May 27, 2007
“Believing Is Seeing”
Romans 8:14 - 25

Memorial Day. Memory Day.

I remember. I remember some things well.

I remember playing on the dinosaur statue when I was only five or six years old when my sister and her husband took me to the zoo in Albuquerque.

I remember my mother crying and waving to me as my car pulled out of the driveway, stuffed to the roof with everything I and my new dorm room would need at college.

I remember the Halloween in seminary when my best friend, Mary Kay, dressed up as “the universe,” complete with starry galaxies, and I clothed as a jewel thief, just off of a heist.

I remember interviewing for my first church position, in New York City, and the search committee chair, Sherry, who was pregnant at one meeting and then carrying baby William at another one a few months later.

I remember how much joy it gave Craig tearing out plaster and lathe from our house in the early stages of our renovations and how much satisfaction we both felt each time a box was closed or a bundle tied up.

I remember some things very well.

Other things I remember well, too well, for they are painful to recall.

I remember crawling out of my crib as an infant, because people were yelling in the other room.

I remember my brother’s high school parties when my mom was gone, with bongs and booze and things going on a child like me couldn’t understand.

I remember the day I walked out on my mother because of my brother’s sickness and how I felt she was enabling it.

I remember the angry people from other churches who accused me of being a prostitute and a child molester just because I was gay.

I remember tracing with my finger the lines of wrinkles on my mother’s face hours after she died.

I remember saying goodbye to Craig as he headed off to Pennsylvania to care for his mother dying of cancer.

And I remember last year, as time after time someone in your family called the church to tell us your loved one had died.

Sometimes I remember, and it is hard, very hard. Especially the deaths of people I loved. At first I don’t want to remember such terrible things, but then I realize, really, I never want to forget.

The apostle Paul told us, if we would stick with Jesus in his suffering, if we remembered Jesus pain as well as his joy, we would be with Jesus in his glory. If that is the case, this congregation has a whole lot of glory in store for it. You have stuck with Jesus and, unlike the ancient monks who suffered deprivations and heartaches on purpose to know their Lord better, you have earned a great reward without trying at all.

Paul, echoing the very words of Jesus, also reminded us that it is easy to believe if we have already seen, easier to believe in a glorious future if we have already touched it, tasted it; but it is far harder but ever more faithful, to believe in glory having never known it.

The world says, “Seeing is believing.” People of faith say, “Believing is seeing.”

“I believe, Lord, yet help me in my unbelief.” It is because I remember the bad as well as the good times that causes me to be uncertain. It is because the suffering can be so hard for me and for the people I love that I struggle to trust God that there is something more, something better, something eternal. Glory, the Bible calls it.

All this, and I’ve had a relatively easy life. There are those among us who remember far more painful suffering. How can you possibly forget? How can you possibly believe such affliction will be turned into something beautiful?

Some of you can’t forget the physical pain of a parent beating you, or the emotional scars of a person you trusted abusing you.

Some of you can’t forget the shame you felt of having to stand in line to sign up for food stamps or welfare benefits.

Some of you can’t forget the heartache of having your belongings thrown out on the street because of a fight with a lover or you couldn’t pay the rent.

Some of you can’t forget how hard it was to ask for help, again and again, from people you love.

Some of you can’t forget the trauma of surgeries or the horror of accidents.

Some of you can’t forget the heart-wrenching decisions about having an abortion or putting your child up for adoption.

Some of you can’t forget being denied jobs or harassed on the street for the tone of your skin or the person you loved.

Some of you have known suffering far greater than I will ever know. Must we also believe that your suffering will lead you to God’s glory?

Having seen what you’ve seen, can you believe what God asks you to believe?

If we could just forget the pain, we think, we could bare to wait for glory. But does glory depend on remembering the suffering or just on the suffering? Some do forget, you know, submerging the crippling pain deeper than the mind’s reach. Sometimes we forget because of disease or injury.

I heard a story on the radio this week of a young man who was diagnosed in 1995 with a brain tumor. The doctors were able to remove the tumor, but the man lost his short-term memory, could not remember what had just happened, or the information given to him just last week. He was advised he would never be able to finish college.

But this young man had not lost his courage, nor his will, just his memory. So, convincing a hospital to use him as a guinea pig, he went back to college and studied 15 hours a day, every day of the week. He would read the same textbook chapter every day, again and again, for a week. He would read his own notes taken during class, again and again for weeks on end, most of the time never remembering having taken them. He read another person’s notes to fill in the gaps when his memory lapses prevented him from even finishing a sentence.

For years he did this, with every single college class. This week Andrew Engle graduated from the University of Maryland Baltimore County with a 4.0 grade point average.

Our memories should never define who we are... the good moments, the bad ones, and even the times that are forever lost to us. We are not our memories, we are something much, much more. We are beloved children of God, and all of us must believe that God has in store for us something greater than the suffering of this world. Like diamonds that are made from coal and gold that is refined from ore, perhaps glory is made up out of the very stuff of suffering. Perhaps.

My beloved, I do not know what this glory is, what it looks like, whether it is something that is revealed to us in this lifetime, or beyond. But I do not have to know it, I simply have to believe it. Scripture says, “For we walk by faith and not by sight” (1 Cor. 5:7) and “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1).

Whether or not we remember the joy or the suffering and the many, many people who make up our complex histories, it does not matter. I believe God has something greater for all of us.

I believe, therefore I see.

Amen

(1) “Lack of Short-Term Memory Doesn't Stop New Grad” All Things Considered, May 25, 2007, National Public Radio. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10451434


Rev. Allen V. Harris
Franklin Circle Christian Church
www.FranklinCircleChurch.org


 

Copyright 2007 -- The Rev. Allen V. Harris

Franklin Circle Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)

1688 Fulton Rd., Cleveland, OH 44113-3096