"Nevertheless"
Where to turn when you can't do as you should
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, February 25, 2001
Text: Job XLII: 1 - 6
One of the most difficult, exasperating and challenging parts of being a Christian is dealing with disappointment. By disappointment, I mean disappointment with ourselves and our inability to live up to the ideal we often set of the Christian life, and our inability to achieve the goal of being a full and complete Christian. It is most difficult and most dark when, deep within our own hearts and souls, we want to be better people than we are; we want to be excellent in our faith; we want to be faithful to our God, but unfortunately, we miss the target. When we miss the target, we become disappointed; we become downcast; and we become guilt-ridden.
However, the good news is that while we feel like that from time to time, we are not alone in that walk and in that experience of not being able to achieve all our spiritual goals. No one could have identified with us more clearly than the great apostle Paul. When writing to the Romans, in Chapter 7, in an immense moment of personal confession, he said:
I do not understand my own actions, for I do not know what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.
In other words, nobody had a greater sense of anxiety over not doing the good that he wanted to do more than the apostle Paul! He was torn by his own sense of disobedience, and his inability to fulfill the high calling that he saw through Jesus Christ.
This happens in so many facets of our lives, does it not? We start out with great and glorious ideals of what life is going to be like and the changes that we can make, only to find that we become disappointed by our own inadequacies, and our inability to fulfill our ideals.
I thought a great deal this week about the lives of politicians. I think that politicians start out with good and glorious and high ideals, but the exigencies of power at times have a tendency to make them fail to live up to the ideals that they espouse. Oh, we can stand in judgment of them, and we can point fingers at them, but who of us has not in our own lives felt exactly the same constraints of our own inability to do the good that we want to do?
You see, living the Christian life, living the moral life, living the obedient life, is not just a matter of the will. We don't get up in the morning and decide that today we are going to be perfect people, today we are going to achieve all the goals that God has set for us, today we are going to be flawless, for we know that in a matter of hours (and in my case minutes) we've already fallen far short of our goals! The will is not enough: The will needs to be inspired; the will needs to be guided; the will needs to be transformed.
A number of years ago, I saw one of the best movies I think I have seen in years, called As Good as It Gets. It is a story of three people who live very disjointed lives. One is man called Melvin Udall, who is played by Jack Nicholson. This character is neurotic and angry, he disassociates and he has poor relationships - he can't keep a friendship for the life of him! Melvin, though, meets a young woman who is kind and generous, and while he is doing awful things like throwing his neighbour's dog down a laundry chute, this woman tries to see within him something good, something redemptive.
Finally, they come to the point where they actually go out for dinner. Preparing for this dinner, the woman, Carol realizes that she doesn't have the finest of clothes, so she picks out the best she has, a very plain red dress. She puts it on and goes to the restaurant, where she is greeted by Melvin. Now, Melvin had been turned away from the restaurant before, and had actually gone and bought a brand-new suit in order to make a really good impression and to fit in this very high-class restaurant. Melvin greets Carol as she comes in, and starts immediately to make fun of her attire. He says, “I was thrown out because I didn't have a proper suit, and now I am dressed like this, and you come in a house dress!”
This poor, single mother was devastated, and she says to him in one of those passionate movie scenes, “Pay me a compliment now! Pay me a compliment now!” There is a long pause, and you expect something rude to come out of Melvin, but rather, something beautiful comes out. He says, “You make me want to be a better man.” In other words, the love that she has for him, the grace that she shows him, makes him try to be a better man.
You see, it is not just the matter of the will, it not just the matter of deciding that we are going to be better, but rather it is the inspiration of love that makes us better. All the way through the Bible, from the beginning to the end, there is this unbroken belief that it is the grace of God and the love of God that makes us better people. It is not just a matter of the will that enables us to live the life that God would have us live, but the will that is inspired by the love and the grace of almighty God. It is summed up in many ways with one word, one word that should in fact inspire and invigorate us: It is the word “nevertheless.”
Not long ago, I was reading through one of the Bibles my father used to prepare for his sermons. It was a wonderful journey in time to go back and to see which passages my father had underlined, what he thought was outstanding. My father had actually studied today's passage from Luke, a beautiful rendition from the Moffatt translation. There was only one highlight: the word “nevertheless.” In so many of the key moments in the Bible, whether in the life of the Israelites or in the life of Jesus, that word, “nevertheless,” seems to appear. It is that “nevertheless” that inspires us to live the Christian life.
I have chosen two texts this morning with which I want to reflect on this word “nevertheless,” because this word helps us and gives us a sense of our purpose in the Christian faith.
The first is the “nevertheless” of prayer. I take as my text the passage from the Book of Nehemiah. Now, Nehemiah was an incredible prophet. He lived around the time of 450 BC when the Persian Empire was at it's zenith, it's most powerful. The Babylonians and the Assyrians had come and gone. They had conquered Israel and they were now on the back burner.
The number-one empire was the Persians. The Persians had defeated Babylon under their leader Cyrus, and they had given permission for the Israelites to return to Jerusalem after they had lived in bondage and exile. Nehemiah was writing during what was known as the “third return” under the Persians: The third return of the people to Jerusalem. It was a critical moment, for the greatest desire of Nehemiah and all the others who were returning was to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. After they had been knocked down by all the various conquerors, their dream, their vision for the glory of God was to rebuild the walls of Zion.
Nehemiah was in a unique position to do this, because he was well in with the King of Persia, Artaxerxes, and just like Joseph and Esther and Daniel before him, he had a position of power and esteem within the royal court. Nehemiah tried to get the Israelites to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem, but the civil service people didn't want any part of this. The administrators, under a man called Sanballat, said, “We don't want you to do this, because if you rebuild the walls you will get courage, and if you get courage, you will get cocky, and if you get cocky, you will think that you don't need us, and you will stand on your own.” The last thing they wanted was for the wall to be rebuilt. So then came the famous words of Nehemiah. When faced with opposition, when faced with rejection, when faced with the administration working against him, he said, “Nevertheless, we will pray to God and we will build the wall.”
“Nevertheless, here, is really a call to a defiant prayer. Nehemiah recognized that there were difficulties and challenges out there, but the one resource the people of Israel had to fight those who opposed them was prayer in almighty God. By being defiant in their prayer, they were taking on the very challenge that lay before them, and they were relying on the grace of God to see them through.
There is a beautiful story told by Jean Giono at the beginning of the 20th century. He visited a shepherd named Bouvier in Provence in 1913. This was an amazing man, and Jean Giono stayed at his farmhouse for a few days. The area had been ecologically degraded for many years, and it had become a disaster zone. All the trees had gone, the fields were arid, the brooks had dried up, and the mistral, the famous wind that blows through that part of the world, had caused devastation that resulted in desert-like scenery.
While Jean Giono was with Bouvier, he noticed that every day Bouvier would pick the very best acorns that he could. At the end of the day, he would have maybe 100 of them, which he would put in a basket. Then, World War I began, and Jean Giono was unable to see his friend Bouvier. After the war, he went back to Provence, and he realized that within a matter of just a few years, streams had started to flow, trees had started to grow, and that Bouvier, throughout the whole of the war, when everything else around was being destroyed, had been planting acorns!
He went back and visited his friend again in 1939. He was amazed at what he saw! The whole area of Provence had become beautiful again, trees had grown, rivers were flowing, the fields were green, there was lushness to the whole environment. But he worried that World War II, which he saw was about to begin, would destroy it all. However, Bouvier continued planting row upon row of acorns, tree saplings began to develop, and by the end of World War II, when so much of France had been laid waste, the area around the farms where Bouvier had planted the acorns had grown strong, and Provence was beautiful.
Jean Giono said that prayer is like planting those acorns. It is the defiant “nevertheless.” When the world around us is arid, when war is breaking out around us, when there is trouble and ecological disaster, when problems beset us, when we feel powerless to control the destiny of the world around us, what did Giono say we should do? Pray. Just like Nehemiah! When he saw that his country was to be devastated, and wondered whether or not the walls would ever be built, he prayed to God and continued to build the walls. My friends, this is something that we need to do in our own personal lives, and as a church, as well. We need to have the defiant spirit of prayer. The prayer that says, “Nevertheless, despite my inability to be the person I want to be, despite my inability to live up to God's high calling, nevertheless I pray, for I realize there is a power that is greater than me, something that can inform and inspire my will, which I alone simply cannot achieve.”
However, there is also the “nevertheless” of obedience. Cardinal Basil Hume, who was the Archbishop of Westminster, and one of the most outstanding Catholic thinkers in Britain over the last 20 years, once wrote in a Times article in London: “If people pray, their consciences become more sensitive. It is very difficult to be a praying person and then go and do beastly things to your neighbour.” Prayer acts as a constraint, even in our obedience. It acts as a source, a means of strength, and a guide.
Now, although the disciples themselves were not in a position of prayer in our passage from Luke's Gospel today, there is implicit within it the same idea, the same resonance of obedience. If you look at the story very closely, Jesus is beside Lake Gennesaret (another term for the Sea of Galilee) and the disciples he has called just recently are looking at their nets, frustrated. They have been out fishing all night, and they have hardly caught a thing. They are dismayed and they are downcast, and they are feeling inadequate. Then, in the morning, as they are washing their nets after their nighttime of fishing, Jesus gets in one of the boats. According to Luke, he sails out with Peter to the deepest part of lake water. Now, this is significant, because the deepest part of the lake is where the fish go at night - that is why the disciples had been fishing there. During the day, they often stay by the shore, but at night they go into the deep water. The disciples had gone and done that, but they caught nothing.
Now, in the morning, Jesus says, “Go back to the very place where you were.” Peter starts to argue with him, and he says, “Well, we've done that. We have fished there, and we haven't caught anything! Why do you think we are going to be successful now?” Jesus says, “Go there, and put down your nets.” Then we read “nevertheless:” “Nevertheless,” says Peter, “I will do as you command.”
In other words, Peter realized that there was a sense of defiance in Jesus, defiance even of the power of nature, even of all experience to the contrary. Jesus gave the command to Peter, and Peter was sufficiently inspired by Jesus that he went and he lowered his nets, and as the story goes, they came back so full that they had to use two boats to haul them. “Nevertheless,” said Peter, “I will cast out my nets.” There is, then, a defiant spirit in obedience.
Even when in our own hearts and souls we're not doing all that we ought to do, and we're not being all that we mean to be, even though within our own wills we cannot achieve all the goals that we want, there needs still to be a “nevertheless” in our lives, a “nevertheless” of hearing Christ's call and saying, “Nevertheless, despite myself, despite my experience of myself, I will go and do what you command me to do. It is the power of your word to which I will respond.”
With all the comings and goings within our Parliament this last week and the role of the Speaker in casting the vote that saved the government, a story about a Speaker in the English House of Commons came to my mind. Every time the parliamentarians begin a day in the House of Commons, the Speaker walks ceremoniously through the Chamber of the Visitors. Before the Chamber of the Visitors is open, a herald goes forward before the Speaker, and cries out, “Visitors, take off your hats, please.” Everyone takes off their hats, making a big demonstration of it, and the Speaker walks right through. It is a sign of respect for the Speaker and for the Commons.
One day, though, not long ago, the Speaker came through and sort of forgot herself when she saw one of her very good friends standing over in the corner. His name was Neil McNeil. She cried over to him, “Neil, Neil, how are you?” and everyone in the gallery sank to their knees immediately! The power of the Speaker, the power of the word, when it is spoken: That is the power that Christ had over the disciples. It wasn't just a matter of their will. They had gone fishing, and they had not achieved their goal. It was the word of Christ that called them, that enabled them to go fishing properly, just as it is the call of Christ and our obedience to him, and focusing on him, not our own inadequacies, that helps us live the Christian life.
Last week, I was reading about the great mystic, Theresa of Avila. She had grown up in a wealthy, aristocratic family. She was very talented; she was a good dancer; she was beautiful; she was very intelligent. However, she did not know what to do with her life. She did not want to get married, as she was in love with no one. She did not want to become a nun and go into a convent, because she did not want the closely proscribed lifestyle. But finally, after a few years, that is what she did.
Once she got into the convent, she found the religion there was full of laws and rules and regulations, but not grace and love and prayer, and she became frustrated. She wanted to understand why there wasn't a greater sense of devotion in the lives of people, even the religious. Religious people seemed to be, as she said, “consumed with themselves, but not consumed with God.”
Theresa of Avila then founded her own movement, an order of nuns who were devout and full of prayer. She became a good friend of a Jesuit monk, who instructed her and guided her, but she was oppressed, she was banned, she was silenced, she was even imprisoned. Her movement was a threat to the church and to the religious powers, for Theresa of Avila wanted people to have a deeper commitment and devotion to God, and she believed that only through prayer could obedience follow naturally.
At the end of her life, she wrote a passage called her “Bookmark.” Inside her Bible was written these words, which were probably her last:
Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing frighten you. All things pass away. God never changes. Patience obtains all things. He who has God finds he lacks nothing, for God alone suffices.
My friends, you will find that yourself, if you practice the “nevertheless” of prayer, and the “nevertheless” of obedience, and the joy of God's grace. Amen.
This is a verbatim transcription of the original sermon.