First Reading: 2 Samuel 1:1,17-27, Gospel Reading: Mark 5:25-34
Let us pray: May your word for us and our response to
your word be a place, in your Spirit, of renewal, commitment and hope for us and
for the world O God. Amen.
So, how has your week been? Has it been same old, or has something
completely new happened, something that has seriously impacted your life? Has it been a happy week, or one of great
sadness or a bit of a mixture? Because
that is the reality for us isn’t it?
That our lives are a mix of good and bad, ups and downs. And sometimes the downs seem to take over,
pulling us into places of great pain and heartache, shutting off the light and
extinguishing hope – the deep dark pit that Psalm 130 talks about.
And in many ways the part of David’s life
that we heard about today was in that deep valley. Just to remind us, last week we talked about
the young somewhat bullet proof David – willing to do anything in the hope, the
knowledge of God with him and in him. And he succeeded in defeating Goliath and
going on to great victories in other battles.
He was Saul’s right hand man, both soothing his pain with his music and
delivering him from his enemies with his sword – and in the process developing
a deep and caring friendship with Saul’s son Jonathan. It was never easy and there was quite a bit
of eggshell walking I am sure – but by standards of the day he was blessed and
lauded.
And then it all changed - David went from
the heights to the depths. He has had to
run literally for his life from Saul, with the help of Jonathan, he had to
abandon the high honours and the relatively luxurious living and is now
sheltering in a cave, earning his crust by fighting the foes (as long as they weren’t
Israelites) of the Philistines, those who he had so eloquently and physically
dismissed on the battlefield in what must have seemed a lifetime ago were now
his employers. David’s ‘I can do
anything with God’ attitude that we talked about last week had taken rather a
beating.
What was it, do you think, that kept his
hope alive? What sustained his walk
with God despite all the curve balls that life had thrown at him – I mean did
he ask to be chosen for this life of intrigue and politicking – he could have
been living a very happy and fulfilled life back on the family farm doing what
he did best – protecting the livestock and being part of a God fearing and
loving family. But he was plucked out
into this new life by Samuel, by God – a life of danger and high stakes and
politics.
So there he was now – surviving. And there was yet another body blow to
come. Jonathan, his dearest friend, his
most trustworthy ally was dead - along with his father and his brothers. David’s lament is passionate in its sense of
grief and loss, his acute pain is there for all to see. There is a really interesting point here in
this magnificent piece of Hebrew poetry – David chose to eulogize the two men,
the friend and the king, side by side.
Despite all that Saul had done to him, plotting his death, hounding him
out of the country, despite all of that, David is honoured his king alongside
his soulmate Jonathan.
This past week I attended the funeral of a
twenty year old young woman Alex: she had been a member of our Rendez-vous
group at Knox Church. She had died
unexpectedly, suddenly, from liver failure – with a 12 hour window of
opportunity for a transplant – and a family praying for a miracle by her
bedside as she lay in a coma. That is a
depth of pain for her family that few of us are called on to experience – where
on earth do you find hope for a future in a situation like that?
Yet as I listened to the words of the
liturgy at All Saints Church and as I contemplated the service of celebration
and farewell that we had here on Monday for the life of Joan Madill, I knew a
sense of hope stronger and more powerful that I have ever felt – that in both
the timely and the untimely deaths of our loved ones there is a hope that
encompasses all our pain, all our suffering, all our anger, all our sweet
memories and sense of irreplaceable loss – a hope that nothing on this earth or
beyond, neither time nor space nor anything in creation can ever separate us
from God’s love. And that hope holds us
through the celebrations and tragedies that are almost inevitably part of all
our lives and living.
In a sermon recently posted on his blog,
Jason Goroncy suggests that this hope – the hope that seems cruelly shattered
in the times of tragedy and hopelessness is the place we sit on Easter Saturday
when we often as not find little to live for – all that we seem to have held
safe and dependable and hopeful is no more.
He posits that what holds us together in that Saturday silence of
hopelessness is what he calls the divine memory. When all seems lost, he says, “It is God’s memory of us which makes possible for us
to neither abandon our sorrow nor to surrender the horizon of hope. It is the
memory of God which places a boundary to our hopelessness and our dislocation”[1]
The promise that we are held forever in God’s love is what allows
us to reach blindly into the Easter Sunday hope - God’s memory of us holds us
before we are born, in our life and in our death – and it is this that we hold
desperately to when disaster engulfs us, robbing us of peace and happiness and
all that we hold dear. When all that is
hopeful disappears from our lives we are held close in the divine memory that
is the love of God.
What kept David hope in God alive through
all his trials, what will keep Alex’s family from sinking forever into the pits
of despair at the cruel loss of such a beautiful young woman from their lives –
it is the knowledge that we are not lost to God, even in the worst of moments
when all seems hopeless, pointless we are held in the divine memory of the
crucified Christ whose scarred hands and body proclaims our names before the
living God who loves us.
Jason concludes his writing with some
powerful words of hopefulness which I too would like to finish with:
“And, in the crucified God, we hope together with those who do not
share our hopes, and with those whose hopes for this life remain unfulfilled,
and with those who are disappointed and indifferent, and with those who despair
of life, and with those who have been the enemies of life, and with those who
for whatever reason have abandoned all hope. In and with Christ, we hope and we
remember them before God. In the crucified God, we hope together with the God
who remembers us and who, in remembering us, is our hopeful end.”[2]
Margaret Garland
with thanks to Jason Goroncy
[1]Rev Dr Jason Goroncy http://cruciality.wordpress.com/2012/06/25/hope-and-memory-job-14-1-14-a-sermon/
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