Ain’t Life Grand
June 20, 2010
Luke 8:26-39 and 1 Kings 19:1-15
Well, it’s been one of those weeks. It all started after Lisa and I returned from my cousin’s wedding in Mississippi. It had been a stupendous weekend. On Friday I had played a really good round of golf with my dad, complete with a stunning chip in from the rough—over a bunker and right into the hole. All day Saturday we spent wonderful time with family members that I hadn’t seen in ages, topped off with a beautiful, emotion-filled wedding and dancing until our feet hurt. All our flights on Sunday were prompt and punctual and Lisa and I returned to Richmond in just enough time to make our Sunday evening indoor soccer game. Ain’t life grand!
But then, we got back to our house; and that’s when the terrors began. Nothing seemed unusual upon our return. The furniture was in order. The fridge had accomplished its one and only task. The house was as Presbyterian as possible—decent and in order. I was a little tired and so I sat down on the sofa to partake of some mindless television entertainment. After a couple of seconds, I felt something tickling my leg hair. And then the same sensation on my other leg. I looked down and saw two fleas. It seemed as if they were staring at me, daring me to pick them up and squash them.
We have indoor pets, so fleas are a rather common occurrence. No big deal, so I grabbed one and slowly decapitated it, before dispatching of the other one likewise. Bad move. These little acts of violence were the Fort Sumter of my next few days of war; because as soon as those reconnaissance fleas were captured and killed, the battles began. Within ten seconds my feet were covered with twenty fleas. Just to see how bad the infestation was, I moved to the other side of room and laid my arm on the ground. A few seconds later, twenty more fleas had attacked, and Lisa and I knew we were in trouble. The room was simply bouncing with fleas. So we shut the door to the room while we decided what in the world to do next. Ain’t life grand!
Lisa was heading out of town for the week to work in Deltaville for her nursing degree, so I would be flying solo in my flea battle. Monday morning I dropped the cat off at my parents-in-law’s house, bought some flea fog, and fumigated the house. The box guaranteed success.
When I entered the house again after a few hours, it smelled like death. Surely no animal could survive the onslaught of the best poisons our industrial complex can come up with! Alas! Though less in number, the fleas were still vigorous in attacking.
The next day, disregarding the boxes explicit instructions, I placed a double dose of flea fog in the most offensive room and finally after a few hours, the fleas were in retreat.
I thought I would celebrate my seeming victory by doing the dishes that had piled up over the days as well as those which had been covered in flea fog. I ran the water in the sink and began to scrub away. Then something didn’t seem right. The water was warm and soapy, but it wasn’t going anywhere. It just kept rising and rising and rising. My kitchen sink was completely plugged. Ain’t life grand!
Out comes the plunger. Plunge! Plunge! Plunge! And suddenly the clear soapy water is now a black, putrid sludge and is still going nowhere. The clog was too deep for the plunger, so I decided to take apart the pipes underneath. I delicately placed a bowl underneath the pipe and slowly break the connection of the P-trap. A slow trickle, of water right into the bowl! Perfect! How smart am I!
But the water kept rising, the bowl was filling, and more water was coming, and coming and coming. Soon the bowl was filled with the stinkingest sludge and it began to overflow. So quickly I try to shut of the P-trap, but it was facing the opposite way that I was and I twisted it the wrong way. The trap popped completely off and suddenly 20 years of grease and stink flooded all of out dishware and pots and pans and even soaked into the nice napkins—the ones we only pull out when we have company. The tidal wave rushed out of the cabinets as well, rinsing my shirt with filth and soaking the rug in front of the kitchen sink.
Soon our dog Lily trotted into the room to see what was going on. Then she laid down, her head on top of her front paws and looked at me with complete disapproval: “What have you done?” She then inhaled a great big breath and simply sighs with disappointment. Ain’t life grand!
It took two days of running between the hardware store and appointments, of snaking my drain twenty feet deep, of completely reassembling the drainage system of our kitchen, of washing the dishes and floors and napkins and tablecloths before everything was once in order.
Finally Friday came. The fleas were gone, the stink and sink were fixed and I had a church softball game to give my mind and body a bit of relaxation. I packed up my things and got changed into my uniform. Only one problem, I had lost my one and only baseball glove. Ain’t life grand!
You’ll have to forgive me. I usually don’t subject you to biography in my sermons. I know you don’t come to church to suffer through my lamentations. But this week has been…unique.
Part of the art of life is maintaining proper perspective, especially in difficult and unexpected situations. Our passage from 1 Kings highlights this. We read of Elijah on the run. We read of Elijah in fear of his life. He is being hunted down by King Ahab and Queen Jezebel’s men because Elijah was responsible for the slaughtering 450 of Jezebel’s prophets. He is now wandering alone through the desert. His only companion is the solitary tree under which he laments his hopeless situation. He has tried hard to purify Israel of foreign Gods, and all its gotten him is despair, loneliness and threats of death. He asks simply, that God take his life away, the pain of living is too much to bear.
But at this moment of deepest heartache, at the apex of loneliness, an angel of God appears to Elijah and gives him bread and water so that he may live. Ain’t life grand.
Elijah then wanders for forty days without food in the desert and finds himself in a cave in the wilderness. There God promises to visit him. First comes a wind so strong it shatters rocks. But God was not in the wind. Then came a terrifying earthquake, followed by a blazing fire, but God was not in these either. Then came, simply, silence. Complete an utter silence. No wind, no animals, no voices or sounds—just Elijah, his heartbeat, his breath. Complete oblivion. The breath of nothingness. The voice of eternity. The presence of God.
There are moments in our lives when we need, like Elijah, nothingness. We often look for the workings of God in the elaborate, the loud, the audacious and triumphant. But often God provides what we need in the vacuum of silence; because silence can take us away from the mundane cares that frequently overcome our lives. In silence we can reflect on the broader world that we live in, on how our lives are being used for good, on the stresses and strains that stretch our coping abilities, on how we have prioritized our lives.
I particularly like the words of God in our passage. Speaking to Elijah, who is suffering through tumultuous uproar and inconceivable dangers, God only asks, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” It is the perfect question, because it causes Elijah to consider not the specifics of what he has done, but the purpose of his life. Elijah realizes that he is on the right path, even though danger lurks in every city and town. Elijah begins to understand that though life has thrown him a few curveballs, his path is still right, his cause is still just. He has committed his life to bringing forth God’s kingdom of justice and righteousness and this is what is most important.
While it is seldom that any of our lives as dramatic or life-threatening as Elijah’s we still go through moments, days, weeks, sometimes years of wandering in the desert. We get lost among the crags and slip on the rubble of our daily lives. It is easy to lose perspective in these moments, to forget our ultimate purposes—which are simply to love God and to love the people of this world. That is why we’re here.
Because, for most of us here, the life that we have is more than simply life. It is a miraculous blessing. Though troubles sometimes come at a rate that is hard to handle, eventually most of them pass. The things that shake us are often laughable later. After all, what’s worrying over fleas and sinks gonna get us anyway? The fleas have now mostly past, the stink is gone, the sink is like new, and a good friend found and returned my long-lost baseball glove. Ain’t life grand!
Friends, our lives are beautiful and lustrous. We are surrounded here by church friends that love us. We have families, mothers and fathers that care for us. We have fond memories that keep us company. If we take the time of silence to remember these gifts in our moments of stress then perhaps we can more fully enjoy God’s hope and purpose for our lives: love of neighbor, love of enemy, love of all people, love of God. Ain’t life grand!
