The Pause That Refreshes

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
March 11, 2007
Rev. Samuel Schaal
[Texts: Isaiah 55:1-9/Psalm 63:1-8/Luke 13:1-9]

In the world of marketing, Coca Cola is a master. Their first advertising theme way back in 1886 was simply, “Drink Coca Cola.”  Advertising became more sophisticated, and so did their themelines. In 1910: “Quenches the thirst as nothing else can.”  In 1922: “Quenching Thirst Everywhere,” a sign of the product’s growing popularity.  In 1929 they hit upon the themeline that they used off and on for many years and one that is remembered as one of the more memorable lines of all advertising:  “The Pause That Refreshes.”  I remember as a kid in the 1950s and 1960s that this theme was still around on some signs.

“The Pause That Refreshes.”  Life in 1929 was becoming more hectic and complex and this likely appealed to that condition. Here in the 21st century, we are still in need of a pause and we are in need of refreshment, as never before: true refreshment, refreshment that only God can provide. The kind of refreshment that the prophet Isaiah several millennia ago promised to the Hebrew exiles. The kind of refreshment that touches the deep anguish of a people torn from their native land. And he joyfully proclaimed that the quenching of that thirst, the satisfaction of that hunger, is real and present and accessible by turning to God.

The Psalmist likewise speaks of our thirst for God, even the hungering of our flesh for God, that God is even better than life itself and that we live in the shadow of God’s wings and we cling to God for assurance and comfort.

Today I want to celebrate the joy and the exuberance available to us as Christians and as children of God.  That might seem strange in the middle of Lent, which is usually a time of fasting and prayer.  But Lent can also a pause from our normal routine where we might not merely deny ourselves pleasures, but deny ourselves that which is blocking our fuller communion with the Lord.  Lent might be a time of true repentance. 

Repentance means to turn around, to orient ourselves to another reality and to respond to that reality, which for us as Christians is God’s call in Jesus Christ.  So Lent can be a time to repent from our own darkness, our own poverty, our own narrowness of mind, heart and soul, to leave behind that prison of soul to follow God’s call into a fuller and heartier experience of life. 

For despite all our wealth and all our things, so many of us still are hungry for something deeper.  I still think Auntie Mame taught her nephew Patrick a deep truth when she admonished, “Life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death.” Despite all the incredible blessings of our lives, we too often are more aware of our lack.  We limit ourselves and we limit God.

Sometimes we think that God is not able to do what really needs to be done in our lives.  Despite what we say, in our hearts we question is God is really able.  A couple of authors have suggested that in the Christian mainline, God has become distant and vague, or even ineffectual. Our church council has finished reading “Becoming a Blessed Church” by minister N. Graham Standish, and both the men’s and women’s ministry groups are now reading “What’s Theology Got to Do With It?” by minister Anthony Robinson.  Both these ministers say that the mainline church traditions have, in their theology, devolved into a unitarianism of the first person of the trinity.  That is to say, we’ve emphasized God the Father, God the Creator, over God the Son or God the Holy Spirit.

By overemphasizing God the Creator, we have underemphasized God’s presence among us since God the Creator tends to be thought of as distant and not as involved in the world. This kind of unitarianism results in a more vague, non-distinct and distant God.

That’s the mainline. The evangelicals likewise have emphasized God the Son which is why they keep asking people if they accept Jesus Christ as their personal Lord and Savior, a unitarianism of the second person of the Trinity. And the Pentecostals over-emphasize emotional experience in the Holy Spirit, a unitarianism of the third person.

The trinity, so says Robinson, turns out to be a theological check and balance. The trinity, as it emphasizes different modes of the one God, and as it emphasizes relationship between the modes, guards against reductionism—reducing God down to the little categories we have to try to understand God.  The more we can be open to the expression of God in these three modes, the more is the majesty and glory of God experienced, not merely talked about. 

That’s one theological explanation of why we tend toward thinking of God as distant and not involved in our lives.  There are others, I would think notably our overly rational and scientific culture. The point is, we so often think of God as not terrible vital, as not terribly able to help us in the real problems that face our world.

In the Bible, we see God as experienced directly.  We see God as a real presence in the world and in the lives of believers. I want to suggest to you that God is present, alive and able in the world, in your lives, in my life, in the life of our church.  I can’t tell you that I always feel that 24/7, but I can tell you this is the dominant testimony of our scripture and I can tell you that here and there I have felt God’s presence powerfully in my own life.

I think that God wants us to be happy. I think that God wants us to be healthy. I think that God wants us to be whole.  I even think that God wants us to be reasonably financially secure (though not narcissistic in our wealth, as Jesus talks a lot more about money than about sex!).  I think that God wants the best for all of creation. That we don’t always have these things is very obvious in our world, but we sometimes walk around with a fatalistic attitude either that the way things are is the way God wants them to be, or perhaps that maybe God is not all that powerful and it’s all up to us, anyway.

But Scripture continues to point us to the God in Jesus Christ who comes to comfort and confront the world, and who offers repentance, which requires our response.

In today’s gospel lesson repentance is a major theme. The people are tempted to think that those who died violently in the temple and at the falling of the Siloam wall somehow deserved it. So the evil doings of an emperor or an unfortunate accident is blamed on human sin.  In the story, Jesus cuts this connection and redirects the hearer to understand that all are in need of salvation, that life is precarious, that death comes at times without warning, so you better be prepared and have repented.  In the parable of the barren fig tree, the gardener suggests that in one more year the tree might produce fruit.  In Luke, this one year refers to the one-year ministry of Jesus in which God is fully known in the experience of the Christ event—a time of repentance, of turning around to the reality of God’s presence in and through all creation and all reality.

In our own experience this Lent, perhaps we need to repent from our own human viewpoints and often too-narrow understandings of mind and heart.  To turn around and face the glory of God in our own lives and in the lives of those around us.  To turn around and see God present among us, here and now, in this congregation.  A living, vital, active spirit of the Lord who lives in us, among us, through us – to enliven us, to take us forward, to be salt and light for the world, to be the church in the world.

If what I am saying is true:  that God is real, a very present reality in our modern world, an active and able presence incarnated into our lives, what about the very real fact of all the pain, suffering and downright evil in the world?  There are events every day right here in Milwaukee as around the nation, of cruelty and disaster and evil. How is God active in that? How is God active in the tsunami? In Darfur?  How was God active in the Nazi Holocaust?  How was God active during the time of slavery in this nation? How can God be real if these things can happen?

This is not an easy question to answer and I don’t know that I can fully answer the question I ask.  But this much I do know and I know it from history.

Let’s look at the story of slavery on this continent.  I’ve mentioned this before but it bears repeating: that the slave master taught the slave the religion of Christianity, in part to keep the slave in line because of Paul’s supposed endorsement of slavery. For Paul said, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Eph. 6:5 and Col 3:22).  So the slave took up Christianity, but saw there something the slave master did not: the Exodus.  And for generations, slaves hoped and dreamed for their own Exodus and came to believe that it would happen, because it happened for the Hebrews. Even though many were born a slave and died a slave, still they dreamed.  The Civil War ended slavery as an institution, but it took another 100 years for a more complete and humane expression in our culture in the end of segregation and the passage of the Civil Rights Bill.   As we witnessed in the mid-twentieth century, the civil rights movement was a movement in and of the black church.  So it turns out that God was not silent in the face of the evil of slavery.  God, it turns out, had the final say – the people were liberated.

This story is encapsulated in our final hymn (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”) which commemorates the struggle of African Americans in their move from slavery to fuller inclusion in society.  Though it is a song that commemorates that struggle, it speaks to the heart of all oppressed people of all lands and all times, that God wants us to be free and that God is working in the world for that freedom.  And please note when we sing the song that it is not a triumphant song.  It does not give credit to humans or to human endeavor – it gives credit to God and God alone.  It is a hymn of thanks to God; a hymn of thanks born in the squalor of human slavery. The hymn’s point of view understands that it was man who enslaved them, but God who delivered them from slavery. 

So this is to say:  even when it appears that God is silent, or that God is absent—even in the most vile evil of the world where we question how could God exist if this or that is happening—that even there, God is still alive, God is still able, God is still at work, though sometimes we just can’t see it, for as Isaiah says, “my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.”

So if God could that, God can certainly meet whatever problems we have, individually, as a congregation, as a community.  For God is God and is able to quench the unquenchable thirst, to provide the living water that truly satisfies.

If truth be told, Coca-Cola and other soft drinks don’t really quench thirst, despite their catchy taglines.  We know that soda pop actually makes you more thirsty, given all the flavorings and additives.  If you’re really thirsty, water works a lot better.  And if your soul is thirsty, if your life is parched, if you yearn and hunger for a fuller expression of life, don’t look to the world – to soda pop or cars or cosmetics or any other commodity. What we really need, what we are really hungry for, what we are really thirsty for, is found in God, through Jesus Christ.  To repent to this, to turn around to this reality, is the true pause that refreshes.

This Lent, may you find refreshment.  And may the good God look upon our congregation with favor and lead our congregation into ever new bold, exciting, vital, active ministry.  For our hurting world needs a bold church of bold people following a bold God.

Amen.