SOMETIMES IT’S NOT THAT EASY

A sermon by George R. Pasley

Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-13

Friday afternoon I received an email from a ranch manager near Olympia, Washington. He has 1,000 alpacas that need shearing, and he wondered if I might be interested in shearing them.

I laughed out loud but I didn’t say no. After all, I am an Alaskan and I do like adventure. So I did some research on the internet and learned that the going rate for shearing alpacas is $25 a head.

Wow! I could take a vacation, have an adventure, and pay off my debts. At least one friend thinks I should, but I haven’t said yes.

After all, I might enjoy shearing the first three alpacas, but the next 997 might get pretty tiresome.

You see, sometimes it’s not that easy.

Actually, most things in life are not that easy. I was in a great mood all week long, without even having to work at it but sometimes it’s not that easy. In fact, once in a while I’m downright miserable.

Sometimes those feelings of misery are just because, and I shake them off.

Sometimes those feelings of misery are rooted in experience, and I deal with it.

But you know what?

I’ve never had a bad day that was as bad as the day that Paul and Silas had.

They were seized, they were dragged, and they were beaten.

They were thrown into jail, they were placed in maximum security, and their feet were shackled.

Nope, I’ve never had a day that bad. So I have to marvel, I have to wonder, I HAVE to drop my jaw and scratch my head.

Because at the end of that bad day, they were putting on a musical performance for all of the prisoners who there in the jail.

Well Paul, well Silas- sometimes it’s not that easy!

I’ve watched people go through divorce, and it tears them apart every which way.

I’ve prayed with people who are shackled by disease, and sometimes it’s all they can do to hold on.

I know a mother whose teenage son is an alcoholic, and it beats at her spirit night and day.

I know another mother with two very small children, and she just got diagnosed with cancer. I can’t even imagine how that news must bear down on her, Because sometimes it’s not that easy!

I wish it were.

I DO wish it were!

Because if it were, the bad days wouldn’t be so long, nor so hard, nor so hard on us.

How do you praise God, when you know you need a miracle?

How do you reach out in the hard times, so God can pull you through?

When life gives you lemons, you can’t always make lemonade.

Or can you- because somehow, Paul and Silas did.

Sometimes it’s not easy. But at all times, it’s possible.

To begin with, Paul himself doesn’t say it’s easy it praise God in times of trouble. Writing on the subject of rejoicing, to the same town that flogged him and threw him in jail, while he was in jail in YET another TOWN, Paul said, “I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances.”

Paul doesn’t say HOW he learned to be content, it just says that he did.

He learned it, and each one of us can testify that most things worth learning aren’t learned easy.

How do you praise God, when you know you need a miracle?

How do you reach out in the hard times, so God can pull you through?

Step number one: believe that you can learn.

Now, I don’t know how Paul learned it, and I don’t know how Silas learned it, but I do know what they learned: it was something about God.

For years I’ve wondered just what hymns they were singing.

I know it’s not in our hymnal, nor in the hymnal before that, nor in any other hymnal we’ve ever had.

It was an old, old song whatever it was.

It may have been a Psalm, because the Psalms were the hymnal that Paul grew up with. But the bible doesn’t tell us which ones they sang.

BUT, I’m not going to call that an omission. Instead, I’m going to call it a loophole. Because guess what? More than a third of the Psalms are songs of lament.

That’s right- lament. They were written in hard times, about hard times.

You might say the lament Psalms were the country western songs of the ancient world.

Leaf through the psalms, and more than one out of three will say something like, “God, why are you doing this to me? I’m at the end of my rope and I am mad at you with a capitol M, I am fed up with life with a capitol F.”

SO IF THOSE KIND OF SONGS ARE IN THE BIBLE, IT MUST BE ALRIGHT TO SING THEM- RIGHT?

Right. In fact, Jesus sang one of them, Psalm 22, on the cross.

In fact again, I think there is good reason to believe Paul and Silas sang some of those songs while they were shackled in the dungeon.

I think so, because the other prisoners were listening.

Prisoners won’t listen to just anything. If it’s not real, if it’s whitewash, if it’s pie in the sky or superficial, they’ll turn you out and they will shout you down. But they were listening when Paul and Silas sang.

But guess what? Most of the lament songs end in praise. Not all of them, but a lot of them- either praise, or an expression of the hope of being able to sing praise, some day, some how.

Hope. That was what they were looking for when they sang, and that’s what they offered to the prisoners and to the jailor and to us.

Hope.

A lament song begins in despair, but it remembers an experience of salvation, and it looks forward to another experience, even greater than the first.

Let me illustrate it with a country western song, sang by Ray Charles and Mickey Gilley. The first verse goes like this:

Same old story they all hand me

Preacher tells me these are troubled times
But I know the Lord's been in tougher scrapes than this one
It ain't gonna worry it ain't gonna worry no it ain't gonna worry my mind.

I know the Lord’s been in tougher scrapes than this one.

There is a knowledge there that the singer clings too, and it is the same knowledge that Paul and Silas urge us to seek out and find:

whatever your trouble, whatever you woe, whatever torments you and curses you, the Lord has been there, known that, but whatever it is, whatever it was, the Lord didn’t stay there because AFTER Jesus sang lament he rose up from the grave!

So I believe they may have sang some honest to goodness songs of lament, but I don’t think they stopped there, I think they went on to praise.

In fact, think of what happened: an earthquake happened, and the foundations of the prison were shaken.

In another age, in another Bible story, the Israelites marched around Jericho and gave loud shouts of praise, and the walls fell.

There’s a slogan making the rounds on the internet: When you're down to nothing, God's up to something!

A month ago a young couple came to Ketchikan to tell about a journey they’d taken- by foot and by rubber raft, all the way from Seattle to the Aleutians.

They told their story, and they shared photographs and videos.

One video was of an encounter with a brown bear as they neared the end of their journey. It was a monster bear, eleven feet in height when it stood on it’s hind legs.

They had a video of the bear. You could hear them shouting at the bear- go away, bear!

The bear looked their direction.

It lifted its head.

It sniffed the air.

It came closer, and closer, and closer.

They did everything the guidebooks say to do:

They shouted.

They made themselves look large.

They stood apart so they really did look like two people.

They did not run

They projected strength and absence of fear.

In fact, listening to the video we could not hear a quiver in the girl’s voice.

Finally, the bear turned and ran.

But I know it wasn’t that easy!

I know they were shaking inside.

I know they contemplated coming all that way to get eaten by a bear.

After all, that happens sometimes.

But they did what they had to do, until they were safe.

Paul and Silas knew that.

They knew Jesus was raised from the dead, but they still knew there were no guarantees.

That is, none except this: God loves us, and nothing can destroy that bond of love.

So their voices may have quivered but they did what they had to do: they reminded themselves about God’s amazing ways, and they put their trust in Jesus.

On Thursday another round of layoffs was announced at our denominational headquarters in Louisville. Thirty dedicated people were let go. But one of my friends told me that some of them were singing an old Gospel song titled “I Know Whom I Have Believed.”

The last two verses go like this:

I know not what of good or ill
May be reserved for me,
Of weary ways or golden days,
Before His face I see.

But I know Whom I have believèd,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed
Unto Him against that day.

I know not when my Lord may come,
At night or noonday fair,
Nor if I walk the vale with Him,
Or meet Him in the air.

But I know Whom I have believèd,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed
Unto Him against that day.

Sometimes it’s not that easy to rejoice, because these are troubled times- they always are. But when it’s not that easy, we reach back into the memory of our faith, knowing that the Lord’s been in tougher scrapes than this one.

And knowing that, we sing- until the foundations shake, and our shackles fall, and our faith is proven.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost. Amen.