Stephen
Terry, Director
How
God Rescues Us
Commentary
for the July 22, 2023, Sabbath School Lesson
"Then
Peter got down out of the boat, walked on the water and came toward Jesus. But
when he saw the wind, he was afraid and, beginning to sink, cried out, 'Lord,
save me!'"
"Immediately
Jesus reached out his hand and caught him. 'You of little faith,' he said, 'why
did you doubt?'" Matthew 14:29-31, NIV
As a windstorm has been raging
outside, I have been reflecting on the past four and a half years and the challenges
we have faced. In that reflecting, I am mindful that many of you have faced
challenges as well, and you will be able to identify from your own experience with
what I share. In 2018, I came home to find my wife in the throes of a stroke,
recognizing the signs, I immediately rushed her to the Emergency Room at a
local hospital. Early intervention minimized the damage, although she tells me
that she can still tell the difference mentally from before and after. A
medication prescribed some months earlier by a doctor
caused a massive pulmonary embolism and a blood clot from that broke free and
caused the stroke. Little did we know that this was only the beginning of
challenges we would face.
My wife often has nightmares
from traumatic experiences she had earlier in life. Two years ago, one of those
nightmares was so violent she fell from the bed and struck her eye on the
bedside table, tearing the lens from her eye and rending her cornea. This month
after a series of delicate operations, including a cornea transplant and lens
implant, she is looking forward to finally being able to get a refractory exam
so she can order glasses and recover normal vision. When we were told in the
beginning that the process would take approximately two years, it seemed like
an impossible wait to finally have healing, and yet, here we are looking
forward to the end.
While all of this may seem like
enough to deal with, several trips to the Emergency Room for me beginning in
November as well as failing strength for my wife brought us both to the same
cardiologist. In March, my wife had cardiac surgery to repair a congenital hole
in her heart, and in April, I had seven stents put in my cardiac arteries. We
have both been recovering from those surgeries. That should be enough, right?
Not even close.
Due to chronic infections that
seemed to ignore antibiotics, we discovered that my wife needed kidney surgery
to remove stones that were too large to remove with ultrasound. It is hard to find
the strength for so many surgeries, especially when still recovering from
earlier ones. Perhaps as a side effect from the anesthesia from this last
operation, she has had nightmares and fallen from the bed twice over the last
week. We pray it has not caused problems for post-operative healing.
As an ironic footnote to all of
this, we also discovered our male Siamese has diabetes. I thought, no problem.
We will give him his insulin twice a day and everything will be fine. Unfortunately,
he is now throwing up several times a day. I also thought cleaning up after
him was no problem. We have a carpet shampooer that does an excellent job of
cleaning it all up. But this morning, somehow a medication pill was on the
floor and got caught up in the shampooer, spreading an indelible yellow stain
over the area of carpet I was trying to clean. An hour of shampooing that same
spot made little difference. Oh, and remember that windstorm? I heard a crash earlier and found that it had done its best to
destroy a patio umbrella and several potted plants.
I don't share all of this as a
pity party. As I said, some of you can relate to
overwhelming challenges from your own experience. We tend to be inane about sharing
such things. Someone asks us, "How are you?" And we reply, "I'm fine. How are
you?" In the process as we struggle with hidden challenges and grief, we tend
to think that because everyone else is fine, there must be something wrong with
our faith, or we wouldn't be struggling so. But when we hide behind the mask of
a life that is going well, we create the illusion that even though Jesus
suffered, we don't have to. In fact, if we do, we are admitting our faith is
defective. But this is a heresy. It is as though Satan were shoving our
troubles into our faces and saying, "You are not saved, and God doesn't love
you, else he would spare you these challenges." But how could God, who could
not even spare his own Son the suffering he endured give us a get-out-of-suffering-free
card?
The grand themes of salvation found
in Ephesians and elsewhere in the Bible are beautiful testimonials of God's love
for us amid assurances that one day the suffering will end. Jesus' trip through
that dark valley followed by his death, resurrection, and ascension were not
only evidence of that love, but also surety of its reality. We live our lives
in a charnel house ruled by the "prince of the power of the air."[i] (Remember
the windstorm?) Although we can choose a better, but challenging life, our
enemy does all he can to dissuade us from that path. Some,
when faced with such struggles, find it easier to give in and go with the flow
of those who, tired of the challenges, choose to seek diversions that will distract
them from the pain and suffering being hidden behind the masks they see all around
them. They learn to accept the masks as a better choice
than facing the reality of what lies behind them. The masks and the available
distractions become reality for them. Actual reality intruding into such lives
would be seen as rude and offensive. But, barring a soon returning Jesus, we
will all eventually reach the end of our lives. When we do, what we consider
real can be shown through a tally of how many hours, weeks, months, and years were
given to what pursuits.
We can spend our entire lives as
escapists, fleeing struggle and challenge, burying ourselves in fantasy and
pleasure seeking. But should we live so long, our ability to pursue those
interests will flag, and we will be left alone with what we have become. If we have
avoided struggle our entire lives, the final challenge that comes at the end
can be terrifying. When taking communion to elderly shut-ins, the most common
lament I heard from them was that they did little to reach others with God's love
and missed so many opportunities to interact positively with those in need of
that love.
We build a universe that we feel
works for us. While we may be willing to admit we are not perfect, our refusal
to entertain different perspectives implies that we are and by further implication
that our personal perspective based on our constructed reality is also perfect.
Even though there are over eight billion such constructs being lived out
currently, we assume ours is the only correct view. Sometimes it seems as
though humanity and humility have little in common. Why do we so often find
common cause with a Christianity that stones to death sabbath breakers,
adulterers, and those with questionable sexual orientation. We love what the
Old Testament has to say about such things even though we ignore anything we
find there that condemns us personally and defend
ourselves with assertions that we are under the dispensation of grace. But what
you hear little of from such fundamentalist perspectives is how wonderfully blessed
it is to be meek and a peacemaker, despite all that Jesus had to say on the
matter. We find it hard to accept a Christianity that embraces others. We are
more comfortable with a faith that keeps them at a distance. That kind of
religion demands we make copious use of masks that hide our flaws lest we, too,
be found on the wrong side of the fence and the stones come our way.
In our upside-down world, we
deny that what Jesus lived and taught has anything to do with reality. Instead,
we advance our personal fantasies as reality and proclaim God and Jesus to be
the real fantasies. In quantum physics, what is reality can be changed by observation
of the subatomic. Perhaps a primal fear prevents us from accepting Jesus and
God as real because that observation would change what we have declared to be
fantasy into something far more real than we imagined.
Putting things more
metaphorically, we can sit around the campfire on a moonlit summer evening
enjoying S'mores. The treat makes us feel good, the fire is warm, and our
friends are here. Why would we want to do anything different? But if we could
pry ourselves from the comfort of friends, a warm fire, and plenty
of S'mores, we might follow a nearby trail that would lead us to
discover a lake, and with the lake a canoe on the shore. Paddling out into the
lake, we see the moonlight shimmering over the water and discover a heart-touching
reality more profound than anything we felt staying by the campfire.