Where I End ... Series

[This is part of a series based on The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr. This sermon deals with the "accepting hardship as a pathway to peace."]

Many years ago, my dad and I got our hands on a motorcycle that had been sitting in a man’s backyard for years. It had been sitting unused for so long that all the gas in the gas tank had evaporated and turned into a hard coating inside the gas tank which broke up into tiny pieces that clogged up the carburetor … so, we had to take off the tank and have it washed out with acid and then we had to take out the dual carburetors and clean them up … and that’s when we ran into a big problem.

You see, the carburetors on motorcycles are controlled by the right-hand grip on the handlebar. A cable runs from the throttle on the handlebar, through the inside of the handlebar, comes out of a hole in the handlebar, and then attaches to a pully that controls the amount of air that mixes with the gas in the carburetor. The problem was trying to get the cable off of the pully so that we could take out the carburetors and clean them. It took hours to finally get the carburetors out. We took them apart, cleaned them up, put then back together … but when we tried to put them back in … well, if we thought taking the throttle cable off was hard, it was nothing compared to trying to put it back on the pully. We struggled with it for two days. A few scraped knuckles and a lot of grunting and choice words later … WE GAVE UP.

In total frustration, we hopped into the car and went to a motorcycle shop near by and explained to them what our problem was. The mechanic smiled, took us back into the shop, and showed us a little bolt near the throttle on the handlebar. “All you have to do is loosen this bolt,” he explained, “and it loosens up the throttle cable.”

We had spent three days fighting with that bike’s throttle cable when all we had to do was turn the throttle cable adjustment bolt and in literally seconds we would have all the slack in the cable that we would need. Taking out the carburetors went from a nightmare to easy peasey … but we would have never known that if we hadn’t GIVEN UP and asked for help from a mechanic who knew what to do.

How often do we do that with God? We struggle with life. We fight. We groan. We try this. We try that. God comes along and says, “Here, let me help you with that” and like a stubborn child, we shove Him away, insisting that we can do it all on our own. And God says, “Well … okay, but I’ll be right here if you need me.” And after we struggle … and after we fight … and after we try this … and after we try that, we throw up our hands in despair and shout, “Fine! You fix it” … and God reaches over, turns a screw here, tightens a bolt there, and voila! … it all comes together. Oh, we thank God, we praise God, we hug God … and then we move on to the next problem … where we struggle … we fight … we try this … and then we try that … and God comes along and says, “Here, let me help you with that” … and the story repeats itself over and over and over again, amen?

“I give up!” A moment of exasperation. “I give up!” A moment of defeat. “I give up!” A moment of shame. “I give up!” The moment that we make enough room for God to step in and do for us what is impossible for us to do for ourselves. “I give up!” The key that unlocks the door to divine peace, a peace that surpasses all understanding but, for some reason, is a key that we will only use when everything else has failed. You see, “I give up!” is the point where I end and God begins. It’s only when we reach the point that life’s impossible for us and we give up that we discover that nothing is impossible for God.

Take Abram, for example. God speaks to Abram one evening in a vision. “Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great” (Genesis 15:1). Let’s stop right there, shall we? The LORD … God Himself … spoke to Abram and … and … He called Abram by name. That right there is pretty impressive and amazing, don’t you think? And yet, right away, we hear Abram’s doubt: “O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus? … You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir” (Genesis 15:2-3). Already Abram is looking for a ‘human’ solution and clearly there is no ‘human’ solution to his problem. So God has to remind him that He is no human. “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them….So shall your descendants be” (Genesis 15:5) … and, to his great credit, the Bible says that Abram believed … but Sarai … well, given her and Abram’s age, she doesn’t see how that could happen but maybe if Abram were to, well, spend some time with her servant, Hagar, then legally she and Abram could have heirs … and this, she believes, will be a viable solution to their hardship and once Hagar has a child … or two … or three … well, everything will be great and she and Abram will have peace in their lives … except …