“When All Seems Lost”

In 1995 the Rev. Daniel Thiagarajah was president of the Seminary in Jaffna, Sri Lanka, where he lived in the president’s house with his wife, Thaya, and three year-old daughter, Lydia. Which is where they were when the word came that the Sri Lankan Army had broken through the lines and was advancing towards Jaffna, and that for their safety the population ought to evacuate. As they piled into their van, artillery shells began to explode all around them – in fact, two landed in the mud right in front of the car, but failed to detonate. Thankful for this narrow escape, they headed south down the only road to safety, but were brought up short as they ran straight into the mammoth traffic jam that results when 200,000 people flee an on-coming army. Fearful that the packed highway would be strafed or shelled, the family split up – Daniel stayed with the van, and Thaya took Lydia on foot. They agreed that they would try to meet up well to the south, across Elephant Pass, at a church where Daniel had once served as pastor. And so Thaya walked, first on the road, and then through the fields, and finally through the waters of the Jaffna lagoon; for twenty hours she walked, as the waters swirled around her legs, her hips, and then up to her neck; finally carrying Lydia over her head as the bombs fell behind and the water rose higher and higher.

Our reading for today draws on a vivid image to talk about the human condition. It uses the image of sinking beneath the waves, of being swamped on the seas, as a way to raise up the inescapable reality of our existence, the truth that there are times in our lives when we find ourselves overwhelmed by the seas of misfortune, when we wake up and realize that we are in the grip of forces and powers which vastly outstrip our puny capabilities and weakness, when we can be terrorized by our worst fear, that there will be no hand to reach out and save us. It speaks to us of those times when all seems lost.

In Matthew’s gospel the disciples find themselves in a small boat far out to sea when a squall strikes, when a microburst suddenly whips the seas into mountains, violently wrenches the tiny craft off course, and threatens to send them all to watery graves.

            We know what he is talking about; we know that he is speaking about us, about the ways in which disaster can reach out and threaten any one and all of us at any time. He is talking about the experience of grief, of despair, of hopelessness, of powerlessness, of crucifixion. He is talking about that devastating blow when after three rounds of chemotherapy and months of hoping and retching and positive outlook and arms that have come to resemble pin-cushions the oncologists say “We’re sorry, there’s nothing more we can do.” He is talking about the numbness that descends when the somber officers in dress uniform turn off the sidewalk and walk up to your front door. He is talking about being up to one’s ears in pain and loss, eyes bleary from weeping, stomach churning without relief. He is talking not about “Reality TV”, where all problems are wrapped up in one short hour, he is talking about REALITY. And yes, he is talking about the horror of refugees fleeing for their lives. But he is also talking about the more mundane type of feeling overwhelmed, the sort of thing that comes from the drip-drip-drip accumulation of smaller griefs and woes, when the job loss comes just as the marriage is falling apart and you are trying to deal with a child with special needs at the same time as your parent is slipping into dementia….

            You might not agree with me on this, at least not openly. You might not want to admit that you ever find yourself feeling as if you are ready to slip beneath the waves. We are, after all, stoic New Englanders. We come from hardy stock, we are tough, we can take it, and after all, we say, “we are not as bad off as so and so.”  That might work fine at the supermarket, or at the beach, or even when you greet me after worship, but it doesn’t work so well at 2:00 in the morning when you are alone in bed and can’t get to sleep and you’re not sure how you are going to get through the night never mind another day. The Titanic is going down and you know it and you know that there is no way you are going to prevent that from happening and the bluffing and the façade just don’t cut it anymore. And the question comes,  I am sinking beneath the waves, and does anyone care? More importantly, does God care?

            That was the question on the minds of those disciples. It had been a long day, filled with Jesus teaching them and the crowds about the kingdom of God, and oh by the way feeding five thousand as well, and come evening Jesus had commanded his disciples to set sail for the other side of the Sea of Galilee. They encounter a terrifying windstorm, and considering there were four professional fishermen among the disciples, it must have been a true gale. Waves threaten to swamp the frail craft.

            Does God care? It is a question which goes right to the heart of any relationship – do you care? It is a question many adult children still struggle with right through mid-life – do my parents care about me? Do they love my brothers and sisters more than me? And so we keep track of how many visits they make to see our siblings, we carefully listen to see whether they praise our children as much as they praise their other grandchildren, we even try to gauge their love for us by trying to figuring out how they plan to dispose of their estate. Worrying about whether someone cares has a corrosive effect on the relationship, and over time, can even destroy it. Because the deeper meaning of “Do you care?” is, “Am I alone?”. For if you don’t care about me, then I really don’t exist for you, and I cannot hope that you will be save me in time of need.

            Jesus, Matthew tells us, cares. The disciples act as if he is alone – but Jesus is with them, even walking over the seas to be with them. But Peter doubts, saying, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” And of course he sinks, but Jesus reaches out and catches him, and after climbing into the boat with Peter, stills the storm. 

            When we read Matthew’s account of the stilling of the storm, we are challenged to examine our own faith. The suspicion that God does not really care about us corrodes our religious life. But, Matthew tells us, Jesus is with us in those times when we feel like we might sink beneath the waves. We are not alone, and God in Jesus cares.

            I don’t know how it was for Thaya that terrifying night when she struggled through the rising waters of the Jaffna lagoon, the only light provided by exploding ordinance behind her, her arms aching from carrying her precious daughter, her heart breaking over the destruction to her people, and her mind consumed by worry over Daniel stuck on the highway. But I suspect, from conversation with her, that even as she cried out in prayer for deliverance, her legs were kept moving by the deep-seated belief that nothing, not water nor bombs nor fatigue nor anything else in all creation, could separate her from the love of God in Jesus Christ. It was that belief, that trust, that kept her going all the way to an eventual joyful reunion with her husband, Daniel.

            And it is that belief, that trust, that keeps me going, and will keep you going, when all seems lost.

Sailing to Bombay

            In the early 1950s William Hutchison Murray, a Scottish mountain climber, was asked to join and then organize an expedition to the Himalayas.  In recounting the preparations for the expedition, Murray wrote of the moment when everything changed, when the epic journey moved from being just an idea towards being a reality.

“We had definitely committed ourselves and were half-way out of our ruts. We had put down our passage money – booked a sailing to Bombay. This may sound simple, but is great in consequence. Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.” (W.H.Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition (1951), quoted in Weavings Vol, XXV, Number 4 (2010))

            For many of us, being free from anxiety, the ability to stop worrying, is the impossible mountain to climb.  In what has to be the most memorable of sermons ever preached,  Jesus spoke about the way to scale these seemingly impossible heights. He does not command us not to worry, as if that would work. No, instead he says make the shift in priorities, change the focus, move off of yourself and your worries and think about and work towards the cause of God, and everything else will fall into place.   Jesus says, make that commitment to God, and the rest will follow. “Strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all things will be given you as well.” (Matthew 6:33)

            It is what Murray says happened for him once they booked those tickets for Bombay. Once they made that commitment, everything else began to fall into place. “The moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.” Living without anxiety and worries is not the starting point, it is the result of committing yourself to God and to the kingdom of heaven. Make that commitment, and you will find that resources unlooked for will come your way, that help unexpected will be at hand.

            Climbing the mountain begins with making the commitment, by putting your trust not in yourself or your planning or your efforts, but in the God who holds you and loves and will give you everything you need.

            Now this is not to say, of course, that everything we wish for is what God will send our way!  Jesus promises that what we need we will receive, but that does not mean that everything we want is what we will receive; we know this when we pray, “thy will be done”, but of course it is one of the hardest thing to live.

            I sometimes wonder if Jesus planned to deliver that famous sermon of his on a mountain because he knew that we all have so many mountains to climb in our life, and that we fret and worry about whether or not we have the energy and the power and the ability to do this.  His good news for us is that no, we probably don’t have the energy and the power and the ability to climb all those mountains. We don’t,  but he does. And he will share that power with you, if only you book those tickets to Bombay, make that commitment, and strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness.

                    

Do We Have to be Anxious?

             Anxiety-producing stuff is all around us now.  Attempted political assassination and mass murder in Arizona, over-heated political rhetoric, over-heated political rhetoric over whether over-heated political rhetoric is a bad thing, global warming, melting polar ice caps, rampant deforestation in the Amazon, the Great Recession, wars without end in Iraq and Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, epidemics of cancer, ever-rising health care costs, job insecurity, failing schools, college applications, strained church budgets, Mayan prophecies of 2012, somebody please stop me!

            Anxiety is not unique to our day and age. Jesus and those to whom he ministered knew, in their own time, all about anxiety, anxiety that was personal, communal, political, economic, religious.  Health care was abysmal, child-mortality astronomical, foreign taxation oppressive, foreign military occupation relentless, religious bickering unending, the political world polarized, pensions, not invented yet, retirement planning limited to having lots of strong sons.

            So Jesus knows better than to tell the people, “Don’t worry, be happy.” Instead, he knows he needs to help them face their darkest fears and deepest dreads, he needs to go beyond offering the temporary band-aid of easy comfort and Pollyannaisms. And so he gives them a bracing does of reality, telling that there will be times, yes, when the very foundations will be shaken beneath their feet, times when it will seem that all moorings have been lost, times when it will feel like they have been “confused by the roaring of the sea and the waves.” (Luke 21:25) They likely would have understood that he was speaking not just about the end time of world history, but about what feels like the end times in their own lives – about those cataclysmic-feeling times that all too often are part and parcel of this earthly existence.

            But Jesus does not stop there, with sounding warnings that seem as if they might be coming from the Channel 7 Storm Center on the eve of a winter nor’easter. No, he takes them to another place, a new place, an unexpected place – a wondrous place. Not, “Don’t worry, be happy”, not, “Stick your head in the sand and just pretend that everything is all right”, but, instead, this: “Now when these things begin to take place, stand up and raise your heads, because your redemption is drawing near.”

            As Flora Slosson Wuellner writes (Weavings, No. XXV, Number 4, 2010), “The moment of our greatest fear, that moment when the ground shakes beneath our feet, is the very moment of God’s deepest presence and power within us. It is the moment of our new beginning.”

            She goes on,

“This does not mean that our sun and moon will shine for us again in their old way, or that the sea will return to its former shores, or the cracked earth will become that old solid ground we used to walk upon. We will walk in new lights and on new foundations. The God of endings and new beginnings never returns us to the old life after profound change. We are offered a new creation.”

The times of our greatest anxieties, these are times not to dread the worse, but to anticipate the best, not to cower in our foxholes, but to stand tall with eyes eagerly scanning the horizon, ears stretching for the sound of the cavalry’s bugle call.

            This is my story, the story of my new life. Many of you know some of my story, about how Sue, the mother of Julia and Katie, my first wife, died of breast cancer at an all too young age, and how I later met Christie, and fell in love, and married. And you know that I believe I have been blessed to have lived two lives, and perhaps you assume that I date that second life from the moment I met Christie.

            But actually, that rise to new life began well before that. I remember the moment as if it were yesterday. I can feel the pajamas that I wore, the robe on my back, the slippers under my feet; I can see the back door, the view out its windows onto the driveway outside, the newspaper lying there. I knew that what I was about to do I had been doing every morning since we had moved into that house, had stripped off and then rehung the horrid wallpaper, had redone the kitchen, celebrated the pregnancies that resulted in Katie and Julia, and so much more. That I had started off each day by going outside and bringing in the newspaper. But this day was different, and even as I reached out to turn that doorknob, I knew that the world was a different place and might never be the same again. Because this was the first day after the cancer had come back, and now all bets were off, and now I knew that I could never trust life again. And I felt robbed, violated, completely overwhelmed by violent seas.

            And yet – and yet, that was the day I began, if slowly, to rise to new life. While my old trust in life had been destroyed, what was made room for was a new trust in the one who, as we sang earlier, has “the Whole World In his Hands”.  No, its not that the challenges and the pain and the suffering went away – cancer stinks, and losing a spouse and mother and friend to a debilitating disease is horrid – its that I discovered that we were never left alone, never abandoned, never left unloved, that help unlooked for always came, that when we ran out of our own resources new power miraculously came our way. Yes, something in me died that day – the faith that life was fair and just and would go on and on – but in that dying there was room for something new to be born, a trust in one whose trust is steadfast and sure.

            Minnie Louise Haskins wrote over a century ago,

“And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.”

The Bible tells us over and over about God’s hand, that symbol of comfort and care and protection, of endless love and strength and guidance. In Psalm 139, the psalmist sings “If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” And in John 10:28, Jesus says “I give them eternal life, and they will never perish. No one will snatch them out of my hand.”

            And so this is the good news for us today, and this is what Jesus means when he says to us, “Do not be anxious.” When we are faced with those times when it seems that the world is moving beneath our feet, when it seems that the stars are falling from the sky overhead – when the test results come back from the lab and the specialist tells us that it is bad news, when the boss calls us into the office and starts apologetically mumbling about reductions in force and how sorry he is, when a spouse packs their bag and walks out the door, when that thin envelope arrives from the admissions office of that college you longed to get into, when you realize that you just made the biggest mistake of your life – then is the time to stand tall; then is the time to raise up your head; and then is the time to put out your hand to the one in whom you can always trust, and who stands ready to open up for you a new life and a new day.