We continue our series today, “When life plays hardball.”  Last week we talked about broken relationship, and the gracious help offered by the surrounding community of faithful people who pick us up, dust us off, and help us get back into the game.

        Another week, another hardball.  Life-threatening illness and death.  We even use language that demonstrates the notion of being knocked down.  Grief and death and illness “strike” us.  We are grief stricken, and heart attacks “strike” and we “fall sick.”  Hear it?   The psalms are sprinkled with the songs of the suffering.  Of  the bereaved.   Of the frail.    Here is one:

PSALM 6

 ² Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am languishing; O Lord, heal me, for my bones are shaking with terror.  ³My soul also is struck with terror, while you, O Lord—how long?

⁴Turn O Lord, save my life; deliver me for the sake of your steadfast love.

 ⁶I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with weeping.   ⁷My eyes waste away because of grief; they grow weak because of all my foes.

        This week, a real hardball was hurled at us and our community.   Oakley Ralph is part of the fabric of Dodge City, and one of the most likeable, godly men of our congregation.   The pitch came at us hard and fast Thursday morning.   The news didn’t seem possible.   Oakley was gone.   Our hearts broke.   And we hurt not only for our own loss but for Pat, Brad and Brian and their families.  Sitting in the Emergency room waiting area, with Dave and Sandy Tartar following Oakley’s death, I looked at Dave, and he said simply, softly, “Hardball.”   Yep.  Hardball.   We know when we’ve been hit.  It hurts.   And sometimes, it knocks us down.

And for those who felt close to the radio personality Steve Brown, and his long fight with cancer, on the same day came yet another wild pitch.  Steve lost his fight.   Many were stunned.  A young man taken from us far, far too young.

Hardball.   Life plays rough.   And sometimes we get hit, and knocked down.

This week, we look specifically at life-threatening illness, and death.

One moment, life is moving along uninterrupted…plans are being made, dates are being calendared, when. . .

·         A pain in your chest or arm gets your attention.

·         The doctor tells you the lump you happened to mention is something that better be looked at more thoroughly…

·         You get a call that your elderly parent has fallen. . .

·         You best friend and partner for life collapses…

·         You go to the doctor for that lingering cough and next thing you know you are being referred to an oncologist…

·         A late-night telephone call tells you that there has been an accident….

The scenarios are limitless.    We take our bodies and our health for granted.   Until that precise moment when we are faced with consequences that cannot be ignored.   I call that a hardball.

There are not easy solutions to hardball situations.  

Some will offer easy answers. Faith-healers pedal a “believe it and all will be well” brand of Christianity.  One who claims to have the “gift of healing” will call all who are afflicted, to offer their illness up to the Lord.   The “gift” of healing enables the holy man or woman to call out God’s powers to heal.  With unintelligible words, and at times the laying on of hands of the whishing of the air before them, they are pronounced healed—if they do not prevent such healing with their unbelief.   “Believe, you will know the healing of God, freedom from pain and affliction.”    “Be anointed with God’s healing, believe and be set free!”

The understanding is of course, that any who are not healed, are failed because of the doubt they have.   Their unbelief has prevented their healing.

It’s a tinkerbell theology—by that I refer to the scene in Peter Pan when Tinkerbell’s light has gone out.  The lifeless fairy will live again only if the children clap and believe!  “Clap children, clap!”   Believe in never-never land, and Tinkerbell will come back to life!

Tinkerbell’s life is literally in the children’s hands.   Just as the healing and life of the sick who go to the faith healer is in the faith-healer’s hands, and their own strong belief that they have indeed been made well.

        So where is God in all of this?   Perhaps the “gift” of healing is not the healer’s to possess, but is a gift because it is in God’s hands.   And as a gift, it is God’s choice how and when it will be given.  I believe that’s what makes divine healing a gift.   Because it is something we cannot coerce, certainly don’t deserve, and cannot make happen because we want it and will it.   It is a gift.   It is in God’s hands.   Some experience it, and others do not.   I cannot answer why.   It is a gift.

        I have seen the gift of healing despite the limitations of medical intervention.   It was a gift.   Unexpected, unmerited, and unexplainable.   It was a grace, a gift from God’s own hands.  I have seen healing where I am certain God provided wisdom and resource through the medical treatment being offered.  No less a grace, no less a gift from God’s own hands.   And, I am sad to say, I have seen situations where despite prayer and pleading, healing did not come…at least on this side of life.   For no reason that I can explain.   I only offer that healing was predicated only upon our desire for it, and our belief in it, then we in a sense are the source of our own healing.   But we are not.   We are dependent upon God.   It is a gift.

I think we get ourselves into a crevice, the proverbial rock and hard-place spot when we begin to think of prayer something that we do and to which God responds.   First, we pray, then, God answers.

God then, becomes sort of a vending machine, or at the very least, an obligated reactor to human petition.   I want…we ask, and God is expected to perform. 

Except for health care workers, Pastors see more folks lying down in bed that most people.   We see them at the outset of illness when there is plenty of hope and words of encouragement.   We pray for healing, for strength, for recovery.

But we also see them when the long fight has used them up.   When their physical bodies are weak, wasting, and worn.   When hope is not in recovery, but in resurrection.   We pray for comfort, for assurance, for a blessed peace in the end.

My prayers at the bedside change as the situation changes…but whether I am praying for healing and strength, or comfort and peace, each prayer reflects the theological question that hovers in the minds of those who suffer from illness, those who are confronting death, or those who are suddenly grief stricken.  The question is, “Where is God in all of this?”  

The sacred story of Scripture reminds us that God’s people have always endured illness, suffering and grief.  The psalms are punctuated with cries of distress and cries for help such as the one we read from this morning.  

Eugene Peterson, author of the wonderful “Message” paraphrase of the Bible, suggests that the Psalms are the primary place a Christian can in times of distress.   “Praying the Psalms” he says, “we find fragments of soul and body.”  

Christ himself shows us the way.  Not the Christ who heals and teaches and walks with his disciples.  Not the Christ who feeds 5000 hungry people on a mountainside.   Not the Christ who confronted the Pharisees or overturned the tables of the moneychangers in the temple.

We look to the Christ who suffered, on the cross.  Who literally died with the same question on his lips:  “MY God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”   These are the words of the 22^nd Psalm, spoken in the moments of agony before death stole his last breath.    Do the words of the Psalm speak to you?  Speak for you?   They spoke for Jesus, who, feeling alone, and abandoned, was willing to reveal his feelings to God.  “Where are you?”   “Why have you left me?”     It is the suffering who have the right to utter such words—to give the reality of the spoken word to feelings so as to make them real.          The cry of Christ from the cross confronts these comments.   “I feel forsaken.   I feel neglected.   Where is God?”    And if Jesus, the Christ feels such abandonment, then it stands as reasonable that we mere mortals might have those feelings too.

What does that mean?   That the very Son of God would cry out in his suffering and death such a cry of despair, and loneliness?   How could Christ, of all beings, feel God-forsaken?

        In truth, people often do feel God-forsaken in the face of illness, death and grief.   I’ve witnessed it many times.   And there are no shortage of well-meaning Christians and pastors who want to explain away these feelings.  “Don’t feel that way,”   “Heaven is just footsteps away,”  “What a great reunion awaits you in God’s glory.”  

But to dismiss feelings of abandonment and fear in the face of terrible illness and death is to never really face the question, “Where is God?  When cancer has robbed away most of one’s body, dignity and hope?   Where is God?   When organs fail and the body weakens and the downward trajectory toward the grave is evident.    Where is God?   When death steals away your beloved, your friend, your steady rock?   When your eyes are wasting away with tears of grief as the Psalmist says.  Where is God?  When you’ve been hit and knocked down—where is God?

        The answer, I believe is once again, the supportive community the God provides for each of us when we’ve been knocked down.

        I believe this, because I have seen it, over and over, in the lives of those who suffer long illnesses, battle with death, and those who grieve when death seems to have won.

The loving, comforting people who are God-sent, reaching out in times of distress.   The caring friends who sit in the hospital rooms, and waiting rooms.   The shoulders we cry on.  The words of comfort that are expressed.   The wise ones who themselves have experienced and lived through the hard hits of life who give us hope.    Even the quiet attendance of the faithful whose very presence reminds us that God is near, very near, and will not abandon.

        I saw it again just Thursday.   Those who help us to our feet when we’ve been knocked down, who hold us close, help us cry, and gently dust us off and beckon us forward.  

Countless times over the course of my ministry, I have heard people express this supportive community of the faithful in a profound question.  It comes from the person in the bed enduring terminal illness.   It comes from the one who has experienced the profound loss of their beloved.  The question is, “What do people do who don’t have the church?” 

That they are really saying is, “Given this terrible thing, I have felt lifted and cared for by those who have surrounded me in this time.  Even now, I am thankful at least for that.”  And they are asking, “How does one survive without that support?   Without that caring community to lean on?”

        In the context of Hardball, I’d ask, “when you’ve been knocked down, how do you ever get back up if you’re are all alone?”

        There are those who are, you know?   Alone, I mean.   And our mission is to keep our eyes open, and our hearts open, so that when we see one nearby who has fallen and who is alone, we will become for them, the supportive, caring community—literally the hand of God, reaching out, offering help, pulling up those who have fallen.