The End of Our Rope is God’s Starting Point
by Griff Martin
A Sermon for the Beloveds of First Austin: a baptist community of faith
For Ash Wednesday
February 17, 2021
*This document comes from an oral manuscript.
One year ago today were all gathered together in the Chapel for Ash Wednesday and it was actually standing room only for our service, a great mix of us, our nurses who helped out at Midweek and our neighbors. We were all ready for our usual Lent or so we thought. Little did we know the clusters that awaited us.
If we could go back, what would we have said to ourselves about the upcoming year? This is what I thought about yesterday afternoon as we once again turned all that we had planned for a special service and changed it once again for another new reality (this is becoming our pastoral speciality these days).
If we had a time machine and could go back a year, would we warn ourselves about the upcoming pandemic from that Coronavirus thing we were starting to read more about in the paper and the fear it would bring to our world in just a few days? Would we warn ourselves that we were going to lose members of our family and church and because of this disease we would not be able to say goodbye or attend their funerals or hug their grieving families? Would we want to know the loneliness that was about to creep into our lives and make a permanent home? Would the parents among us want to know we were about to become full time working parents who were also homeschooling their children and also their sole play mates?
Would we want to know that in the midst of that we were also going to come face to face with our whiteness in a way that brought us to our knees? That our fears about our finances and employment would be a daily fear? Would we want to know that we would not worship in person for the next year? Would we want to be warned about another grueling horrible election cycle, actually that one we probably could have guessed? Would we want to know about the capital insurrection and how gutted and scared that was going to make us feel in our already raw hearts?
Would we want to know how many of our best plans would suddenly be changed overnight? Would we want to know that we were all going to face anxiety, loneliness and uncertainty like we had never before known? Would we want to know how much of what we had held as normal would be no longer?
Or just this week just when we thought we saw the end of this tunnel, would we want to know that we were going to face one of the worst winter storms Austin had ever seen and that half of us were not going to have power and the other half was going to have to live with as little power as they could to try and help their neighbors? That we would be in fear of losing water and would literally not be able to get out our driveways? As Jonathan More perfectly put it, it’s like we got thrown from our COVID jail straight into shu.
I don’t know about your but this is the end of my rope.
God hear our prayers, God help us.
The texts assigned to use this day are mostly laments and prayers of confession… I think we could have left them out easily and just let your write your own right now. In fact that might be what you need for worship right now, write a lament and cry it out.
The Psalm is intriguing… I had written a whole homily on the Psalm I wanted to preach, in a nutshell I wanted to remind us how wrong we get this Psalm. Psalm 51 we always say it’s a Psalm of David following his abuse of Bathsheba, that this is his prayer of forgiveness. I don’t think it’s that. If it is it’s a horrible confession and apology because he never apologizes to Bathsheba or his family. I think we say it’s for David because it’s too real and too raw for us to face any other way.
But it’s a beautiful prayer that we need to reclaim, it’s a prayer that names a really broken sinful reality that none of us really want to face and then calls forth recreation into more. Today I am thinking of it less on an individual level and more on a communal level, what does it mean for us to just name our current reality, because if you are like me then the simple truth is you are at the end of your rope or maybe better put this last cluster, this storm, has us willing to say it “now I am at the end of my rope.”
We are crying out mercy and surrender.
The good news is the end of our rope is one of God’s favorite starting places. God loves mercy and surrender.
The beauty of this Psalm though, and why I believe it is chosen for this day is that there is more to it. It is more than just a confession, it’s a plea for re-creation as well…. This is who we are, this is our reality today and this is who we want to be, this is what we want our world to be.
And with that comes the magnificent promise that God’s love and mercy and grace is so all, that it can “take the dust of our broken hearts and generate abundant life.”
Lent is a journey of just that. And my prayer is that this Lent will be a time of truth and beauty, of recreation for each of us.
We need it and our world needs it.
I don’t know that tonight we need to focus a lot on the brokenness and the death, that reality seems too real today. Instead maybe we focus on this, today is the end of our rope but it’s the start of the process of Resurrection. Resurrection always begins in the broken places.
Yesterday I was lamenting to my aunt, who is about as real and faithful as any Christian I know and I was telling her I have no clue what to preach tonight and she said, “Griff remind them that Jesus wins. Maybe just tell them that truth..”
Which is exactly what the disciples did… when they looked back and told the story they told us the one truth we needed to know, Jesus is victorious, love wins.
It’s the deepest truth we know, it’s why we are Jesus followers because we believe that Jesus wins, just like the disciples did when they followed him to Jerusalem and right into the brokenness knowing that somehow Jesus was going to do his thing once again, they had seen him do it over and over again with fishes and loaves, with dead friends and bleeding women, with story after story, with stormy seas, with demon possessed graveyards, with water and wine and fussy wedding guests, with lepers and paralytics, with grieving widows and scared followers…. He took the end of the rope and gave new life.
Tonight we start Lent, tonight we say to Jesus we are willing to walk into the dark scary reality with you because we trust you that there is More.
This service is supposed to have two elements as we commit ourselves to this journey, the imposition of ash and communion. If I have learned anything in the past year, one of the things I have learned is to trust you all, you can improvise and make moments meaningful. I don’t know what that looks like for you today, but I trust that in this moment or some moment today you will find a way to improvise these elements. Maybe you took some bread and wine and lipstick in front of a mirror and say a prayer, confess the end of your rope prayer, draw a cross on your forehead or hand and commit to making the full journey with Jesus this Lent and then take communion as a promise. You can be more traditional and pray a prayer of confession and then put the cross on your forehead and take communion as grace.I trust you to do whatever feels right for you at this moment, a cross- communion- a prayer- a promise.
Whatever you do just don’t give up- Jesus wins and we will walk with him all the way to the Victory of Love.
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