“Not Only For Eagles”

A sermon based on Isaiah 40: 21-31

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

5^th Sunday After the Epiphany, February 5, 2010

British Philospher Anthony Flew, who is now a Christian philosopher, once elaborated on a famous story entitled The Parable of the Invisible Gardener.   Told in brief, the story is about two people, a believer and a skeptic, who are walking through the jungle and come upon what looks like a garden in a clearing.  Because the clearing has flowers, the believer believes in the existence of an invisible gardener; but because there are weeds, the skeptic does not believe in the existence of an invisible gardener. 

It should be noted that they are looking at the same reality.  Neither person’s mind is changed by the arguments of the other.  At the end of the story, the believer leaves the garden believing that the flowers are from God, the invisible gardener.   The skeptic leaves the garden not believing in anything but the aggravation of the weeds   (From Lectionary Homiletics, Vol 23, No. 2., Feb./March 2012.) 

Which way do you look at life?  Psychologists have a test to help us answer.  They put half a glass of water in front of you and  ask you the proverbial question: Do you see the glass as being half full or half empty?    Some of us can see the flowers growing and know the glass is always half full.  Others of us can’t see the flowers for the weeds.   Are any weeds growing life-garden?  Do the weeds which are growing along with the wheat (like in Jesus' parable) tend to negate all your confidence in life, in yourself, in others or in God?   Do you believe that God will finally work his purposes out of any situation?   The apostle Paul affirmed his faith in the God of Israel when he wrote to the Romans: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose (Rom 8:28 NRS)?   But such “optimism” is getting harder for many to grasp?

SOMEDAY YOUR FAITH WILL BE SHAKEN   
As you look at the “garden” we call life; life with all its ups and downs; its successes and failures; its booms of growth and maturity, as well as, its recessions and depression; do you see the hand of the “invisible” gardener?  There is always evidence both ways.  Some days it seems that God is on his throne and all it right with the world.  Other days, we wonder, at the very least why God does not answer our prayers and why is almost nothing the way it’s supposed to be.

It must have felt that way for the people of God we call Israel.  One day they had a King named David who was promised by God himself to have a Kingdom that would never end.  Then, another day, the throne was empty, vacant, and the much beloved kingdom was completely taken away with no obvious hope of return.   Isaiah the prophet names the doom and gloom of the mindset:  “the people are like grass, their constancy is like a flower in the field; the grass withers and the flower fades”.    In verse 24, it’s even more graphic with the pessimism of the times ringing out loud and clear:

“scarcely are they planted, scarcely re they sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth.  When the (it) blows on them, they wither and the rushing water carries them off like stubble.”

This skeptical view of life can come to anyone; believer and non-believer alike.  In Isaiah’s day, this was the overwhelming perspective of God’s people; nothing lasts, nothing good will happen in our life time; if there is a “gardener”, then he is not too good, because there are just too many weeds, too many pains, too many failures.   The attitude was this: what’s the use sowing seeds of righteousness when you know it will be eventually grow up in weeds and it will all wither away.

I heard this attitude from a pastor once.  He said he spent many years trying to teach his congregation to love the truth; to follow the hard way, not the easy way; to bear the cross and not be ashamed to walk with Jesus in the dark places of life.  But then, he said, that when God called him away from that another pastor came behind him who very easily led the people in a completely different direction that was all wrong.  It was like the Pied Piper of Hamlien.   He’s the one who played his “magic pipe” that could lead the rats away from the city.  When the people did not pay him for his services, he retaliated by playing his magic pipe and leading all their children to their doom.   That’s exactly what happened the church, he said.  When the Pastor with all the “magic answers”  and “magic words” came, they people stopped facing reality, didn’t want to bear the cross, and all the children were mesmerized by the sweet and easy sounds that lead them over the cliff.  They wanted the ease letting everything go and hearing the sounds that “tickled their ears”, even if meant a march to a death of truth. 

When the pastor found this to be the way things go; he left the local church to never return.  He became an academic in the university; where at least they were not afraid to think the hard thoughts.   He said that he’d never take responsibility to lead a church ever again.

Has anything ever shaken your faith like that?   Have you had your faith so shaken that you ended up trusting no one and living on the edge of believing in nothing.  Something will happen that will test your faith.   I’ve seen it happen time and time again.  I saw it in a family when a teenager suddenly took her own life and the parents were devastated.  I saw in in a man whose young wife; the mother of two young sons, suddenly died a horrible death with cancer.  I saw it in a person whose husband drowned in a pond, thrown off the boat along with his son, who even though he had just come back from the marines, could not keep his father afloat.  I’ve seen people face failure in their business.  I’ve known people who had to face guns pointed at them in war time; lying in foxholes playing dead with the enemy all around.  I’ve known people who lost it all in the stock market.  I’ve known people whose marriage failed; a child rebelled; a baby died; or their own health fell apart.   The question is not will you get through this life unscathed, but the question is “when” and “how” will the moment of trouble come?   Isn’t this what Job realized: "humans are born of trouble and the sparks fly upward!”

It’s not the subject any of us want to consider; the day of the shaking and testing of our faith. But that day will come.  This day did come to Israel.  When the prophet Isaiah wrote these words “Comfort ye, Comfort, Ye, My people” (Isaiah 40:1ff.), the people were a thousand miles from home, taken into exile, with no prospect of return.  It was so easy for them to get depressed about everything, to become skeptical and fail to see the flowers still growing in the clearing of the jungle.  Because they couldn’t see the gardener, it was so easy just to focus upon the weeds. 

EVEN THE YOUNG CAN BE STRESSED OUT
It was such a difficult day for the people that Isaiah wrote in our text that “even youths will faint and become weary” (40:30).   That’s certainly something that no society wants to hear.   But aren’t we hearing echoes of that same thing today; that the youth, or the young growing up today will not have it as good as their parents or grandparents; or that the average life span for youth today will not be as long as it has been for their parents?   The marriages, the families, the jobs, the careers and prospects for the future come crashing down upon the young, even before they get started.   Having to face a world, and realities many are not quite ready to face, having to bear a burdens even young backs and young minds are not yet strong enough to bear, Isaiah observes, that in the day of crisis: Even youth will faint and become weary.”  

Recently I heard a younger person say they were close to the breaking point in caring for a sick relative.   They had to ask another relative to come and take over for them.  They just could not handle it all.  It was simply too much.  They had a lot of brain power, but they had very little emotional power; especially too little capability to fulfill the responsibility they needed most to fulfill.  They just did not have the spiritual and emotional resources to do it.  When faced with the “normal” hardships, not really excessive ones; but in facing what were the normal, but not wanted challenges and responsibilities of life, love, devotion, caring and doing their duty for family; they “fainted” and “became weary” especially in well doing.

All of know something about what happened on that Italian “Cruise Ship” and it’s Captain who was supposed to be sworn to be the last man off that ship, and instead he was one of the first to abandon it; claiming that he just happened to fall into the life boat ahead of everyone else.   What we all know is that when the “difficult moment” came he just could not take it.   That’s at least how it appears.  He “swam” for his life and his faith fell apart.  He did not have the emotional resources or the intestinal fortitude to handle what had to be done.  “Even young men will faint and become weary.”

ONLY THE LORD CAN GIVE US STRENGTH
When the situation seems hopeless, is there any other option?  Isaiah believes that there is.   When the circumstances and evidence point to the contrary, he chooses to believe the invisible gardener is still present in his garden.  But how does he know?  What can he say to convince us when that dark and difficult moment comes?   The unbelieving skeptic has a voice comes shouting in our ear:  Isn’t the invisible gardener just a figment of your imagination….that’s why he’s always invisible, he’s just not real.    But the argument does not faze Isaiah at all.   He is not looking at whether you see the gardener, but he is realizing the benefits of “waiting” in his strengthening presence.  He is content to see and smell the flowers that still grow, even among the weeds.   Though some “young” do faint, and others become “weary”, he has noticed something else that makes make sense of it all: “those who wait on the Lord renew their strength”.  He offers a word of hope; not out of “proof” or sightings of the gardener, but out of his “faith” that empowers “those who wait upon the Lord.”

Mohandas Gandhi, a Hindu who dared to believe in Jesus Christ, though he still had trouble embracing the Christianity of most Christians, once echoed Isaiah’s faith when he said: “I think it is wrong to expect certainties in this world….God is the only certainty, or we could not be certain of anything at all.”  Maybe this is exactly why so many “are fainting” and “growing weary”, because they have yet to learn, that God, the invisible, improvable, mysterious but very present God of Israel and Father of Jesus Christ, is life’s only certainty  (Also told by Annette N. Evans, Ibid) .   

Isaiah wants “wait” upon this God who can renew our strength, but he tells us even more than that.   Isaiah also wants us to know “waiting on the Lord” who gives us strength and hope, we have a God who himself, “does not faint” and “does not grow weary”.    Exactly because God is God and His “understandings are unsearchable” we gain strength.   God not only gives us the ability to get through difficult moments in life, he can empower us to overcome those moments, to grow stronger through those moments, and even to go far beyond getting our strength back; but he says that if we will allow God to “renew our strength” that God can teach us to soar above them.  You don’t have to hang down your head and limp through the pressures of life, but you can soar, you can run, and you can patiently walk through them, in the strength and power of God.

In the Mexican Sierra Madre Mountains, there is an Indian tribe called the Tarahumara.  They are incredible atheletes who seem as if they are created just to run, doing so with simple sandals made of rubber tires strapped to their feet.  Regularly they travel 60, 70, or more miles with tremendous ease.   Their whole society is built on running.  Christopher McDougal says, “The Tarahumara will party like this all night, running for fun.  Then, they will roust themselves late in the morning just to run in another race that would not just last one or two miles, but would last for days.”  Those are people “born to run” and not be weary.   Their whole life and society is built upon running.  But what is our society built upon? He wonders.  Once good roads came into our areas, and vehicles could be bought, we stopped walking and running.  Our society and our health went into decline because we stopped running and walking.   Maybe the simple key to gaining strength is to learn again to “run for our lives” rather than “running from our lives” and to slow our lives down so that we can learn to “walk” and “run” with strength, as the Taraumara do.   Apply our physical needs to our spiritual needs, the question arises: Have we stopped moving, growing, developing, and maturing spiritually, settling in to lives that are much too comforting, and that’s why we can’t seem to keep up the pace in our spirits?  It’s certainly something to think about. 

ARE YOU READY TO SOAR?

How can we keep from losing the power and passion for life?   How can we learn to “walk without fainting” or “run without becoming weary”?   Maybe his ultimate answer is in his first image of learning to “mount up with eagle’s wings” and learning to fly.   Sound a little ridiculous?  On a “literal” level it can.  What human can fly like an eagle?   But take this imagery on a figurative, metaphorical and spiritual level; and you can already begin to experience a “lift” in your life.    When Isaiah wrote these words he may well have been in a prison, far away from home, but suddenly he looks up and he sees an eagle in flight and knows that they only way of dealing with his depression is not what he can do with his body, but what he must do in his soul.   Only faith in the “Lord, who can renew his strength” can get him out of that prison of his heart and mind, and lift him beyond all that is happening.   He is now ready, in that prison, to learn what God can teach him, even in the worst of situations.  He can learn in his heart, soul and mind to soar in faith and hope above everything he sees.  


 A preacher, who is the descendant of an enslaved people in America, has this final lesson for people, who know freedom, but really don’t know how to soar and fly with that freedom.  The story he tells has been passed from mouth to ear somewhere along the palmetto dunes of South Carolina, a story passed down from West Africa to the North Atlantic. 

The story takes place in St. Johns Island, just off the coast of South Carolina, as Africans who had been mislabeled slaves are toiling in the hot sun. They are working so very hard to pick cotton. There is one young woman and beside her is her small boy, maybe six or seven. She’s working in the fields and she has such incredible dexterity that she is able to pick cotton with her right hand and caress the forehead of her child with the left. But eventually, exhausted by working so hard in the fields, she falls down from the weight and the pressure of being—in the words of Dubois—“problem and property.” Her boy attempts to wake her very quickly, knowing that if the slave drivers were to see her the punishment would be swift and hard.    He tries to shake his mother, and as he’s trying to shake her, an old man comes over to him. An old man that the Africans called Preacher and Prophet, but the slave drivers called Old Devil. He looks up at the old man and says, “Is it time? Is it time?”

The old man smiles and looks at the boy and says, “Yes!” And he bends down ands whispers into the ear of the woman who was now upon the ground and says these words: “Cooleebah! Cooleebah!”   At that moment the woman gets up with such incredible dignity. She stands as a queen and looks down at her son, grasps his hand and begins to look toward heaven. All of a sudden they begin to fly. The slave drivers rush over to this area where she has stopped work and they see this act of human flight and are completely confused. They do not know what to do! And during their confusion, the old man rushes around to all the other Africans and begins to tell them, “Cooleebah! Cooleebah!”

When they hear the word, they all begin to fly. Can you imagine? The dispossessed flying? Can you imagine the disempowered flying? Three fifths of a person flying? The diseased flying? The dislocated flying? They are all taking flight! And at that moment the slave drivers grab the old man and say, “Bring them back!”

They beat him, and with blood coming down his cheek, he just smiles at them. They say to him, “Please bring them back!”

And he says, “I can’t.”

They say, “Why not?”

He said, “Because the word is already in them and since the word is already in them, it cannot be taken from them.”

The old man had a word from West Africa, cooleebah, a word that means God. It had been placed into the heart of these displaced Africans and now they had dignity and they were flying.

Ah, is it not the job of the church and the preacher? No, we are not called to make people shout. No, we are not called to make people dance. No, we are not called to have our bank accounts fly.  No, we are called to make sure that the people of God fly! Fly from breakdown to break through.  Fly from hurt to healing.  Fly from heartache to being mended to a whole person.  We are called as a people to ensure that those who have been marginalized have a word in their spirit that allows them to fly.   And the question is: are we a part of a church, are we a part of a ministry that causes people to fly? (As told by Otis Moss III., www.csec.org).

Isaiah says it: “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength. They mount up with wings as eagles. They shall run and not get weary. They shall walk and not faint.”

Yes, when the word of God is in us, we can fly.   Will you let God’s Word live in you?  If you will, you can walk when you need to  walk, you can run when you need to run, but you will also be able to “fly” when your day comes to test and try your wings.  Amen