2-8

The Emerywood Pulpit

“Waiting on God”

Isaiah 40: 21-31

He was a bitter old man — or at least that what he seemed like to me.  He really wasn’t that old — mid-sixties or so — but life had made him feel and look much older.  In reality he was a wonderful preacher, minister and authentic human being.  However, when you have buried your son and every day walk out the front door and see his grave, you can soon grow bitter.  But I get ahead of myself; allow me to digress and tell you the story.

My friend was a Disciples of Christ minister and my mentor in this little backwater area of Northern Kentucky.  Yes, he drank a little too much whiskey and he chewed tobacco on occasion — particularly when we played golf together.  There was nothing fake or sham about Paul… he was as real a human being as any person I have ever known.  He would join “the guys” at the volunteer fire department on Monday evenings.  They loved him and even those who would never grace the door of his church came to him with their problems.

Our lives intersected in 1978 or so when a member of my church took us to play golf.  His grief was very poignant, very real at this point.  The father of four and a small town pastor, he was caught in the throes of deep, deep grief.  Earlier that year his youngest boy had come home from school on break when a friend stopped him in the parking lot of a car wash.  This friend was showing him his new pistol when it slipped from his hand, hit the ground, discharged and hit his son in the femoral artery.  He bled to death 2 blocks from the hospital — nothing could be done to stop the bleeding.  

This son was the apple of his eye.  Bright, articulate and the valedictorian of his high school class, he was studying to be a minister and his father could not have been prouder.  Then came that dreadful day, the first of many as he walked every day of his life out the front door of his home, looked down the street, and there he saw the cemetery and the very grave in which his son lay.

Shortly thereafter I came into his life.  Why, I don’t really know, except for the fact that our common friends thought I might cheer him up and he might mentor me.  They were right on the second thought, if not the first.  Nothing could cheer him up. On the golf course I would turn around, look at him and he would be standing there, in the beauty of a Kentucky fall afternoon with leaves changing and the sun beaming down — with tears running down his cheeks.  “I can’t believe he’s gone” or something like that would mumble from his mouth.  After a while he never had to say anything…I just knew.  He had about him an aura of deep, residual sadness that he never lost as long as I knew him.  I am sure he died with it.

I’ll never forget one morning when I stopped by his home for a cup of coffee after going to the hospital.  It wasn’t yet ten o’clock and he was already awash in tears.  He looked at me with eyes glistening like lightning in their pain and demanded, “Where is this God we worship?  Why hasn’t this God shown up?  Where was he when my son died?”  Of course I had no answer, so I tried to quietly slip away.  I should never have tried that move…it did not work.  “Sit down!” he bellowed.  “Where do you think you are going?  Job had his friends to listen…you’ve got to listen to me!”  So I did and for the next 2 hours or so he ranted and raved, asking questions I could not then nor ever would be able to answer.  I learned more theology and psychology in those hours than from any of the vast theology tomes or Biblical books I read.  Every answer I tried to give sounded meek and tinny compared to the depth of his questions and objections.  Finally I just sat in silence and listened, realizing that no answer was better than the answers I was trying to give.

Where was God that day when his son was accidentally shot and killed?  Was he right to expect God to protect his son?  Where were the guarantees that when we have children nothing bad will ever happen to them?  Who said that as long as we believe in Jesus only good will come our way?

I have found that most people live between two extreme poles when it comes to God’s action.  Some of us assume that God will look after us and nothing bad will ever happen to us.  We live with a sense of entitlement…God owes us this in return for our faithfulness and service.  When God does not show up as we expect, we can become angry and ruthless in our response, feeling bitter and abandoned, wondering if God really cares at all.

Another response to God’s presumed inactivity is to give up on faith and belief all together.  The common doubts that are part of life become overwhelming and we just say, “I knew God didn’t exist.”  Several years ago a minister in our city died at an earlier than expected age due to cancer.  I went to see him and realized that he had become quite bitter, believing that God had deserted him in a time when he was faithfully trying to serve God.  Quite honestly it’s not all that uncommon to see this response, especially from people who have been faithful servants for all or most of their lives.  More than one person has moved from belief to bitterness in wrestling with the absence of God’s love.

Israel is under siege and preparing for the final onslaught of the Babylonians.  God is not showing up to rescue them and they are hopeless.  Isaiah has told Hezekiah as much in chapter 39.  Then in chapter 40 we see the promise of a Messiah to come and restore Israel.  However, this promise is bordered again by frank discussion that what they are experiencing is not God’s presence and salvation, but God’s abandonment.  Israel believes that God has forgotten her and wonders when and where God will show up and fulfill these promises.  She is but as grasshoppers before God; as grass which grows and dies in the heat of the day.

How does God act in human history, in the stuff of our lives?

Sometimes God acts to intervene in a direct and powerful way.  All of us have heard the stories of miraculous healings and such through which God works.  There have been account after account of how God directly answered prayer in one form or another.  Whether the focus was medical, economic or some other such need, the reality is that there are times when it seems as if God has directly intervened.  I will not put these down…I may have even witnessed one or two of these myself through the decades.  I don’t know that I’ve ever seen God intervene in a test for a student who was ill prepared, but that’s another story.  What is wrong is to think that direct intervention, i.e., miracle, is the only way in which God works and that if the miracle we seek is not forthcoming then God has abandoned or forgotten about us.  We cannot limit God to one form of working, no matter how much we may desire that to happen.  

Other times God works by interacting with the people of God to bring about God’s will in a particular situation.  Go back and read the Biblical narratives of Israel and we will see that God was always at work through specific people: Abraham, Moses, David — and yes, even the pagan Cyrus the Great, the Persian emperor.  Return to the pages of the New Testament and there read the accounts of Paul, Silas and others as they spread the good news of Jesus Christ.  God worked in and through them in ways that even they could not believe. 

Or go look at more recent human history and see people such as Harriett Beecher Stowe, Mother Teresa, Henri Nouwen, Billy Graham, William Carey, and the like.  Go read theologians such as A. J. Heschel, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber and even our own Baptists in the South native sons Carlyle Marney, Wayne Oates and Henlee Barnette.  God used these men and women to stir and move God’s people in ways that otherwise they would have never, ever done.  Go, look now and see such women as Lauren Winner, Barbara Brown Taylor, Anne Lamotte and so many others through whom the Spirit of God speaks.  God works by interaction with God’s people who are open and willing to listen and heed.  

Hear me carefully: we are all saved by the grace of God when we are compelled by the Spirit to come to Christ.  However, any human being who has ever come to Christ has also had a human handprint on them…God used someone, somewhere, and somehow to bring that person to faith in Christ.  We do not come to Christ by ourselves…we come as God interacts with God’s people.

God also works in our lives internally, i.e., God acts inwardly in the lives of God’s people.  No, God does not heal every believer who has a life-threatening disease.  Yet, God does work in the life of every believer to take tragedy and make it beautiful, to take what is seen as chaotic and evil and make it into cosmos and life itself.  God does not always heal, but God never abandons.

Too often I have stood beside the bed of a child or young adult whose life has vanished all too quickly before our eyes.  Too often I have walked away from a graveyard or columbarium, having placed into the ground the remains of one whose life was all too short upon this earth.  However, I must honestly say that in my soul searching and wrestling in these moments and days I have found the genuine presence of Christ more real than in any or all of the “good days” that life has brought to me.  

His name was Chuck — and he was all of nine years of age.  He was a big, strapping young boy — full of life and joy.  One day he wasn’t feeling good, went to the doctor and they discovered he had a form of cancer that was virtually untreatable.  It usually went to the brain and once there it was ineradicable.  He underwent chemo and for a year or so did well.  We were able to take him to an Alabama football game and meet Coach Ray Perkins. Then, after about a year I received a call: come quickly for we have a bad diagnosis.  

Arriving in the home I could see that there were no dry eyes to be found.  Chuck was sitting in his recliner and he looked up at me and said:  “Dr. Bob, do something.  I don’t want to die…I am too young to die.”

I had been praying all the way over there, so I reached down inside myself and asked God to give me some words.  “Chuck, you know God loves you.  We really don’t know what’s going to happen, but we do know this.  You are in God’s hands…you can live every day to the fullest for God has taken hold of you.  Remember, each person only has today…tomorrow is never promised to anyone.  Just enjoy each day as it comes and we will worry about how many of them later on.”

We prayed and chatted — he seemed to pick up a little.  Chuck died about 9 months after that, at the age of 11.  Just before the funeral his mother said to me, “You remember what you said to Chuck that day?”  Yes, I replied.  “Well, after that he never complained about dying.  He became an inspiration to us all as he knew that no matter what, he would be in God’s hands.”

What was amazing was that this family was not particularly religious or a family of faith.  Yet, in and through this struggle a faith came alive in them that could only have been placed there by God.  Rather than let this experience embitter them, they allowed the Spirit to internally work in them God’s miracle of grace.

When we read these last verses we often think that Isaiah has it backwards: soaring, then running and then walking.  I really don’t think so.  There are times in our spiritual lives when we soar — and those are great.  There are times when we run and in our activity touch so many people — and these are wonderful.  However, there are times when all we can do is walk from one day to the next.  Even in these God is present, even in these times God is at work.

Wait on the Lord…look around…God is at work when and where we least expect.  As Alex Haley’s grandmothers and aunts said to him:  “God may not show up when you want him to…but don’t worry, God will be on time.”