Wadhams United Church of Christ
2569 County Route 10, Wadhams, NY 12993
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Sermon by Steve Smith
February 8 , 2009
There’s a woman out in California who has become a national celebrity of sorts in the last few weeks. We first heard the whispers of her acclaim when the news broke that someone had given birth to octuplets, and everyone survived the ordeal. The plot thickened like a simmering stew when it leaked out that she already had six children. Eyebrows were raised, along with several perplexing questions, when we subsequently found out that she was a single mother, and that every one of her fourteen children had been born as a result of in vitro fertilization techniques.
Fertility doctors have been anxious to distance themselves from this case by pointing out that no responsible doctor would transfer eight embryos into a 33 year old woman. Unlike previous multiple births, we haven’t heard much about anyone stepping forward to lavish the new mother and family with gifts of clothing, supplies, a new van, or even a new house. I can’t help but wonder if she might have been expecting that kind of outside support. Some people who are apparently even more skeptical and cynical than I am (I know that’s hard to believe, isn’t it?) have accused her of having the octuplets in an effort to cash in with a TV or book deal.
The woman’s mother believes that the public’s opinion of her daughter will change once we have a chance to learn more about her. Ann Curry scored the first TV interview, and the segment will air tomorrow morning on the Today show. During the interview, Nadya Suleman (whom the NY Post has labeled “Octomom”) made a comment that I found more disturbing than any of my other cynical thoughts. “It was always a dream of mine, to have a large family,” she told Ann. “I just longed for certain connections and attachments with another person that I really lacked, I believe, growing up.”
In other words, she’s expecting this new group of eight babies to do something the other six didn’t manage to do: to fill up the emptiness inside her. She’s expecting something from these babies that they aren’t capable of giving her: a sense of being loved and nurtured for who she is. As those of us who have reared children can attest to, it isn’t so much about what the babies can give to us, it’s more about what we can give to the babies. While there are great rewards to be found in raising and nurturing children, I fear that this young mother has set herself up for a great deal of disappointment by expecting this new brood of infants to meet her needs.
While her plight initially gave me some brief moments and hours of having someone I could feel superior to, her situation by this week’s end has actually become a call to humility and self-examination for me. When I can be honest with myself, I have to admit to having some pretty unrealistic expectations about life and how things are supposed to go. In my perfect little world, for instance, no one is ever supposed to suffer or experience pain or displeasure of any kind. Everyone is always expected to be nice to everyone else, and most importantly, people should go out of their way to make sure that I have everything I want or need whenever I experience a sense of lack or want. All I should have to do is make a little whiny sound when I want something, and the world should stop spinning in its orbit until I’m satisfied.
As we all know, life isn’t exactly like my fantasy world. So I’m all the time having to adjust to reality while carefully nursing my wounded ego with self-affirmations and plaintive prayers to God about how unfair life is. While I still have some deep-rooted psychological issues from my painful discovery that the solar system revolves around the sun and not me, difficult circumstances have given me ample opportunity to go back and reconsider the way I have defined my expectations of life, my relationships, and what God has to do with all of it. I find great value in self-examination, but I also have to tell you that it can get ugly sometimes. It’s a lot more fun to make fun of other people and bolster my sagging self-esteem by reminding myself of just how wonderful I am in comparison to people who just don’t get it.
As an illustration of what I’m trying to get at, I spent a fair amount of time in my college and seminary years memorizing little bits of scripture that I found inspiring, comforting, and renewing. As a result of that memorization and some of the teaching I listened to, I developed some ideas and notions about God that proved to be troublesome later in life. Since many of those portions of the Bible came from the Psalms or other inspirational sections of the scripture, I internalized a picture of God that was based on poetic expressions of adoration and praise. Because those little bits and pieces were likely penned during periods of euphoria, I initially had this impression that believing in God was supposed to leave me constantly breathless with wonder and awe, and that I could expect God to deliver me from anything trying, or painful, or devastating.
As you might expect, it didn’t take long before that illusion evaporated. Because I had memorized a portion from the New Testament that told me how God was going to fill me with a peace that passes understanding, for a few years I fully expected to go through life in a blissfully tranquil state that knew nothing of frustration or anger, let alone unworthy feelings of bitterness, or envy, or a deep-seated desire for retaliation. In my mind, those nasty intruders were supposed to be zapped by my invisible energy shield before they even got close to the rarefied realms of my pure and righteous thoughts. Once again, life got in the way of my expectations of what it meant to live in faith.
In my disappointments, I have occasionally gone to passages of the bible to find some global promise I wanted to wring from them so that I could go to God in accusatory tones of not living up to those promises. In my vanity, I assumed that God’s ensuing silence meant that I had somehow managed to render God speechless. Almost invariably, though, God has come back with something that renders me speechless and stops me dead in my tracks. So when I get to feeling sorry for myself and endlessly rehearse all the reasons why God has lost track of me and dropped me between some cosmic crack in the universe, I’m brought up short with these wonderful words from the prophet Isaiah:
Why would you ever whine or complain, saying, “God has lost track of me. He doesn’t care what happens to me”? Don’t you know? Haven’t you heard? God doesn’t come and go. God is from everlasting to everlasting.
When I get to feeling blue because it seems like God has abandoned me, and the world feels like it’s crumbling around me, I struggle still with the notion that God isn’t supposed to let bad things happen to good people, especially people who commit their lives to serving God. As I’ve learned and relearned on previous trips on that nauseating merry-go-round, though, God never promised to spare me the hard times. Instead, God promises the exact opposite: You will have troubles in this world, Jesus promised, but don’t be afraid, because I have overcome the world.
In fact, if you look more carefully at the Psalm we read this morning, you will find all kinds of trials and troubles implied. If God upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry, then it means that good people are going to be oppressed and abused in this world, and folks who deserve better are going to go to bed hungry tonight. If the Lord sets the prisoners free and gives sight to the blind, then it means that innocent people are languishing in a prison somewhere, and folks who live decent lives are going to suffer from blindness, deafness, and a host of other crippling diseases.
If the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, then it means that there are all kinds of people who are carrying burdens that we can’t even begin to imagine. If our God watches over the immigrants and sustains the orphans and widows and widowers of this world, then it means there are people who had to flee their homeland in order to survive. It implies that death is going to rob children of their parents, and spouses of their mates. It suggests that cancer and other deadly syndromes are going to continue claiming victims. Underlying all these troubles and hardships, we can find the promise of God that seems so elusive when we are aching and hurting:
The Lord gathers those who have been exiled by the traumas of life. He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
Once again, the clear implication is that life is sometimes going to send us around the bend and down into a hole. There are going to be things that break our hearts and leave us feeling empty and wounded. There are going to be times when we simply can’t understand what life is about and why the people we love and care about have to suffer and die. But the underlying message is profoundly hopeful: God is going to be there to gather us up into healing community. God is going to be there to tend to our wounds and bring us the help we need. God is going to meet us when our weariness reduces us to helplessness. God is going to be the ground that meets us when we stumble and fall.
God is going to be in the echoing silence when we vainly think we’ve reduced God to speechlessness. God is going to be there when it hurts to think, it hurts to hope, and it hurts to love. God is going to be right there when we endlessly rehearse all the reasons we can think of why God doesn’t care about us. God is going to be right there when our expectations are disappointed, and our misguided thinking sets us up for major setbacks. So when I’m tempted to laugh at people like Nadya Suleman, the Octomom, I have to remember that God is right there with her in the midst of her confusion and brokenness. I have to remember that she needs my prayers and my compassion, not my ridicule and sarcasm.
So our coming to the table of the Lord to celebrate communion is a call to humility and self-examination. It is a reminder to us that God loves us so much that God willingly embraced the worst that life can bring us, just to show us God’s intent to be there with us when life gets painful and complicated. The prophet Isaiah painted a picture of the suffering servant, a messiah who was familiar with our grief, a man of sorrows. Whatever it is that we bring to the table with us this morning, whether it’s our grief, our disappointment, our frustration, our speechlessness, our weariness, or all of the reasons we can think of why God doesn’t care about us, our God will meet us here to gather us up into healing community.
Our God is with us right here, right now, to forgive our sins, to bind up our wounds, and to remind us that no matter what the world might tell us or what we might tell ourselves, nothing can change the depth and breadth of our God’s tender love for us. Our God is with us right here, right now, to help us stand again when we stumble or fall. Our God is with us right here, right now, to lend us a steadying hand and to help us keep putting one foot in front of the other. Our God is with us right here, right now, to be the wind beneath our wings, and to give us everything we need in order to prevail.
Order of Service
February 8, 2009
Welcome, Announcements, Joys & Concerns
A Prayer for Peace NC #570 (vs. 6)
Opening Prayer
Leader: O God, how lovely is your dwelling place. Our souls yearn for your presence; our hearts cry out for you, the living God.
People: We seek you, Lord God, and you answer us. You deliver us from our fears.
Leader: We come to you for comfort, that we might be sustained and that we might be understood.
People: We come to you for challenge, that we might be reminded that our ways are not your ways and that we can be transformed.
Leader: As we come to you today, open our hearts and minds to hear your voice as you speak to us through scripture, word, and song.
People: We have come into your house, Lord God. Here, where even the sparrow finds a home, where even the swallow has a nest near God’s altar.
Leader: Come all you who thirst, all you who are weary and heavy laden. Come take refuge here, for if God cares for the sparrow, how much more will our loving God care for us.
ALL: We come to you, Holy One. We come to you.
Hymn NC #55 Rejoice, You Pure in Heart
Responsive Prayer
Leader: Everlasting God, creator of the ends of the earth, you stretch the sky over our heads like a canopy filled with twinkling lights.
People: Yet you care for the least of us – healing the brokenhearted, gathering up the outcast, lifting up the downtrodden.
Leader: You give power to the faint & strengthen the powerless. You bless us with everything we need.
People: Just as Jesus went off to quiet places to pray, help us to find that quiet center in our souls where we may meet you and offer you our prayers.
Leader: Give us the heart of Jesus, to care for the sick and to take pity on the afflicted.
People: Give us the spirit of Jesus, to spend time in prayer and to keep your path clearly before our feet.
Leader: Give us the love of Jesus, to be at ease with everyone we meet, that we may truly be instruments of your grace.
People: Renew our strength, that we may mount up with wings like eagles, that we may run and not grow weary.
Pastoral Prayer, Lord’s Prayer
Hymn NC #18 Guide Me, O My Great Redeemer
Psalm 147:1-11, Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39
Sermon Octomom
Service of Holy Communion
Offering, Doxology, Dedication
Hymn NC #292 Breathe on Me, Breath of God
Benediction (Based on Isaiah 40)
Leader: Though the stress in our lives sometimes seems overwhelming, in God, we shall mount up with wings like eagles.
People: Though the demands of work and family may wear us out, in God, we shall walk and not be faint.
Leader: In God, we find steadfast love that endures forever. May the strength and love of God surround and uphold you, now and forever.
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