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July 27, 2008 -- Pentecost 11A In the Name of Jesus. Amen. Most of you know that my son, Adam had a rather bizarre accident in gym class a year and a half ago, in January of 2007. He was 14. While running, he jumped, fell, and couldn’t stand up again. The teachers, helping him, got him up on his feet in order to get him into a wheelchair. I was called and told they thought he had some pulled muscles and, would I come get him? The school nurse thought it would be wise to get him to Urgent Care just to be sure. By the time I came, his legs were horribly swollen, he was pale and clammy with pain, and they wanted to help me get him into our minivan. Even the littlest move, however, caused him excruciating pain. I insisted we call an ambulance. When they came, they immediately gave him morphine and waited until it had kicked in before even trying to move him. After going to the hospital, hoisting him into a bed in the ER, and eventually taking x-rays, the doc came in with a rather puzzled look on his face, and asked Adam what exactly had happened in gym class – both of his legs were broken! It was our turn to be shocked. Adam lay there quietly, taking in that news. It was a few hours before they had emergency surgery arranged. It wasn’t until they were prepping him for surgery that we discovered what he had been laying there, our 14-year old boy, silently dealing with for those few hours. He thought he would never walk again. When we found out that was what he was thinking, the surgeon assured him that not only would he walk again, but that he would be playing baseball in the spring. And he did. The healing and recovery was a painful challenge for him; and it was emotionally painful for Merle and I as well, as we had to move him and do exercises with him which we knew caused him in severe pain. But he was so motivated to play baseball in the spring (the boy LIVES for baseball) that he not only endured, he challenged himself, pushed himself to the limit and, I am not exaggerating, never once complained. In fact, when Jane and Bill Nemitz brought a meal over, they said to him, “Boy, your parents are taking good care of you aren’t they.” My husband jokingly said, “Yeah, he’s gonna owe us big time.” Adam, without missing a beat, said, “Yeah, I’ll be changing their diapers some day when they’re old!” By baseball season, his legs were healed, but still not totally limber and strong, so he couldn’t run very fast. He would take his at-bat, but a teammate would run for him. By the end of the season, he was not only running himself, he was sliding into home, and I was watching and cheering… peeking through my fingers!! Football season; still working on strengthening his legs for the longer and more rugged runs of football. During practice, the coach would have them run and run, and would time them. Early on, Adam was still rather slow. The coach, knowing about Adam’s legs and that they were healed but needing to strengthen, one day ran along beside Adam and encouraged him to go faster. “You can do this, Adam,” he said. And Adam responded, “I can do it coach! I can do it!” Knowing his coach believed in him, Adam told me he reached deep inside himself, and actually finished faster than some of the other boys that day. No one else made a big deal about it; he just did what football players were supposed to do. But, I think he felt like a champion that day. If someone had asked him in January, before his accident, if he thought he could ever go through something like breaking both legs, endure so much pain, and still play baseball and football that same year, I’m sure he would have laughed and said, “No way!” He didn’t have a choice about the accident, but he made choices every single day as to how he would deal with it. I am a proud Mom, and proud to tell his story, because I don’t think I could have done what he did. He daily chose to rise to the painful challenges of recovery; he chose to sign up for both spring baseball and football in the fall (against my advice, frankly!), knowing he would have to come from behind in training. Those choices made this 14-year old kid not only physically stronger and a better player, but emotionally and spiritually stronger – and inspired me to want be more like him! This is what James is talking about when he writes, “My brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of any kind, consider it nothing but joy, because you know that the testing of your faith produces endurance; and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” In Greek, these words that James uses, translated “trials” and “testing,” aren’t about being tested into temptation, into sin. Nor is it about God “testing” us with trials or even tragedy to see if we have “enough faith” to please God, as if trials or tragedy in life are some kind of sick test of faith that God wants to see if we can pass, or if we’ll fail. On the contrary, in Greek, these words, trials and testing, have specifically to do with the kind of trials and testing of athletes. God is not the stern and stoic examiner just waiting for us to fail, but the coach who knows what hidden strength and courage we carry within us, even when we don’t know that ourselves; who doesn’t just shout at us from the sidelines, or hold a clipboard recording our scores; but the coach who runs alongside us saying, “You can do this. I created you. I know you can do this!” A bald eagle pushes her babies out of the nest. Is she trying to make them afraid, to crash land, to suffer? Of course not. She knows they can fly. But they don’t know they can fly – not until they are free-falling through the air and suddenly their wings pop open and – for reasons they cannot explain – they fly. If one of them doesn’t fly the first time, does the mother eagle let it crash to the ground in order to teach a lesson? – “Open your wings, next time!” No, the mother eagle swoops underneath the free-falling child-bird, catches it on her own back, and returns it safely to the nest. Is she cruel to “test” them by pushing them out of the nest in the first place? Does she mean to make them simply fall? No. She means to make her children soar, to strengthen those weak baby wings so they can move out of that nest and into the world. If she didn’t, they would never leave the nest, they would languish helplessly, and never ever know the full effect, the purpose, of those wings or of their very lives. This, James says, “produces endurance, and let endurance have its full effect, so that you may be mature and complete, lacking in nothing.” This word “endurance,” is not simply the ability to stoically bear things as we northern Europeans are inclined to do; it is the ability to eventually conquer them. Its “full effect” is that we discover our God-given strength – perhaps at least part of what it means to be created in the image of God – our God-given strength to deal with the trials which inevitably come into our lives because we live in a broken world; strength we didn’t know we had not only to survive, but to conquer even harder battles. Verses 6 and 7 of this text are problematic, and are among the reasons Luther wasn’t altogether happy about this letter being included as Scripture. As James encourages us to pray for wisdom in handling such trials, he says, “…Ask in faith, never doubting, for the one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord.”Luther’s problem with this is that elsewhere the witness of Scripture declares that God loves to give us what we need, that God is a “prodigal”/lavish giver, that God loves us unconditionally (what we call grace), that God loves to raise the dead. And the Psalms of the Bible are filled with statements and questions of doubt, “How long O Lord, how long must I suffer?” Nowhere does Scripture suggest that the measure of God’s gifts is dependent on the measure of our faith. In fact, if anything, Scripture affirms that God gives beyond the measure of our ability to believe. Who of us hasn’t known that civil war that sometimes goes on within us? On the one hand, we believe in the unconditional love of God. On the other, we worry that we’ll never be good enough for God to truly love us. Doubt is not disbelief. Doubt is an honest wondering, it is that moment when the love and grace of God simply appear to be too good to be true, and we think, “There must be a catch. Certainly, we have to do something to be worthy of the self-sacrificing love of Jesus.” It is precisely then that we pray for wisdom, wisdom to discern that God’s love for us, God’s presence with us in times of struggle, doesn’t depend upon how we feel at any given moment. When that doubt turns to despair, perhaps even to the point where a person can see no other way to end the pain than taking his or her own life, is there anything in Scripture that says God’s love only goes so far and no further, that God’s love is too small, too insufficient to surround and embrace even despair; that God doesn’t, like the mother eagle, swoop beneath us and catch us on God’s own back and deliver us to the safety, the victory of Jesus’ resurrection, to eternal life with him where there is no more death or grieving or crying or pain? Paul tells us in Romans that there is nothing, nothing in our past, nothing now, nothing yet to come; nothing on this earth, nothing that even hell can dish up, that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. God knows you better than you know yourself. God loves you when you are strong. God loves you when you are weak, and wraps you up with endless compassion. God has chosen to love you and has committed himself to you. God will never let you go. Amen. Rev. Joan Gunderman,
Senior Pastor |
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