This Week's Sermons

Sermons for the Month
NOTHING Happens
DATE: February 14, 1999
SERVICE: Transfiguration of our Lord
TEXT: Exodus 24:12-18
"To all of you Saints here this morning, grace and peace to you from God our Father, from His Son, Jesus Christ and His Holy Spirit. AMEN

Runners of all distances know that the key to success, the key to improving times, improving form, improving strength, is endurance. To build endurance, dedicated runners scrunch into their sneakers and sweats - early on a weekend morning; in the middle of a blazing hot summer afternoon; during sleety, miserable winter nights. Admiration for this kind of a determined exercise regime is what led to the runaway popularity of the Nike ad campaign, "Just Do It!"
The truth is that all of us are subjected to grueling tests of endurance every day, every week, every year of our lives. These endurance races we are locked into aren't usually measured in kilometers or shoe leather. Instead these tests of stamina sneak up on us.
Let me get specific: Over the course of your lifetime you will spend at least five years waiting in lines and two years just trying to get in touch with people by telephone. You can also look forward to spending eight months opening nothing but junk mail and six whole months sitting and staring at traffic lights that refuse to turn green. In fact, if in order to get to work, your time behind the wheel averages 60 minutes a day, you will spend six 40-hour work weeks just getting yourself to and from your workplace (taken from Jeff Davidson, The Complete Idiot's Guide to Managing Time [New York: Alpha Books, 1995.]).
Talk about endurance!!!
What you do with yourself while you are "enduring" the daily grind to your soul and sanity of these daily tests reveals just how faithful you are to God. A tremendous amount of life is just waiting. Being faithful when nothing much seems to be happening is what it means to "keep the faith."
Moses is an unexpected, unlikely example of endurance. "Unexpected" and "unlikely" because if any biblical figure can claim to have lived a life filled with divine intervention, it was Moses. Here was a man to whom God appeared and spoke in no uncertain terms. Here was a leader who could call on God to rain curses down upon his enemies and perform great acts of deliverance for his people. Here was an individual who had experienced a life of privilege in Pharaoh's household, a life of hardship and rejection in the desert, and a life of power and respect as the divinely appointed leader of the Israelites as they moved out of bondage and toward the Promised Land. Moses just isn't the first person that comes to mind when you think about someone finding ways to fill time when God doesn't seem to be showing up, when nothing happens.
But in today's first reading that is exactly what Moses is doing. As the leader of a "stiff-necked people" Moses already knew that all eyes were fixed upon him. The Israelites watched Moses for inspiration, for guidance and for leadership. But with typical human perversity they were also watching to see if Moses would slip up, step too far out on a limb, or in this case climb too far up a mountain.
With his halfway-up-the-mountain announcement to huffing priests and puffing leaders that God required him to continue up to the top alone, Moses knew his reputation was at stake. Moses had walked out and up, leaving his brother Aaron in charge, because he had heard God call him to yet another special mission. Imagine Moses' state of mind, then, when after his dramatic departure and the arrival of a mysterious cap of clouds on this mountaintop, Moses then experiences ... six days of nothing. Camped up within this cloud cover, Moses didn't even have a view to take his mind off his inertia.
How different the Exodus story if instead of sticking it out until that seventh day, Moses had given up in embarrassment and disgust on the fifth day or the sixth day. Despite the hardship, the cloying clouds and the sense that one was encamped on the edge of a "devouring fire," Moses stuck it out. Moses endured. The riches-to-rags-to-righteousness experiences that had unfolded in Moses' personal life history had taught him that if he wanted to hear God's voice, he had to be willing to wait.
Because sometimes when you least expect it ... Nothing Happens.
As the cloud of God's glory continued to sock in that mountaintop and enfold him in silence, Moses was faced with the problem of how to fill his days during this lengthy weather delay. Though God's presence was near, God's voice kept silent. It was up to Moses to fill this silence with evidences of his faith and acceptance of God's inscrutable will.
How do you do it? How do you handle life when ... nothing happens. How do you fill up those hard-to-endure dry spells that choke your days? How do you keep faith when God seems to be keeping secrets instead of keeping promises? God's directives to all of us, leaders or followers, powerful or humble, self-assured or shaking in our boots, is that we respond in four simple ways.
Try praying. Just because God seems to be silent doesn't mean we have to keep silent as well. One of the greatest comforts, the greatest privileges, we enjoy as children of God is the ability to turn to God in prayer at any time, in any place.
•Caught in traffic? Instead of punching every button on your radio or reaching for your cell phone, what if you used that moment as a time to pray?
•How many decisions would go begging if the first pink message slip on your desk you returned each morning were directed toward God? •Instead of reaching for the Maalox or Pepcid AC to calm your churning stomach, what if you poured out your deepest fears and longings and dreams to the always attuned ear of God?
Try thanking. When plans and programs we had counted on seem to stall out and even unravel before our eyes, it is hard to recall that everywhere and at all times God is deserving of our praise. You say - thank God during those times when our jobs are sagging or our dreams are dragging? How can giving thanks to God help resuscitate a seemingly boring marriage or a work place initiative?
The very act of thanksgiving may begin like slipping into those still soggy sneakers for yet another endurance run. But as we gather our inner resources, remember and rejoice in the myriad of reasons why we should be praising God, the endorphin-like feelings of genuine joy and thankfulness begin to well up inside our sorry little souls. Praising God primes our pumps and prepares us to hear the words that will come in God's time.
Try witnessing. Even if God keeps quiet, that doesn't mean we don't have plenty to say. Every preacher has gotten into the pulpit on a Sunday morning with his or her spiritual tanks flat empty. This is when our endurance is put to the test. On dry days we can do nothing more, or nothing less, than rely on our youthful memories, our long-ago learned lessons from Scripture and tradition. We can proclaim those lessons even when our mouths and spirits feel like cotton. Sometimes it is by preaching the gospel to others that we preachers are the ones who experience that "heartwarming" that signals the flame of the Spirit has finally caught in our soul.
Try enduring. Even when nothing happens, or worse yet when nothing good happens, that doesn't mean we have carte blanche to fold our tents and go home. God's schedule is the only calendar that counts, and none of us are privy to its pages.
The one sure way to thwart God's plan is to refuse to enter into relationship with God. Even if all we have to offer are crazy, half-baked schemes and dreams, proceed with all the energy and spirit you can muster.
This is Transfiguration Sunday. This is a good Sunday to ask--even if it weren't February in Akron--are you caught in eternal grayness of the clouds? Does your life look to you like just one big rain delay?
When was the last time you heard God's voice in your living room coming on like Cecil B. Demille's The Ten Commandments?
Don't despair. Endure. Remember Moses.
Sometimes when you least expect it ... God Happens.
AMEN