FUMC Brundidge

December, 1997

I came in a little early this morning and sat here as the organist was practicing and soaked up a little of the tradition that exudes from this beautiful sanctuary.  And I’ve enjoyed the music program this morning.  I can tell that this is a church with tradition, and I’ve been in a lot of churches.  I know that you have a great deal to be proud of.  I admired the stained glass windows.  You’ve also got a lot of places where people could sit in here.  So, you’ve got an almost unlimited opportunity for growth.  You don’t have to build a new sanctuary in order for the Kingdom of God to expand here in Brundidge.

Some of you that I met earlier were kind enough to remember that I ran for political office in this area one time.  Do you know that that’s been twenty years ago?  The few of you who remember that race for the state senate, that sort of sets a good background for what I am going to be talking with you about this morning.  We don’t always succeed in the things that we try to do; and yet though unsuccessful, those experiences may be very important to us in our faith journey and in our growth as persons.

As we enter in this advent season, what does it mean that Christ came into the world and lived in the world?  Does it mean that suffering is over?  No, I think that you have lived in the world long enough to know that that didn’t happen that way.  And yet when we begin to approach the meaning of religion, we often wonder why do bad things happen to good people?  Why the trials and tribulations?  But even that is not exactly what I want to talk with you about this morning.  And from the scriptures, we get mixed messages.  “Come, my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”  “Deny yourself; take up your cross daily and follow me.”  Now, toting crosses and a light yoke don’t sound to be exactly the same, do they?  And the scriptures talk about the peace that passes all understanding.  Yet Jesus said, “I’ve not come to bring peace but a sword.”  How can we reconcile all of this?  What is the benefit of suffering?

Now, why would I talk about something like this here at the beginning of advent season?  For one thing, Christmas is not only the happiest time of the year, it is the saddest time of the year.  Can you think of anything more melancholy than to remember…those of you who were older…the Christmases when you were a child?  The haunting thoughts of the people who were there who are not there now.  I venture to say that in this audience, there will be those people who are struggling with business reversal, who are struggling with family problems, who are struggling with wayward children, with sickness and, indeed, even death.  How do we as Christians contend with those kinds of things?

Yet, in our civilization, suffering is a very important element.  Progress, through suffering, is the cornerstone of faith that undergirds our civilization.  We remember the soldiers who died that we can have freedom and liberty.  We remember people like Sir Thomas Moore, who died for freedom of religion.  We remember Socrates, who took the hemlock for the sake of law.  We remember Jesus Christ, who died to bear our sins.  But we wince a little if someone suggests, as Jobs comforters did, that sin causes stress.  And I’m certainly not suggesting that everyone who suffers stress has committed some sinful act, and that’s their punishment.  That’s not my point at all.  But mental health counselors, indeed all health counselors, would have us believe that stress is the great enemy and evil.  We should avoid it.  But haven’t we come full circle when we begin to try to avoid all of the stress that comes our way?  Religious leaders follow suit by touting the peace that comes from religious experience.  Good people don’t suffer, they seem to be saying.  Well, now, that’s not true.  Good people do suffer.  So, how do we reconcile all of this?  How do we reconcile the easy yoke with the cross that we must take up?

I want to call your attention to a couple of different passages of scripture as we move through what we are talking about.  First, I want to point to Genesis, 32, verse 24.  Now, let me give you the background, rather than reading the whole story.  You remember Jacob had stolen his brother’s birthright, and he had gone off and as we would say here, “done good.”  He had spent twenty-some-odd years, and he had accumulated great wealth.  And now leaving his father-in-law, he had decided to go back to his home, which he had left, you will remember, in a bit of a hurry because Esau was not really glad of what he had done. And as he got nearer and nearer home, he became more and more apprehensive.  We would say he suffered stress.  And on the night before he was to meet Esau, he….and I’ll just pick up with the scripture there.

24  And Jacob was left alone and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day. 

25 When he saw that he prevailed not against him, he touched the hollow of his thigh; and the hollow of Jacob’s thigh was out of joint as he wrestled with him;

26  And he said, ‘Let me go for the day breaketh,’ and he said, ‘I will not let thee go except thou bless me,’

27  And he said unto him, ‘What is thy name?’ and he said, ‘Jacob,’

28  And he said ‘Thy name shall be called no more Jacob, but Israel, for as a prince hast thou power with God and with men and hath prevailed.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but my experience in my faith’s journey has often seemed like wrestling with that man in the night.  That’s a part of the challenge that we must face.  What happened to Israel as a result of his experience?  He gained a new identity according to the commentaries.  His old name, Jacob, meant “the Supplanter.”  He had taken away what rightly belonged to Esau.  His new name, Israel, means “God rules.”  God rules.  And there is a lesson in our stress that “God rules” brings very clear to us and brings home to us.  Now, the message of stress is not ended there.  Do you remember Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego?  What did they say when confronting the fiery furnace?  Did they say, “God will deliver me?”  No.  They said, “God can deliver me.”  And God did, in fact, deliver them; but the remarkable thing about that story is their faith in God and their willingness to walk into the furnace because they knew that God could deliver.

We come to church to get the peace that passes all understanding, but we don’t take it out into the world with us.  Of course, you can’t talk about the topic of this nature without talking about Job.  Job had all of his possessions removed…all of his family removed…and yet he maintained his faith.  You know, we play in our minds with God.  During the past week, I had occasion to sentence a number of people up in Wedowee, and I think about the first five who came up for sentencing told me that everything was going to be all right…that they had found the Lord.  Now, really.  I finally turned to the Sheriff and said, “You must be doing a wonderful job over in that jail…with all of these people finding the Lord.”  I resisted the temptation to go further and say, “That is wonderful, because where I am about to send you, the field is white to the harvest.”  I didn’t do that.

But we have to be a little skeptical of these things.  During the past week, I heard a T.V. evangelist saying if you give money, a blessing will come to you.  And he told stories about people people who had given money and how money came right back to them.  Using God as a gambling device, I guess.  One guy gave a hundred dollars, and, gosh, he got a house in the mail, or something like that.  Now, our minds are skeptical about such claims.  Certainly, we don’t…any of us…think that God is in the business of granting our bets.  I’ll stay away from the Auburn/Alabama football game; but, you know, it’s bad enough to have to beat the other team and the referees, let alone when God gets on the other side, as well.  Forgive me for that.  I just couldn’t resist it.

But what all does God intervene in?  God intervenes in anything He wants to intervene in.  If He wants to run a football game, He can.  But there’s somebody out there on the other side, too.  And that’s something that we all have to remember.  And I’m sure that in all of these things God’s will is, in fact, done.  At least, these things do not happen in violation of the Will of God.

Is God just there for us to tempt, for us to say, ‘if we’ll do this…’ … Have you ever bargained with God?  ‘If we’ll do this, will you relieve me of that?  If I’ll do this, will you give me that?’  I’m afraid that most of us have some tendency to do that.  That is not the faith that undergirds the world.  That is not what brings us the peace that passes all understanding.

Let me bring another passage of scripture that involves a bit of suffering to your attention.  Luke, the 22nd chapter, the 39th verse.  Now, let me give you the stage here.  Jesus Christ, Our Savior, was in the process of being betrayed by his friend.  He was in Gethsemane.  “And he came out and went as he was to the Mount of Olives; and His disciples also followed Him; and when he was at the place, He said unto them: ‘Pray that ye enter not into temptation,’ and He was withdrawn from them about a stone’s cast and kneeled down and prayed, saying,  ‘Father, if Thou be willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless, not my will but Thine be done;’ and there appeared an angel unto Him from Heaven strengthening Him; and being in agony, He prayed more earnestly; and his sweat was as it were great drops of blood falling down to the ground; and when He rose up from prayer and was come to His disciples, He found them sleeping for sorrow; and He said to them, ‘Why sleep ye?  Rise and pray, lest ye enter into temptation.'”  Can you feel the agony…the stress…and yet, our religion is supposed to take stress away from us.  What a shallow, what a shallow concept of religion that is.  God, indeed, calls us to take up our cross daily; but do you know what?  When you are surrounded and undergirded by a faith in God the Creator, the yoke is easy and the burden is light.  It is the reassurance of God’s living presence.

It’s not when we experiment with God with our little minds that God comes to us.  It’s when we experience him in our inner-most depths…when He takes charge of that part of us that makes decisions…when we know that He is.  When we know that because He lives, we can face tomorrow.  Because He lives, all fear is gone.  That is the relief that comes from experience.  Not all of the problems go away.

As a judge, I see plenty of life’s suffering and brokenness; and it is a matter of concern to me, and I can’t help but meditate what the experience of Christmas—what the advent of Christ—means in all of this.  We act out our callings against the background of faith.  I think that I was called to be a judge, but that doesn’t make the decisions that I have to make easy.  It doesn’t eliminate the sleepless nights.  You were called to the work that you do in the world, and you must take Christ with you into that work; but that doesn’t make the experience easy.  The ultimate issues of life are not easy; the stress is there.  But an understanding of the power of God and of the nature of God will carry us through it.

Five years ago, during the advent season, I lost my father.  He was 82.  He’d lived a good life.  I remember as we called the family in, because we knew that he was going…and I can never tell this story without feeling some emotion.  My son, Mike, came in and I said, “Mike’s here, Daddy, do you see him?”  “Yeah.” and Daddy said, “Hi, Mike.”  Mike said, “Hi, Paw.”   And then Daddy turned to me and said, in whatever world he was living in at that point, “I think we are all here now.  Y’all go ahead to the table and eat.  Save me a place by El.”  Ella is my mama, his wife of 56 years.  Save me a place at the table by Ell.  All of the grief, all of the sorrow that I could feel, was brought to bear on my soul in that moment.  But I understood the meaning of the table.  There he lay with a tube in every aperture of his body…and yet he was dreaming of a table…a table that had one end there in that hospital room and the other end in eternity.  I’ll never experience the 23rd Psalm in the same way again.  Because I know that He prepares a table for us, in the presence of our enemies.  In the very presence of the deepest stress that we can feel.  God is there.  And that’s what makes the yoke light.

I have said that I suspect that there are those here who have wayward children, who experience broken homes.  There are those for whom Christmas will not necessarily be a joy, because of the melancholy of Christmases remembered.  But there is a great joy in the Christ child.  There is hope because of the man who experienced sweat drops of blood as he went through his agony; and if he could face that, we can face whatever we have to face, because of our faith.  It is our faith that bears us through the tide.  When we can say,

 ‘Oh God our help in ages past,

our hope for years to come,

Be thou our strength while life shall last,

and our eternal home.’ 

That is the kind of faith that can carry us through whatever we are called on to do in this world.

I hope that the advent season will be good to you.  And I hope that for those of you who may be struggling with some soul-searching problem, my visit will have been meaningful.  It’s been helpful to me to prepare these thoughts, and it’s been a pleasure for me to be with you.