"When the Floods Threaten to Overwhelm Us"

The water is not under our control. Something I came to realize once again as I struggled with the shut-off valve hidden back behind the washing machine, while getting drenched from the spray of the burst inflow hose. Something that hit home even deeper when the lever of the valve sheared off in my hand, and I frantically ran towards the basement in search of the master valve which cuts off water to the entire house.

            Something we learned here on Thursday morning, when the crew removing the old underground oil tank next to Jenkins Hall accidently severed the water pipe leading from the well into the building, forcing us to close the school and send the students home.

            Global warming is here, and it is coming on stronger all the time; the ice caps are melting, and since that ice melt has to go somewhere, sea levels are rising. Meteorologists tells us we can expect more and more violent storms, hurricanes, typhoons, and twisters, and that the risks of flood and coastal inundation are creeping ever upward.

Bottom line, you don’t need to have a doctorate or be a post-Katrina resident of New Orleans or post-tsunami coastal Japan to understand that the waters are not under our control. And it was precisely that same understanding which was held by the ancient Hebrews – that water can betray us, can threaten us, can wreak havoc upon us.

            Way back when in the pre-modern Middle East, Israel’s neighbors told stories about a great primeval flood. In their stories, divine beings would battle it out with each other, only noticing humanity when our noise became too annoying to them.  So they decided to use water to wipe the planet clean. In the ancient epic Gilgamesh, the gods sent a flood which wiped everything out, except one family and the animals that they saved.

            The Hebrews knew that story, but then they retold it, retold it in a way that comported with their understanding of how their God worked. And so it does not start with a battle in the heavens between rival gods, but with a divine response to human violence; rain pours down, yes, but also a blessing, in that humanity, through righteous Noah and his family, is rescued; and it ends with a promise by God not just to humanity, but to “all flesh”, a promise that never again will the waters of chaos prevail. God will not dis-member the good creation – God will remember it,. God would remember his creation, and as a sign of that covenant, just as a warrior returning to hearth and home would hang his bow over the fireplace, God would hang his mighty bow over the clouds.

            Friends, for me the point of the account in Genesis of Noah and the flood is not whether or not “it really happened”, and I don’t believe the point of the account for the ancient Hebrews was limited so narrowly, either. They knew that chaos exists, and that chaos was a constant threat to their civilization – the chaos of famine and flood, of disease and invasion. But they also trusted that God had remembered them in the past, and would remember them in the future.

            But we know that as well. We know how it feels like we are being swamped, that the floodgates of chaos have been opened and threaten to sweep it all away.

            When you struggle to keep the grades up and there is all that pressure to get into college and the coach seems to hate you and the guy you secretly pine for doesn’t even look at you and all of a sudden everyone is picking on you on Facebook and somehow you got grounded right before the big dance. High School can be like that.

            When the officers slap the cuffs on your wrist, and the magistrate says “No bail”, and the barred door to the cell slams closed behind you.

            When the sheriff walks up to your door and serves you with a lawsuit accusing you of stealing funds from the charitable organization you had faithfully served for years.

            When a routine chest x-ray comes back and your doctor says, “There seems to be a mass.”

            When after thirty years in the same company your manager comes in and says “We’re sorry, but we are going to have to let you go”, and you have no idea of where that next job might ever be.

            When your spouse says, “I’ve found my soul mate” -- and they are not talking about you.

            When you realize that you can no longer make it in your beloved home, and need to transition to “assisted living” or even a nursing facility.

            I suspect we all know what it can be like to feel as if we are being swamped, as if the waters of chaos will have their way with us.

            Which is why the eternal truth standing behind the account of Noah and the Flood is such good news for us. The good news that God’s grace will prevail, that just as God conquers the unconquerable waters, God can control the chaos that threatens to overwhelm us. That God remembers us; remembers us in the sense that God calls us to mind when we are in danger of being swamped, when we fear that we are alone and forgotten and that God just does not care; but more than that, that God re-members us – God will join us together as one once again, will put us back together, not just as ourselves, but also in solidarity with all creation and with our Creator.

            The Noah story anticipates the Jesus story; God’s promise to remember us is fulfilled in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Far from abandoning us, God comes to us, takes on our own fragile and failing humanity, and remembers us, put us back together, heals and saves us. And once again it is water that is at the heart of the story, but this time, instead of a rampaging flood, it is waters which cleanse, which heal, which remember us into a new community: the waters of our baptism.

            God remembers; and so let us, in our turn, remember as well.

String Too Short to be Saved

       

     Donald Hall, the poet laureate of New Hampshire, went into his grandfather’s attic one day. Some people are keepers, and some are throwers, and Hall’s grandfather was most definitely a keeper. One of the many boxes in the attic was filled with short pieces of string, and bore the hand-lettered label, “STRING TOO SHORT TO BE SAVED.” Hall later wrote a poem, which states the obvious, that his grandfather saved the string that was too short to be saved.

          Maybe you know what it feels like to be, in your own way, a piece of string too short to be saved.

          Because even with all the emphasis over the past decades on boosting self-esteem, on feeling good about ourselves, I think that deep down we realize that we really just don’t measure up, because we continually finds ways to fall short of living as we know we ought to live.

          The church has a word for that failing to live as we ought to live: sin.

          I think, deep down, we all know the power of sin in our lives. It is not just “out there”, where it is easy to see and label, but it is in here, in me, in you, and it is among us. It is in here, in each of us personally, and it is among us as well, a force and power that infects our institutions and social organizations.

          And we know how impossible it is, really, to ever totally reform and put sin behind us. No matter how many times we resolve not to do it,

we blow up at the kids,

or succumb to road rage,

or refuse to forgive an old slight,

or grudgingly put up with the abuse,

or say to ourselves for the millionth time that I or my needs are not that important,

or give in to the fear which makes us grasp tightly onto our possessions, as if they could save us.

          If you’ve ever felt that you are string too short to be saved, Paul the Apostle’s words for us are bound to be good news for you. “There is therefore no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.” (Romans 8:1-11)

          God has saved us all – it has happened already, it has already been done, it is not something that you have to wait for – God has saved us all in that great attic. Nothing is ever lost to God.

Not the boy who stepped in front of the train.

Not the spouse that cheated and abandoned their family.

Not the solider who went over the line in combat.

Not the young woman struck down by cancer.

Not the child hurt by the trusted adult; not the adult who hurt the child.

Not even me – and not even you.

We will each appear to be string too short to be saved – and our God will judge us -- and yet God will not be frustrated, and will save us still, will not condemn us. God accepts the unacceptable. God loves the unlovely. With arms wide open, God welcomes you just as you are. You have been set free from the law of sin and death, you have received within you the Spirit of the one who was raised from death by God, so that you, also, might rise to new life through the in-dwelling of Christ.

          A string too short you might think you are, but you can live in the knowledge that you are worthy of storage in God’s spacious attic, where you shall be knotted together forever with all the other too short strings into a seamless tapestry, one with its creator.

So as the Thanksgiving holiday nears we can indeed say, "Thanks be to God!"

The Gift of Rules

         

My generation – those of us who came of age in the late Sixties and early Seventies – did not have much time for rules. Rules – laws, regulations, even the unwritten customs that governed how our parents lived – were viewed as mere legalism at best, oppressive totalitarianism at worst. We rebelled against dress codes, hair length, the draft, drug use laws, sexual mores, the unwritten rules about the proper roles of women and men in society, and more. A popular song summed it up for us, with its refrain, “Signs, signs, everywhere there’s a sign, blocking up the scenery, breaking up my mind, do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?” We rebelled against everything in the name of freedom.

            So of course we – well, at least speaking for myself – have never been big fans of the Ten Commandments, the original engraved in stone set of rules. And a close corollary of this denigration of the Ten Commandments is the tendency to view the Old Testament as all about law, the New Testament all about grace, to think that Jesus was all about freedom, his Jewish tradition about a binding, legalistic ritualism.

            But when I understood the context of the Ten Commandments, I came to see them in a whole new light, and to understand that far from being an oppressive list of “thou shalt nots”, they instead are gifts from God, gifts designed to help the community thrive and flourish.

            Try to imagine what life was like for the enslaved Hebrews. They had no laws of their own – they were subject to Pharaoh’s rule alone.  Where they lived, what they did, when they woke and when they slept, all were dictated for them by their overseers.  Who was their god, the one who exercised total domination and control over everything in their lives? – Pharaoh. What was their sole task? – to obey unquestioningly, and to fulfill the work quotas.

            And then, suddenly and without time to prepare, they find themselves with more freedom than they know what to do with, a wandering group out in the wilderness, with no history of self-government, no law books, no rules or regulations or even ingrained customs by which they might order their society. All they know is the old way, a way of totalitarian control by an autocrat, where the chief values are unquestioning obedience and meeting production quotas.

            Which is where God steps in. With a set of rules, yes, but first, with a reminder. A reminder that this God is all about freedom.

            “Then God spoke these words: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery….”

            It is as if God starts off by saying, “Before we begin, let me remind you about who I am – I am the one who heard your cries when you were enslaved back in Egypt, and the one who acted on your behalf to bring you to freedom. No longer are you Pharaoh’s – now you are mine. No longer are you chattel to be brutalized and exploited by an Egyptian overlord; now you are mine, and I am all about giving you what you need, as a community, not only to live, but to live abundantly. So listen up….”

            When we get the youth group together each year, one of the first things we do is sit down and together come up with a set of rules by which we agree to live with each other. Rules like “no put-downs”, and “we will treat each other with respect”, and “no drugs or alcohol”, and so on. Everyone knows that these rules help us to live together as a youth group, they help prevent the kind of splits and divisions which can ruin a group. Do they restrict our freedom to do things – sure. But in the name of helping us build a life-affirming community.

            It is, of course, the same with those Ten Commandments. Far from being an arbitrary set of legalisms designed to hem us in, they instead are God’s vision for us of a flourishing, life-affirming community. And because those Commandments are linked to the Exodus, to God’s bringing the Hebrews up out of the brutality and exploitation of Pharaoh, they can be seen as a vision of an alternative reality, God’s reality, which God hopes we will we embrace.

            And so the first commandments remind us never again to submit to false gods, to the Pharaohs who would enslave us, either through military might or, as more often is the case, through the seduction of promises of wealth, or fame, or security, or a life of ease. And the latter commandments seek to enhance human community by putting limits on the acquisitive capacity of members of the community – the power individuals have to take by might or cunning from more vulnerable members of the community. As Old Testament theologian and preacher Walter Brueggemann reminds us, “”the protection of property is to be understood in the first instance not as a rule of property, but as a defense of the weak against the rapacious capacity of the strong.” (Theology of the Old Testament, p. 185).

            The Ten Commandments are, at base, not just law, but law rooted in God’s amazing grace, gifts freely extended to us, gifts embodying God’s wisdom, gifts setting out God’s vision for us of a world where God’s love is lived out by God’s people, in community, together. An amazing grace, not just for individuals who once were lost, but for the entire human community, that together we might truly see.

So this is the question for us.  Is it enough to just live by the rules, to “shalt not” when the Bible says “thou shalt not”? Or does God call us to do more, to not only see into the vision of a good life lived in community, but also to strive to make that good life in community a lived reality for all its members?

“We Don’t Know How to Pray – Get Over It!”

I think most pastors find it astonishing – as do most folk in the pews – that the Bible is full of folk who just don’t know how to pray. We just assume that they wouldn’t even be in the Bible unless they could nail something as elementary as prayer.

            But look at those disciples who followed Jesus around for three years. If anyone should have picked it up it was those folk, who hung on Jesus’ every word as he traipsed the length and breadth of the countryside. But then they come to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1). Jesus responds by giving them a prayer, one we now know as The Lord’s Prayer.

            And here we have Paul the Apostle, the same guy who founded churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece, confessing that “we do not know how to pray as we ought.”

            All of this I think is great news for all of us who tend to get anxious when it comes to prayer. We often tend to think prayer is all about technique. For instance:

 – that we need to breathe deeply, and slowly – never mind that whenever I am intentional about breathing deeply and slowly my heart rate picks up and next thing you know I am panting like a dog.

-- or that we need to empty our mind of all our cares and worries. My spinning instructor is big on this one. She will say, “Okay, for the next two minutes I am going to stop coaching you, I just want you to have two minutes of uninterrupted silence, a time when you can just let go of all the things on your to-do list, all your worries about your health or loved ones, all the things waiting for you back at the office.” So of course while I previously was very happy just thinking about my bike riding, now she has me thinking about that to-list, health worries, loved ones, and the work back at the office!

--  Or that we need to walk the labyrinth, or find a secluded glade up in the mountains, neither of which is ever around when you need on!

            So what happens for a lot of people is they just figure since they will never get prayer right, never master its techniques, they should just forget about the whole thing.

            But friends, Paul reminds us that we don’t know how to pray, but that is alright, because the Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.”  When we cannot find the words, there is the Spirit filling in for us, but not with words – because often our deepest concerns are simply just beyond words – but with sighs. The same God who loves us so much that he came to us in Jesus Christ, taught us, walked with us, suffered for us – that same God is not some sort of cosmic red-pen-wielding essay editor just ready to reject every petition that crosses her desk, but instead is right there alongside us, right there deep within us, supporting us in our deepest yearnings.

            So no, you don’t know how to pray as you ought – so get over it!

            But maybe you are still expecting to get your money’s worth out of this sermon, and so are expecting some instructions on how to pray. Instructions I have none, but I do have some stories to share about prayer as I have experienced it. Not because I am an expert at prayer, mind you, and not that what works for me will necessarily work for you, but in the hope that my stories might help you with this spiritual practice we call prayer.

            So we are driving down to the Jersey shore on the Garden State Parkway a month ago, about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, the car loaded up not only with our bags but also with all the paraphernalia that Julia is taking with her to college, five of us crammed in together, when all of a sudden I hear a high-pitched whine coming from the left side of the vehicle. Definitely not from the engine, from the left side. So I pull over to the breakdown lane and, one eye on the traffic whizzing by, I try to see if there is anything going on with the two driver’s side wheels. Of course I see nothing.  Hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I climb back in and we start off again, but once we get back up to speed there comes that high-pitched whine once again. So nothing else to do but get off at the next exit and look for a service station. We found one pretty quickly, but of course it is Sunday night and there is no mechanic on duty. The two men working the station, each with accents that seemed to indicate that they were recent arrivals to the States from perhaps Portugal, could not have been nicer or more helpful, even calling a mechanic and urging him to come help us out. But to no avail. A call to AAA produced no better results – they could only offer us a tow, but no mechanical help. So there was apparently only one thing to do – well, actually, two. As I pulled out my smart phone to look for a nearby hotel, where we could spend the night before trying to get the car fixed the following morning, I muttered a silent prayer. Nothing complicated, nothing eloquent like you might find in The Book of Common Prayer, just more along the lines of “Oh God, help us out here!”

            The next thing you know Christie is talking to a guy who had stopped to get his car filled up, who also seemed to be of Portuguese extraction, and who had overheard the attendants talking about our problem. So he comes over and tells us his sister-in-law has the same make car, and had the same problem, and that what she learned was that the cause was a pebble jammed between the wheel and the brake, and that the thing to do was to put the car in reverse, go forty feet, and then hit the brakes hard, and the pebble may fall out. With nothing to lose, I gave it a try, out popped a pebble, problem solved, and we were safely on our way.

But prayer is not always about happy endings, or getting what you want when you want it. Sometimes it is just all about being honest about how bad things really are. Ellen F. Davis, in her book “Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament,” tells of the minister who visited a parishioner in a nursing home. The parishioner would not speak to her or look at her, simply glaring ahead all the time.  Realizing that making chit chat was not going to help, she went straight to the Bible, opening the psalms and reading psalms of comfort. But they elicited no response, still the same stony stare. At last she turned to the psalms of lament, reading Psalm 102:

I have become like a vulture in the wilderness,

like an owl among the ruins….

I eat ashes like bread and mix my drink with tears

because of your indignation and anger,

because you have picked me up and tossed me aside….”

And for the first time that stony face softened, for the first time he looked at his visitor, for the first time he spoke, saying, “Finally, somebody who knows how I feel.”

            And prayer often is not even about us, or by us, or up to us. It turns out that on that same vacation as the car trip I told you about earlier I developed a blood clot in my left calf, which turned out to be a big deal, and very, very painful, for a couple weeks at least. All the time. 24/7. It made me quite grumpy, as chronic pain can tend to do to people, but it also made me feel just too bad even to pray for relief.  It was like just as I didn’t have much time for inter-personal relationships because of the pain, I just was not in the mood for that relationship with God which we often think of as prayer. Reaching out was the last thing I wanted to do – I just wanted to crawl inside myself and be left alone. But that is not to say prayer was not important to me. It was. It is just that I knew, that a member of this faith community, this church, I had a whole lot of people, starting with the chair of the Board of Deacons and some members of the choir who were in the know, praying for me. They were picking up the ball for me when I was just in no shape to run with it myself. And I have to say this was a great comfort to me, so much so that it got me to thinking about all those folk who do not have a church or faith community that can hold them in prayer in the tough times, and made me think how terribly lonely that must be.

            Paul the Apostle was right. We don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the good news for us is that it just doesn’t matter, because the Spirit is right there with us in our lack of knowing, our lack of diligence, even our lack of wanting to pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.

So pray at all times, pray free from anxiety about whether you are doing it right, pray in the confidence that you have a divine prayer partner close at hand, praying with you, and for you. Amen.