Thy Word my soul with Joy doth Bless

5LentC, Sullivan Park Care Center, March 17, 2013 by Annette Fricke

Johannes Olearius, a prolific hymn writer, wrote these words:

Lord, open Thou my heart to hear
And through Thy Word to me draw near;
Let me Thy Word e’er pure retain,
Let me Thy child and heir remain.

Thy Word doth deeply move the heart,
Thy Word doth perfect health impart,
Thy Word my soul with joy doth bless,
Thy Word brings peace and happiness.

       Elie Wiesel writes: ‘One day the king summoned his counselor and told him of his anguish: “I have read in the stars that all those who will eat of the next harvest will be struck with madness.  What shall we do, my friend?”

            “Nothing could be more simple, Sire,” replied the counselor, “we shall not touch it.  Last year’s harvest is not yet exhausted.  You have but to requisition it; it will be ample for you.  And me.”

            “And the others?” scolded the king.  “All the subjects of my kingdom?  The faithful servants of the crown?  The men, the women, the madmen and the beggars, are you forgetting them?  Are you forgetting the children, the children too?”

            “I am forgetting nobody, Sire.  But as your advisor, I must be realistic and take all the possibilities into account.  We don’t have enough to protect and satisfy everyone.  There will be just enough for you.  And me.”

            Thereupon the king’s brow darkened, and he said: “Your solution does not please me.  Is there no other?  Never mind.  But I refuse to separate myself from my people, and I don’t care to remain lucid in the midst of a people gone mad.  Therefore we shall all enter madness together.  You and I like the others, with the others.  When the world is gripped by delirium, it is senseless to watch from the outside: the mad will think that we are mad too.  And yet, I should like to safeguard some reflection of our present glory and of our anguish too; I should like to keep alive the memory of this determination, this decision.  I should like that when the time comes, you and I shall remain aware of our predicament.”

            “Whatever for, Sire?”

            “It will help us, you’ll see.  And thus we shall be able to help our friends.  Who knows, perhaps thanks to us, people will find the strength to resist later, even if it is too late.”

            And putting his arm around his friend’s shoulder, the king went on: “You and I shall therefore mark each other’s foreheads with the seal of madness.  And every time we shall look at one another, we shall know, you and I, that we are mad.”

            This past week and entire month have been extremely busy for me and that can either cause one to become extremely possessive of ones time or so generous that you wonder if time is ever meant for oneself.  I suppose the point of it all is really what we do with our time and see it more from the perspective of where God would have us be. There is a time to grieve past our thoughts, actions, and experiences.  There is a time to let go of the past whether or not we deemed it good or bad.  God does new things in our lives.  God invites us into the future by allowing us time and space to repent and start fresh.  It is sometimes quite unhealthy to keep doing things and seeing things the same way we always have.  God can give us that new perspective that will change and transform our lives in a way we never thought possible.

            Elie Wiesel is Jewish, so I thought that we would at least ponder that first lesson from the book of Isaiah. In Isaiah we read, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?”  Although the setting of this passage is the exile and all that the Jewish people lost because of it which included land, their families and homes; this passage speaks at a deeper level.  The cry of the Jewish people is universally applicable to many situations in life.  Where was God when this disaster happened?  Why had God allowed this to happen?  What kind of future did the chosen people of God have now? Has God abandoned us?  If we go back just three chapters in this same book, we hear those words we remember most in that Johannes G. Olearius hymn sung during Advent, “Comfort, comfort ye, my people.  Speak ye peace, thus saith our God.  Comfort those who sit in darkness, Bowed beneath their sorrow’s load.”

            Our text in Isaiah goes on to proclaim the providence of God.  God will provide for our every need.  If we go back even further, to Abraham, that is also the message.  When Abraham followed God’s command to make a sacrifice, his only son Isaac; God provided.  Yet, because we have experienced the grim shadow of past tragedies, the way in which those ghosts of past loss, shame, and grief swirl around us and cloud our vision, preventing us from seeing anything but darkness and despair.  They still, at times, cause us to doubt God’s providence.  They cause us to doubt even the promises we have received in Jesus Christ: divine forgiveness, new life, and the love of God. Isaiah reminds us that our God is the God who has delivered us in the past and will deliver us again.  Our God is the God who makes a way where there is no way, creating streams of living water in the midst of parched deserts.  God will never abandon us, no matter how bad things get.  Weeping is not denied, but God redeems it and transforms it into a means of blessing.

            From our second lesson, Paul writes, “For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.”

            God does not promise us riches or an easy life in choosing to be a disciple.  Life itself will batter, bruise, and break us down.  It will tear us apart and bring us to tears and heartfelt grieving. Yet we, like Mary, are continually called to radical devotion to God.  We are to be generous, as generous as Mary was when she anointed Jesus’ feet with costly ointment and dried his feet with her tears.  In our temptation to condemn those like her in our own world, let us see her in a new way, in God’s way.  She is doing a good thing.  As Evelyn Underhill has so eloquently and succinctly put it, “worship is summed up in sacrifice.”  Here is the ideal action of a disciple: the washing of feet.  Jesus received from Mary what he would soon offer to the other disciples, she “wiping” his feet with her hair as he will “wipe” their feet with his towel.  Here is a holy emblem of the disciples’ life: washing and being washed; blessing and being blessed. We are to be God’s people to all, the poor and the wealthy alike, those economically and spiritually rich or poor; all of us need God because before God, we all stand naked and in need.

            We live our lives in the shadow of the cross, but we also live in the presence of the risen Christ.  Here is your invitation to daily companionship with Jesus, in extravagant acts of compassion and generosity, in moments of worship.  All this, in a world which lives by a mind-set of scarcity, rather than a mind-set of abundance, and so tempts us to close in and give little; God and all that God is, is always with us blessing us with abundance.