The Downtown Presbyterian Church

Sermons

TO ASK A QUESTION

DEAD-ENDS AND NEW BEGINNINGS

David Harkness

March 28^th 2004 Isaiah 43:16-21

A preacher in a small informal church kept shouting in his sermon, “Christ is the answer! Christ is the answer!” Finally an elderly gentleman stopped him and said, “Preacher, we know that Christ is the answer, but what is the question?” We all have our own set of primary questions with which we deal almost every day. Perhaps some of yours may be questions such as:

How can I pay the bills?

How can I repair a broken relationship?

What meaning can I find in living this particular day?

How can I best manage my life with my financial condition, physical strength, mental alertness, and other limitations of resources?

Our primary questions reveal a great deal about who we really are. Some people are driven by great challenges, whether they be scientific discoveries, changes in theological perspective, or whatever, to ask profound questions. Martin Luther was a man who asked very profound questions. Consequently he was known as a man who did not have an even temperament. His highs were high and his lows were low. His avalanche of deep and penetrating questions about the meaning of salvation by faith alone were to shake the very foundations of the church of his times. Someone has said of Martin Luther, “If you could have cut off his highs and filled in his lows, he probably would have made a good worker in his father’s foundry.” His questions were indicative of what the Psalmist was trying to express in saying, “deep calls unto deep at the sound of thy cataracts; all thy waves and billows have gone over me.” The questions of Martin Luther were anguishing. But the riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, that only grieving leads to joy and only embraced endings lead to new beginnings.

The passage from Second Isaiah which was just read displays a strange irony. Second Isaiah, the profit of the exile had sought to comfort his people during their long difficult years in exile. He was always urging them to remember the past, and the most important event to remember was their deliverance from slavery in Egypt. And yet he says here,

“remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. behold, i am doing a new thing, now it springs forth; do you not see it?

Rather than saying, “forget the past” what he is really saying is, “If you think dividing the Red Sea and leading you to safety was something, keep you eyes and hearts open for more surprises in the future. There are even greater things in store for you.” You may be aware that the young people have unique ways to accurately describe their assessment of a person. One of these is “he’s not playing with a full deck of cards.” Using this as an analogy, what is the particular set of cards that you play with day by day. And what are the questions that you deal with on a routine basis? Perhaps there are more cards in your deck than you realize. we live in a time that is radically different from earlier times. Television and instant mass media bring before us constantly suffering, destruction, disaster, and massive death. During these weeks of lent as we look at the cross of Christ, which has been so vividly illuminated by the release of Mel Gibson’s PASSION film, it seems that the whole world moves into a deeper shadow, the shadow of numberless crosses, borne in terror, in hate, in pain, in death. We become accustomed to shuffling around our own little set of cards, of dealing with the same old set of questions, so accustomed to dealing with threats of terror, massive suffering and death, that we can’t even come to grips with the more profound questions. As Walter Brueggemann says, we reach a state of numbness, an awareness that we cannot deal with it all.

But all the while, underneath the casual surfaces of our lives, perhaps hidden deep within the subconscious parts of our minds, great questions and mighty hungers trouble our days with flickering shadows of mystery. Our inability to imagine or even tolerate a new intrusion, the happening of God’s powerful “new thing” is predictable given our capacity to manage the same old set of cards and to deal with the same old set of routine questions. Even superficial religiosity, heard constantly on the radio and TV, can support this blockage of God’s powerful “new thing.” As we shuffle around our limited set of cards day by day, we can easily come to the conclusion that life is only a rearranging of the same of cards. We may decide with the writer of Ecclesiastes that “What has been will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun Is there a thing of which it is said, See, this is new’? It has been already in the ages before us.” (Eccl. 1: 9-10)

Because of the nature of the God we worship, there are more cards in our deck of life than we can ever imagine. He is the kind of God who creates newness out of the old, who makes a way, unknown to us before, out of dead end situations, and situations in which there appears to be no hope.

He is the one who said to barren Sara and her husband Abraham in their very old age what seemed totally impossible: “a child will be borne to you and this will be the beginning of a completely new realm of dynamic new happenings in the lives of the peoples of the world.” And He was the One who spoke and acted to redeem a race of hopeless slaves in Egypt. We are painfully aware that we must accept the reality that life is full of endings that require new beginnings. Everything changes and if we cannot cope with the reality that there are endings, then we cannot imagine that there are surprising new beginnings. All the major changes of life, marrying, divorcing, the birth of a child, the loss of a loved one, gracefully allowing a child to grow up and leave home and become his or her own person, breaking up a household, facing terminal illness; all of these require that we let go of the present and live in expectation of new beginnings. Situations that challenge the limitations of our humanity can force us to keep refining the deeper questions such as “What is God like? Several years ago Betty and I spent the only day and night we ever spent in beautiful Ireland. There is a place on the northern shore of Ireland about which I had read. It is very near the home of one of our delightful new members, Trevor Henderson. It is called the Giant’s Causeway. Something compelled me to go there on my only day in Ireland. If you can make the somewhat difficult hike down to the shore you will find there a fascinating and rare formation of nature. Hundreds of huge hexagonally shaped basalt pillars drop down a slope and disappear into the depths of the ocean. As I stepped from one solid stone to the next until the waves lapped at my feet, I became aware that faith is like the Giant’s Causeway. We can know certain things about God and his revelation in Jesus Christ, and we can stand firmly on this solid foundation. But just as the stones disappear into the depths of the sea, when we face dead ends in life, we can only imagine and wonder who God is in the depths of mystery, the magnitude of his love, and the majesty of his power and holiness. When we fully accept the fact that life has endings and keep our spiritual eyes open, we will live with a readiness for the unexpected newness that can surprise us. These dead ends can also create a closer communion and sharing with others who are also struggling with great questions and mighty hungers. Asking deep questions leads us to the revelation that there are dimensions of life we had never imagined. To imagine a new gift given from the outside violates our reason. We set limits on our ability to simply accept the graciousness and depths of God’s love, and the truth that God not only forgives our transgressions, but he forgets them. I hope the scripture which I read last Sunday is still fresh on your minds. God had spoken to Moses out of the burning bush and told him to take off his shoes because he was standing on holy ground. The Bible doesn’t attempt to prove there is a God. It only defines what God is like. Someone in ages past experienced a presence that compelled him to write these words that tell us something of what God is like:

“I have seen the affliction of my people - I have heard their cry – I know their sufferings - And I have come down to deliver them” Someone has said of this experience: “All the world’s a desert, and every bush aflame with God, but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”

Life has all kinds of dead ends. Perhaps you have seen a few. In Rudolph Otto’s book “The Idea of The Holy” he tells a story that happened near the end of those terrible days of destruction in Germany during World War II. A man was traveling and came to one of the large German rivers which had previously had a massive bridge. But when he came to this river he discovered that the bridge had been completely destroyed. There was nothing but a massive expanse of water and no bridge. As he stared out over that great void, his first impulse was to drop to his knees at the sight of such nothingness and his having come to such a prominent dead end. But as his heart and mind searched for something to make sense of this situation which so powerfully illustrated what was happening all over Germany, he said that suddenly in his darkness, god became so real and so near that he felt he could almost reach out with his hand and touch god, and that god could reach out and touch him. And in that moment he had this overwhelming feeling that he and Germany had come to a place of new beginnings. When we face life’s devastating dead ends, god can create wonderful new beginnings.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing, can you not see it?”