the
going gets tough, the tough get going – and who doesn’t want to be among the
tough? Or we hear, “When life hands you
lemons, make lemonade.” Who doesn’t want
to make something delicious in life? I
do appreciate the de-motivation take on some of these – “When the going gets
tough, the smart left a long time ago.”
“When life hands you lemons, make a glass of orange juice and leave
everybody wondering how you did that.” A
little quirky humor is one way I try and make some lemonade in life.
Sure
that making lemonade advice is good advice sometimes. Life isn’t perfect and if we wait for it to
be so, we will be waiting a long time.
However, I also think that this advice can be superficial. Life is more difficult and challenging, bewildering
and painful than the lemonade advice perhaps acknowledges. Last Sunday we prayed for a woman named
Lavonne, a friend to some here in this congregation. We prayed for her as she was in the final
stages of her life. Lavonne was a 59
year old woman who had pancreatic cancer.
She died that day. Before she
died, Lavonne touched many lives after her diagnosis, including some in this
congregation. Somehow cute sayings about
lemons and lemonade don’t quite capture this life situation. This week Marcus
Borg died. Dr. Borg was a New Testament
scholar whose work has been of help to many who struggled with deep questions
even as they were drawn to the God of Jesus Christ. Borg helped many to see Christianity in new
ways. In the words found toward the
close of his final book, Convictions, Borg wrote: What’s the Christian life all about?
It’s about loving God and loving what God loves. It’s about becoming passionate about God and
participating in God’s passion for a different kind of world. (231) In reading some of the articles about Borg’s
death, these words were written even as he struggled with his health. There is more here than making lemonade out
of lemons.
Life
is more difficult and challenging, bewildering and painful than the neat phrase
about making lemonade out of lemons captures.
We experience deep disappointments – some relational, some occupational,
some maybe even spiritual.
So
where is God in the midst of our struggles, difficulties, bewilderments and
pain? I think of the powerful passage
from Elie Wiesel’s book Night.
Elie Wiesel spent time in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, which was
liberated seventy years ago this week (January 27, 1945). Wiesel writes about the concentration camp
experience in Night. In the
passage I want to share with you, three prisoners are hanged, including a young
boy who was accused of participating in a sabotage plot.
“Long live liberty!” shouted the two
men. But the boy was silent. “Where is merciful God, where is He?” someone
behind me was asking. At the signal, the
three chairs were tipped over. Total
silence in the camp. On the horizon, the
sun was setting…. Then came the march
past the victims. The two men were no
longer alive. Their tongues were hanging
out, swollen and bluish. But the third
rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an
hour, lingering between life and death, writhing before our eyes. And we were forced to look at him at close
range…. Behind me, I heard the same man
asking: “For God’s sake, where is God?”
And from within me, I heard a voice answer: “Where He is? This is where – hanging here from this
gallows…” (64-65)
Where
is God? God is with us. God is with us in the midst of our pain and
bewilderment and discouragement and disappointment. God is with us to embrace us. God is with us to help get us through. God is with us, and with God’s presence, we
may even grow and change through the difficulties of life. There is something deeper here than being
tough and making lemonade, but at the same time, this is a word of hope. With God, not only might we make it through
life’s most difficult times, but we might even enlarge our hearts and grow our
souls. Marcus Borg writes about going through a time of intense doubt about
Christian faith. “My doubts about
whether I really believed in God were a source of deep anxiety” (Convictions,
29). Borg drifted away from faith all
together until he took a religion class in college and found intellectual
passion and a revived Christian faith.
Elie Wiesel, survivor of Auschwitz, in a more recent book reflects on
his life following emergency heart surgery, a surgery that may have marked the
end of his life, but did not. Reflecting
on all his life, he writes, “And so, the patient that I am, more charitable,
repeats, “Since God is, He is to be found in the questions as well as in the
answers.” (Open Heart, 69). On
the next page, Wiesel writes about his grandson, Elijah. “Grandpa,
you know that I love you, and I see you are in pain. Tell me: If I loved you more, would you be in
less pain?” I am convinced God at that
moment is smiling as He contemplates His creation (70). Coming through crisis, Wiesel encounters God
in new ways. In a book on church
leadership I just finished this week while sitting at O’Hare airport, I read:
“it is precisely in the moments of crisis, despair, disorganization, and fear
that God’s Spirit forms new community in the Bible” (Dwight Zscheile, The
Agile Church, 128).
The word of the Lord came to Jonah a second
time. Jonah had been through a lot –
a stormy voyage, a few days in the belly of a big fish, being barfed up on
shore. God was with Jonah, and the word
of the Lord came to him a second time.
This time, when he followed the leading of the Spirit, something
happened. The people of Nineveh turned
from their evil ways.
Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to
Galilee proclaiming the good news of God. After John was arrested. We often miss the human element of
Jesus. Here the person who baptized him,
who at some point was probably teacher, mentor and friend, he is arrested. It is after this crisis that Jesus ministry
begins.
This
past Monday, in our social hall, I listened as Vernon Jordan spoke to the
gathered MLK breakfast crowd in the Twin Cities. The speech was simulcast here. Jordan, a long-time civil rights leader spoke
about the world today, and how he thought some things would make Martin Luther
King, Jr. cry tears of joy and some would make him cry tears of sorrow. Jordan shared that he still had an audacious
faith, and that arose in part from moments of crisis and pain. Jordan shared a story about May 1980 when he
was in Fort Wayne, Indiana and was shot.
He told those listening that he received many good wishes, but one that
stood out among others was a telegram from George Wallace, former
segregationist governor of Alabama. It
read, in part, “I am praying for your complete recovery.” Recovered from his wounds, a year later,
Jordan traveled to Alabama for a civil rights ceremony. At that event, Governor George Wallace who
himself was partially paralyzed and used a wheelchair as a result of an
assassination attempt in 1972, was present.
The Governor’s wheelchair was brought to the stage, and Wallace asked
Jordan for a favor. He asked him for a
hug. Jordan said he wrapped his arms
around "the villain of Selma, a mean old racist who once stood at the
schoolhouse door to keep black people out." Out of crisis, a deepened faith in the
possibility for change.
On
any given Sunday, I don’t know all the disappointments, discouragements,
bewilderments, pain that you all may be experiencing. I may know some, but certainly not all. Over time, I have learned a deep respect for
people’s pain. I can never see myself
saying, “when life hands you lemons, make lemonade.” Yet there is good news to be shared
nonetheless. It needs to be shared in a
way that genuinely respects human pain, disappointment, discouragement, and
bewilderment. There is good news. God is with us. God is with us again and again and again, and
the word of the Lord comes to us again and again and again. God is with us, and we can make it. God is with us, and we may even grow as we
grapple with our disappointments, discouragements, bewilderments and pain. There is good news. When life hits the fan, as it sometimes does,
God does not send lawyers, guns and money.
God arrives – embracing us, calling us.
Amen.
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