The Best Part Was Playing Along the Banks of a Fair Sized Stream

Epiphany 2a 2005

16 January

Isa. 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-10

I Cor. 1:1-9; John 1:29-41

Jack Hardaway

MIRE

I was about eight years old before my parents decided we needed to start going to Church. Before that my parents played tennis most Sunday Mornings.

My brother, Geoffrey, and I would tag along and spend the morning playing in the woods and fields and streams that abounded around the tennis courts.

The best part was playing along the banks of a fair sized stream.

This one time Geoffrey and I became pretty much stuck in the deep mud on the side of the river.

We couldn’t get out.

We ended up pulling out by leaving Geoffrey’s cow boy boots and my Converse tennis shoes sunk down in the mire and clay.

We then had to dig our boots and shoes out of the mud. It took a long time, we lost our socks in the process.

We then slugged our way back to the tennis courts, looking like we had just dug ourselves out of our own graves on a rainy day.

I shudder to think what my Mom thought when she saw what we looked like.

I’m sure Dad was jealous that he didn’t get to play in the mud, though he sagely kept silent on the affair.

Sometimes we just get stuck, mired down, the clay sucking at our feet as we begin to sink. We try to rescue our shoes but succeed in only sinking further into the mud.

Have you ever been stuck?

In a job?

In a relationship?

Has your marriage ever been mired down? Or perhaps I should say how often?

Not just people get stuck.

Church’s get stuck in a pit sometimes.

All institutions get stuck in the mud with the attitude that always finds excuses to not change anything, lost in the fatal inability to even imagine how things could ever be different.

There is a great scene in William Faulkner’s Novel, As I Lay Dieing, that is a perfect picture of my own succumbing to inertia.

The father is riding with his family in a horse drawn wagon, carrying the coffin with his dead wife in it. He comes to a swollen river with the bridge out.

The father stops the wagon and just stares at the river.He just stares at the water like he can’t remember how to turn the wagon around, not having the energy to change directions. That is the picture.

Then there is just being trapped by evil, whether by addiction or by the violence and greed of someone else.

Like the people of Israel in Egypt or Babylon, or black Americans under slavery or Jim Crow.

Or all the women who have been or continue to be subject to the whimsy of others rather than their own will.

The desolate Pit, the Mire, the clay.

It finds all of us. Sin being what it is, we even seek it out.

Sometimes we don’t want to be freed from it. We define ourselves as victims, as slaves. Freedom becomes too big of a burden to strive for or to imagine, and we grasp and cling at others to keep them down with us in the mud.

This is the world and language of the book of Psalms, especially of Psalm 40, the psalm with which we pray this morning.

“I waited patiently upon the Lord; he stooped and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; he set my feet upon a high cliff and made my footing sure.”

The God who stoops to get us unstuck.

The God we waited and waited and waited for patiently.

Sometimes for a long time, sometimes too long.

The psalms also accuse God sometimes of being too slow or asleep, or too late.

It would be too simple to say that God is the answer to all our problems.

In fact the psalms sometimes accuse God of being the problem.

Perhaps the way we are more mired down than any other is in our trying to pull ourselves out of the mud by ourselves. Waiting patiently upon God seems to be the part the we skip over, the most essential part.

The essential thing is to take all that we are and offer it to God, all our stuckness, let our cry go up.

That is the lesson of the psalms, they draw forth all that we are, especially all that stuff we’d rather ignore or forget about or can’t handle and offers us to God.

This is where true prayer begins, that is when we begin to truly walk with God.

All our problems probably won’t be solved, but something does happen when we invite and acknowledge that God is interested in us, that God is interested in others and that God is desperately involved in all that mud we wallow in, bringing us into a freedom that we can’t even hardly imagine.

What happens is that God draws us out of ourselves to behold the glory and to worship the holiness of the One who created us, the one who stoops even unto death and the cross so that we may be unbound, so that we may be truly free, the one who gives and is our sure footing.

God is up to something Good, come and see.

Let that relationship begin and grow and change us into more than we can hope for. That mire and clay is going to try and keep us down in the pit, always finding reasons not to wait patiently upon the Lord.

But that mud isn’t the real problem, the real problem is not letting God play in the mud with us. That is when we begin to sing a new song, a song of praise in the mud.

How glorious. Sounds kind of like Church, at least it ought to.