GOD IS FAITHFUL [HESED]

 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Genesis 21:8-21; Romans 6:1b-11; Matthew  10:24-39]

As the time for my departure as your priest winds down from concept to actuality, I have tried to keep a balance between this looming reality and (as we have often said together) “keeping our eyes on the prize”.  In this time, in my preaching and teaching, in my pastoral and administrative leadership, I have struggled (and that is the word) – struggled to keep this balance.  On the one hand, I have not wanted to have this “goodbye” time be the overarching focus between us.  On the other hand, it is important to recognize, celebrate, and give thanks for the partnership and life you and I have been privileged to share.  Nonetheless, for weeks this balancing has kept me from sleeping through the night.  This is a sign that the things in my life are painfully uncertain because under normal circumstances I am a very good sleeper.  Needless to say – at least for me – these past weeks and months have not been normal circumstances.  I honestly have never been at such a point of change and uncertainty.

So, given the fact that next Sunday is my last Sunday with you as your priest, I need to ask you for your help.  I need your help in getting me through this last piece of “goodbye”.  In addition to formalizing our separation in next Sunday’s liturgy, people I have known and worked with through the decades as fellow members of Christ’s Body will also be visiting to join us.  That these former colleagues and parishioners (and perhaps even a former student or two) would make the effort to be with me at this point in my life quite frankly overwhelms me, to the extent that I wish I could deflect the emotional power of it all either by hiring a “stunt man” or producing a cardboard cut-out of my likeness to relieve me from having to show up.  But then again, in this fragile emotional state of mine, I am not sure I would want to face the risk of no one noticing that there was a stunt man or a cardboard cut-out in place!

Added to the intensity of next Sunday, the reality of my family reuniting in this place and at this time guarantees that I will be a visible mess.  In particular, our Latin American family will be here, bringing our eight-month-old granddaughter whom Bev and I haven’t seen since she was a new-born.  And you know what kryptonite my grandchildren are to me!

So, I hope you can see that I need your help.  I need your help with facing this time and experience in some facsimile of balance, viewing it as the tremendous (albeit, overwhelming) gift that it is, because sometimes it all feels like a diabolical stress-test.

So, if you will – by your prayers and your presence, I ask for your assistance in celebrating and in keeping all our eyes on the prize, which (finally) brings me to the point of this sermon: God is faithful.

All week, my usual sermon protocols has been a bust.  I can’t focus on the demanding lessons for this day.  They are so intensely important that at this point I simply don’t have the bandwidth to get to their significance and to tell you what I see and feel about them.  But what has struck me about the propers for this summer solstice Sunday is the Collect for the Day and the words that remind us of what we need to know as we live in and through these strange and demanding times -- in the world, in our nation, and yes, in our St. Philip’s community life.

Specifically, the point I wish to lift up to you comes in the direct petition of this day’s “collecting” prayer: O Lord, make us have perpetual love and reverence for your holy Name – and here comes the meat of the prayer – that you never fail to help and govern those whom you have set upon the sure foundation of your loving-kindness…[1]

The simple message is: God is faithful.

“Loving-kindness” is the English translation for this divine quality.  It comes from the Hebrew term, hesed, but while “loving-kindness” is a sweet, descriptive word, it doesn’t automatically convey the nature and wonder of God’s faithfulness to us.  In the Hebrew context, hesed speaks to God’s “covenanted (promised) faithfulness”.  Yes, God is kind.  It is God’s nature to be kind.  “Loving-kindness” is what and who the Holy One is and what the Holy One does.  However, what can be missed -- or more seriously taken for granted -- is that God has covenanted (contracted) with us always to be faithful to us – come hell or high water.  No matter what, even when we deny God and reject God’s love and life, God is faithful -- to us, his people.  That’s hesed.  No matter how God feels about us, no matter what we do to ignore or deny God, the Creator of all that is will not abandon or divorce the people of God because God is faithful.

St. Paul is, I think, mindful of the reality and ramifications of God’s hesed when he writes about the “foolishness of God”.[2]  To those obstreperous Corinthians he writes: "For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength" – such as in a crucified Messiah, confounding all conventional logic.  Or as I have irreverently expressed this point about God’s hesed, “either God is an idiot for loving us so faithfully; or God is really onto something!”  Mostly, we want to believe the latter – that God is really onto something.

So it is that piously and politely we say: “God is faithful”.  And our lives, lived in trust of God’s faithfulness – even to the extent of “belief” (that is, “giving our hearts to” God) – our lives stand on the “foundation” of God’s eternal faithfulness to all of creation.  John’s gospel says the same thing: “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever “gives their heart” to him should not perish but have eternal life.”[3]

God is faithful.  Hesed.  “Loving-kindness”.

But in reality, and for our parts, we are not that faithful to God or to one another; and a good deal of our “unbelief” (our sequestering our hearts from God) is that for whatever reasons, the promise of God gets delayed.  And in that delay, our faith, our trust in God and in God’s “loving-kindness” gets tested – not infrequently to the breaking point.

“Save us from the time of trial” is the contemporary English translation of that “testing” line in the Lord’s Prayer.  “Save us from the time of trial, and deliver us from evil.”[4]

God is faithful, but the promise of God often gets delayed.  Then what?

A wonderful scriptural story of God’s promise being delayed lies at the heart of today’s Old Testament lesson.  It is the story of God’s two covenanted partners, two old coots: Abraham and Sarah, who have pledged their lives to God’s life and to God’ promise of life.  As you know, at the age of 75, God promised Abraham that he will be the father of a nation of people, whose covenanted job is to be God’s alluring light to the world.  That noble and awesome task is one thing, but the stumbling block to its fulfillment is that Abraham and Sarah are childless.  There is no heir to this covenanted partnership, and the prospect of having a baby when they should be playing shuffleboard in Florida is – as we read in last week’s lesson from Genesis – laughable.

But God is faithful, and it turns out that the redeeming joke (albeit, delayed) is on Sarah and Abraham.  At the age of 90, Sarah conceives, and bears a son.  Of course, paying close attention to this outlandish story, one perceives God’s life-giving sense of humor in that the son of Sarah and Abraham is called “Isaac”, which in Hebrew means “laughter”.  So, one might say that their son, Isaac, was known to his chums as “Chuckles” – Chuck for short.  Hooray for God’s humor and for God’s faithfulness.

But in today’s episode of this family story, there is “trouble in river city”.  The promise that is Isaac is threatened.  The threat stems from Abraham’s panic over God’s promise of a son.  That promise got delayed – delayed to the point that Abraham took the situation into his own hands.

Sarah gives her husband permission to impregnate her servant, Hagar, who in turn produces a son, Ishmael, to be the heir.  But this “solution” in the face of the delayed promise is no solution at all.  As both boys grow into their toddlerhood, Sarah becomes jealously protective of her offspring against Hagar’s child.  And she forces her servant and her son away in a rather nasty and clearly complicated soap opera drama that to this day has unseen human and historical consequences.  Yet, God is faithful – both to Hagar and her son and to Sarah and Isaac.  Messy, disturbing at some levels, nonetheless, the story reveals that God is faithful – even when delayed in actuating the promises.

One of the aspects of my leaving you and this place is what I have mentioned in a recent edition of our newsletter: the NOW, the “News of the Week”.  There is unfinished business between us, and for me that most glaring example of this unfinished business lies in the pastoral needs of this community.  Even though the transition leadership team and I have been in weekly discussion of how to hand-off what I, as your priest, have been pastorally tending, my leaving of what we have been together for ten years, I, nonetheless, have to walk away from the pastoral connections I have had at St. Philip’s.

I can’t tell you how hard this is for me: to let God be God at a moment like this.  But God is faithful, and the promise of God’s caring presence bringing healing and new life to his people here is what needs – what demands – trusting.  That the caring of those who are facing the real test of staying with God and the promise of abundant life in the face of threatening, heart-breaking circumstances is one of those transitional issues that you will need to fill in new and organized ways.  Loving-kindness.  That you will do this, making sure that those under physical or emotional or spiritual duress are not lost and left to be on their own, allows me to let go a little more faithfully of this ministry of care and hope.  But please know that it ain’t easy for me to do this!

It is, may I say, the most pressing element of my leaving both for me personally as your priest and as that designated person who has had the intimate privilege of accompanying many of you in the “time of trial”.  But God is faithful, and in that covenanted faithfulness, there is deliverance from evil (from being on our own), even as there is guidance for new life.

So, for both of us, priest and people, this leaving one another is a hard balance of dealing with the painful reality of saying “goodbye”, yet separating with the gratitude of the new and unexpected life God has given us in this past decade.

Who’d uh thunk it?  God is that faithful, and over our time together we have become the living proof of this promise and of the “loving-kindness” that God’s faithfulness has produced in our midst.

“Though [our] destination is not yet clear” -- either for you or for me, we both can “trust the promise of this opening” and “unfurl [ourselves] into the grace of beginning”.[5]  Because – because God is faithful.  Amen.

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[1] Book of Common Prayer. Collect of the Day: Proper 7; page 230.

[2] 1 Corinthians 1:25.

[3] John. 3:16.

[4] English Language Liturgical Consultation .

[5] John O’Donohue. For a New Beginning.