Listen to this sermon on how a life of faith can help us endure hard times.
As some of you may already know, while I was gone the past two weeks, I experienced the Polar Vortex that blasted the Midwest with Arctic air. Never had I endured the cold like the moments when I rushed out of my warm car to scrap off windows and push snow away from stuck tires. I was reminded of this a few days ago when I came across a quote from the explorer George Kennan who wrote the 1877 classic Tent Life in Siberia. I am sure many of you are familiar with it. In a letter, he once noted that among Russian mountaineers there is a saying that declares, “Heroism is endurance for one moment more.”
It occurred to me that according to this definition I had been near a lot of heroism in Illinois. First, there was the heroism of the highway patrols who rescued people from cars and trucks during whiteout conditions. When Eunita, Danalyn, and I drove to Chicago Monday morning in the hopes of catching our flight, we passed by 47 cars and trucks stranded in ditches. Most had pink ribbons tied to their door handles to indicate that the highway patrol had already been there during the night. I had trouble fathoming the endurance required to wade into the snow all night long rescuing one person after another in danger of freezing to death. By the time of our drive, daytime temperatures had reached -15 with a wind chill was -38. I didn’t want to know what it had been like the night before.
Another form of heroism was found in those simply trying to survive. With the homeless shelters of Chicago filled to capacity, not everyone could find a room and a roof. To make matters worse for the homeless, at some shelters, the beds come already inhabited…by bedbugs. According to one reporter who interviewed some of the homeless on the streets, a few prefer to brave the cold over braving the bites having experienced both. For the homeless, blizzard conditions combine with poverty to bring the unwanted heroism of endurance. When it comes to endurance, the path to take is not always one of choice. While some choose to wade through snow in the middle of the night, others do not.
To some degree, all of us face both types of challenges. There might be challenges at work, for example, that we choose to take on. We want the challenge because it promises to be rewarding. It promises to bring greater satisfaction, greater meaning, greater accomplishment, or greater recognition. At the same time, we might find ourselves taking on challenges we wish we didn’t have. They could be challenges to our health or to the health of a loved one. They could be challenges to our already packed schedules as yet one more task is added to our load. Whatever the case may be, we face the challenge of endurance whether we want to be heroic or not. In this situation, the relevant question for us as a church becomes how do we make this place a place of renewal, a place where in the words of our scripture we go from being weary and exhausted to mounting up with wings like eagles.
There is an image for what it takes to make a church a place of renewal that I think is appropriate for this time of the year. In his autobiography entitled The Long Haul, the legendary activist and educator Myles Horton talks about how he was able to sustain his work in social justice movements from the early 1930s to the late 1980s. The image he uses comes from the days of slavery when slave masters would tell their slaves that they could celebrate Christmas as long as the backlog burns. You see the slaves would have a big fireplace to stay warm and in the back of the fireplace there was this big log. It’s job was to create a perpetually hot backstop to keep the smaller pieces of wood burning in front of it. A good backlog would burn slowly, and the slaves had a trick for making this log burn for up to two weeks. The trick was to take the biggest log they could find and then haul it into the swamps where they would sink it into the water. For a whole year, they would leave it there to soak. At Christmas, they would then take an ox to the swamp and pull the log out for the fireplace.
Horton liked this image because he was fighting against the burnout common to people who do social justice work. Those who burnout can sometimes be like the smaller pieces of wood that get real hot and burn real fast only to be consumed by their own fire. The trick is to be like the backlog and burn real slow so that your fire keeps you going without consuming you. I think the image of the backlog also works for churches who want to be places of renewal. To be a place of renewal during the storms and blizzards of life, you need to have a backlog that keeps burning. You need to have a backlog that perpetually enables people to feel the warmth of the Holy Spirit as they come in from the cold, as they shake the snow off their boots and place their hands by the fire. In order to be truly effective, it helps to have some deacons who are willing to wade out into the snow and rescue people when they get stuck or in trouble. It helps to have some friendly greeters and ushers who open doors and get you close to the fire. It then helps to have some people inside who keep the coals stoked. Choirs are good at that. It also helps to have some people who make sure that we have a fireplace and some wood to begin with. That would be our Property and Finance ministry.
The image of the backlog I think works in yet one more way. I think as individuals we have to do what it takes to keep our own internal fires going. For me, this means connecting with the deep passions and experiences of love that motivate me. At times, these passions and experiences of love come by ways that are not always easy. My decision to participate in the upcoming run and walk for background checks was essentially made for me shortly after the shooting at Sandy Hook occurred. I remember it was on my day off, and I was getting Danalyn ready to go on a trip that would lead to a nap for Danalyn followed by a lunch at a pancake restaurant. When I saw the headline before heading out the door, my first reaction was that I couldn’t bear hearing this news, but when I got in the car, I eventually started listening to the news. It was hard to avoid it. Danalyn fell asleep for her nap, and while I waited in the parking lot of the pancake restaurant for her to wake up, I found myself crying with a mixture of sorrow, anger, and fear as I thought about the kind of world in which she was growing up. Even after we got into the pancake restaurant, I had trouble keeping myself from crying. It was then that I decided I had to do something. I had never had any desire to be active on gun-related issues, but I suddenly felt motivated to do so. A backlog had been lit, and if I were to describe the source of that fire I would say it was love.
It’s this experience that helps me to understand our scripture for today. Initially, I kept feeling that the scripture was presenting me with something of a theological problem. I kept thinking where exactly is this God who “gives power to the faint”…who “strengthens the powerless”…who enables people to “run and not be weary”? Is this some kind of magical God who secretly provides energy drinks and protein bars to the chosen few? If so, I had mixed feelings about this kind of God. On the one hand, this is the kind of God I want while I am running my marathon for background checks. On the other hand, this kind of God doesn’t make any kind of intellectual sense to me. There is, however, a God who does make sense to me and that’s the God of love, the God who creates a spark in us that can’t be put out, the God who lights our deepest passions and motivations. If my legs and digestive system are willing, this is the God who will help me finish the race. I invite you to think about what your own backlog is. Think about what keeps you going through storms and blizzards. Think about what enables you to endure for one more moment. I believe this is the God who we need. This is the God who will renew us when we are weary and exhausted. Amen.