Episodes
Sunday Aug 11, 2019
A Story of Fear and Promise
Sunday Aug 11, 2019
Sunday Aug 11, 2019
A Story of Fear and Promise
A sermon preached by Rev. Ginger E. Gaines-Cirelli at Foundry UMC August 11, 2019, the 8th Sunday after Pentecost.
A few Sundays ago, Pastor Ben prayed a prayer that seemed a direct line both to the human heart and to God. It was a prayer of lament and a call for God to come down with holy fire to consume all that consumes us. It echoed the Psalmist’s cries, how long, O Lord, do we have to live in fear, to wait for the promises of peace and freedom and justice and life abundant? It echoed the prophets who critiqued human reliance upon anyone but God for security and answers. This crying out to God for help—sometimes in anguish, sometimes in exhaustion, sometimes in impatience or anger or grief—has always been part of the biblical story, our faith story.
Somewhere between the years 60 and 95 of the Common Era, a group of “second generation Christians” were crying out. They had experienced years of persecution (Heb 10:32-34). They were weary and disappointed that the promise—the fullness of God’s Kin-dom—had not yet appeared. Some, we are told, were dropping out of participation in the community as a result of the experience of suffering, confusion, uncertainty and perceived lack of divine response (10:25). What they received in response to their cries is the letter to the Hebrews, with its encouragement to have faith and live with hope, love and patience in the midst of persecution. They are reminded of the faith of those who came before them.
Abraham and Sarah and the ones we hear about today. For those who may not know the story, Abraham was led by God to leave his familiar home without having any clue about where he was going—but he is assured the mystery place holds promise. Abraham wandered as a pilgrim for years, never putting down stable roots. And when he was 99 years old and his wife Sarah was 90, God promised the couple that they (who had been unable to conceive a child) would now have a son. They both found this particular promise hilarious; seriously had a good laugh over it. However, Abraham and Sarah did conceive and bear a son—Isaac—even though, as the writer of Hebrews so delicately puts it, they “were as good as dead.”
Abraham and Sarah are praised for their faith. And, for me, the question is: what is faith? Based on their story we see that faith isn’t the absence of doubt or laughter in the face of what seems an unbelievable promise. I also don’t think faith requires us to literally believe Abraham and Sarah conceived a child when they were pushing100 (in the way we think of time). Furthermore, I don’t think faith is something that frowns upon my own aggravation at being given story after story of miraculous births to preach about when no such miraculous occurrence happened for me or for many others. Faith doesn’t mean we don’t question things or that we ignore science; nor is it dependent upon bad theology that says “everything happens for a reason.” Faith doesn’t require us to check our brains, our hearts, or our emotions at the door.
The faith being lifted up is more like what Rev. Rachel Cornwell preached a couple of Sundays ago: it’s about remembering the context of God. That might be as specific as recounting biblical stories of God’s liberating love and mercy or practicing disciplines that keep you mindful of God’s grace. Or it might simply be grasping a stubborn thread of belief in the power of love or beauty or truth in this world—when everything seems hopeless. This latter seems to me to be much closer to the real faith deal—or is certainly where it is forged. //
Simone Weil was an extraordinary woman whose life and writings have influenced many, including myself. I haven’t time to recount even a brief biography today, but she comes to mind because of her experience of what she calls “affliction”—the experience of utter pain, despair, and suffering—and her reflections upon it. She writes:
Affliction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell…During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God’s absence becomes final. The soul has to go on loving in the emptiness, or at least wanting to love, though it may only be with an infinitesimal part of itself.[i]
In affliction, Weil says, persons are “nailed down to the spot, only free to choose which way we look.”[ii] She insists that even in the worst moments, to continue to direct our gaze at God, to continue to hope, to continue to want to love, in the midst of absolute despair and suffering—when “there is nothing to love”—is faith. “Faith is the conviction of things not seen,” the conviction of things not perceived, not understood, not experienced… (Heb. 11:1) Faith is to “see” no end in sight of affliction and yet, perhaps with only an “infinitesimal part” of yourself, to hold on to a small stubborn thread of hope.
The spirituals that wrap our worship in depth and grace today are woven from such threads. These words and melodies were composed and sung by enslaved Africans and their progeny whose lives were marked by constant and unyielding affliction. These songs of lament, of faith, of hope, have nothing but a promise to go on—that God will do something sooner or later, that God is a God who receives the cries of enslaved people and cares, a God who has led people out of bondage before and will do it again. For some, the promise may have been understood as freedom only realized in death—because all they had ever seen in this world was cruelty and enslavement. But the spirituals, composed in blood, sweat, and tears, are songs of faith.
The main character in Colson Whitehead’s novel, The Underground Railroad, is an enslaved woman named Cora who risks everything to find freedom. Cora has no use for God or religion, thinking that “waiting for God to rescue you when it was up to you” was foolish and that prayer “put ideas in people’s heads that got them killed, distracting them from the ruthless mechanism of the world.”[iii]
Cora had these thoughts, and yet she made choice after choice seemingly fueled by something larger than just herself. Her choices reveal her focus, where she was looking, her determination to overcome fear and to seek and find something that might be called freedom, something that might be called true life. And following another crushing blow, in a moment of apparent breakthrough, on a magic-realism railroad handcar deep underground, Cora tells a salvation story, a story of a community laboring to build hope, sacrificing, dying for the sake of others, a story that not only looks back but looks forward. And she sees herself in the story—even in that moment, continuing to make a way to freedom. Reflecting on the wonder of the underground railroad, she muses:
Who are you after you finish something this magnificent—in constructing it you have also journeyed through to the other side. On one end there was who you were before you went underground, and on the other end a new person steps out into the light.[iv]
In the darkest hour and a moment of untold suffering, when she was “as good as dead,” Cora saw the promise from a distance and greeted it. It was a promise of new life and liberation. Seems like a God thing to me; maybe even like faith.
Beloveds, in our suffering, in our waiting, in our fear, when there is nothing to love and you cannot see any way out or forward, by all means, cry out, question, rant, and lament. But also remember that even bound and gagged you can choose where to look…and to whom. Our story indicates that choice makes all the difference.
[i] Simone Weil, The Love of God and Affliction, in Waiting For God, 70.
[ii] Ibid., 73.
[iii] Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad, New York: Doubleday, 2016, p. 251.
[iv] Ibid., p. 304.
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