Sermon: Power to the Faint

Texts: Isaiah 40:21-31

Date: February 5, 2006

Rev. Dee Eisenhauer, Eagle Harbor Congregational Church

A homily in dramatic dialogue form

Meg pounds on Rachel’s front door until Rachel lets her in.

Meg: Rachel, what is up with you?   I have been calling you for days.   Didn’t you get my messages?

Rachel: grunts

Meg: What’s wrong?   Why are you in your pajamas at 3:00 in the afternoon?   No offense, but you look like death warmed over.

Rachel: No offense, Meg, but you sound like a harpy.

Meg: A harpy?

Rachel: Look it up.

Meg: Dear me, I forgot to pack a dictionary in my purse.   Do you mind if I come in and use yours?

R: Knock yourself out.

M: finds dictionary and looks up definition: Harpy: a foul malign creature of Greek mythology that is part woman and part bird; or a predatory or shrewish woman.   I’m a harpy?

R: If the talon fits…

M: Does this mean you want me to leave?

R: Ya think?

M: Well, tough.   I’m your friend.   I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong.  

R:   Grunts.

M: I’ll just make myself comfortable until you get ready to talk.

R: All right —I’ll talk if it’s the only way to get you to go and leave me alone.  

M: It’s the only way.

R:   I’m just so tired.   I’ve hardly been able to get out of bed for three days.   I just get up to go to the bathroom and get more pudding.   But now I’m out of pudding.   So I think I’ll just stay in bed from now on.

M: Are you sick?

R: No.   I just had my physical a week or two ago and all systems are go.

M: What then?

R: I feel completely exhausted from the inside out.   Like it’s too much trouble to breathe or blink.

Voice of Isaiah: Even the youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted…

M: When did you start to feel this way?   Do you remember?

R: It’s been kind of building up.   At first I thought it was just all this rain getting to me.   But wet winters haven’t put me through the wringer like this before.   I think I earned my duck feet years ago—I kind of like rain.  

M: OK, not the weather.   What else is going on?

R: Well, you know my uncle died of lymphoma back in November.   I wasn’t super close to him, but I still felt terrible about it.   He was so young.   Only like 56 years old.   And he was such a nice guy!   He was always laughing and joking around.   He never did a mean thing to anyone.   I just don’t get why he would have to die when so many horrible people live until they are ninety-whatever.

M: Seems kind of random.

R: Random is right.   I guess it got me thinking about how random the whole universe seems.   My sweet uncle the accountant dies while your creepy uncle goes right on designing bombs for the department of defense.   New Orleans gets hit by two hurricanes and then a tornado this week right where they were rebuilding.   We have rivers flooding while the farmers in Oklahoma are watching their land turn into desert.   This life is totally random.

M: Hey wait, I said your uncle’s death seems random.   I don’t think the whole universe is random.

R: If it’s not random, what is it?

M:   Uhhh…It’s not random, it’s ordered.   It’s created.  

R: Created?   Created by whom?

Voice of Isaiah: Have you not known?   Have you not heard?   Has it not been told you from the beginning?   Have you not understood from the foundations of the earth?

M: The Creator.

R: You’re talking God.

M: Well, yeah.

R: Are you one of those Intelligent Design freakazoids?

M: If you mean, do I think they should teach fundamentalist religion in Ms. Beemer’s high school Biology class, then no.   I’m not one of those freakazoids.   But if you mean do I believe that God has something to do with the universe and with my life, then yes, I am one of those freakazoids.   But I really prefer the simpler label of freak, if you don’t mind.

R: OK, freak.   What makes you think there’s a God somewhere in this mess?

M: I learned about God as a kid, just like you.   We were in Sunday school together.   It was like lesson one, day one, page one of the Bible.   God created the heavens and the earth.

Voice of Isaiah: Have you not known?   Have you not heard?   The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.

R: So you learned it as a kid.   Big deal.   Do you believe everything you heard as a kid?   You still think the moon is made of green cheese?

M:   Of course not.   The moon, as everyone knows, is not made of green cheese but of lovely yellow Wensleydale cheese.   No, I don’t believe everything I heard as kid.   But there were credible witnesses teaching us that stuff.

R: Credible witnesses?

M: People who lived what they taught.   Mrs. Seales, do you remember her?   She didn’t just teach about God’s love, she lived it.   I’ve hardly ever met anyone who was as accepting of everyone as she was.   She taught us that song, do you remember?   “Love, love,   love; that’s what it’s all about.   God loves us we love each other, mother, father, sister brother.   Everybody sing and shout! Cuz that’s what it’s all about.   It’s about love, love, love…”

R: Enough already!   I liked Mrs. Seales, too, but she was probably just parroting what she heard from her Sunday School teachers.  

M: I’m just saying that she wasn’t just talk.   She acted like somebody with a Creator who was involved in creating her life.   Every day.   Remember that one day she was madder n’ hops at her mom who was getting senile and had flushed her brand-new expensive hearing aids down the toilet?   She was mad, but she asked us all to help her pray for patience.   And when she prayed for patience, she could be patient.  

R: There has got to be more than looking at a sweet Sunday school teacher to convince me that God’s real.  

M: I agree.   If I hadn’t felt God’s presence myself I wouldn’t be so convinced.

R: Oooh, “feeling God’s presence.”   My dear freakish friend, when have you felt God?  

M: You were with me once when I did.   Remember when we were camping in the Cascades a couple summers ago?   There was that one clear night in the meadow when it was so nice out that we decided not to pitch our tent but to sleep under the stars?   I must have been awake half the night looking at those stars and feeling like God was hovering inches over my face.

Voice of Isaiah: Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these?   He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because God is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing…He stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in.

R: Meg, I was with you, so why didn’t you tell me you were having some kind of religious experience?

M: Maybe I was afraid you would think I was a freak or something.

R: Fair enough.  

M:   I wouldn’t say I can “feel” God every day, but it’s happened often enough that I believe God’s leading me even when I don’t have that wowie-zowie goosebumps feeling.  

R: I still don’t believe in God.   And I’m pretty sure God doesn’t believe in me.   It’s not just that I don’t think God exists—I don’t think God knows I exist.

Voice of Isaiah: Why do you say, O Jacob, and speak, O Israel , “My way is hidden from the Lord, and my right is disregarded by my God”?

M: Oh, Rachel.   No wonder you don’t want to get out of bed.

R: I feel completely, totally alone.   Like whatever I do doesn’t matter to anyone.   If God’s around, he must be hibernating with the bears, blissfully unaware of the stinking mess down here.

Voice of Isaiah: God does not faint or grow weary.

M: Rachel, you’re not alone.   God’s not asleep.   And you didn’t always think this way.     Do you remember when you used to take me with you to those big family retreats up at Fort Worden ?   Remember the year we were 11—the year we were really into roller blading?

R: I’m really tired.   Get to the point.

M: One afternoon we were skating for hours.   We were having a great time.   But when it started getting dark we were a long way from our cabin.   It was uphill all the way back.   We hadn’t brought any shoes or flashlights with us.   We were so exhausted—remember?

R: I remember.   It seemed like such a big deal, like we would never make it back.   I   just wanted to sit down and cry.   I think that’s the last time I felt as tired as I do now.

M: We said a prayer.   Probably because we remembered how Mrs. Seales prayed for patience.   We prayed for strength to get home.

R: Yeah.   A couple of goofy kids, praying in roller skates.

M: Do you remember what happened?  

R: The wind came up.

M: The wind came up off the beach and we kind of opened up our coats and it felt like we almost sailed home with that strong wind at our backs.

R: Do you really think God stirred up the wind for a couple of dumb kids on the Washington coast?   If God’s up there, we couldn’t be more than a couple of specks to him.

Voice of Isaiah: It is God who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers.

M: I don’t know if God stirred up the wind for us.   I don’t know.   I don’t know how God could create and name the stars and still know you and me.

Voice of Isaiah: His understanding is unsearchable.

M: But I believe that God was answering our prayer.  

Voice of Isaiah: His understanding is unsearchable.

M: It wasn’t the wind that we felt on our backs that mattered so much that day.   It was the wind that God stirred up inside us that mattered—our knowing that God cared about two worn out kids, and helped us get home.

Voice of Isaiah: God gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless.  

M:   You and I both knew it.   We talked about it later.   We both told our moms.   Remember?

R: I remember.

M: Rachel, the fact that we were kids doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.   Kids understand more about the world than adults do in some ways.   They’re not so cynical.

R: Yeah.

M: I think you need to get back in touch with your inner freak.   The one who knew that God had her back through all the weirdly random pains and incredibly indiscriminate joys we get in this….

Voice of Isaiah: Unsearchable?

M: Unsearchable life.

R:   What can I do?   I’m so drained.   And I’m still out of pudding.

M: I’ll go get you some pudding later.   Meanwhile, let’s do what we did when we were kids.   Let’s be quiet and pray.   We went from being kids with wheels to kids with wings, because we prayed.   God will probably not solve our problems in a minute; we might have to wait.   But I feel sure that God knows we’re here right now and in need of help.   You and me.   Meg and Rachel.   Little grasshoppers who need the wings of eagles.

Voice of Isaiah: Those who wait for the Lord will renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.