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The
Endurance We Are Given Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis March 2, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Psalm 136 "For you need endurance, so that when you have done the will of God, you may receive what was promised.” There are times and places when and where human existence is received by the human spirit more as a test than a gift. Superficially in these days when our trivial pursuits are frustrated by yet another inch or two or ten of snow, and we think ourselves unable to endure the season to its end…or more soberly on this planet, when the uncertainty of human history makes us wake every morning wondering if we can endure that morning when we will wake to news of a war declared by us…or most tangibly within the landscape and limitations of our human hearts, given our inability to heal the infirmities of those we love or even our own infirmities, we find ourselves crying out for an endurance we can no longer give ourselves. The intractability of nature, the vagaries of human history, the frailty of our flesh and blood test our endurance, we say. Therefore, especially when we find ourselves approaching the end of our ability to pass the test, we take our places of a Sunday morning in the pews provided. No doubt in this world of commerce, some have come expecting endurance to be a holy commodity the church should be able to dispense. Others have come mercifully out of habit and, thus far, the habit itself almost has sufficed. More and more we come as those who can believe enough only to beseech the silence. Though inevitably somewhere in the familiar order of unknown hymns, ancient prayers, and endless sermons, the mind wanders and we wonder: will this hour return us to the given world only to sink further into the chaos around us or, by some unforeseen destiny and undeserved grace, we will know ourselves thrust—more self-consciously than we ever can remember—upon the God whose steadfast love endures forever? Thankfully, we are not the first to arrive! In fact, there exists around us a cloud of witnesses whose testimony concerning the endurance we seek places our days within an eternal parenthesis that most of us have either forgotten or never understood. Within those parentheses, we endure, you and I, upheld by the hand of God’s providence--governing, preserving and directing of our days--but if we have come to look only for the God of the moment, beseeching God that we may endure, we likely will miss the God whose steadfast love endures forever! The scriptures never tire of reminding us that the God who keeps us in life is the same God who created us in the beginning and who has promised to redeem us and all creation in the end. Out of this all-encompassing faith in the God who was and is and is to be, God’s people endured the present darkness as a people preserved, maintained, guarded, assured, strengthened and so upheld by the God whose steadfast love was before they ever were and would be eternally: whose steadfast love endures forever! So first, before we may ask after the endurance we are given for the living of these days, we would do well to ask after the steadfast love of God that was before we were: to ask after the God whose creation is the context of our enduring. The psalmist begins in the beginning, thanking the God whose “understanding made the heavens…who spread out the earth on the waters…who made the great lights…the sun to rule over the day and the moon and stars to rule over the night.” God’s steadfast love endures forever was the congregation’s response to the cosmos God created, and implies a particular activity of God in the created order, without which we could not endure. Says the first chapter of Genesis explicitly: God separated the cosmos from the chaos, the light from the darkness, the dry land from the sea, and because the steadfast love of God endures forever, God acts to separate the cosmos from the chaos still! “Why is it,” ask the theologians, “that the being of the creature is menaced by nothingness, menaced in such a way that it needs the divine preservation and sustaining and indeed deliverance if it is not to fall victim to it and perish?” We are met on all sides by waters too high, darkness too dense, chaos too powerful to manage. It is no coincidence that, following on the heels of the story of creation, we are told stories of murder and mayhem, of deceit and treachery, of idolatry and a great flood: stories underlining the chaos that is crouching at our every door! Therefore, remembering in their present exile the endurance God had given them in the face of Pharaoh’s army, the Red Sea’s depth, the hunger in the wilderness, and their own rebellion, this people confessed anew with no immediate evidence, “God’s steadfast love endures forever!” What these witnesses report is that the God whose creating hand separated light from the darkness, also went before them like a pillar of fire in the night; that the God whose creating hand separated the waters from the dry land is also the God who parted the Red Sea: the steadfast love that created the context of our human being at all is still holding back the chaos. We cannot draw such direct connections between the events of our day and the mighty acts of God. Rather these stories standing at the beginning of the days are revelation’s left-hand parenthesis, in whose light we may see the way we have traveled thus far and the know the One in whose strength we have endured. Without that light, we are left with secular metaphors whose claim to sacred meaning misses the enduring immensity of God’s creative power to keep us in life. “I walked and photographed nearly every inch of [ground zero] as it was transformed from an awesome pile to a vast and empty pit,” writes Joe Meyerowitz, likening the architecturally exposed wall built into the design for ground Zero to the Parthenon or Stonehenge: “a sacred space below sea level yet open to the sky.” “In the early months I thought nothing could be more emotionally powerful than the towering complexities of twisted steel. But as the debris cleared, I became aware of something more powerful still—the subterranean ‘bathtub’ and the space within it…[This] inanimate hero of the disaster,” he says, “not only caught the incalculable power of the collapse, but managed—under the assault—to prevent the Hudson’s waters from flooding Lower Manhattan. It is an unshakable foundation whose massive walls were never meant to be seen, buried as they were behind garage walls, train stations and malls.” Within the parenthesis, as the chaos and darkness do their destructive worst in nature and among nations, the only unshakable foundation whose steadfast love can never fully be seen, “hidden as it is behind garage walls, train stations and malls,” hidden as it is behind all the other things that have upheld our days, may be known as the One who has kept the chaos at bay and the flood waters from rising. Perhaps there, in the pit cleared of all our hands could not save, we might hear the strains of ancient Israel and the early church proclaiming from out of the void: God’s steadfast love endures forever. Though on the other hand, if the parenthesis in the beginning of our days is God’s creation of the cosmos and steadfast love that continues to hold off the powers of darkness and the deep waters lest they overtake us, then the parenthesis at the end of our days is the promise of an eternal city where God no longer need separate the light from the darkness, the land from the waters, the life from the death, where “there will be no more death, neither sorrow nor crying nor anymore pain…where the glory of God will be its light.” Whereas for endurance in exile the Israelites first looked back to the God who, from the beginning, had upheld them, now the author of Hebrews turns a people persecuted and disheartened toward the steadfast love of God for them that will endure eternally. “Yet, ‘in a very little while, the one who is coming will come and will not delay,’” he writes as if to say, even though everything in this present time points to your abandonment and has pushed you to the end of your endurance, the God whom you know in Jesus Christ, will come to redeem the time: for his steadfast love endures forever. We may know this, my friends, because into our parenthesis was born the One who endured nature’s intractability, history’s vagaries, the frailty of flesh and blood and who lives eternally. To trust that our lives are held within the parenthesis of God’s creating and redeeming love is to trust our lives into God’s redeeming hand revealed in Jesus Christ. Because he lives, we may bear these our days lived within the parenthesis with a great assurance, say the theologians, that “nothing will escape God [all will endure]: no moment of human life; no thinking thought; no word spoken; no suffering or joy; no sincerity or lie; no ray of sunlight; no note which has ever sounded; no coulour which has ever been revealed…; no wing-beat of the day-fly in far-flung epochs of geologic time…. God will not allow anything to perish, but will hold it in the hollow of His hand as He has always done, and does and will do.” This has been revealed to us, my friends, in the fact of creation, in the words of scripture and in the face of Jesus Christ. We have only, in this present hour, to trust our every moment and thinking thought and word spoken, our every suffering or joy, sincerity or lie into His hand, where we, and all whom we hold dear, will endure: for “God’s steadfast love endures forever!” “With all the pain and waste I’ve known in my own life and the lives that touched mine,” concludes Roxanne Slade toward the end of her ninety years, “—not to mention the horrors of this whole century, one slow bloodbath—I’ve never been able to shake that knowledge that came with my childhood…. If I lie in my own bed in the dark, and look straight up at nothing at all beyond the ceiling, I can almost always start to feel again that calm first fact from my childhood. And then the whole great hoop of whatever is, gorgeous or dreadful as it may be, starts turning in the night sky above me bearing everything that has ever been or is…. Once I’ve glimpsed that for the length of one more night anyhow, I can tell myself that the only axle which matters is turning with all its weight of trees and waterfalls, plagues and fire storms, souls in torment and me in some surviving shape—no doubt huddled toward its rim—holding nothing in hand but my strong memories and the hope…. If I’m dead wrong then I’m no more than dead. And by the time I’m numb and cooling…I’ll likely be tired enough for sleep, though if what’s called for is music and dance, I estimate I’ll be prepared, if only to hum and sway in place.”…and to sing with the multitudes: O give thanks to the God of heaven, for his steadfast love endures forever! |