September 13, 2009 Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost
First Congregational Church in Thetford, Vermont, UCC
Psalm 116; Mark 8:27-36
This congregation has an unusual number of people struggling with health
problems that are making their lives full of uncertainty, anxiety and grief. Two have
aggressive forms of cancer, two are recovering from dangerous heart conditions, one
family is under extreme stress and strain due to a debilitating operation, and there are
people with mysterious intestinal ailments and neurological problems. A few are waiting
for results of tests, and many others are suffering from chronic conditions or recent
losses. At times like these when so many among us are struggling, it is safe to assume we
are all struggling, because the word compassion means literally to suffer with another,
and we have much compassion to feel right now.
At the same time, the Apostle Paul said that we should rejoice with those who
rejoice as well as weep with those who weep, so we can be thankful for those who are
healthy, or those who in the midst of terrible struggle are able to say. in the famous words
of Dan Clouser, “Praise God!” and mean it.
Dan said those words to us at Prayer of the Heart shortly before he died from the
pancreatic cancer that had struck while he was still strong and healthy and in the prime of
life. One of the beautiful things we learn by being part of a community of faithful people
is that the way of Christ that leads into God’s peace, joy and love does not skirt around
the valley of the shadow of death, but leads right through it. How many times over the
years have we walked with someone into a darkness of fear, anger or grief as they
suffered the loss of their health and life, only to find to our amazement that while still
caught in the snares of death, they suddenly seemed full of profound peace and radiant
light. We have seen this time and again.
Whoever Jesus was, whether you think he was the Son of God or Son of Man or
just the son of a carpenter, he knew something that we need. He knew the way through
loss or death into that radiant place. He knew how to open the human heart to the
comfort, guidance and power of the Holy Spirit—a power that surpasses all others in this
world. Right now we need this spiritual way, but it is difficult to find, so let us look at
the scripture passages w to see what they suggest.
Psalm 116 is written in the voice of someone dying who has called out to God to
be saved. Last week I told the Desert Father and Mother story of the man in the temple
who was attacked by demons. He was trying to resist them by himself, but finally the
devil dragged him to the door. The old man caught hold of the lintel and cried out,
“Jesus, save me.” Immediately the demons all left and the man collapsed to the floor
weeping. Jesus came and said, “Why are you weeping? You were careless. As soon as
you called for me, see, I was here.”
This is the experience described in Psalm 116. After the Psalmist cries out to be
saved, the next verses say, “Gracious is God, and righteous; our God is merciful. God
protects the simple; when I was brought low, God saved me.”
But then several verses farther on the Psalm says “Precious in the sight of God is
the death of God’s faithful ones.” What we expect the Psalm to say is precious in the
sight of God is life, not death. What does it mean that death is precious?
Some think it means just that God sees death as “costly.” But maybe there is more
to it. One possibility is that the Psalmist is still dying. Maybe the Psalmist was like those
we have seen, Dan Clouser or Gladys Boyd or others who were clearly freed from the
shadow of death even as they were dying. Some force was at work in them to give them
the gift of peace and joy they radiated. They may have been flat on their backs in
paralyzing pain, but it seemed as if their souls were walking before God in the land of the
living, and it was from that other soul realm that the peace, radiance or praise came.
Sometimes even the most faithful people die anguished deaths—faith is no
guarantee that we will feel grace. But maybe the deaths of the faithful are precious to
God because they give God the opportunity to show the material world the reality of that
other radiant world within and around us here, the way every once in a while a rainbow
or prism or drop of dew shows us the colors that are always present in light, yet most of
the time hidden from our vision.
Or maybe we can find another reason in the gospel of Mark. Just before today’s
passage Jesus had a hard time healing a man’s blindness. He tried once but the man still
did not see clearly, saying that people looked like walking trees. So Jesus had to try
again. Then we come to today’s passage that begins with Jesus asking what people see
when they look at him. He finds that they are blinded by their expectations. His
disciples think he is the Jewish Messiah, the great warrior king who would overthrow the
Roman Empire and raise Israel to glory.
So Jesus sets out to correct their vision. He says he must undergo great suffering,
be rejected by the religious and political establishment and be killed. Peter takes him
aside and rebukes him. We don’t hear what he says, but we can imagine him saying,
“You don’t have to do that. That’s not who you are. That’s not the way we see it.”
Jesus finds that his first attempt to heal their blindness has not worked, so he tries
again. He uses the words of an exorcist trying to rid someone of a demon, because
Peter’s attachment to the world and its rational judgments is an extremely difficult
blindness to heal. Jesus says, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not
on divine things, but on human things.” Then he goes on to say to the crowd, “If any
want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and
follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life
for the sake of the way I am teaching will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the
whole world and forfeit their life?”
We did not read all the way to the end of the passage today, but Jesus says in the
end, “Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see
that the realm of God has come with power.”
What Jesus is trying to get us to see is that there is a death that is precious in the
sight of God, and it is the death that comes through self-emptying, willingly accepting the
crucifixion of our self-will, willingly accepting the loss of what we have thought of as our
life, willingly turning our attention away from human things to be focused on divine
things. If we die this death, if we see with this healed vision, letting go of all the worldly
cravings and judgments and expectations that possess us, then we will see the realm of
God in all its power long before we taste our physical death.
Maybe the death of a faithful one is precious in the sight of God because it often
takes death to wake us up to the truth that the realm of God’s love and light is real and is
what matters most in life. Jesus is trying to teach us how to have this vision and enter
into this life long before we reach our actual deathbed. What does it take to do that?
The answer is hidden just beneath the surface of both of today’s passages.
Strangely, it is a word that does not appear in either. It is trust. Why do we cling to our
worldly judgments and ways, why do we keep setting our mind not on divine things but
on human things? Why do we resist the losing of life that saves our life? Because we do
not trust what Jesus taught. And who can blame us? We are trained from birth to be
rational creatures, to be self-reliant, to trust in human and worldly powers. And God does
not look so good from that perspective, allowing genocide and poverty, hardship and
death. The cross looks like foolishness and weakness. Losing is for losers. Who would
trust that?
And yet if we do trust Christ’s teaching, if we do die to this world by letting go
and turning our heart, mind and will over to God’s care, we find the way opens up before
us. We find that we experience the mysterious healing that the Psalm describes. God
saves us, and we finally realize that we are each truly precious in the sight of God—that
God’s love is with us in life and death.
Jesus experienced the power of the Spirit when he went through the self-denial of
the wilderness and the death of the cross, he experienced the Spirit’s comfort, guidance
and power, he experienced resurrection, and so can we, if we trust Christ’s way to lead
us.
What does this look like in practice? It looks like what happened to Thomas
Dorsey. Dorsey was one of the inventors of gospel music. He began his career as a well-
known jazz and blues musician, but he had a spiritual awakening and became the choir
director at a Chicago church for forty years. In 1932 he was thirty-two years old and
recently married to his wife, Nettie Harper. He had to go to St. Louis to a big revival
where he would be the soloist, but Nettie was eight months pregnant, and he had a strong
feeling he should not go. He went anyway, and the next evening got a telegram during
the revival telling him his wife had died giving birth to their son. Then the day after that
his son died, too.
For a while he felt abandoned by God and wandered in a darkness of despair. He
was ready to give up his faith. Then he remembered his feeling not to go to St. Louis,
and he thought maybe that was God speaking. Instead of giving up, he vowed to listen to
God more closely than ever, to set his mind not on human things, but on divine things.
Still, he was lost in grief.
One night he had the opportunity to go to a music school by himself after the
students were all gone. Years later Dorsey wrote,
“It was quiet; the late evening sun crept through the curtained windows. I sat down
at the piano, and my hands began to browse over the keys. Something happened to me
then. I felt at peace. I felt as though I could reach out and touch God. I found myself
playing a melody, one in my head—it just seemed to fall into place: Precious Lord, take
my hand, lead me on, let me stand, I am tired, I am weak, I am worn, Through the storm,
through the night lead me on to the light, Take my hand, precious Lord, Lead me home.
“As the Lord gave me these words and melody, He also healed my spirit. I
learned that when we are in our deepest grief, when we feel farthest from God, this is
when He is closest, and when we are most open to His restoring power.”
So now, in the grief of our suffering or compassion, let us pray in silence, letting
go of everything, dying the precious death, and opening to God’s restoring power and
newness of life…
Amen. And now let us sing Precious Lord, Take My Hand…
(The Thomas Dorsey story came from an internet source that attributed it to Guideposts
Magazine but without a date or issue number.)
Sermon 09/12/2009