Strong at the Broken Places

During some discussion of the last post, I found myself reminded of a sermon that I read a while back. At the time, I was struggling with a sense of doing what I thought was 'right' vs accepting my own true feelings about a situation. I was struggling with how I was as oppposed to how I ought to be. I was also struggling--more than I knew--with a sense that not even God can take care of some of the issues I really care about, and which really frighten me. At some level, of course, I still struggle with these things. I suspect that is not an uncommon situation!

So I was reminded of this sermon, which not only spoke to my heart but also speaks powerfully to a malaise in society and religion at large. Here is an excerpt:

"We are bored with God, believers sometimes as much or more as non-believers. Why? Because God is not real for us.

Deep down, we know, if God is not real for us, nothing else in heaven or earth will save us.

And sometimes we know how much we long for God.

Yet God is not real for us.

If God is not real for us, we will die in our sins, an earlier generation would have said. How would we say it today?

If God is not real for us, we will die of boredom, of indifference; we will die of trivia. Some of us are trivializing ourselves to death. Some of us may die having lived lives that amounted to little more than working hard for the money to keep ourselves entertained...until we die. We are becoming unreal.

We run the risk of dying no longer capable of being ashamed--ashamed that we don't seen, much of the time, to feel anything excpet our worries about our work and our compulsive need to be entertained. We run the risk of no longer even being ashamed that we don't seem to care enough to change anything, to resist anything, to do anything--but go with the flow, laughingly or silently as circumstances require.

The mercy of God is finally deliverance from shame. But be thankful for stabs of shame along the way. They are not enough--but they are glimmers of light and life.

We long for God, everyone one of us. But God is not real for us.

God is not real for us because we will not go to that 'certain place' in the night where the ladder is raised and a way to the light is opened--and a way from the light to us is opened. We do not accept that we are people who lie or sit in darkness.

God is not real for us because we turn away from the darkness of our time in which men and women like ourselves have need for us--and need for what we can do to help. God is not real for us because we deny that darkness in our own souls. We flee from it at first glimpse.

God won't have anything to do with anything--except what is real. God won't have anything to do with anything--except what is real.

God will not deal with you in the unreal places of your life or deal with me in the unreal places of mine. Neither will God be with us when we flee from the reality of the challenges of our personal lives and flee from the challenges of our times. God simply remains with those realities--and waits for us.

There's a line in an Arthus Miller play, 'Good God, why are the grievances the only truths that stick?' Our grievances are at least real. And God will be there--with whatever truths in your life really "stick". God will transform those truths, and perhaps take those truths away from you in a sense and make different meaning for them than you are trying so hard to mean. But if you will begin to listen and trust only just a little, God will begin to transform that matters that are real for you.

...God is there--in the darkness of the matters that are real for you..."

(Strong at the Broken Places, from Our Hearts Are Restless Till They Find Their Rest in Thee, Selected Sermons to the Colgate University Church 1974-1989, by Coleman B. Brown)