Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 9, 2009

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.

There's an old saying that comes out of people's experience with warfare. They say: "There are no atheists in foxholes." Something about the hellish experience of being under fire in a battle zone tends to make people turn to God, it seems. And we've all heard of "jailhouse conversions," where someone who's been convicted of a crime and is doing time for it finds Jesus, converts, and becomes a zealous proselytizer for the faith. One of the most famous of these jailhouse converters is Chuck Colson, the convicted Watergate felon, who claims to have had a "born again" experience while in prison for his crime and now is a prominent conservative Christian speaker and writer. And if you're like me, you're powerfully skeptical of these kinds of conversions. About the soldier who gets religion in a foxhole I want to ask: Is a conversion based on fear really an authentic conversion? Will it last once the source of the fear is gone? About people like Colson I want to say: "O really? Did you really find faith, or are you just trying to make yourself look good, make yourself look forgiven, and maybe make a good deal of money selling accounts of your supposed conversion?" I have a hard time forgiving people like Colson, even though I know that forgiving them is my calling as a Christian; so I tend to find their claims to have turned their lives around to be pretty dubious. Their newly proclaimed piety can sound awfully self-serving and not very genuine.

That's how I tend to think of these kinds of religious experiences, experiences that can seem to be grounded only in fear or to be thinly veiled efforts at self-justification. But then, as so often happens, the Bible brings me up short. I read a passage like the opening line of Psalm 130, that we just heard. There we hear the Psalmist wail "Out of the depths I cry to you O Lord." The Psalmist cries out to his God from a place of despair. He apparently is feeling profoundly guilty about something, because he says "If you O LORD should mark iniquities, Lord who could stand?" He throws himself onto God's mercy and forgiveness. In this Psalm is seems that it is precisely the writer's sense of despair, his sense of being in the emotional and spiritual depths, that has caused him to turn to God. This Psalm always gets me to thinking: Maybe I shouldn't be so quick to judge people's whose conversion experiences seem suspicious to me.

Then I read the story of Elijah that we also just heard. In that story, Yahweh's prophet Elijah is running for his life from Queen Jezebel. She has vowed to kill Elijah because she, not being an Israelite herself although she is married to King Ahab of Israel, worships her god Baal not Israel's God Yahweh. And Elijah has just killed all of the prophets of Baal who were in Israel, an act that seems like an atrocity to us but that the ancient Hebrews would have considered an act of faithfulness. So Jezebel has vowed to wipe out Elijah, and Elijah is running for his life toward to wilderness of Sinai to escape Jezebel's wrath. Elijah, like the Psalmist of Psalm 130, is in the emotional depths. He's exhausted, and he's scared. He says "It is enough now, O LORD, take away my life." He's come to the end of his own resources, and he's ready to end it all. And that is when the angel of the LORD appears and ministers to him. And it makes me think: Is that how it works for a lot of people? Are the emotional and spiritual depths where we a great many people find God? Is it in our despair that we experience God coming to us and caring for us?

In the book we will continue discussing at the Monday evening book group tomorrow evening, the author Barbara Bradley Hagerty says precisely that it is. For her book Fingerprints of God Hagerty talked to a lot of people about their faith experiences. Based on those interviews, and based on her own spiritual experience, she says that, for a great many people, "brokenness lies at the root of conversion." She recounts numerous stories of people having powerful spiritual experiences precisely when they come to the place of "brokenness." By brokenness she means having come to the end of one's personal resources, the end of one's strength. Brokenness is the place of not seeing how we are ever going to keep going. It is the place of being completely unable to cope with one's situation with only one's own resources to draw upon. And time and time again Hagerty heard stories, often very similar stories, of people having powerful, life transforming spiritual experiences precisely in that place of brokenness when they had never had such an experience before.

For most of popular Christianity, of course, that's not the way it's supposed to be. Faith and prayer are supposed to keep bad things from happening to us, right? Bad things, like despair, like brokenness, are just bad, aren't they? There's nothing good about them. Nothing good can come out of them, right? We're just supposed to avoid them. That's what most people in our culture think. That, it seems to me, is what most Christians think.

Yet we hear all the stories to the contrary. Some of us have had experiences to the contrary. I know I have. Psalm 130 and our story of Elijah remind me that my most transformative contacts with God have come in my few times of brokenness, in my few times of despair. Some of you know those stories. I won't repeat them here, but I can attest, along with Hagerty, that brokenness indeed is often the trigger for conversion. It is often the beginning of faith, or the occasion for strengthening faith. It is often the place where God touches us most directly and most powerfully.

There are some people among us who know this truth particularly well. They are some of the people who struggle with alcoholism or drug addiction. They are some of the people who find the road to recovery in one of the 12 Step programs, Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous. I do not have personal experience in any of those programs, and I know that some of you do. So I hope I don't get this wrong. Please bear with me. The 12 Step programs begin with an admission of brokenness. Step 1 is: "We admitted we were powerless over our addiction - that our lives had become unmanageable." In other words, recovery begins with the recognition of brokenness, the recognition that we can't do it using only our own resources, that we need help. Steps 2 and 3 recognize that it is in this place of brokenness that God, as each person understands God, or what the 12 Step programs often call "a higher power," is the help we need and that God's help comes precisely in the midst of brokenness. Steps 2 and 3 read: "We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity " and "We made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God." I have spoken with people about their experience in Alcoholics Anonymous, and I have heard them say that it was precisely this turning to God in the midst of their brokenness that set them on the path to recovery. The depths of addiction are some of the darkest into which we humans fall, and it is precisely there that we can encounter God. It is precisely there that God can and does come to us. It is precisely there that God can and does give us the strength and the spiritual and emotional resources that we don't have on our own to keep going and to climb out of the depths.

Which of course doesn't mean that we should all go looking for depths to fall into. It doesn't mean we should all seek to become depressed, or terrified, or addicted. Of course not. It does mean that we can know that when we face our times in the depths God will meet us there. It means that when we find ourselves falling into the depths of despair, hopelessness, grief, fear, addiction, or any of the other depths into which we all fall at some point in our lives, we can have hope. We can have hope that God goes into the depths with us. We can do more than hope, we can know, that whatever depths we face do not and cannot separate us from God, do not and cannot separate us from God's love, do not and cannot separate us from God's grace.

"Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord." It is the classic cry of the person of faith, or of the person desperately in need of faith, in times of brokenness. It resounds across the millennia, from the Psalmist of Psalm 130 to our own personal experience. It says: Don't be so skeptical of the man who finds God in a foxhole. That, after all, is where God is. Don't be so skeptical of those jailhouse conversions. That, after all, is where God is too. Along with so much of the rest of the Hebrew Bible the Psalmist of Psalm 130 says that with the Lord there is "steadfast love." Steadfast love to reach us even, or perhaps most especially, in our depths, in our times of brokenness. Out of the depths we cry to you, O God. And we know you hear us. Thanks be to God. Amen.