June 6, 2004
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There
is a family; maybe you know them. Everyday is a struggle to make ends meet, if
the two ends can even be found. The adults in the house work eight hours, five
days a week, with no benefits. They shop at discount stores, not by choice, but
by necessity and since each dollar has to stretch as far as it possibly can
sometimes the choices are heartbreaking – milk and fruit or gasoline, a needed
pair of shoes or the electric bill. Suffering produces endurance. A
few miles away there is another family. From the outside it’s all good. The
father and husband works at a well paying job, the mother and wife is able to
stay at home. The children are good students and are involved in clubs and
sports. But inside the house there is a sense of deepening despair. It is not
that the family wants to keep up with the Joneses, it is that they can hardly
keep up with themselves. They feel lucky to share one meal a week together, they
keep up with each other through notes on the refrigerator and text messaging on
their cell phones. There is little time for anything other than work, school,
and their other obligations. They are maxed out emotionally and spiritually.
Something has to change. Endurance produces character. You
heard about these families on the news. They are among the 800 or so homeless
people in Columbus. They are among the millions who are uninsured. They sleep at
Trinity House and other places that take families. They are at the same time,
easy to ignore and unforgettable once we see them; and there is one more family.
They have sent their son or daughter, husband or wife, their brother or sister,
nephew or niece, their best friend off to Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, South
Korea, Japan, Haiti, somewhere across the world and across the country. Every
ring of the phone, every unexpected knock at the door, every vision of warfare
on television raises the level of their worry. They display character as they go
forward with their lives in stressful times. Character produces hope. I
am not sharing any great secret when I tell you that these are stressful times.
There is among us a sense of disquiet and uncertainty about the future, and we
are not always sure of what is happening in the present. We sense the foreboding
everywhere and we do not always know how to fix it. We hear the prophet say to
us, “do not be afraid.” And we hear the apostle say hang on in hard times
because by the Holy Spirit, we can bear what we have to bear.
We look around and wonder how can this be? Elijah
and Paul remind us that our present circumstance is not necessarily our destiny.
What looks like a dead-end, may have an unseen exit. The good news is that the
way through is in our relationship to God. It is the divine human relationship
gives us peace and access to the grace of God. Grace is what comes to us as an
unexpected and undeserved gift. We didn’t earn it, we didn’t ask for it, it
is not Christmas or a birthday or an anniversary present. God’s grace is ours
because God loves us and who goes with us every step of the journey. As
we go along in life, we will experience some things, even some difficult things.
But we have heard this morning that suffering produces endurance, endurance
produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint. But
we say, suffering is more likely to produce exhaustion, emotional and physical
pain than it is to produce endurance. We
ask, when does suffering lead to endurance? When we’ve gone through something
and come out stronger on the other side. We plead, tell us about a time when
suffering produces endurance which led to character, which led to hope. A
long time ago a prophet of God named Elijah. Elijah lived in a time when the
king of Israel, a man named Ahab was married to a woman from the Canaanite city
of Sidon. Her name was Jezebel and she was a worshiper of Baal. “In Canaanite
religion, Baal the storm god is the one who brings rain and so the possibility
of life on earth. When there is a drought, it is presumed that death has been
victorious and that Baal is dead. [And] when there is rain, it is presumed that
Baal is alive. “Elijah
proclaims that God is Israel is always alive, and to prove it, empowered by God.
Elijah declares that there will be no rain for six months (I
Kings 17.2). By doing so he challenges the
power of Baal, because a drought is a sign of the Canaanite god’s
powerlessness” (New Interpreter’s Bible,
vol. 3, Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999, p. 127-128). The
drought has changed people’s lives. Farmers and backyard gardeners know the
value of rain. Too little leaves the landscape parched and dry and it is hard
for either crops, gardens, or people to be nourished properly. We have seen in
the news scenes in the Midwest and the south in the last few days, and in our
own streets just a few weeks ago, as hard rain fell. Too much water leaves
everything wet, bogged down, messy, drowned, and mosquito infested. Then
Elijah is instructed to go visit a widow in Zarepheth, a village in Sidon, he
sees first hand that humiliating Baal has come at a high price. When Elijah gets
to the house, he makes two requests. The first is for a glass of water that is
not a strange thing for a traveler to ask for, but given the drought, he has
declared, it is an ironic request. If there had been an abundance of water, she
would have offered. It is what hospitable people do. The he asks her for some
bread. Again, it was not a strange request for a traveler, but listen to what
the woman says. She has no bread, just a bit of flour and a little bit of oil.
And the few sticks are for building a fire so that she and her son can eat a
last meal and then lie down and die. The
woman is suffering. Despair, resignation, hopelessness surround her. What can
she do? Elijah reminds her and us of what it means to endure. He tells us that
while this woman suffers from hunger of the body and spirit, all is not lost.
There is no reason to fear, he says. Trust that what you have now will be enough
for now, and it will grow. Believe God can provide abundance even in a time of
drought. “Take the bread and oil and make a small cake for me then make from
what is leftover food for you and your son. Start with what you have. It will be
more than enough. It will last till the drought ends, and so it does.” When
life gets hard, and it will, we are called on to endure. We are never called on
to ignore or pretend everything is OK, when it is not. We are never asked by God
to celebrate and rejoice in the midst of disaster. We are asked to endure with
faithfulness. If a woman who didn’t share Elijah’s faith, she was like
Jezebel a woman of Sidon, so likely also a worshiper of Baal, yet that woman can
believe that as bleak as things are, the God of Israel and later of Jesus will
provide. Surely we can believe in the provision of that same God and act with
faith. We can get up and do all that we are called to do and know that somehow
with grace and mercy, our God will provide. What
are you hungry for – food, money, prestige, respect, a community of friends,
to be noticed to feel loved? Start with what you have and trust that God will
help you set priorities, decide what is most important as you feed and ease your
hungers. Then maybe like the widow of Zarepheth, the little bit you have is
enough to keep you going in times of stress and drought. When
Elijah asked the widow to make a cake out of the little oil and meal she had
left, she could have responded with words not fit for tender ears. What do you
mean, “make you a cake? I don’t know you. We are at the end of our rope, and
you have the gall to ask me to give you some of the food we have left? But that
is not what she said. Instead she was faithful, trusting, and willing to give up
despair in order to take a risk and live, shone through. She did as Elijah
requested, and it made all the difference of the world. She made use of what she
had, and she acted with character. How
we use what we have is a test of character. Character is revealed in the choices
we make about providing basic needs, if we can for our families, it is what we
do with our money, how we respect ourselves and others. Character is seen in the
love and respect we show for our communities – it’s seen when we pay
attention to and love others. Often it is said that character is how we behave
when nobody is watching. Character is about our truest self. Let’s be people
of endurance and character. Character
produced hope in her and her hope led her to life again. She will have to deal
with some other difficult moments; in the next verses, Elijah will bring her
critically ill son back to health, but she and the boy will live. We
feel for the widow and her son, just as we relate to the families described at
the beginning of this sermon. We know all these people. They live next door,
they are our relatives and friends, they occupy the pew with us every Sunday
morning. Every now and then we see them when we look in the mirror. They are the
people we are. Our lives are too often filled with too much despair, too much
doubt, too much of a sense of being trapped, just too much of whatever gets us
down. There is indeed suffering all around us, a war that seems to have no end,
violence in our streets, confusion about how to get adequate health care to the
most vulnerable among us, it is enough to make us give up. Memories
of fuller pews, bigger choirs, healthier budgets, fuller classrooms, of our
departed friends and loved ones are all around us. It is enough to make us want
to quit trying sometime. We do indeed despair. But
there is more to our lives than despair, doubt, and being trapped. We live in
hope and so we are eager to hear again the voice of the prophet Elijah, the
apostle Paul, and the Lord Jesus Christ tell us that now is not the time to give
up or despair. We are not trapped permanently in difficult places. In these
times of spiritual drought, look up. Clouds are forming – good clouds are
taking shape. Good refreshing, healing, life-giving rain will come again. In the
meantime, we have enough to start. Many
of our regularly attending members and friends are away today, it will be this
way all summer – but we are here now offering our praise and our thanks to
God, and it is enough. We will endure, we will not merely survive and I believe
deep in my soul we will thrive and grow. What
we do in the meantime is about faith and character. We can quit, but we raised
our hands last week and said that we expect this congregation to live beyond our
lifetime. So, no more talk of dying, we will live. Christians proclaim a savior
who was crucified, dead, buried, and who rose from death to bring us life. We
live now and this church will live after us, if we use what we have now, people,
resources, praying spirits, and inspired hearts to rebuild and transform us from
being a great church to becoming a greater more faithful church. We
are people of hope in a season of hope filled with weddings and graduations, The
preparation for Vacations Bible School that surround us all are signs of hope
that there is more for us to learn and there are creative ways for the Holy
Spirit to teach us. So understand is not merely wishing for more people, more
money, more outreach opportunities, more nurturing care. “Hope refers to
confidence, trust, and conviction” (Texts
for Preaching – Year C. Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1994, p.
357). We hope because we believe that God’s
promises through Jesus Christ can be trusted. The
promise that Christ came to bring life in all its abundance is true (John
10.10); the promise that where two or three
are gathered in his name, he is among them, and he is among us is true (Matthew
18.20). The promise that comes to us when our
hungers seem to paralyze us and all we can see are doom and trouble is true.
Christ has over come the world. Do not be afraid (John
16.33). The promise that we need hunger and
thirst no more is true (John 4.14, Revelation
7.16). The
promise is that when we believe in him we will know even in stressful times what
it means to have God’s love poured into us. It means that we can start where
we are, and move from this point forward. We can move in the love of God in
Jesus Christ from suffering to endurance, endurance to character, and from
character to hope. That
is the word we have for the families and friends we know, including our own. It
is a prescription for stressful times, and it is the good news of Jesus Christ
for us to live and claim and share. It is water and bread in times like these.
It is the prescription we need, and if we give ourselves a dose of Spirit filled
hope daily, we will find our faithfulness fulfilled. Praise be to God.
Amen. Dr.
LaTaunya M. Bynum |
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Broad
Street Christian Church
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