SERMON OF FEBRUARY 8, 2009

M. Bruce McKay
Pilgrim-St. Luke’s United Church of Christ

“Our Source of Strength”
Isaiah 40:21-31, Mark 1:29-39

 When our sons were still young, I took them to Delaware Park on a Saturday afternoon.  While they were playing on the swings I noticed a little girl playing nearby in the sandbox.  She was singing to herself.  The tune was familiar, but the words didn’t sound quite right. 
She was singing “Jesus Loves Me”, much closer to being on key than I could have managed.   But rather than singing, “Jesus loves me!  This I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to him belong; they are weak, but he is strong.”
 Her words went like this: “Jesus loves me!  This I know, for the Bible tells me so.  Little ones to him belong; he is weak but I am strong.”
“He is weak but I am strong.”
Even if we get the tune and the words right, there are times in all our lives when we might just as well be singing, “He is weak but I am strong!” 
Times when we are convinced that the only strength that matters is our own.
Times when we refuse to believe and behave in such a way that suggests there is a strength that comes from beyond ourselves.
None of us, including Jesus, are strangers to times like these.
That’s why, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed.” (Mark 1:35)
It had been an incredible opening day for Jesus’ public ministry in Capernaum.  It began in the synagogue, on the Sabbath.  People were astonished at his teaching and amazed at the power present in him to cast out an unclean spirit that was harming a person in their midst. As soon as they left the synagogue they went to the home of Simon and his brother Andrew.  Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever.  Jesus came to her, took her by the hand, and lifted her up.  The fever left her and she began to serve her family and her guests.
That evening, at sundown, when the Sabbath ended, “the whole city” Mark tells us, gathered at their door.  Jesus continued healing and helping those who were brought to him.
Now if this power came from Jesus himself what would have mattered most would have been getting a good night’s sleep – getting plenty of rest so he could begin the next day with enough strength to continue his ministry.
But Jesus knew that there was something more important than getting a good night’s sleep because he knew that the source of the strength he’d had the day before was not his alone.
That’s why, “In the morning, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there he prayed.” (Mark 1:35)
Often we think of prayer as an opportunity for us to get God to do something we want God to do for us or for those we love – as if God wouldn’t be inclined to do it, without being reminded.
When Jesus got up in the middle of the night and went off to pray his primary concern wasn’t getting God to do something for him - but finding the strength to do something for God.
Often we think of prayer as primarily an opportunity to speak intentionally to God – a word of intercession, a word of confession, a word of gratitude. 
 Often that is what prayer can and should be.
 However, when Jesus arrived in that dark, deserted place, my hunch is he spent more time listening for God to speak than he did speaking himself.  In the silent, solitude of that time away he was searching for strength from beyond himself as fervently as Simon and his companions were searching for him. 
 Jesus knew that his public ministry in the world was intimately tied to this private time alone with God.  He knew that prayer and action weren’t opposing ways of being in the world, but rather two halves needed for a whole life. 
Prayer and action are no more in opposition to one another than breathing in and breathing out.  Attempting to have one without the other leads to our suffocating and dying to the life God would have us live. (The Company of Strangers, Parker Palmer, p. 156)
Jesus understood this in both good times and bad.  That’s why he wove contemplation and prayer into the very fabric of his life.  That’s why he turned to God in prayer after that amazing day in Capernaum and why he continued to turn to God in prayer throughout his ministry, up to and including the time he was dying on a cross. 
When things are going relatively well we can often convince ourselves that we are the source of our own well being.   We can convince ourselves that all we have and all we are is a product of our own strength – our own hard work, our own determination, our own capacity to create our own life.
When the tide turns we may find ourselves more open to considering the possibility that our source of strength comes from beyond ourselves.
Now is such a time.  In our nation, in our community and in our church people are experiencing all kinds of loss.  In the month of January alone nearly 600,000 people across the country lost their jobs.  Millions of Americans have lost their homes.  Millions more have lost much of their savings for retirement.  The 37 million Americans who are poor and the 48 million Americans without health insurance have been no strangers to loss for far longer than the last several months. 
In such a time as this hope can be hard to find.   Tragedy, pain and suffering seem all too common.  The suicide rate in the US armed forces was higher last year than it has ever been.  Last month, the number of suicides in the US Army alone will likely surpass the total number of servicemen and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The greatest threat to American lives isn’t  al-Qaida but a sense of powerlessness and despair in confronting the demons in today’s world – the demons of war, violence and poverty – the demons of feeling helpless and hopeless in facing the future.
A colleague tells the story of a friend of hers who was a psychiatrist in a health clinic at a prestigious women’s college.  They were together soon after a student she had known and counseled had committed suicide.  In the course of their conversation, with tears streaming down her cheeks, the psychiatrist spoke about her vocation and the vocation of all of us trying to make a difference in the lives of others. 
“She said: `You know I cannot save them.  I am not here to save anybody or to save the world.  All I can do – what I am called to do – is to plant myself at the gates of Hope.’”
Planting ourselves at the gates of Hope means planting ourselves in a “sometimes lonely place, the place of truth-telling, about our own soul first of all and its condition, the place of resistance and defiance, the piece of ground from which you can see the world both as it is and as it could be, as it will be; the place from which you glimpse not only struggle, but joy in the struggle.”  (The Small Work in the Great Work by Victoria Stafford, quoted in The Impossible Will Take a Little While by Paul Loeb, p. 187-188)
Planting himself at the gates of Hope is what Jesus did in that deserted place while it was still very dark.  He did this knowing that the source of his strength was the same God in whom we “all live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28)
 “Have you not known?  Have you not heard” asks God through the prophet .
Have you not heard about the God who “…gives power to the faint and strengthens the powerless…?”  
And in doing so gives power to everyone, for “…even youths shall faint and be weary.” (Is.40:29-30a)
The Hebrew word translated “faint” in these verses means to lack the inner resources or strength to carry on.
The Hebrew word translated “be weary” means to be beaten down by the burdens of life. (The Prophecy of Isaiah, by J.A. Motyer, Intervarsity Press, 1993, p.307-308).
There were times when even Jesus grew faint and felt weary – times when he needed to deepen the inner strength that came from the One he called Father – times when he felt beaten down by life’s burdens.
In those times he too had to “wait for the Lord” to renew his strength.
He did this, in today’s text, by going to a deserted place in the darkness before dawn.
“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength…” says the Lord through the prophet. (Isaiah 40:31a – RSV and NRSV)
Other translations put it this way:
“Those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength…” (NIV)
“Those who trust in the Lord for help shall renew their strength…” (TEV)
Waiting – hoping – trusting in a God who will renew our strength as its source when we too grow faint and feel weary.
Sweetness 7 is a new coffee shop that’s opened recently on the corner of Lafayette Avenue and Grant Street.  It’s supplied with cabinets and counters from Buffalo ReUse that were once found in homes and buildings that have been demolished.  The artsy, colorful space has transformed a forlorn corner in a tough part of town into a vibrant, energetic place to meet people, get coffee or tea to go, or set up your lap top to do some work.
Buying this building and investing in this business was a huge risk for Prish Moran, but she wanted to do something in response to a tragedy in her life.   Her only child, a son, was killed a few years ago in a car accident.  Faced with the unspeakable grief of losing her only child, Prish decided to plant herself at the gates of Hope.
She did this as an active member of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Ave.  Her pastor and those in her church family joined her recently at Sweetness 7 to offer a blessing to her, to her business and to the community that it has begun to transform.
While I’ve met Prish I haven’t talked with her about her prayer life.  Her being a Unitarian doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about who she understands God to be. 
But my guess is that Prish Moran knows more about prayer than many of us.
My guess is that Prish Moran knows very well what it’s like being in a dark, deserted place well before dawn.
My guess us that Prish Moran knows that the source of her strength to plant herself at the gates of Hope came from beyond herself – from the grace and goodness of a God who gives her life meaning and purpose in the face of unspeakable loss.
Thomas Merton said that someone who doesn’t pray is like a person who sleeps on the sidewalk outside her own house, without ever going inside.
My guess is that Prish Moran has spent a lot of time searching the house of her own soul for a source of strength beyond herself – a source of strength to not only stay in the struggle but to find joy in the struggle.
Her journey inward and her journey outward are 2 halves of a whole life. 
Like breathing in and breathing out they go together in creating a life of self-giving service in a world that is all too familiar with heartache and loss.
In such a time as this, may the same be said of each of us!
May we too hope in the Lord and thereby renew our strength –
To mount up with wings like eagles.
To run and not be weary.
To walk and not faint!  (Isaiah 40:31)
Amen!