A Sabbath homily. Voice recording forthcoming.
♪ Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)
Hillsong UNITED
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Grace and peace to you.
It was just before eight in the evening on the first of July, in Lexington, Kentucky, when an eleven year old boy named Avory Woolery looked into an apartment pool and saw a man unconscious at the bottom, in seven feet of water. No one was doing anything. Everyone else stood frozen at the edge. So Avory put on his goggles, went under, and pulled the man up from beneath the surface. Someone helped lift the man onto the deck, and his friend began CPR until the paramedics came. The man was rushed to the hospital in serious condition. Avory did not know him. When they asked him about it later, he said it did not matter. He was not going to let another human being die that day.
That is where I want to begin this morning. Not with a lesson yet, just with that picture. A grown man at the bottom of a pool, out of time. A ring of adults who could not move, frozen the way any of us might freeze. And a boy, not yet twelve, who went down into the deep after a stranger.
There is something in that scene that the whole of the gospel is hiding inside of. Someone is going under. Most of the watching world stands still. And rescue comes from the one direction no one expected it to come from. Hold onto that picture, because we are going to keep returning to it.
We all know what it is to be in the deep, because sooner or later all of us end up there.
The deep is not always water. Sometimes it is grief, the kind that washes over you when you lose someone you love, the kind that takes your breath and makes the morning feel impossible. Sometimes the deep is fear, the fear of an unknown you cannot control, the kind that keeps you awake and makes your hands shake and makes you wonder if you are strong enough for what is coming. Sometimes the deep is a decision too heavy to carry, one you turn over and over and still cannot see your way through. And sometimes the deep is simple loneliness, a night when sleep will not come and the silence feels like it could swallow you whole, when you feel like the only person awake in the world.
You know which one is yours. As I named those, one of them likely rose up in you more than the others, because you are either in it now or you remember it too well. The deep is not only a feeling. It is a place. It is real. And here is something we have to say plainly in the church, because we do not always say it. In that place there is room for the honest question. There is room for the grief and the anger and the prayer that comes out as a cry instead of a sentence. The deep does not silence those things. If anything it makes them louder. And GOD does not flinch at them. HE does not turn away from the person who is going under. HE meets us there.
But the deep is not the whole truth about us. There is also a hand reaching down, and there is a voice calling us back toward the shore.
You, LORD, are a shield around me, the Psalmist writes, my glory, the One who lifts my head high. Sit with that middle phrase. The One who lifts my head. Because the deep does the opposite. The deep bows your head. It drives your eyes to the floor. It convinces you that you are alone and always will be. And into that, GOD comes not with a lecture but with a hand under the chin, lifting the face back up. That is not a promise that you will never go into the deep. It is a promise that when you do, you will not go alone.
And there is more than a hand. There is a throne. The LORD has established HIS throne in heaven, another Psalm says, and HIS kingdom rules over all. That is not a claim that everything down here is already the way it should be. Anyone with open eyes can see that it is not. Children go under. Good people get sick. The wrong things win for whole seasons at a time. The verse is not pretending otherwise. It is saying something harder and better. It is saying that no corner of this world, and no depth you could ever sink to, is outside the reach of the GOD who sits on that throne. The throne is not shaken by your worst night. The kingdom is not smaller than your grief. The One who reigns is not nervous about your circumstances, even when you are. So the deep, real as it is, cannot finally own you.
♪ You Never Let Go
Matt Redman
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Now I have to make a correction here, because this is exactly the place where well meaning faith goes wrong.
Some will tell you that GOD sent the deep. That the drowning, the diagnosis, the loss, the long dark night, all of it was handed to you on purpose by a GOD who wanted to teach you a lesson. People say it to grieving families with the best of intentions. Everything happens for a reason, they say. It was all part of the plan. Hear me carefully this morning, because this matters more than almost anything else I will say. The deep is real, but the deep is not the gift. The rescue is the gift. GOD does not author the drowning. GOD dives after the one who is drowning. HE does not send the storm to punish you. HE is the One who meets you in it, and who has power over it. When we hand people a GOD who arranges their suffering on purpose, we take away the very One they need, which is a GOD who is on their side against the dark, not the author of it.
Listen to the promise GOD makes through Isaiah, and notice how honest it is. When you pass through the waters, HE says, I will be with you, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. Look at what GOD does not say. HE does not say you will never see deep water. HE says when, not if. The waters are assumed. What GOD promises is not a life on dry ground forever. What GOD promises is HIS presence in the flood, and that the flood will not have the last word over HIS people.
And that matters, because sometimes the rescue we ask for does not come the way we wanted. Sometimes the water does not drain. Sometimes the person is not healed, and the marriage is not saved, and the season of darkness runs longer than we can bear. A hope that hangs entirely on GOD removing every deep is a hope that will drown when the deep does not lift. And that was never the promise HE made. The promise is HIS presence in the water, and a throne that is not moved by the storm.
♪ Even If
MercyMe
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And here is the hope underneath all the other hope, the thing that makes this more than encouragement.
The deepest rescue is not finally that GOD wades into the water beside us, as much as HE does. It is that Jesus Christ went down into the deepest deep there is. Think about what HE actually did. HE did not shout instructions from the safety of the shore. HE went into death itself, into the grave, into the one water that swallows every one of us in the end. HE let it close over HIS own head. And on the third day HE came up out of it, breathing, alive, with the keys to the place in HIS hand. The deep has a bottom now, and HE has already touched it. The grave has a door, and HE has already walked back out through it. So for everyone HE has claimed, the deep is no longer a place where you simply disappear. It is a place HE has already been, and already left, going ahead of you and leaving the way open behind HIM.
That is why we can be honest about the deep in this room. We do not have to put on a brave face and pretend the water is warm. We do not have to hide our fear to protect GOD’s reputation, as if HE could not handle our honesty. We can say out loud that the water is cold and deep and frightening, and in the same breath say that it has already been conquered by the One who went under it and rose. Both things are true at once. That is the whole Christian life, held in a single sentence. The water is real. The empty tomb is more real.
Let me bring this back to a boy in a swimming pool.
Avory did not have to be there. He did not have to act. He was a child, and no one would have blamed him for standing frozen with all the adults. But he moved. He became, for one afternoon, a picture of something far larger than himself. A picture of the One who does not stand on the shore and watch us go under, but goes in after us.
And we have to be careful here, because Avory is not the savior of this story. He would tell you that himself. He is a brave boy who did a good thing, and his courage points past him to the only One who can reach all the way to the bottom. But that is exactly how GOD tends to work. HE sends real people, ordinary and unqualified, into the deep places of other people’s lives, and through their small courage HE does something only HE could do.
So the question this morning turns toward us. What does it mean to be a hand to hold in the deep for someone else? Sometimes, rarely, it means going in when the trouble is right in front of you. Far more often it is quieter than that. It means staying present when the grief hits, and not rushing to fix what cannot be fixed today. It looks like a chair pulled up in a hospital waiting room, a meal carried to a house where someone has died, a message sent to the person you know is lonely and then sent again next week when the casseroles have stopped coming and everyone else has forgotten. Most of all it means refusing to look away.
Most of us will never pull a stranger from a pool. But every one of us, this very week, will pass close to someone who is quietly going under. A coworker holding it together by a thread. A friend who has stopped answering. A neighbor whose grief has outlasted everyone else’s patience. You will get the chance, again and again, to be the person who does not leave someone alone in the water. That is not a dramatic calling. It is a faithful one, and it is yours.
And when it is you in the deep, and one day it will be, hear the word underneath all the others.
You are not holding yourself up by the strength of your own faith. You never were. There is a hand holding you, a hand that will not let go, a hand that lifts the bowed head and steadies the shaking one and brings the drowning one back toward the shore. And that hand has scars in it, because it has already been where you are afraid to go. So hold onto this, especially on the days you cannot hold onto much. The throne is established. The kingdom rules. The grave is already empty. The deep is not the end of your story. The hand that holds you is.
Grace and Peace.