Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 9, 2006

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

When my kids were little we had a children’s record that had a song on it about helping. I don’t remember most of it, but the last lines that the rest of the song built up to were:

Some kind of help is the kind of help
That helping’s all about.
And some kind of help is the kind of help
We all can do without.

We can understand that, can’t we? We all need help at times. Maybe we aren’t persecuted for declaring the Word of the Lord, although I must say that because of our Open and Affirming commitment I have experienced in this town a tiny, and I mean tiny, little bit of what the prophet experienced. For the most part, however, proclaiming the Word isn’t why we need help. We need help because of life, because we’re human. We suffer the trials and tribulations that seem an inevitable part of life in this world. We get sick, or our loved ones do. We go astray, falling into sinful ways, addictions, or crime, or our loved ones do. We lose our jobs or burn out on them and feel lost and without purpose. We grow old and infirm, gradually losing physical and mental abilities we once had, or our loved ones do. Our loved ones die, and eventually we will too. Maybe there are people who are so strong, so self-sufficient, that they can face those things alone, although I don’t think that’s really what God wants for us. In any event, I’m not one of them, and I doubt that many of you are either. We all need help, just like Isaiah.

In our passage this morning, Isaiah says that he got that help despite his suffering. He says: "The Lord God helps me; therefore I have not been disgraced....It is the Lord God who helps me, who will declare me guilty?" Isaiah 50:7a, 9a Isaiah sees help coming from God, but does it? He says "the Lord God helps me," but apparently that help, whatever it was, didn’t prevent the suffering and persecution that he endured. So we have ask: What kind of help is that? Is that the kind of help that helping’s all about, or is it the kind of help we all can do without?

I think the conclusion is unavoidable that if God helps us it isn’t by preventing bad things from happening to us. Maybe it’s because I lost my wife of thirty years to cancer at far too young an age, or maybe it’s almost sixty years of life experience and several years now of being a pastor, but I just don’t believe that God helps us by preventing bad things from happening to us in this life. Bad things do happen to good people. I think we all know that, or I’d like think we do. Still, although that truth seems obvious to me, it sure isn’t obvious to a lot of Christians. Yesterday, twice, I heard proof of how so many people don’t get it. That proof came in two news reports about the deadly tornadoes that ripped through Tennessee and Georgia on Friday. First, in a radio report on NPR, I heard a man who had survived a tornado strike say: "It is only by the grace of God that we’re alive." Then, a couple of hours later, in a TV news report on CNN, I heard another tornado survivor say: "We’re just thankful God is on our side. We must be living right." Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not condemning these two men. They had just been through a horrific experience. They were still pretty shook up when the reporters interviewed them. I don’t take their remarks as well thought out theological statements. Still I think those remarks reveal a widely held mindset among us, namely, the belief that God protects God’s faithful ones from harm in this life. I had to wonder, though: Does that mean that God withheld grace from the dozen or so people killed in those tornadoes? Does their death mean that God wasn’t on their side or that they weren’t living right? Those seem to be necessary inferences of the belief that God saved these two survivors, and that is an inference I simply can’t accept. To me, life simply contradicts the belief that God protects God’s faithful ones from harm. I don’t see how that belief survives the experiences of life.

More puzzling yet to me is how people who consider themselves Christians can hold that belief in the face of the story on which the entire Christian faith is based, the story of Jesus Christ. From an earthly perspective that story is of a man who devoted his entire life to teaching God’s word and doing God’s work in the world only to be scorned, rejected, falsely accused, arrested, tortured, and brutally executed. To the eyes of the world, Jesus at the end was abandoned by the God he thought he knew so intimately that he even called God Abba, Father. The world will look at claims that God helps God’s faithful ones avoid harm, will look at Jesus on the cross, and will say: You call this help? If the story of Jesus tells us anything, it seems to me, it tells us precisely that God doesn’t help us, didn’t help even Jesus, by saving us from suffering and death in this life.

And I can hear the Fundamentalists saying, as I’ve heard them say before: What happened to Jesus doesn’t tell us that God doesn’t protect us from harm in this life because Jesus was different. He had to die. He came to die. As the promotional materials for Mel Gibson’s movie put it a couple of years ago, dying was his reason for living. That position, which is very widely held among American Christians, says that Jesus’ death saves us; but it doesn’t teach us anything. It says: Jesus and we are so different, and God’s purpose in his life was so different from God’s purpose in our lives, that his death teaches us nothing about how God relates to us other perhaps than to forgive our sin. It tells us nothing about how God is present in our lives. It tells us nothing about how God acts and how God doesn’t act in our lives. This conservative evangelical position doesn’t make Jesus’ death irrelevant for our salvation. Far from it, but it does make Jesus’ death irrelevant to our understanding of how God is present with us, irrelevant to how we are to live, and irrelevant to how we are to die.

And that, my friends, is a position I cannot accept. Jesus’ death is in many ways the most important part of his story. It certainly is one of the things that make Christianity unique among the religions of the world. We follow a crucified Savior, and to the rest of the world a crucified Savior is an absurdity, an oxymoron. Look at the founding figures of some of the world’s other great faiths. Look at Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammad. They all died of natural causes at relatively advanced ages. They certainly were not tortured and executed as political criminals the way Jesus was. Jesus’ death makes him unique among the founding figures of the great religions, and it makes our faith unique among the world’s great faiths. It is so central to the story of our faith that is has to teach us something. It has to be something that we enter into and learn from and not merely something that we observe from afar and of which we are mere passive beneficiaries, as the conservative position on these things makes us.

So just what does Jesus’ death teach us? What it teaches me perhaps more than anything else is precisely that God does not prevent bad things from happening to God’s faithful ones in this life. If God did not prevent unspeakably bad things from happening even to Jesus, God certainly isn’t going to prevent bad things from happening to the likes of us. We might wish it were otherwise, but it isn’t. Our own life experience teaches us that truth, and Jesus’ life experiences teaches us that truth with divine authority.

So we have to ask: If God doesn’t prevent bad things from happening to faithful people, was Isaiah deluded when he said: "The Lord God helps me"? Was there really no help for Jesus on the cross? My answer to those questions is of course a resounding No! Isaiah was not deluded. Jesus was not without help on the cross. Rather, we learn precisely from the cross of Jesus how it is that God helps us. We learn what divine help really looks like; and it sure doesn’t look like God preventing bad things from happening to us and to our loved ones.

Here’s what it does look like. It looks like God being present with us in everything that happens in our lives, the good things and most especially the bad things. Isaiah knew that. In our little passage the suffering servant is not saved from abuse and shame, yet because God is with him he can say: "I have not been disgraced." We know that God was not only with Jesus, God was in Jesus, as Paul says. 2 Corinthians 5:19 (NRSV alternative translation) Indeed, for Christians Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, the Word of God made flesh. John 1:14 And so we see in Christ Jesus precisely how God deals with human suffering and death because in the suffering and death of Jesus we know that God is present, that this suffering and this death are in a real sense both the suffering and death of a man and the suffering and death of God. We see that God does not prevent suffering and death. Rather, God enters into them with us. God suffers with us. God dies with us. God holds us in suffering. God holds us in death. My late wife Francie knew that. God granted her a vision of it as she suffered and approached her own death. She knew it. Isaiah knew it. Jesus knew it. Jesus demonstrated it to us because it is in him that we so clearly see God entering into human suffering and into human death. Jesus on the cross is precisely, paradoxically, what God’s help looks like.

You call this help? Yes, I do. I call it help that gives us hope and that gives us courage. It is help with which we can bear the unbearable. Because we know that Christ rose from death, we know that suffering and death do not have the last word. In this life and beyond this life God empties our tombs and brings new life out of death. The story of Christ on the cross is the story of God’s solidarity with us in whatever happens. You call this help? Yes. I call it the greatest help there is or ever could be. I call it the help of God. I call it indeed the kind of help that helping’s all about. Amen.