When Life Gets Rough

Matthew 26: 36-46 Marianne Niesen July 31, 2011

When I planned themes and sermons for worship last November (really!) I had what I thought then was a good idea. I’d spend time in July on some of the ‘great prayers of the Bible.’ So I initially planned a whole series – but, of course, that was before I knew Tyler was coming as our Associate Pastor or that I would be on a retreat in mid-July. So, instead of a focused ‘series,’ I have done several of the ‘great prayers’ over several weeks – with a break in between. In early July, I focused on the Lord’s Prayer. Last week, during Christmas in July, we looked at Mary’s great Magnificat. And today, my thought was to focus on Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane.

Then . . . I began to re-think that. After all, we are finally getting summer. Most of us have thoughts of picnics and time at the lake and enjoying the few ‘lazy hazy crazy days of summer’ we probably have left. Who wants to be reminded of sadness and despair and betrayal? Who wants to think about Holy Week again? Who wants to focus on a darkened garden where the olive trees arch overhead with gnarled arms and frightening shapes? Who wants to think about a time when ‘the way grows drear’ and shadows deepen? So, I resolved to find something less heavy for today.

And then, I got a call from Su DeBree, letting me know that after the senior high camp at Luccock, one of the campers – just 16 years old - who had been hiking to the falls near the camp, fell to his death. It was an accident – an accident that plunged a family and the entire Bozeman United Methodist Church community into overwhelming grief. Luke’s funeral was last Thursday but the grieving will be long lasting. And then, like you, I heard about the gunman in Norway, who bombed a building in Oslo and then traveled to an island where he literally stalked and gunned down people attending a leadership camp. Most of them were teenagers. And though they had names we have trouble pronouncing, we can identify with the overwhelming sadness and pain of their parents and friends. We’ve all heard that ‘things like that don’t happen here’ – we’ve probably even said it a time or two – and then something does happen and we must figure out how to go on. How to make some sense of it. We hear talk about the debt ceiling and wonder how it will impact our own individual plans for the future. It may be summer but, have you noticed, that life keeps happening?

As much as we might like to take a break from hard stuff and spend a summer focusing on ‘sweetness and light,’ complaining mostly about the weather, life just isn’t like that. It all drove me back to ‘Plan A.’ Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane is one of the rare times, we get a glimpse of Jesus actually praying. With the ‘Lord’s Prayer,’ Jesus taught others to pray and there are times in scripture when we are told Jesus ‘went off by himself’ to pray but here, we actually see it. By this time in the gospel, we, as readers, know that things are moving toward a crescendo. Tension has built. From a purely human perspective, we sense anxiety in Jesus and in his friends. We know they have all just shared a meal together – and a rather dramatic one at that. And then they go to the Garden on the Mount of Olives. The scene is heavy, dark, overwhelming – and oh-so-human. Listen . . . from The Message, Matthew 26: 36-46.

A few moments ago, we sang Precious Lord written by Thomas A. Dorsey who is now known as the ‘father of gospel music.’ This was not the Tommie Dorsey of Big Band fame. Precious Lord was written by ‘Georgia Tom,’ a struggling musician who had just received word that his wife and infant son had died. From that abyss of darkness and grief came the hymn Precious Lord. [1] Jesus’ prayer in the Garden was his version of Precious Lord. By all accounts, Jesus was facing death. It was a time of crisis. And it was a heavy crisis. An overwhelming crisis. A ‘worst-case-scenario’ crisis. We have them too. When those kinds of things happen to us or around us, what do we need to know – about God, about ourselves? I think things get real basic at moments like that. What do we need most of all? We need to know we are not alone. You see, in the end, prayer is not a grand bargaining scheme . . . if this cup passes, I’ll do X; if she survives, I’ll go to church; if I am cured, I’ll exercise. Or – in the face of Norwegian terrorism or a young person’s accidental death – prayer is not about reaching a point of resignation to something called God’s will.

Too often, I’m afraid, our definitions of prayer fall along those lines. Prayer is part of our ‘strategic plan’ for dealing with life. That’s not all bad. But, most often, the prayer we really need when things get rough tends to erupt from a precious-Lord-take-my-hand kind of place. We need an embrace more than an action plan . As I reflected on all of this, I remembered a prayer-poem I had read years ago. Amazingly, I was able to find it amidst my many shelves of many books. It is entitled The Last Prayer of Petition Ever (written between New York and Chicago 35,000 feet up). In other words – what we know as ‘cruising altitude.’ It was written over 30 years ago by John Shea, a native Chicagoan and Catholic priest. Henri Nouwen acclaimed his work like this: These prayer poems . . . are deeply religious and deeply rooted in our contemporary life experience . . . they are serious but full of humor, pointing to deep meanings, but staying very close to the street on which we live. [2] Here it is:

Sigmund Freud has put me wise

That God is merely the me

Afraid to face the exploding crash of a 747

From the inside.

Also it is common knowledge

That doctors reserve the back wards

For people who daddy God for daily bread.

Of course, theologians, always the last to know,

Keep asking for little red wagons

While everyone else is buying them at Sears.

Heaven is not stormed by my “gimmes.”

I no longer beg God

“to make mine enemies

the footstool under my feet.”

I am busy with the upholstering myself.

My prayer life has taken a collegial,

Adult, Vatican IIish turn.

I do not beseech a mercy or beg an intercession

(needless to say importuning is out)

but consult with the Senior Partner

on affairs personal, social, and cosmic.

So it is

I wonder who was addressed

When in the sudden drop of an air pocket

My heart relocated to the space behind my teeth

And someone sitting in my seat screamed,

“O my God, don’t let the plane fall!” [3]

You’ve heard it said that ‘there are no atheists in a fox hole.’ I suspect there are some atheists who might disagree but the point is the same. Times of crisis and pain often drive us – even in spite of ourselves – to reach for something or, better, Someone greater than ourselves. When all the theologizing goes away, we just want to believe we are not alone. And, I believe, that is the bedrock of all prayer. We are not alone. We may not be able to define or describe God; we may not even want a picture of the Divine but, when push comes to shove, we do want to know our lives have meaning and that we matter. One of the most common tributes people pay to those who have died is to say . . . Joe or Jane or Sally or Chuck will never be forgotten. And yet, we know that human beings do forget and life moves on. So, the underlying and bigger truth in it all is to trust that God – however we name God – will not forget. That there is a God who holds us all in love – in our pain and in our challenges, in our lives and in our deaths – for all eternity.

And that, it seems to me, is precisely what Jesus knew. At that most vulnerable of times, he went to the Garden to talk to God. Not to convince God of anything and not to talk God into or out of anything. I believe that what he needed most in that moment was the same thing we all need. To know he was not alone. I know that we have traditionally read this scene as Jesus’ acceptance of God’s will. As he prayed that there would be another outcome, he finally realized there was no way out. Violence would win the day and he would suffer. And, in fact, we live in a world where violence often wins the day and the innocent too often do suffer. Accidents happen. Injustice erupts. It happens over and over and over. But, that isn’t God’s will – God’s manipulation of things to teach us lessons. No, that is the reality of life in an imperfect world. Even Jesus had to face it. And, the thing that enabled him to meet his betrayer, to face the authorities, to confront death, was the awareness that, in it all, God was with him. Even when the others slept, someone stayed awake and noticed.

The thing that has helped me, more than anything else, when confronting this subject of ‘God’s will,’ is a eulogy delivered by the great preacher William Sloane Coffin, for his son, Alex, who died in a car accident when he was just 24. He was killed driving too fast after drinking too much. His car went off the road and plunged into the river. He wrote:

When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my sister’s house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, “I just don’t understand the will of God.” Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. “I’ll say you don’t, lady!” I said.

For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fist around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths . . . The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is “it is the will of God.” Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break. [4]

When Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, he went to God, his Abba, whom he expected to be there. If there is nothing else we learn here, let us learn at least this . . . that God is with us. That as we face the unexpected trajectories and inevitable tragedies of life, God is there. We are accompanied. We are not alone. Jesus teaches us a prayer of trusting in and resting in God’s presence. It seems to me, when life gets rough, that is perhaps the best thing of all to know. That this Precious Lord of ours takes our hands and leads us on, hears our cry and hears our call and, in the end, leads us home.

[3] Ibid., p. 18.