02/03/2024
At times things seem pretty desperate. What to do; what to do. Perhaps one should trust in God.
“Hope against All Odds”
Dr. Jim Beard
Well, guess what happens next Sunday. Yah, you got it that big football game called the Super Bowl. Some people will get very excited about this game and others couldn’t care less. But it will be on the television and those who are interested will be getting out the dip, the chips, and drinks to watch this annual event. In this we pay homage to football our great national pastime.
Of course, the game is actually played by professional athletes who are paid ridiculous amounts of money to play the game and entertain us all. If you have ever watch athletes in any sport, you will begin to notice that they are a pretty superstitious lot. A place kicker will go through the same ritual every time before attempting a field goal. A basketball player at the free throw line will do exactly the same routine before shooting. A batter in a baseball game will have an exact ritual as well.
You may have noticed that many of these rituals involve the player doing the sign of the cross. This begs the question of whether God cares who wins a football, basketball, or baseball game. Many players after winning a game will thank God for the victory. Does this mean that God had something against the players on the team that lost?
Many of the players are not that simplistic about the whole thing. One of the most well-known players for praying publically in football games was Tim Tebow. Generally, he was either applauded or criticized by most people. The common misconception was that he was praying for God to bless his team and to give him victory. In fact, based on an NFL microphone he wore, his prayers were for protection for himself and the other players and for his strength to honor Jesus.
As you are probably aware sports are all around us as the Summer Olympics are coming up this summer in Paris. We will see literally hundreds of athletes pushing themselves to nearly superhuman limits in order to win the gold medal. Of course, in addition to talent, the ability to do all of the very difficult performances comes from literally months and years of very intense practice. Even then there are limits. We are mortal. We cannot continue to do all things no matter how hard and we can’t keep doing it forever.
Doug Bratt of Calvin Seminary related this story;
“In her August 24, 2006 New York Times article entitled, “Secrets of Endurance: Eating to Go (and Go and Go),” Catherine St. Louis describes the running phenomenon that is “bonking.” She compares it to running out of gas in the fast lane of the Long Island Expressway.
Australian triathlete Chris Legh fell victim to bonking at the 1997 Ironman championships. His meltdown was, in fact, so vivid that a Gatorade advertisement immortalized it. Just before Legh reached the finish line, his limbs went as limp as a rag doll’s because he was both dehydrated and underfed. “One moment he was striding,” the author reports. “The next he had collapsed.”
“You can do all the training in the world,” she goes on to quote Legh as later saying, “but if you go out too fast, or make a mistake with your nutrition, then your day is done.””
The point is that we all have our limits and that no matter how much you try you can’t do just anything. This is true of humans doing sports activities, and it is true of nations and peoples trying make their way in the world. There are times when things seem bleak and all hope seems lost.
Such was the case of the Jewish people in the sixth century B.C. They had been captured by the Babylonians and most of the leadership and notable citizens carried off to Babylon to live as exiles. Those who were not carried off faced a bleak future of poverty and hardship.
The challenge for those in Babylon was to continue their worship of YHWH, the Lord, in the midst of the Babylonian pagan culture where the many gods of the Babylonians were worshiped. They were desperate to return home to a nation of followers of the Lord God Almighty. All looks bleak as the Jews cry out in a deep need for deliverance, as Shakespeare put it in Richard III, “Now is the winter of our discontent…”
Hard and depressing things happen, and it is difficult to deal with them in a world where we expect God to make all things right. In 1948 there was a plane crash in over the Los Gatos canyon in California. The plane was taking some migrant workers back to Mexico. There were 32 people on board, four white crew members and twenty-eight Mexican workers. When the newspapers, with one exception, reported the incident they listed the names of the four white crew members and simply refer to all of the Mexicans under one collective name, “deportees.” This so incensed the folk singer, Woody Guthrie, that he wrote a poem about it. The poem was later put to music by schoolteacher, Martin Huffman.
“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,
Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;
You won't have your names when you ride the big airplane,
All they will call you will be "deportees"
Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,
Our work contract's out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to that Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.
The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills,
Who are all these friends, all scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, "They are just deportees"
Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil
And be called by no name except "deportees"?”
This poem is very much a classic lament. It decries a bad situation and puts it out there for all to see. Many of the psalms are laments as is part of our scripture today. In verse 47 we read “Why do you say, O Jacob, and complain, O Israel, ‘My way is hidden from the Lord; my cause is disregarded by my God?’”
Often laments wonder about the apparent absence of God. God, if you are there why don’t you do something?
Elie Wiesel, the well-known Holocaust survivor in his book Night which is a memoir of his time in the concentration camps tells a particularly difficult story, one which I have used before, but which I and many others have misinterpreted. Alan Brehm of Hickman Presbyterian Church in Nebraska tells the story and comments on the interpretation.
“Three prisoners, two men and a boy, were to be hanged in front of the whole group. Of course, the men died instantly. But the boy did not. As they were made to file past the gallows, the whole camp had to watch him struggle as he slowly strangled to death. At one point, someone in the crowd cried out, “For God’s sake, where is God?” Wiesel says, “And I heard a voice within me answer him: ‘Where is He? This is where—hanging here from this gallows.’”
You may have heard this story, [with its] obvious parallel with a Christian theology of the cross, where God suffers with Jesus on the cross and even sacrifices himself for us all. [This observation] has made this story fodder for many a sermon. But that’s not what Wiesel meant. What Wiesel meant when he said that God was hanging there from the gallows is that God was dead—or at least [Wiesel’s] faith in a God who could or would intervene on behalf of his people or any other people for that matter.”
This comment is driven out of total despair. It is the despair we get from immigrants dying in a plane crash or being exploited in other situations. It is the despair of millions of Jews dying in the death camps and the despair of thousands of Gazans who see death rain from the sky, day after day with no end in sight. It is the despair of women who are abused and have no voice. It is the despair of Jews force to live in Babylon amongst the captors that they hated.
And out of the pain and despair comes the word of God, “Do you not know? Have you not heard?” And the Hebrews say, “What? We don’t see you God. You are not doing anything. Woe is us.”
In this section of scripture, we have an argument. Dr. Paul Hanson’s commentary on Isaiah 40-66 titles this section, “An Argument with Doubt.” The writer is trying to convince the Jewish people that God is there, and God can be depended on. There are some considerable similarities between this scripture lesson and the book of Job.
In the book of Job, we have Job convinced of his innocence trying to get an audience with God to present his case. Based on the old belief that bad things happen to bad people Job is basically saying to his friends, his wife, and anyone who will listen that he does not deserve the horrible things that are happening to him. Job wants God to explain it all to him; he wants his day in court. But God is silent until the very end. God never explains himself, but rather gives Job some perspective by saying out of the whirlwind, 2“Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
4“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding.” I was always disappointed that God doesn’t explain undeserved evil, but then I am mortal and may not be able to understand it if he did explain himself.
So, God doesn’t explain to the Jews why this evil has befallen them. He doesn’t tell them what he is going to do about it. But he gives hope, hope in the face of trouble and in the face of doubt.
Doubt is constantly with us. It is part of the human condition. Some time ago I had the opportunity to see the play, Doubt. In this story a nun who is the principal of a Catholic elementary school becomes convinced that the Priest in the parish is inappropriate with one or more of his students. She begins to gather evidence and talks to people to prove her case. Although there seems to be considerable circumstantial evidence of his guilt, she is never quite able to get all of the evidence that she needs to be certain. Eventually by almost sheer force of will she manages to get the priest reassigned, although with a promotion. At the very end of the story she very emotionally confesses to another nun that she has doubts, such doubts.
Therein lies the story for all of us. We all have doubts; we all have real doubts, and what God, through the prophets, gives us is not certainty but hope. That is the role of the prophet. The prophet will discern the movement of God that gives hope to the hopeless. Such hope as is exemplified in the old spiritual, “O Mary Don’t You Weep.” A song sung in times of peril and hopelessness and said to the congregation not to weep because Pharaoh’s army got drowned and God is in charge.
“Oh Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
Oh Mary, don't you weep, don't you mourn
Pharoah's army got drownded
Oh Mary don't you weep
If I could I surely would
Stand on the rock where Moses stood
Pharoah's army got drownded
Oh Mary don't you weep
One of these nights about 12 o' clock
This old worlds going to reel and rock
Pharoah's army got drownded
Oh Mary don't you weep”
Trusting in God is to embrace that unseen force, the person of God and go with it. A gentleman by the name of John W. Fountain told this story on National Public Radio about his life.
“I believe in God. Not that cosmic, intangible spirit-in-the-sky that Mama told me as a little boy 'always was and always will be.' But the God who embraced me when Daddy disappeared from our lives -- from my life at age 4 -- the night police led him away from our front door, down the stairs in handcuffs.
The God who warmed me when we could see our breath inside our freezing apartment, where the gas was disconnected in the dead of another wind-whipped Chicago winter, and there was no food, little hope and no hot water.
The God who held my hand when I witnessed boys in my 'hood swallowed by the elements, by death and by hopelessness; who claimed me when I felt like 'no-man's son,' amid the absence of any man to wrap his arms around me and tell me, 'everything's going to be okay,' to speak proudly of me, to call me son.”
Faith and trust in God requires us often to believe that things are not as they seem. When illness strikes, we need to see that things are more than the pain we feel, and more than all of the doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel might provide. When the powers of the government and the corporations are all aligned against us, we need to understand that God is more than all of them put together. We ultimately must come to see that in spite of the temporary setbacks that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Jesus Christ will triumph in the end either in this life or the next.
The Jews of Babylon would return to the Promised Land, but they just didn’t know that yet. The Persian King Cyrus was marching from the east and perhaps, just perhaps, he would be their liberator. But they had to get by until then. They had to believe in what they could not see yet and could not touch. They had to believe in the invisible and all-powerful God.
Their young people were tired and weary, and they were likely to stumble and fall. But if they had hope in the Lord, then their strength would be renewed. For with love and support of the Lord God Almighty they would soar on wings like eagles, they would run and not grow weary, and they would walk and not be faint.
And now for us, Lord, give us the faith and trust that we might also soar on wings like eagles, run and not grow weary, and walk and not be faint. May the Lord be with you all.
