The Rev. Noah Van Niel
St. John the Evangelist
February 25th, 2018
Lent II (B): Genesis 17:1-7, 15-16; Psalm 22:22-30; Romans 4:13-25; Mark 8:31-38
Hold on just a little while longer / Everything will be alright
I learned that spiritual in my college Gospel choir, and it comes, like most spirituals, out of the experience of slavery and oppression Africans underwent in these United States. And in its simple melody and refrain are housed a kernel of confidence that defies explanation. For how could anyone living through an experience as awful as slavery not be crushed in body and spirit, let alone trust, believe, sing that “everything will be alright?” It is a song of victory for the simple fact that it was being sung at all. It is a song of strength and power and endurance. It is a song of faith.
It is that kind of faith, born from the womb of adversity, forged in the fires of affliction and 
tested in a world full of strife that gives these spirituals such a lasting legacy. It is a faith that saves people from giving up and serves as the foundation for our entire religion. It is the faith personified in Abraham, a man so famous for his faith that he became the father of the faithful. It was his defining characteristic and the key to the covenant that God made with him and his descendants. And that faith, embodied in him and inherited by us, is the key not just to our salvation but our survival.
For those of you who came to our first class on The Bible last week (second class is after the 10am service today!) you’ll remember we talked a lot about the covenant that God made with Abraham. It is a three part covenant: I will be God to you; I will make you the father of many nations; and I will give you a land of your own. It is this three part covenant that God says is “everlasting,” — nothing Abraham or his descendants could do would ever revoke it. It can never be broken.
Faith in this covenant and whether it will be upheld by God serves as the central drama of the Old Testament because over and over again it is tested by the circumstances the people of Israel find themselves in. How are those promises possible, God? We are slaves in Egypt, how will you give us our own land? We are conquered by foreign empires, God, how are we still your people? It was that way from the moment the covenant is made. As Abraham laughs, “You will make my descendants more numerous than the stars? Ha! I am old and my wife is notoriously barren! How’s that going to work? How’s this going to work, God? Because I can’t see a way forward.”
How often is that our question too? How often do we find ourselves in situations that seem impossibly bleak, where we look into a future that is not just cloudy but opaque? Where we say, there is no way forward; I have weighed all the outcomes and the good ones aren’t possible and the possible ones aren’t good. Whether it was a longed for seemingly impossible child for Abraham and Sarah; a longed for but seemingly impossible freedom for the people of Israel enslaved in Egypt; a longed for but seemingly impossible liberation for African slaves brought forcibly to this country so that we might build a nation on their backs; to a longed for but seemingly impossible end to the barrage of bullets piercing through the halls of our homes and our schools and on our streets; to the longed for but seemingly impossible way forward through grief when we have lost, in a cruel instant, a beloved friend, father, husband, child of God. There have been countless moments through history and countless moments in our own lives where the situation seems so hopeless that we wonder how God will keep up his end of the bargain, how God will keep his promise that “I will be God to you.” Often it feels like that promise is forgotten or forsaken or just impossible. When we ask again and again and again: “Where are you God? You said you’d be here.”
When I was young I had what I imagine is a common experience to many of you. It was before the age of ubiquitous cell phones and so meetings, or pick-ups after school, were scheduled ahead of time and adhered to because there was no easy way to get a message to the person otherwise. One afternoon, after some after-school fun, I was to be picked up by my mother who was always right on time. But that day she wasn’t. And it doesn’t take more than a few minutes of sitting there for your mind to start playing some pretty nasty tricks on you. Did she forget me? Does she not love me anymore? Did something happen to her? Doesn’t she know how alone I feel? How scared I am? You watch every car coming around the corner with a desperation that borders on panic, and when you finally see that familiar make and model coming towards you the relief is palpable but so too is the anger that blossoms from fear: “Where were you? You said you’d be here.” My mom probably wasn’t more than 20 minutes late, stuck in traffic or something. But the fear that the promise that was made in love, that unbreakable vow that she would always be there, a promise that your life is predicated on, is actually not as solid as you thought, that fear doesn’t need long to take hold of us.
We’ve all been there. And we’ve all been there with God. Abraham was there with God. The slaves were there with God. And it is in those moments that faith is all that we have to keep us going. This is a faith we struggle to maintain at times because in our human relationships, bad things do happen. There are times when something terrible happens and your parents can’t pick you up from school or, like ten days ago, you’re not there for your parents to pick up. So it’s only natural to think the same thing applies to our relationship with God. That something can happen and actually break that covenant, nullify that promise and make it not so “everlasting.”
And it is in to that void, that void brought on by the horrors of the human condition, that God sends Jesus Christ and the gift of The Resurrection. To show us that the boundaries of God’s playing field stretch far beyond what we understand our boundaries to be. So we could see that even when we feel abandoned, alone and afraid, even when we feel like we’re sitting on a curb and no one is coming to pick us up, God is still there, holding up His end of the bargain by holding us in love. That even in death, the most hopeless, irreversible situation we can imagine, we are still well within the bounds of his care. That even on the cross or in the tomb, God has not forsaken us. Jesus tries to alert his followers to this gift–three times in the Gospel of Mark he tries to teach his disciples about what was coming. But even he can’t get it through their thick skulls because it requires such a radical re-understanding of how God rewards the faith of his followers. There will soon come a time, he is trying to tell them, when all your hopes are dashed, when all your faith feels forgotten, when life ends in what feels like defeat not victory. There will be crosses to bear and there will be pain and anguish and grief, but there will be resurrection too. “Jesus began to teach his disciples that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected…and be killed, and after three days, rise again.” Jesus’ death was “necessary” so that we could see that even in times of despair, times of impossible darkness, God’s covenant truly is everlasting. For it is the God who “gives life to the dead, and calls into existence things that do not exist,” that can make a way out of no way, can transform hopelessness into hope, darkness into light. Faith means trusting in His promise despite all the odds. To believe that the covenant God made with Abraham really does apply to you and really is unbreakable; to believe in the promise of the Resurrection so that you know even a lost life is not a life lost. It is the same kernel of faith that allowed an entire race of people who were abused for generation after generation and who still bear the scars of their subjugation to “hold on just a little while longer.” It is to be able to say, not with naiveté or denial but with honesty and conviction, “God, I see no way out of this, I see no way forward. Your covenant feels broken, your promises feel forsaken and I feel forgotten, but ‘hoping against hope,’ through tears and fears and anger and grief and pain and loss, though I sit in the very valley of the shadow of death, still I will sing: “everything will be alright.”