Too Wonderful? -- A New Sermon

For First Congregational Church, Greeley, Colorado, June 15, 2008

Texts:    1 Corinthians 1:20-31
                Genesis 18:1-15

There’s a really obvious sermon to be preached about this text.  A sermon abut how Abraham and Sarah’s faith was so great that, in their old age, God rewarded them with the thing that they wanted most, a son.

The sermon would then go on to talk about how it can happen to you, too.

The person preaching the sermon would tell you if your faith is strong enough, if you pray sincerely enough, if you live rightly enough, then God will reward you with health, wealth, children, whatever it is that you most want, “Wealth and pelf and fame and name and all of that noise.”

Yes, I’m sure many a televangelist has preached that exact sermon. It’s a very comforting sermon, one that can make you feel good about yourself, about God and about your future and there are a lot of people in the world whose faith is based solidly in that sermon.

Three years ago, I did an internship as a chaplain at Grady Memorial Hospital in Atlanta.  Grady is right in the heart of downtown Atlanta, and is part of Atlanta history and culture.  Grady has been in Atlanta since 1890, and you can see in the architecture of the oldest parts of the current building the history of racial segregation, that lead to it’s being known, especially now among older African-Americans as “The Gradys.”

Grady serves as the public hospital for Fulton and DeKalb counties and the teaching hospital for both Emory and Morehouse medical schools.  It has more than 900 beds, four ICUs, a NICU, a children’s hospital, a burn center and a level-one trauma center.

I don’t think that it’s exaggerating to say that at some point, Grady touches the lives of almost all of the more than five million people who live in the Atlanta area.  For years it was common to see cars around Atlanta with blue and white bumper stickers that said simply, “If I’m in an accident, take me to Grady.”

All of that is to say that as an on-call chaplain there it doesn’t take long for you to see incredible, heart wrenching things.

The first time I held the pager, less than a week after I started working at Grady, I was called down to sit with a woman about my age.

It turned out that her 14 year-old son, home for summer vacation, and grounded for having acted up the week before, had broken through her locked bedroom door, found her pistol and shot his 16 year-old sister, Bethany, in the back of the head.

Bethany was rushed to Grady and her mother was called from her school, where she was studying to be a medical technician.

Sadly, there was nothing to be done for Bethany.  Despite the best efforts of the E.R. doctors, it was soon determined that Bethany was brain dead.  It was at that point of that one of the E.R. nurses called for a chaplain and it was at that point that Bethany and her family entered into a kind of twilight zone that I had had no idea existed before I started working at Grady.

Grady, and I assume other hospitals, has a set policy and procedure that has to be followed before a patient could be declared brain dead and removed from life support.

At Grady, two separate teams of doctors had to examine the patient, twelve hours apart, and independently determine that the patient was, in fact, brain dead.

What that policy meant for me, as a chaplain, was that, time and again that summer, I would sit with families during that twelve-hour interval.  An interval where the staff of the hospital knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the patient was gone, but during which the families clung to the thinnest reed of hope that their loved one was coming back.  Hoping that the first team had made a mistake or that their son, daughter, mother, father, husband or wife was going to get better and that the second team was going to find that everything was going to be okay.

It was at the beginning of that twilight zone interval that I met Bethany’s mom. She was sitting in a private waiting room near the E.R. that we called the “large family room.” With her were here sister and a number of classmates who had brought her from their school.

When I entered the room, two of her classmates were sitting, one on either side of her, holding her hands and telling her, “You’ve got to get down on your knees and start praying.  You’ve got to get right with God, because if you get right with God, there’s no way he’ll take Bethany away from you.”

“If you get right with God, there’s no way he’ll take Bethany away from you.”

And that, right there, is the danger with taking this text and turning it into a feel good sermon, a sermon about how if you just get right with God, like Abraham and Sarah were right with God, then God will give you everything you want.

The danger lies in what happens when it doesn’t work.  What was Bethany’s mom going to go through when, twelve hours later, Bethany was, in fact, despite all her prayers, taken away from her? She was going to be left with two choices, either blaming herself for her daughter’s death because she wasn’t “right with God,” or blaming God for having abandoned her.

Now, as a guest preacher I could probably get away with preaching that sermon. I could stand up here and give you all kinds of wonderful promises about how, with proper prayer and sufficient faith, God will give you whatever you ask for.  I could give you a sermon on what is known in seminary circles as “The Prosperity Gospel.”

And it would be a win-win situation for all of us.  For me it’s a really simple sermon to write and one that would feel really good to preach, and y’all would leave here feeling good about yourselves and about God.  Everybody wins.

But I can guarantee that if I were to preach that sermon, I would never be asked to preach here again.  That’s because, a short time after my preaching of that sermon, two weeks, three weeks, maybe a month, someone would come to Bob or to Mike and want to know why their loved one had been diagnosed with cancer or why they hadn’t gotten that job that they really wanted; hadn’t they prayed hard enough, aren’t I faithful enough, why has God turned God’s back on us?  And neither Bob nor Mike would be very happy with me for putting them in that situation.

I got a new job this week.  It’s kind of a hobby job. It’s never going to earn me enough money to live on, but it pays a little bit and it’s a whole lot of fun to do.

I’m working as a “guide” for a relatively new service out there called “ChaCha.”  ChaCha is a human powered search engine. Anybody can, for free, text or call in any question that they want ChaCha to answer.  Those questions are routed over the Internet to guides like me.  We do our level best to find an answer for the “InfoSeeker” and send it back to them along with a link to a reference web page as a text message. Guides are never supposed to just say, “I don’t know,” or “I can’t find an answer for your question.”  We’re supposed to always come up with some kind of answer.

It’s interesting that I got that job this week while I was working on this sermon, because I think the message of that prosperity gospel sermon is that God is just like ChaCha. God is not like ChaCha.

So, here we are, having abandoned the easy, feel good sermon.  Great.  My life just got a little bit harder.  What do we do now?

We do what we should always do when we’re stuck:  We go back to the text.

Let’s look at what Paul has to say, “Has God not made foolish the wisdom of the world?” “For God’s foolishness is wiser than the wisdom of the world and God’s weakness is stronger than the strength of the world.”

We don’t need to look for the God who gives us everything we want, for the ChaCha God who rushes to answer our every request.

We need to look for the God who does what we can’t conceive of, in the places we can’t imagine.
Sarah thought the idea that she would have a son was ridiculous.  The funniest thing she had heard all day, in a kind of sardonic way if nothing else.

Despite years of trying, she had never been able to conceive when she was young and now she wasn’t young anymore.

Abraham had to be at least 90 by this point and Sarah was close to the same age.

Sarah knew that she had been through “the change of life,” “it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women.”

And Sarah knew, as everybody did, as everybody still does today that women who have been through “the change” never have any more babies.

“You’re going to have a son.”  Ridiculous!

And yet, and yet, is anything too wonderful for the Lord?  We worship the God of the impossible; we praise the God that does the ridiculous for us.

And in the proper season, Sarah did indeed have a son and she named her son “Isaac” which means “laughter.”

And what about Bethany’s mom? What about all the people I sat with in the family rooms, the waiting rooms, the lobbies and the hallways?

Did Bethany come back? No.

Does that mean that God was not there with her, with her mother or with her family?

God’s presence filled that family room.  God was there in the people that just sat and waited with Bethany’s mom, in the hands that held hers, and in the days and weeks that followed as she struggled to put a shattered life back together and to find a new way to live without her daughter.

But God was not there in the mundane, human way of “trying to make everything right.”

No, God was there in the little stolen moments of happiness or laughter that seemed so wrong and inappropriate at first but which, slowly over time became more and more frequent. God was there in the little bit of energy and hope that allowed her to get up each morning.

God was there in the people that sat with her and supported her and God was there in the people who gave her room to grieve and who didn’t try to force her to get better, to “just get over it already.” And God was there in millions of other ways that we will never know.

Is God’s wisdom like human wisdom? Is God’s strength like human strength? Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? No, no and no.

But to see the wisdom, to feel the strength, to experience the wonderful, we need to stop trying to make God fit into human boxes and human expectations. 

We need to give God the room to be wonderful, the room to do those things that our wisdom can’t understand and that our strength can’t begin to touch.

Only then will we be truly able to know, to believe, to experience how wonderful God truly is.

Comments

[muphinsmom]

I'm so glad you got to preach. Hopefully the end of a long dry spell. Wish I could have been there to hear it. Reading it certainly touched me. Thanks.

[katie]

great sermon - thanks for sharing!

[Heather W. Reichgott]

oh, girl. you seriously need to be ordained.