A Fourth Church Sermon by Joanna M. Adams

August 10, 2003 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Out of the Depths I Cry to Thee

Joanna M. Adams
Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 130
2 Samuel 18:5–7, 15, 31–33
John 6:35, 41–51

“Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.’”

John 6:35 (NRSV)

Gracious Lord, in the stillness of this moment,
we remember that you are God
and that without our asking you have fed us with the bread of life.
Grant now that as we inwardly digest the words of the Holy Gospel,
that we may hold fast to the blessed hope of everlasting life
that you have given us in our Savior, Jesus Christ.
In his name we pray. Amen.

It is good to be back with you this morning after several Sundays away from the Fourth Presbyterian Church pulpit. I have just completed two weeks of vacation, the highlight of which was a wonderfully restorative time at the beach with friends and family.

My time away, however, began with a wrenchingly sad memorial service held at the church I served in Atlanta for more than ten years, just prior to our move to Chicago eighteen months ago. Perhaps you read about the airplane crash in Africa that took the lives of twelve members of the same wonderful extended family. They were members of my congregation and treasured friends. The grandparents, George and Jean Brumley, were prominent Atlanta leaders and philanthropists and the best Presbyterian elders you would ever want to know. They lost their lives, as did two of their four daughters, two sons-in-law, a son, a daughter-in-law, and their four eldest grandchildren. All were killed on the last leg of a long-anticipated journey to participate in a tour of an African game preserve. The plane in which they were flying plowed into fog-enshrouded Mount Kenya just minutes before they were to land.

I baptized two of the little children who lost their lives. This was a family with which I had shared many of life’s richest experiences: births, weddings, wonderful new projects undertaken by our congregation and successfully completed. George and Jean were here in April 2002 when I was installed as Co-Pastor. They wouldn’t have wanted to miss the celebration of my new opportunity in ministry.

In recent days, I have known the truth of the poet William Alfred, “It is a fearful thing to love what death can touch.”(1)

While on an intellectual level we concede that loss and death are unavoidable aspects of life, those painful realities do not present themselves with stunning existential force on a regular basis. If they did, we couldn’t stand it. Over the years as I have served as a pastor in four different congregations, someone will ask, someone going through a terrible bout of illness or deep grief, if I believe that God gives us more than we can bear. My response is not particularly unique, but I usually answer that I do not believe that it is God who sends the calamity or the tragedy. I do believe that life can and does deliver unto us more than we can bear sometimes. When that happens, it is God who bears what we cannot bear.

There are many, many people connected with this Atlanta family whose hearts are heavy still and will be for a long time to come. In recent days, I have found that in spite of the heaviness of my own heart, I have had to get on with living my life. Indeed, I have needed to do that in honor of these joyful people whose lives have been snuffed out. So I have tried to live life as fully as I can. I have gathered seashells along the Atlantic shore. I have played in the sand with our granddaughter, Virginia, and I have baked the best peach cobbler with the freshest peaches you have ever tasted. (Unfortunately, there is none left to share.)

I have also been enormously comforted by the three scripture passages that the lectionary providentially selected and assigned to this Sunday. I did not turn to the story of the death of Absalom out of choice, or to the 130th Psalm out of choice, or to the Gospel lesson about Jesus as the bread of life. They were chosen for me because God knew I needed to read them. In them, there is the unflinching acknowledgment of the realities of pain and death, but there is also the promise that in all circumstances, God will still be God, and because that is so, there is always reason to hope, always reason to go on.(2)

I have no way of knowing what your outlook on life was when you entered this sanctuary this morning. Perhaps you were in a particularly joyful mood, enjoying a vacation, enjoying a sunny day in the city. Perhaps you are at an especially carefree and happy time in your own life. If that is the case, then I suggest that you simply tuck away today’s message, today’s scripture passages, just in case you wake one morning to discover that the worst has happened, that the bottom has dropped out, that you are in a valley so low that you can barely muster a prayer. For those of you who need it today, let the message nourish your spirit. For all the rest, save it for a rainy day.

The 130th Psalm consists of a plea, a cry to God, a passionate petition that can be summed up in one word. That word is “Help!” “Out of the depths I cry to thee, O Lord. Lord hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” When there is no place to turn, when life seems unbearably unkind, we turn to God and cry, “Help!” Have you ever been in the midst of a crisis and received terrible news or had something drastic happen to you? The first words you utter spontaneously are “O my God!” There is a prayer if I ever heard one. The biblical tradition assigns this prayer to King David, at a time of anguish at death of his son Absalom. If you are a little rusty on your history of the Hebrew people, I will remind you that Absalom, David’s beloved son, had also led an insurrection against his father. While the armies of the son and the armies of the father were at war, the father sent word to spare the life of his son. But regardless of the orders, Absalom’s life came to a grim and violent end. The writer of 2 Samuel attributes this and a whole string of tragedies in the king’s house to David’s own earlier disobedience with Bathsheba, but that does not diminish the pathos of the loss.(3) And how true it is that the mighty as well as the meek come to know that the real world is not only a place of joy and promise, but a place where loss and death are inevitable.

Several years ago I preached at a conference in Virginia. The Bible leader for the week was from sunny California. I think that he had all of his teeth capped, because all I can remember about how he looked was that he had this large toothy smile, which he wore every day, all day, including the hour and twenty minutes he spent lecturing to us. He was a man who never stopped smiling. I stopped to think about it. How could you be a student of the scriptures and miss all the parts where people get knocked flat by the vagaries of life? The Bible tells us how to live, how to survive, in the real world.

“Let your ears, O God, be attentive to my need.” Notice that the one who cries out is operating on the assumption that Someone is already there to hear the cry. Note also that there is no blame directed toward God for the death of Absalom. God did not will Absalom’s death. Three spears in his heart were what killed the young man, that and a bevy of armor bearers who finished him off. There was nothing even a king could do about it. David was able to endure the terrible feeling of powerlessness because of his confidence that somehow, in the midst of it all, God was there, God would care, God would hear and respond to his plea.

There is a famous minister and political activist named William Sloan Coffin. Twenty years ago, Dr. Coffin’s twenty-four-year-old son was killed in an automobile accident one rainy night. The day after the accident, Bill Coffin was at his sister’s house. A woman, someone Coffin’s sister knew, came by the house to offer comfort. Speaking to the theologian/philosopher/grieving father, the woman sighed, “I just don’t understand the will of God when something like this happens.”

Coffin replied, “I’ll say you don’t understand the will of God, lady! Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his? Do you think it was the will of God that Alex was driving too fast in the rain and that he probably had had a couple of frosties too many? . . . My only consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves in Boston harbor closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”(4) Out of the depths we cry to God and discover that God is there ahead of us.

I do not know about you, but I sometimes worry about the prayers that I offer up to the Almighty. I sometimes wonder if I have expressed my thoughts as cogently as I should have. Let me tell you something. If you ever find yourself in a valley so dark it makes the bottom of the well look like sunshine, remember this. You do not have to outline the situation with appropriate sentence structure for the Almighty. You do not have to compose perfect paragraphs. You just have to know your need and know that God knows your need before you even put words to it. God’s love is steadfast. God’s love is plenteous enough for any terrible situation. A cry in the dark suffices.

David cried out to God, and because he owned his grief, he was able to move to a more ordered understanding of God’s steadfast love. David was not a perfect person, but he was sure that God did not hold his past shortcomings and sins against him. He trusted that no one was disqualified from being heard or responded to with divine love, including himself. “If you, O Lord, should mark out iniquities, who could stand?” None of us, for sure. But there is forgiveness, with God there is comfort, even for broken people like ourselves. So David moves from an incoherent plea to a statement of confidence in the mercies of God and then into a place where he can begin to hope again. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits and in his word I hope. More than a watchman for the morning, my soul waits for the Lord.”

Here is where we might learn something from that smiley Bible lecturer in Virginia. I think it was hope that made him smile. I want to think that, because the Bible, while it is full of the truth about the real world, is also full of truth about the real God and what God is doing in this world. “Behold, the days are coming when I will make a new heaven and a new earth. There will be no more tears or suffering or pain because the former things have passed away.”(5) You can bet your life on that promise. There is a bigger picture that we can see now as only through a glass dimly.(6) There is a new creation on the way, and we must never forget it. We must never ever give in and give up to despair. This is the choice, isn’t it? Despair or hope. Hope takes life on its own terms and believes that, whatever happens, God is in the midst of it.(7) Beyond the worst life can do is always the best that God can do.

In 1963, a church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed and four little African-American girls were killed. This was at the ugliest and cruelest time of the Civil Rights struggle in the South. In his eulogy at the church on the day of the funeral, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said this to those who mourned, “Now I say to you that life is hard, at times as hard as crucible steel. It has its bleak and difficult moments. . . . But if one will hold on, [one] will discover that God walks with [you] and that God is able to lift you from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope and transform even the dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inner peace.”

What do we hold on to? Jesus says hold on to him. “I am the bread of life,” he said. “I am the sustenance that will see you through absolutely anything. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. I am not like the manna which your forebears ate in the wilderness that was good for a day and then was gone, I am the everlasting bread that connects between time and eternity.” Think of it this way: Jesus is the bread that gives us, in the here and now, life that is of the age to come.(8) He does it amazingly through his own death. “The bread I give for the world is my flesh.” In other words, he gives himself so that we might have reason to hope. Here is a way to put these ancient words, in the language of modern parlance: “I am the bread of life, you who come to me you will never be hungry.” Think of it this way. Try to remember this sentence: Whoever comes to me will have what it takes to endure absolutely anything.

One last word today. My friends, the Brumleys, gave great Christmas presents every year. Several Christmases ago, the Brumley gift was an angel, a beautiful ceramic angel with a shining face, a halo around her head, a trumpet touching her lips. The angel is a finial for a lamp, the piece that you screw on the top of a lampshade. It sits now on a lamp in the bedroom in our apartment in Chicago.

I have thought a lot about our friends and their deaths, and I have come to think of their death and our hope in terms of the angel. When the light is shining and the room is filled with light, I can see the angel, a symbol of the presence of God, and know that God is with me. But when the light is turned off and all seems dark, where has that angel gone? Nowhere. God is with me still. Lights on, lights off, God is there. So it has been, so it will forever be, world without end. Amen.

Notes
1. As quoted by Peter J. Gomes in Strength for the Journey, HarperSanFrancisco, 2003, p. 38.
2. C. Clifton Black, Theology Today, July 2003, p. 153.
3. Walter Bruggeman, Charles Cousar, et al, Texts for Preaching, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993, pp. 458–460.
4. Dr. William Sloan Coffin Jr. “Sermon from Riverside,” 23 January 1983.
5. Revelation 21:1–5
6. 1 Corinthians 13:12
7. Joan D. Chittister, Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2003, p. 106.
8. Paul Strobel, “The Jesus Diet,” Christian Century, 26 July 2003, p. 19.