Always Working

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III
Manassas Presbyterian Church
Manassas, Virginia
June 7, 2009

Always Working
John 5:1-17

Clouds gather on the horizon,
thick black clouds.
The residents know a severe storm is coming;
the weather channels have been warning them
for the past 24 hours.
Food and water are stored,
windows boarded up,
fresh batteries put in flashlights and radios.
Lightning flashes, clouds collide,
and then a funnel drops from the sky and touches the ground.
It gathers energy as it races through the fields
on its way to the center of town.
It takes only a few moments
for the tornado to do its devastating work,
leaving a path of death and destruction:
an entire community leveled,
nothing remains.

A five-year old tells her mother she doesn’t feel well,
that her head hurts.
Her mother takes her to the doctor,
who, after a battery of tests,
has to tell the mother and father
that their daughter, their little girl,
has a tumor in her brain,
and that she will not live to
celebrate her sixth birthday.

A man buys a gun;
a semi-automatic gun that was not designed for sport,
but designed with only one purpose in mind:
to kill, to kill a human.
A few days later,
the man walks into a building on a college campus;
or perhaps it is a high school classroom,
or maybe it’s the place where he worked until last month
when he was laid off.
We all know the end of the story;
it has become all too familiar.

Tragedy surrounds us,
suffering, pain:
senseless tragedy,
senseless suffering,
senseless pain.

There are times when it seems like it is all too much.
When we want to lift up our voices in anguish to God,
cry out with the lament that Matthew and Mark tell us
were Jesus’ final words on the Cross
“My God, My God, why have you forsaken us?”

Why do the innocent suffer?
Why do the good die?

We question God’s will and God’s purposes.
There are even times when we may wonder
whether God is even present,
whether he has turned away,
whether God could be treating us as he once treated
the children of Israel so long ago:
“When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers,
I will not listen.”
(Isaiah 1:15)

But our Lord Jesus Christ teaches us
that God does not turn from us,
God does not abandon us,
God does not forsake us,
God does not stop listening to us.
Never.

God is always present,
God is always there.
And God does not stand idly by.
God is, as we heard our Lord say in the lesson,
“always working”,
Jesus is “always working”:
working in our lives
working “for our welfare,
and not for our harm,
to give us a future with hope.”
(Jeremiah 29:11)

Bad things happen;
Accidents happen;
Storms happen.
The will of God is not what makes them happen;
the will of God is to help us get through them.

It is illness, sickness, and disease that we struggle with the most.
When a disease attacks even the healthiest body,
especially when disease strikes down a young person,
that’s when we really wonder,
when our faith is really tested.

We don’t understand why a five-year old
would die of a brain tumor.

We can’t comprehend how a twenty-year-old
could learn she’s got lymphoma
with little hope of a cure;

We are stunned when we learn a forty-year-old
who went to the doctor complaining
of a pulled muscle in his lower back
is told that the pain is the result of
cancer of the esophagus,
cancer which has advanced so far
that he has only a few months to live.

In our anguish we lift up our voices to God,
Why? Why?
Why are there such terrible diseases?
Diseases that are so merciless and cruel.
Diseases that elude our best efforts to eradicate them.

In our anguish, we forget about all those illnesses,
all those diseases which we have eradicated,
those diseases for which we now have cures.
The paradox is, that the more successful we are
in finding cures for diseases,
the more difficult it is for us to understand
those that still elude cures.

But in every situation, God is with us.
God is at work.
Jesus is at work,
even in the life of a person with the most insidious disease.
The poet Walt Whitman wrote lines
in a poem that capture perfectly God’s presence:
“I do not ask the wounded person how he feels;
I myself become the wounded person.”
(Song of Myself, 33)

In the humanity of Jesus Christ
God took on our pain and our suffering.
When we suffer, God suffers;
when we feel pain, God feels pain.

The Psalmist understood this when he wrote Psalm 23.
He begins the Psalm by speaking of God in the third person:
“he leads me beside the still waters;
he restores my soul.”
But when the Psalmist walks through
the Valley of the Shadow of Death,
the Psalmist’s relationship with God becomes so intimate,
the presence of God so clear in his life:
“You are with me.”
You comfort me.
You feed me.
You anoint me.”

We may not fully understand,
but God is there,
always there, even in the most horrific circumstances.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, the author of the classic
"When Bad Things Happen to Good People”
--written in response to the death of his 14-year-old son
from an incurable disease--
put it very succinctly when he wrote:
“God does not explain;
God comforts.”
(The Lord is My Shepherd, 110)

The apostle Paul reminds us that we do not walk by facts,
we don’t walk by sight,
we walk by faith.
Or as Gene Barndt said at yesterday’s service for Linda,
“We believe”.
We trust;
we have faith.

The English preacher Leslie Weatherhead has written,
it is a “dim cathedral called human pain.
It is a sacred place….
There are many windows in the cathedral
so we do not walk in black darkness.
And under the eastern window,
beyond which the sun of understanding
rises ever higher in the sky,
is a cross which whispers its eternal message
that God himself in Christ came right down
into our pain and shared it.
He understands how we feel.
He promises that one day we shall understand, too.” (Salute to a Sufferer)

God is present, here and now,
just as he is at all times and in all places.
Jesus Christ is present here and now,
just as he is in all times and all places.

Jesus invites us, all of us,
to come to his table and find peace:
peace in the assurance that God is the ever-present “I am”.

Jesus invites us to come to his table and find nourishment,
find comfort,
find hope.

Come to this table.
Come and be fed.
Come and find peace.
Come, for God in Christ is here,
present, working, as he always is,
so that our cups may always run over.
AMEN