The last time I preached on these lections was three years ago—a little more than a week before my mother died. In this last week, as this anniversary approaches again, I’ve found that I can’t seem to move away from the story I told you three years ago. Perhaps I need to hear these words again. Perhaps those of you who have heard the story might also need to hear it again. Whatever the case, these are the words I have today.
The stroke happened sometime during the late evening of January 26, 2001. A shower of tiny blood clots broke loose from the upper chamber of my mother’s heart and pushed their way into the small arteries of her brain. The clots became wedged in the tiny vessels and stopped the blood flow to several parts of her brain. Without the nourishing oxygen and glucose that the blood carries, important parts of her brain died. The part of her brain that gave instructions to the left side of her body. The part of her brain that judged risk and allowed careful decisions. The part of her brain that found meaning in the written word. The parts of her brain that allowed an active, independent 86 year old woman to cook, garden and read a book a day. It took only minutes—perhaps only seconds—for that shower of clots to change my mother’s life.
As long as I can remember, my mother's greatest fear has been that she, like several of her brothers and one of her sisters, would have a stroke. She feared that it would not be “the big one,” a stroke massive enough to end her life. She was not afraid to die. She was terrified that she would live. She told my sisters and me later that she sat down on the floor when she began to feel weak. And I know that she prayed as she lay on her kitchen floor through that long, long night. I know that she continued to pray as she lived in the situation that she most feared and dreaded.
Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.
Each of us have had experiences of crisis and calamity in our lives. There have been times in each of our lives when illness and death have struck without apparent meaning. Times when deepest hopes have been disappointed and fondest dreams have turned to dust. And when those times have come into our lives, we have prayed—or we’ve tried to pray. There have been times in the lives of everyone here when we have prayed for God to do something! To make life all right again! To turn back the clock! To heal! To cure! To take the pain away from a loved one—to bring the fullness of God’s creation into our very own lives.
We pray. And sometimes the crisis resolves, and we continue our life journeys with at least a temporarily heightened sense of the fragility of our existence on this earth. To all intents and purposes, a miracle has happened, our prayer has been answered in the way we hoped, and we rejoice. But sometimes, the only resolution to the crisis is grievous loss and pain.
In this time of war, most of us know at least one person who has lived with fear for a family member or close friend serving in the armed forces. I have heard many people giving thanks for the safe return of a loved one, saying that their prayers have been answered.
Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.
But what about those who have not returned—will not return—to their families and friends? What about those who have died? What about the Iraqi people who have died? What about the prayers of those people and those who love them? What about their cries to God? What about the events in our own lives which cause us pain? What happens when our prayers don’t seem to be answered? Where is God when the bad things happen?
There are all kinds of answers to those questions. There are people who say that human suffering is part of God’s great plan—a plan so great that we can’t possibly know its purpose or understand its meaning. There are others who say that perhaps faith was not strong enough. Others say perhaps the prayer was not fervent enough. And still others say that it’s punishment for some misdeed. And there are others, like me, who stand and say, “I don’t know why suffering happens to those whom God loves.” I don’t know why suffering happens, except through the randomness of chance in a world that appears to be constructed to allow the kind of flexibility required for growth and change.
I don’t know why we suffer. But I do know that the God who has touched my life—the God I believe in—the God in whom I place my trust—I know that this God doesn’t send us suffering. This God who sent Jesus to show us how much we are loved—this God gives us strength to live with the suffering and problems that come to us.
When the times of trial come—and as my mother used to say, none of us gets out of this life without taking a few licks—when the times of trial come and the enormity of crisis strikes our hearts, there is something in each of us that leaps to connection with God—the very same God who may rarely enter our thoughts in the time between our Sunday visits to this place. In the moment of impact, when the fullness of understanding is sinking into our minds, when we are struggling to take in the way our life has changed, the first cry of our heart is invariably a call to God—a plea that God be God, that God be strong and powerful, that God be able to do all the things our hearts call out to be done. Our first cry is that God do all the things we expect our God to be able to do. We cry out, begging for God’s mercy, and in that moment of seeking and asking, we find connection. It is in the asking, in the searching, in the knocking— even, perhaps especially, in the ongoing questioning and doubting—that we encounter the God who is always waiting for us.
Elie Weisel tells of young boy who was hanged following an attempt to escape a camp during the Holocaust. The child didn’t weigh very much, and it took a long time for him to die—a long time for him to suffocate at the end of the rope. A man pointed to the boy’s body, hanging on the scaffolding. “Look at that boy,” he said, “and tell me where your God is.” The reply was: “God is hanging there.” Whenever we call, whenever we suffer, God is with us, making of us more than we thought we were or ever could be, bringing God’s own self to be with us in our pain and sorrow.
During my first visit to Texas after Mother’s stroke, she and I prayed together. We didn’t have a lot of practice at that. Our prayer together had been pretty much limited to grace before meals—perhaps five or ten times in my life. As we were sitting together, she asked me to pray. I asked her how she wanted us to pray. She thought for a long moment. “I guess,” she said, “I guess we’d better pray for God to give me the strength to go on living until it’s time for me to die. I’m not big enough to do it by myself.”
None of us is big enough to do the task of living by ourselves. Just as a loving parent hears the cry of a child in the night, God hears our call and comes to us, ready to comfort us and help us deal with our worst nightmares. And just like children in the grip of night terrors, we sometimes can’t recognize the care that’s offered to us, so we continue to flail and thrash and cry out in our fear. But finally, when the night is finished and the storm is over, we recognize the gentle arms, we hear the reassuring voice, and we are able to rest in the strength of the one who loves us.
Ask, and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you.
Thanks be to God.