O come, O come, Emmanuel. Amen.
Help is on the way. When you’re in a difficult situation, those five words can make all the difference – help is on the way. When I was in college, I was involved in a pretty bad car accident. A vehicle crossed the center line and hit me head on. I wasn’t able to walk on my right leg for about 4 months after it was severely broken, but, luckily, I was fine. I remember not knowing what to do though – because of my leg, I couldn’t physically get out of the car. But someone came over to the car and told me “I’ve called 911, help is on the way.” The sound of those sirens was one of the most reassuring things I’ve ever heard.
Perhaps
you’ve heard the story about American prisoners of war in World War II Germany.
After Victory Day, even though the prisoners were still imprisoned, there was
exuberant celebration when the news came over the radio. They knew that help
was on the way; they know that their current predicament would soon be over.
Knowing that help is on the way can transform a frightening, uncertain, and
lonely situation into one of hope and strength.
The
message that “help is on the way” is what this week’s Collect is anticipating:
Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us. This prayer
goes back to the 700s and draws on both Psalm 80 and chapter 12 of Hebrews. It’s
a prayer of urgency, as it does not begin with the normal address of “Gracious
God” or “Almighty Father,” or anything like that. No, this prayer gets right
down to business, naming that we need help and we need it now – Stir up your
power, O Lord. It’s sort of like when you see some disaster coming, the plate
is about to get knocked off the table – we don’t say “Excuse me, I don’t me to interrupt,
sir, but would you please mind the plate on the edge of the table.” No. We
shout, “Look out.” And that’s what this prayer is doing – there is no time for
pleasantries. This is a bold plea for God’s intervention.
This
prayer has an interesting cultural impact as well. In England, the Sunday on
which this Collect is used is known as “Stir Up Sunday,” not because everyone
is getting their horses ready for riding with stirrups, but because it was on
this Sunday that you had to stir up your pudding. You know, the figgy pudding
that those carolers at your door are asking for. They won’t go until they get
some. The pudding recipe takes a long time, and needed to be stirred every once
in a while as it sat. Then, on Christmas, you’d warm it up and enjoy. This
prayer became a reminder to everyone to make sure they were stirring the
pudding. Obviously, that wasn’t the original intention of the prayer, but it’s
come to offer not only a godly plea for help, but also a culinary reminder. And
just as the pudding needs to be stirred to come out right, the disorder of this
work needs to stirred up and healed by God’s bountiful grace and mercy.
The
question for us is – do we trust that help is on the way? I’ve preached a few
times in the past year about the idea of “enchantment,” and you’re probably
going to hear of that theme woven into sermons over the next month or so. I’ll
be teaching a preaching class at Hood Seminary the first week of January that
will focus on preaching and enchantment.
By
enchantment, I don’t necessarily mean believing in fairies or unicorns, rather,
enchantment is being open to possibilities that are not currently present and visible.
Enchantment is about the humility that comes from knowing that we do not know
it all. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, “The world is charged with the grandeur
of God.” In other words, there is more to life than meets the eye. There is
more to the past than history can ever tell. There is more going on all around
us than we can ever be aware of. There is more ahead of us than we can imagine.
Trusting that help is on the way, even if we cannot yet see it, is one aspect
of enchantment.
Our typical lens though is one of reduction.
We tend to reduce the meaning of things, not expand them. Our culture values
explanations more than it does possibilities. Too much of our lives revolve
around what is provable and quantifiable. And so when I tell you that the
distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 91 million miles, no one really questions
that, even though none of us have ever directly made that calculation, and most
of us wouldn’t even begin to know how to. But when I say “The Body and Blood of
our Lord Jesus Christ, given for you,” people have all sorts of questions and
qualifications.
To
be clear, I’m not trying to get into a science versus religion sort of debate,
which really isn’t a debate at all, because both science and religion are on
the same side, both are concerned about the power and pursuit of truth. The
question is why do we trust help that comes from certain places and remain
doubtful about other sources of help. It’s a question of enchantment – when we
pray “Stir up your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us,” are we expecting
that help is on the way?
The
prophet Isaiah in today’s reading speaks of the earth bringing forth its shoots
as a way of understanding God’s work and movement in the world. We know that beneath
the surface, the soil is brimming with life and possibility. A seed is placed
in the ground and it remains out of sight. And yet transformation is happening.
Eventually, life breaks forth in a green shoot. So, Isaiah says, the Lord will
cause righteousness and praise to spring up.
The
thing about enchantment is that there is nothing that I can say or do to
enchant you. If you believe that God is up to something in this world, thankfully,
there is nothing that I can do to make you lose that sense of faith. But, if
you’re not so sure about this enchantment business; if you think that
spirituality is sort of like yoga, something that’s helpful for your mental
well-being, but nothing more; if you think that faith is about what we do in
the world as opposed to what God is doing in the world, well, there is nothing
that I can say to make you think otherwise.
Enchantment
is a bit like love. It’s impossible to make yourself fall in love with someone,
and it’s just impossible to make yourself not love someone, even if you really don’t
want to. Just as love transcends our ability to understand, explain, or
control, it’s the same for being open to possibilities that are beyond our immediate
senses.
What
I can offer though is a description of enchantment that might help you to
experience it. Enchantment, or we can call it faith, openness, or wonder,
happens not through our intellect or wills. We cannot make ourselves open to
wonder through logic or stubbornness. No, enchantment comes through our
attention. This world is a beautiful, wonderful, amazing place, but noticing
those things requires our attention. I’ve quoted the poem many times before, and
I’ll do it again now – Elizabeth Barret Browning wrote, “Earth’s crammed with
heaven, and every common bush afire with God; but only they who see take off
their shoe, the rest sit round and pluck blackberries.” It’s about noticing.
Consider
Psalm 126. If you’re in the habit of praying Noonday Prayer, you know this
Psalm well, as it is used in that liturgy. “When the Lord restored the fortunes
of Zion, then were we like those who dream. Then was our mouth filled with laughter,
and our tongues with shouts of joy.” Those shoots of God’s deliverance had sprung
up and the people recognized it as the Lord doing great things for them. Their attention
was on God, and so they noticed God’s grace and mercy. It’s like the image of
the iceberg – we think we see the full picture, but we have only a glimpse. We
think our success is because of our hard work, persistent efforts, and innate
intelligence, when, in reality, we find ourselves in a situation for success
that we did not create, supported by people whom we are not in control of, and
with resources that we did not obtain on our own. It’s about where we put our
attention. If we only look inward, that will limit our vision and diminish our
sense of enchantment.
The
Psalmist recognized that their mouth was filled with laughter and their tongue
with shouts of joy. Notice the passive voice. The Psalmist knows that they did
not fill their own mouth with laughter, they did not bring about their own
salvation. They notice that the dry watercourses of the Negev are flowing with
water. The dry rivers flow with water just as the faces that had been tearful become
exuberant with singing.
This
is why the Church encourages us to pray. It’s not that God needs our prayers, but
we need to be trained in attentiveness. We need to learn what help looks like so
that we’ll recognize it when it arrives. In reading Scripture, we come and see
that truth, that though we go out weeping, it is possible to come again with
joy. Sins can be forgiven and deaths can be resurrected. In prayer, we pay
attention to things that we overlook in the busyness of life. We notice the
beauty that surrounds us. We make connections we had ignored. We receive nudges
of hope and peace.
And
though I can’t make you believe, I can’t enchant the world for you, I will encourage
you to leave the door open to those moments when something happens that you can’t
explain. Most of us have moments of doubt, and that’s okay. But most of us also
have moments of faith, so trust those are as real as your doubts. For some
reason, we tend to give more attention to what we doubt than what we are confident
about. When you catch those sparkles of grace, hold onto them and believe them.
The
Psalmist notes that they were like those who dream. Dreams are all about possibility
and wonder. Dreams are about our deepest hopes and longings. What do you hope
for? What is your dream for this world? We use the term “dream” to mean
something that is not yet, but we hope will be. Our dreams are held in the
hands of God, the God who is on the way. And those dreams are coming true if we
have eyes to notice mercy in places of brokenness and love in times of fear.
Paying
attention to that which is on the way matters because it trains us to notice when those
dreams become a reality. You might know that what is, perhaps, the most famous
speech in recent history was not planned as such. On August 28, 1963, Martin
Luther King stood in front of the Lincoln Memorial to make a speech. It was a
speech about a bad check that America had written to African Americans. Read
the speech and you’ll find language about promissory notes, insufficient funds,
and moral bankruptcy. King intended to give a speech using economic language to
speak of injustice. And, by all accounts, it was a fine speech. But no one was
captivated by it. No one was enchanted by the possibility of something new happening.
The
speech wasn’t quite falling flat, but it wasn’t stirring anything up. And so,
the Gospel singer, Mahalia Jackson, who was seated near King, said to him, “Tell
them about the dream, Martin.” She had, previously, heard him speak in the terms
of Psalm 126, about being like those who dream. If you watch the speech, you’ll
notice that King leaves his prepared remarks and delivers the speech that
ignited a nation’s imagination and enchanted our collective conscience with new
possibilities. He shifted his speech, proclaiming that help was on the way, testifying
to a God who is coming with that famous line, “So even though we face the difficulties
of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.”
Beloved,
there remains a dream for wholeness, for peace, for justice, for love, for all things
to be made well. And that dream is alive and coming on earth as it is in heaven
because this world is charged with the grandeur of God, enchanted with
possibilities that we can only begin to imagine. And so, as we pray “Stir up
your power, O Lord, and with great might come among us,” we trust that, indeed,
help is on the way.
