Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume
of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door. “
“'Tis some visitor,” I muttered,
“tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly, I remember, it was in
the bleak December, and each separate dying ember ….
Okay, I’ll
stop there.
These words
may sound familiar to you. Maybe you
recognized them right away. Maybe the
title and the author are right on the tip of your tongue. Maybe you need a little hint—so here it
is—this poem features a bird who utters only one word over and over—Nevermore.
If you
guessed this poem is The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe, fantastic!
If you’re
also thinking “Hmm, Nevermore? Isn’t
that the school Wednesday Addams attends in that show on Netflix?” Yes, yes it is. That’s how writers pay homage to the greats
who came before them.
If you’re
also thinking that you never expected to hear a sermon that featured Edgar
Allan Poe, the master of the terrifying and the macabre, and a reference to the
Addams Family, well, two things—it’s October, tis the season, and also, I’m a
former Language Arts teacher … trust me.
In the poem,
The Raven, the narrator is deep in grief over the loss of his beloved
Lenore. When a mysterious raven appears
in his room, he finds himself compelled to speak to the raven as if the bird
were a mystical conduit to the other side.
It seems
crazy, but the narrator is suffering, frantic for answers, desperate for
something, anything to ease his pain, at one point asking the raven, “Is there
balm in Gilead?”
This
question—is there balm in Gilead—is actually lifted directly from the Bible,
specifically, from Jeremiah 8:22, where Jeremiah, another man in deep grief and
mourning over the suffering of his people in forced exile in Babylon, asks, “Is
there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then is there no
healing for the wound of my people?”
Jeremiah is
also credited with writing the book of Lamentations and, for the most part, the
book lives up to its title. It is a book
of laments, an accounting of suffering, a liturgy of grief. Jeremiah is known as “the weeping prophet”
for a reason.
And yet, as
we see in today’s reading from Lamentations 3:21-24, Jeremiah also offers an
antidote to spiritual grief and suffering.
Those verses read, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my
portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’”
Let those
words just settle on your heart for a moment.
Isn’t it amazing that thousands of years later, words like that can
still have so much impact, can still provide so much solace and promise?
“The Lord is
my portion, therefore I will hope in him.”
That’s a
verse worth remembering, worth tucking away in your mind to be pulled out when
needed.
If I
surveyed a hundred people, Family Feud-style, and asked them what they thought
was the most popular and well-known verse in the Bible, what do you think would
be the answer?
My guess is
John 3:16, right? “For God so loved the
world, that He gave His only son …” we know this one, right?
But my pick
for the second most popular verse would be Jeremiah 29:11 … “For I know the
plans I have for you, plans to help you and not to harm you, plans to give you
hope and a future.” That’s my
paraphrase.
And here’s
the thing, I can tell you how old I was, where I was and who shared that verse
with me for the first time. I was
spending the summer with my grandparents when I was seventeen. They were devout Southern Baptists and so
that very first night that I arrived, they sat down with me on the couch in the
living room and gave me my very first Teen Bible. And that night my grandparents shared with me
Jeremiah 29:11. They taught me to underline it and date it so that I would
always know when I had first heard it.
Now, I will
be the first to tell you, my grandparents could be a little heavy-handed when
it came to sharing God’s word, aka, witnessing.
I had
believed in God since I could talk. I
had plenty of Bibles. My grandparents
were not the first people to ever talk to me about God. I had been through CCD at the Catholic church
and Sunday schools at Methodist churches and other Baptist churches. I prayed nightly and deeply. I was intensely spiritual. And I owed most of that to my parents and how
they raised me.
But that
night with my grandparents was the first time I had ever heard Jeremiah 29:11. And those words spoke to me. They speak to me still.
My
grandparents weren’t finished, though. They
told me that just like they had shared that verse with me, I now needed to
share that verse with someone else, which considering I was an introvert—was more
than a little terrifying to me. But my
grandparents knew the power of God’s word to heal and bring hope to others.
In today’s
reading from 2 Timothy chapter 1, Paul tells Timothy in verse 5, “I am reminded
of your sincere faith, a faith that lived first in your grandmother Lois and
your mother Eunice and now, I am sure, lives in you.”
It may seem
like a throw-away line at first. Ah so
Timothy has a family. Grandma Lois and Mom
Eunice. Great. But this verse says so much more than
that. It is a statement that shows how
faith is passed from generation to generation.
How Timothy’s “sincere faith” is directly connected to his mother and
grandmother’s faith.
It is a
verse that shows us just what our purpose is on this earth. We are stewards of God’s word, stewards of
His love and it is an awesome responsibility.
It is a responsibility that should humble us in how grand a purpose it
is. God’s word is precious. Afterall, the Word became flesh and dwelt
among us. We are caretakers of that Holy
Word.
But we
cannot hoard the Word and keep it to ourselves.
We must share the Word, share our faith, because as Paul tells Timothy
in verse 7, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of
power and of love.” It is a “holy
calling” Paul says later because he knows how powerful the word of God can be
in driving out darkness and hate and bringing light and love to the world.
It seems
like in the world these days, we are shown again and again how words hurt, how
words divide, how words prolong pain and encourage hate.
Every day we
see the power of hateful words, so much so that maybe we doubt that words of
love can ever be enough.
Very rarely
are we shown how words heal and bless, how the power of grace and mercy, of forgiveness
and unconditional love can move mountains.
In today’s
gospel reading from Luke, Jesus tells the disciples if they had faith the size
of a mustard seed, they could say to that mulberry tree, “Be uprooted and plant
yourself in the sea,” and it would do exactly that. The mustard seed command in Matthew is a bit
different, replacing the mulberry tree with a mountain. But regardless the message is the same.
This is what
your faith is capable of. Even faith the
size of a mustard seed could change the shape of the world. The potential of your faith is beyond
anything you could ever comprehend or imagine.
Nothing you
do in service of that faith is small.
And woe to anyone who dismisses your mustard seed.
Nothing you
do for God is small.
That summer
with my grandparents, I was on the phone with my mom one night. She was having a hard time. My mom had a hard life. And on that particular night, she was upset
and was having her own “balm in Gilead” moment.
People who
feel helpless and hopeless, who are in despair, always ask, in their own way, about
the balm of Gilead.
When you are
suffering spiritually, when your soul cries out, when you ache from someplace
deep within … you become desperate for anything that might ease your pain.
And so, Edgar
Allan Poe’s narrator turns to a raven for answers, only to be left angry and
bitter, cursing the bird, for its constant non-answer of “Nevermore.”
In the end, Poe’s
narrator is left without hope, confident there is no spiritual balm for
the grieving.
But we (you
and I) we know better. We know there is
hope.
There is
hope in God. And that hope is no small
thing.
And so while
I was on the phone with my mom, that night, more than thirty years ago, I
opened up my Bible and said to her, “Have you ever read Jeremiah 29:11?”
[And let me
say one last thing on Jeremiah 29:11.
God’s promise in this verse that His plans for us are plans to give us “hope
and a future”—that promise is not just a promise to us, but a generational
promise.
What does
that mean? It means that no matter what
generation you are, whether Silent Generation, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z
or Gen A, you are the hope and the future of all the generations that came
before you.
You are
someone’s hope.]
So what are
the words that you need to hear today?
Is it Jeremiah 29:11. Perhaps you need the words from Jeremiah 31:3
where God declares this … “I have loved you with an everlasting love.”
But also,
remember this—as important as God’s word is in sustaining us, in lifting us up,
in carrying us through the dark, Decembers of our lives, we, as stewards of
God’s word, have a duty to share that spiritual balm with others.
And so, I
will leave you with one last verse, this time from 1 Peter 3:15. “Always be ready to share with others the
hope that is inside of you.”
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment