Midweek Lent Reflection - Seeking (Week 3)

Isaiah 58:6-9

Throughout Lent we are reflecting on what it means to be God-seeking people and asking honest questions to deepen our faith and understanding. 

Sharing stories of Bible characters who have searched for God, I introduced you to Ruth and Pastor Jonathan introduced you to Esther. This week and next, we’ll share stories of our own experiences seeking God. And finally, in our last week together, we’re going to invite you to have conversation together and share your stories.

Tonight, I want us to return to one of the Scripture readings from Ash Wednesday where we began this time of searching and seeking. 

A reading from Isaiah.

⁶Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? ⁷Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

⁸Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. ⁹Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.

Word of God, Word of Life.

Thanks be to God.

As we share our stories and experiences, one question we’re asking is, “Where is God in All This?” My ministry colleagues who went to the Lutheran seminary in Columbia credit former LTSS professor the Reverend Dr. Tony Everett with that question.

When we’re reading biblical texts, it’s a question that helps us remember first, that God is always the actor

and second, that the text is revealing something about who God is.

When we apply it to our lives, I think it helps us remember that God promises to be present with us in all things and nothing separates us from God’s love.

One of the stories I tell about God showing up is when I tell the story of having cancer at 26.

It was 1996 - Jamie and I had been married 3 years, and our oldest daughter had been born the year before. I was losing weight, but everyone though I was just shedding the weight I’d gained when I was pregnant with her. When summer came and I began to get short of breath, my doctors thought I had asthma, so I started carrying a rescue inhaler.

No one expects an otherwise healthy twenty-something to have cancer.

But that October when the rescue inhaler wasn’t helping anymore, and I couldn’t catch my breath to have a conversation in Sunday school, the other women encouraged me to go to the emergency room.

Jamie kept our baby girl at home, and I went to the regional hospital where they took a chest x-ray and found out I had a softball size tumor that had collapsed one of my lungs. I had Hodgkins Lymphoma.

I was admitted and came home six days later on oxygen.

The next six months involved a lot of doctors, injections and transfusions, imaging and tests. But what stands out to me as I remember it, and what my mom remembers from that time, is how our church loved us.

We had moved just three months before, in August and joined the church down the street from the military school where Jamie was teaching and coaching football and where we lived on campus. We were new to the town, the neighborhood and the church.

But their response to our need was immediate, without qualification or reservation.

For six months, someone from the church prepared a meal for us every other week on the day I took chemotherapy. And then on the Friday after chemo, when the side effects would hit hardest, one of the other mothers picked up our one-year-old daughter and cared for her while Jamie was teaching so that I could rest. Later when I had to travel an hour to the hospital where I had daily radiation treatment, volunteers drove me five days a week for a month.

God showed up in the hands and feet, kitchens and casserole dishes, of the people in that congregation and community.

A few weeks ago, when we learned Ruth’s story I encouraged us to remain open and curious to how the changes in our lives are helping us encounter God in new ways.

I have shared that I came back to the church through campus ministry as a college student. My husband Jamie had gone to an Episcopal school where he went to chapel every week, but neither of us had been raised as regular Sunday church goers. My mom hadn’t been raised going to church every Sunday either. The idea of a community beyond blood-related family who love one another and help one another wasn’t familiar.

But the witness of that congregation’s care remains vivid in our memories, even now.

We are created for relationship, and the ways that we embody God’s love by sharing our lives, our stories, our food and our presence are all ways that God’s light breaks through and shines like the dawn on the people we encounter.

Thanks be to God.