Sermon Text

August 9, 2009
The Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

THE GIFT OF ENDURANCE
I Kings 19:4-8

Elijah was down in the dumps. He was in the depths of depression. He had come down from Mount Carmel after defeating (and, not incidentally, slaughtering) the priests of Baal, feeling his power, knowing that God was on his side, and that everything was going to be a breeze from now on. Then he got the message from Jezebel: “By tomorrow this time, you’ll be food for crows, just like my priests!”

Elijah ran for his life. He took only his personal servant, and headed for the southern frontier. When he reached the edge of civilization at Beersheba, he left his servant there and went into the wilderness. When he had travelled about a day, he came to a scrubby tree, sat down under it, and asked God to take his life. He never really considered taking his own life, since suicide was not really an option for a devout Hebrew.

But God wasn’t through with him yet, even though things were looking grim. God provided the food that Elijah needed to make the journey on to Mount Horeb, where God revealed Himself to Elijah in a new and clearer way.

One of the great wonders of the Bible is the humanity that shines through every page of the book. The Bible deals with the full range of human emotions. We have an easy time identifying with many of the characters in the Bible, because we know how heavily life can weigh upon us at times. Serious setbacks, illnesses, tragic deaths, separations and losses happen to us all, and they leave us with anger and bitterness and unanswered questions, down in the dumps with God’s prophet Elijah.

And the problems with which we have to deal are not just personal, although the personal ones are certainly enough. They are also world-wide, and they involve the suffering and pain of literally billions of people. Evil seems to abound in this world, with disasters both natural and man-made, death and destruction, war, injustice, and oppression.

If God is so good and just, we say, how can God allow so much pain and suffering in the world? That is a question, a cry of anguish, which is common to people in all walks of life. It has been such an important question in the church that we even gave it a name, centuries ago. “Theodicy” has long referred to the attempt to justify the goodness of God in the face of evil in the world. As recently as a generation ago, our own denomination made a statement on theodicy in A Declaration of Faith: (II/2)

God called all He had made good.

We declare that the universe of matter, energy, and life
is God’s good creation in all its parts.
Even though evil has emerged within God’s creation,
we may work and play in it
and explore it with wonder and joy.

Evil is whatever works against the loving purpose of God
for human beings and all creation.
Natural forces may have evil effects.
Sinful human choices produce evil results.
Evil may become institutionalized in our social structures.
The power of evil to hurt and destroy,
to cut off the possibilities of full human life,
calls into question the power and goodness of God.
Whether we understand evil personally or impersonally,
we cannot explain how it originated
in a world made good.
But we can affirm that evil is God’s enemy as well as ours.
In Christ, God shared our agony over evil
and broke the back of its power
by bearing the worst it could do.
God works continually to overcome evil.
In the end it will be utterly defeated.
Therefore we have the courage to endure evil,
to learn from it, and combat it.

The biblical book of Job is a poignant and eloquent examination of the place of misfortune and disaster in a world ruled by a supposedly just and loving God. Job’s first response to his hard times was stoic indifference to his great losses: “Naked came I from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD” (Job 1:21). This kind of glib denial of deep feelings just turns me inside out, whether I read it here, or hear someone mouthing it to a bereaved family.

But no more than a week later, we see a different Job, one who curses the day he was born, who becomes bitter and rails against God and life.

“Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer? Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are appointed to me. When I lie down I say ‘When shall I rise?’ And the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn. My flesh is clot6hed with worms and dirt; my skin hardens, then breaks out again. My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good.” (Job 7:1-7)

Many of us have felt this way when faced with one of life’s great tragedies. I’ve had the same conversation with some of you. We don’t understand, and we keep on asking, “Why?” and “To what end? For what purpose?”

One minister writes that Isaiah 40:31 has been of great help to him in times of crisis:

But they who wait upon the LORD shall renew their strength;
they shall mount up with wings as eagles,
they shall run and not be weary,
they shall walk and not faint.

The minister continues: “The hardest challenge of life ultimately is to stick with the situation that can’t be changed and not either go out the top in bitterness and presumption, or go down through the bottom in despair and giving up.”

When you’re really up against it, the power to walk and not faint, the power to hang in there and not give up, may be the greatest gift that can be given. Many times it’s the only solution, and if we can receive that gift, then slowly, mysteriously, what we can’t change begins to change us. And the real transformation is not in the circumstances, but in what the circumstances make of us, and how they reshape our personhood.

The simple fact is, when you are at the bottom, the greatest gift you can hope for may be the gift of endurance. Our modern mindset has us expecting to be rescued by somebody – by medical science, or technology, by charismatic leaders. But there are some situations which simply can’t be changed, and which can only be endured.

And what is asked of us is not the stoic, all-accepting indifference that we see in the first part of Job’s story. Sometimes our enduring is filled with anger, bitterness, and resentment, directed at others, at ourselves, at life, and at God. We look for someone or something to blame for our predicament, or for our pain, because we think that finding somewhere to place the blame will ease our burden. But it seldom, if ever, does.

Neither is this endurance mere survival. We have all known people who did no more than survive a great tragedy, or a great loss. Mere survival is not God’s will for us. This endurance is growth, insight, new strength, and perhaps even a new sense of God and of how God works.

The gift of endurance -- most of the time, it’s just not what we’re asking for. We would rather be rescued, frankly, and that’s understandable. But sometimes, it seems that the gift of endurance is the only gift that comes to us.

Jesus speaks a word of comfort to those who must endure the hardest of times: “By your endurance you will gain your lives.” (Lk. 21:19)

The God whom we worship is One who does not stand idly by, doing nothing. On the contrary, this God is One who stands with us, giving strength, hope, and the gift of endurance. The outcome is that, in this God’s hands, out of evil itself and not just in spite of it, good can come; out of darkness, light; out of death, life.