Good Friday – Pr. David Hewitt – April 2, 2010

     I want to tell you a story, a true story, involving a bishop, some Lutheran seminarians, some Haitians, some New Jersey Presbyterians, and some Ethiopians. In other words, I want to tell you a story about the length & breadth & depth of God’s grace in a very big world.

     First, the bishop. When she was a little girl in Iowa, April Ulring would thrill at the worship in the Lutheran Church her parents would take her to every Sunday. She would go home after worship and baptize her dolls and preach to her siblings. And she would sing. Oh, she just LOVED to sing! She later said of music and the Word of God, “I think we experience music like we experience the Scriptures. We don’t peer over the Scriptures and decide what is in there, but the Scriptures always stand over us… interpreting our lives, interpreting the world, interpreting our relationship with God. I think,” she went on, “that music is very much like that. Even when I was a choral director…you don’t stand over the music and sort of manipulate music. You hear the song….It embraces you and embraces those whom you are directing or leading. We are embraced by music and music, in a sense, interprets us and stands over us.”

     April and her husband, Judd Larson, were working and had three kids, two older girls and a young son, Ben, when they both felt called to be pastors. Then April and Judd served as co-pastors in several churches. Then one day April became the first woman to be elected bishop in the ELCA. One of the highlights in her ministry as a bishop was visiting the fastest growing Lutheran Church in the world, the one in Ethiopia. I’ve seen video of April visiting the Nakamte Prison in Ethiopia where the church ministers to convicts there, every year converting them by the hundreds. I saw the Ethiopian chaplain thank April and the church for contributing money so that the inmates there could have beds to sleep on. “You mean they had to sleep on the floor before?” April is heard to ask. “Yes,” says the chaplain. He sees the beds as proof that the future is in God’s hands, and that “God says that there are many changes underway.”

     Eventually April retired from being bishop and went with her husband to minister in Duluth, all the while praying for their now grown-up son, Ben, as it was his turn now to study to be a pastor at Wartburg Seminary in Iowa. Ben met a fellow seminarian there, Renee, and they fell in love and got married while still in seminary. They joined by Elly and by Ben’s cousin, Jonathan Larson, became a foursome that enjoyed singing spiritual music together – Ben writing the songs they loved to sing. One day he tried to comfort his wife Renee with a song. She was undergoing a crisis in her faith because of the difficult things she was learning in one of her systematic theology classes. So he wrote a song for her. Here he is, singing it:

     If you are in search of certainty, then you are on the wrong ship

     & If you are in search of control, then you are sailing in the wrong waters

     But in this world, not all is uncertain

     There’s the love of God, and my love for you…..

     This year Ben & Renee, and Jonathan, devoted their winter break to helping people in Haiti, staying at the St. Joseph Home for boys, located in one of the poorest slums of Port-au-Prince. There, they helped a nurse minister to 20 boys who had literally escaped slavery. And Ben sang his songs to them every day on his guitar.

     On January 12^th this year Ben and Renee and Jonathan were taking a break from their ministry, by hanging out at their sleeping quarters on the 4^th floor. Then it began. The earthquake. All three stood up in all the shaking. Renee and Jonathan placed themselves between two overhead lights they were afraid might fall. She looked for Ben. He was steadying himself on a pillar in the middle of an open space, about 10 to 15 feet away. “That’s smart,” Renee thought. But then large pieces of concrete began to fall. It became loud. The concrete was falling on top of Ben’s head. Renee could see he wasn’t moving, and his eyes were closed. She yelled and ran to him, to pull him toward them, but then the floors above them collapsed completely, and they could no longer see Ben. “We’re going to die,” thought Renee. Everything went black, as the shaking went on and on.

     Afterwards, Renee and Jonathan found themselves in a small space surrounded by collapsed walls. They called out for Ben. No response. They found a small hole where light was coming in. Following that light, they got out, and searched for Ben, even during the dangerous aftershocks. “Don’t go in there!” people yelled at them. Renee didn’t care. “I stuck my head in the hole,” she later said, “and I heard Ben. He was singing.”

            Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found;

            Brought here together by Christ’s love, by love we thus are bound.

 

            Let us recall that in our midst dwells Christ, God’s holy Son;

            As members of each body joined in Him we are made one.

     Perhaps he remembered that thing his mother April had said about God and God’s music – music which Luther called “the handmaiden of the Gospel: “We are embraced by music and music, in a sense, interprets us and stands over us.”

     Renee yelled for him: She and Jon were okay. She loved him. And keep singing! She heard him sing some more. Then the singing stopped. “I knew I couldn’t get to him,” Renee said. Later, with the help of a medical team from a Presbyterian church in New Jersey and officials with Lutheran World Relief, after three days they found Ben’s dead body.

     Meanwhile, Renee and Jonathan in their grief spent their nights in an abandoned lot with dozens of homeless Haitians. Even though many had lost their own loved ones, the Haitians offered to help Renee and Jonathan through their loss. “They carried us in our deep darkness,” Jon said.

     There was a deep darkness over the land at the time our Lord and Savior died for us on the cross. “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” Jesus yelled, the first verse of theh 22^nd Psalm, as He carried the past, present and future sins of the world in His arms, on His shoulders, in His great big heart – as He carried out the ultimate symbol of love – a total distance from His Father, on behalf of you and me. And yet. And yet He was able to chant the rest of Psalm 22 to Himself, saying to God even in the midst of the bitterest agony, “From You, O God, comes My praise in the great congregation; My vows I will pay before those who fear Him. The poor shall be satisfied; those who seek Him shall praise the Lord. May your hearts live forever!” (Ps. 22:25-26) And through Him, our hearts DO live forever. Through Jesus. Through Christ on the Cross!

 

    When I survey the wondrous cross, on which the prince of glory died;
    My richest gain I count but loss, and poor contempt on all my pride.

     Renee tells others, “My life has been nothing but uncertain since January 12^th, the day of the earthquake in Haiti….Nothing is the same for me. Lately I’ve been listening to some of Ben’s songs….There is one song my husband wrote for me…and it begins like this: “If you are in search of certainty, then you are on the wrong ship. And if you are in search of control, then you are sailing on the wrong waters.” I have heard,” she adds, “many say that our church is in an uncertain time, yet I am certain of the work of the Spirit….”

     She and Jon are going back to Haiti later this year, to help…and to follow Ben’s example – he has been described by one friend as someone who would not only give you the shirt off his back, but also “his hat and socks, too, if you asked him.” She is glad that Ben’s story is an avenue that God has made to help Americans connect to Haiti and aid them in their time of material need. She remembers the beautiful letter that she and her mother-in-law (the bishop) received from the church in Ethiopia. They remembered the bishop who had helped them so many years ago. “They wrote this beautiful letter. There were pages and pages with it, signed by” the our Christian brothers and sisters in Ethiopia. “I feel I’m being carried by the prayers of the people,” says Renee. “I’ve learned a lot through this experience – [that] the one very solid thing [in this life] is the power of the Body of the Christ, and the people who comprise it.” The people of the Way of the Cross.

 

     O the wonderful cross! O the wonderful cross!
     Bids me come and die and find that I may truly live!
     O the wonderful cross! O the wonderful cross!
     All who gather here by grace draw near and bless Your name!
     Were the whole realm of nature mine
     That were an off’ring far too small
     Love so amazing, so divine
     Demands our soul, our life, our all
     O the wonderful cross! O the wonderful cross!
     Bids me come and die and find that I may truly live!
     O the wonderful cross! O the wonderful cross!
     All who gather here by grace draw near and bless Your name!

 

Amen!