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The God Who Abides
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis January 28, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 6:1-9 John 15:1-11
In her Memoir of a Modernist's Daughter, Eleanor Munro remembers her grandfather as a “…a knobby, sour-faced Scot” who had given her the first intimation she had of “an exile’s lament, the pain of separation and the impossibility of finding one’s way back to the place of beginning.” At parties in her home, he would lift a finger to a circle of guests, intoning in an impassioned brogue, “What is maan? A wind tha’ passeth awee an cometh naw agin.” Munro's father would dismiss these outbursts: “He believes in things people no longer do. Don't hurt him by arguing, but remember there's no truth to them.” Her grandfather died while Munro was away at college, leaving his essay-prone granddaughter a black notebook. Years later, she picked it up and therein found inscribed one hymn twice, first in his youth; and then, on the last, unfinished page, trembling, he had written, “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me….” He believed in things people no longer do: “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me.” We are helpless, you and I, pelted by the storm within and without. We come into the world having no memory of a time when without another's aid we could eat or bathe ourselves or tend to the smallest of our needs short of sounding a tearful alarm. Likewise if we live long enough or if some unforeseen tragedy overtakes us in the days we have been allotted, we may also go, helpless, out of this world. Along the way, of course, intimations of helplessness stop us in our tracks, always at the very limits of our human existence. I think of those who have known a deep and abiding depression or addiction or obsession wherein human will does not avail. Trembling we trace the words, “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me.” I think of those who have stood by as the dearest one in the world, be it a parent, a spouse, a child, a grandchild, a lover, a friend has suffered, beyond our ability to help, in heart or mind or body. Trembling we trace the words, “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me.” I think of those who have known the exile's lament, the pain of separation and the impossibility of finding one's way back to the place of beginning, be that place a good marriage or a clear purpose or, literally, a homeland. Trembling we trace the words, “Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me.” I think of any here who, even now, watch their own vitality and mobility and independence and control slip away because of the ravages of age or disease or chance or accident. Trembling we trace the words, "Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me." "Only nine words they were," Munro writes, "but placed just before the silence of the book's end, they sank deep into my mind, evoking the thoughts even a young person has of the dark distance into which all things are swept. And as life goes on, other deaths and losses add to this store of darkness, so it deepens, until the smallest natural happening--a roll of thunder, the edge of a wind lifting the hair, an animal cry at night--can open…the sluiceway behind which awaits one's own death ahead." What, then, is your only comfort, in life and in death? asks one of the finest Reformed statements of faith, the Heidelberg Catechism, of us all. What is the only "provisional but effective and promising help given you in a difficult situation?" ask the theologians, "help…which becomes good reason, despite the fact that you have serious and even urgent reasons to the contrary, nevertheless to endure, nevertheless to take courage, nevertheless to be joyful?" And what is our warrant for that nevertheless by which we let ourselves be comforted with the help we cannot give ourselves? In other words, what can we expect at life's limit when other helpers fail and comforts flee: What is your only comfort, in life and in death? "That I belong," answers the catechism, "--body and soul, in life and in death--not to myself but to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ." That is to say, our lives and our deaths are in his hands and not our own; our anxious fears and comfortlessness in this world, our misery and our longings and our doubts belong to him. In him we are given to know in all things that God is with us; that God abides and does not abandon us in any circumstance; that God has hold of us and will not let us go. The only problem with such comfort is that these words, these assurances are not comforting in the way in which we would like to be comforted. Oh they may comfort the ones who, at some remove, speak them because they are pleased they have had something to say. But to those who are, in fact, living at the limits of human existence…holding on by their toenails to hope or health or wholeness…to citizens of a secular culture who are truly comfortless, word of a Savior who abides is literally not very helpful. I think of Barbara Ehrenreich’s rant in the most recent edition of Harper’s Magazine, “I hate hope,” she begins. “It was hammered into me constantly a few years ago when I was being treated for breast cancer….Hope?” she wails, “What about a cure?” Right! We rather had in mind a cure or a rescue or an answer or a way out…and instead we are told of a Savior who abides with us? But the Heidelberg Catechism goes on--as if throwing down the gauntlet to our faithless expectations—claiming that this Savior not only comforts but "protects me so well that without the will of my Father in heaven, not a hair can fall from my head; indeed, that everything must fit his purpose for my salvation." Protects me so well? To such assurance, the secular mind facing life's terrifying limits says, "If this be God's will, spare me God’s protection!" Those of uswho do believe in things people no longer do sometimes wonder as well--in the classroom and around the kitchen table, in the hospital corridor and as we pray in the darkness, on the bedside of those we love and standing at the edge of an open grave—wonder what sort of protection we can expect. What manner of provisional help will be given us in life by the God we know and to whom we belong in Jesus Christ? As we suffer or are exiled or get sick and must die, what is meant by God's protection? In the first place, the help and protection God has to give is simply protection from the meaninglessness, the purposelessness of our finite existence, with all its trouble, toils and snares. Small comfort, we quip. But for any who have known the darkness without some trust that a reason will be traced by God behind it all for our good, this is no small comfort, but our only comfort. It has been said that “God designed the world…as a school for character, as a vale of soul making; a pilgrimage, said the Puritans, to fit us for the celestial city.” (Leith) God designed. Curiously, this design is discernable even by those who are without creed: "A crisis of illness, bereavement, separation, natural disaster," writes Gillian Rose, a philosopher reflecting on her own advanced case of ovarian cancer, "could be the opportunity to make contact with deeper levels of the terrors of the soul, to loose and to bind, to bind and to loose….Existence is robbed of its weight, its gravity," she now understands, "when it is deprived of its agon [deprived of the chief conflict that is the linchpin of the plot].” Such is the atheist's way of confessing the truth of the gift of human existence and the help we are given. To wit: that life's meaning and purpose cannot be given apart from the fact of life's limits and failings and endings and our struggle therein. But for those whose only comfort in life and in death is Jesus Christ, such a coincidence of life's limits and life's meaning is no coincidence at all. It is the very design of the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction. And though any hint that the God we know in Jesus Christ would visit us with illness, bereavement, separation or natural disaster must stick in the throat, nevertheless, the cross is God's earnest that God has a purpose even in the darkest hour--especially in the darkest hour--and this purpose is the protection and help we can expect, the kind of comfort we can depend upon. It is the comfort of a God who destines us not to the shallows but to the depths of human existence and abides with us there. Then in the second place, part and parcel of our helplessness is the accumulated experience of being out of control. As we are those who belong, in life and in death, not to ourselves, but to Jesus Christ…the kind of protection which can be expected is the counter-intuitive trust which is given as we relinquish control of our life and our death, relinquish in our minds something that in fact has never been ours to have or to hold! The biblical witness is filled with such comfort, though it is hard for the human mind to receive God's comfort and help as such. I think of the Israelites who would not (could not?) listen to Moses’ assurance of God’s presence “because of their broken spirit and their cruel slavery.” But I think also of the psalmist who speaks of God's complete knowledge of our lives from beginning to end: "Thy eyes beheld my unformed substance; in thy book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them." The words frighten us, for they tell us we do not number our days: God does and does for purposes far greater than we can ask or think. That is not to take from us our proper responsibility in life. Still we must decide what road to take, what pill to swallow, what person to marry, what end to pursue. But it is to say that our lack of control in the face of nature's impartiality or of sin's unpredictable consequences is God's protection from our having to be God, from our living the lie that we are in control. Such is the tender and terrible help and protection given us by a Savior who abides with us; who bids us live in a great trust toward the God who has numbered not only the hairs on our head but the days of our lives; who loves us in life and in death with a love that will not let us go. Though finally the help and protection we can expect from God [with apologies to Barbara Ehrenreich) would seem to be not much more than a hope: a hope beyond this gift of our mortal and broken human life in the sure and certain hope of eternal life: "Therefore," concludes the catechism's first question, "by his Holy Spirit, he also assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him." We who once, in the beginning of the book and with steady hand penned the prayer, "Help of the helpless, O Lord, abide with me"-- and thus expected the things of eternal life to be given in this mortal life—now have grown up. Secularity has left some of us cynical in the face of a God whose protection is available only as we are vulnerable and whose help would wrest from our hands sure control. But to those who have, by grace, found comfort in the claim of Jesus Christ upon our days, there is the unparalleled help of the hope which we see in a mirror darkly, of the assurance which we know in part. The comfort which comforts us in all our affliction is the hope of eternal life that frees us to live for Christ alone…from now on…until, with trembling hand at the end of our book of days, we trace the prayer God in Christ has already answered: “When other helpers fail, and comforts flee, help of the helpless, Lord abide with me.” |