Dave Johnson
Sermon: “Love Rescues You” (Psalm 91:15)
September 29, 2013
In the Name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When I was a sophomore in college, my all time favorite concert film, U2’s Rattle and Hum, was released. None of my friends were interested in seeing it, so I drove alone in my old Ford to the theater on a cold, misty November Sunday night for the late show. When the previews began, I was the only person in the theater, so I hustled back to the lobby and asked the sole employee, a kind disheveled middle-aged man, if he would mind cranking up the volume. He laughed and nodded his head, “Sure, why not?” and turned the volume up for me. I took my place in the center seat of the second row, sat back with my legs resting on the seats in front of me, leaned back and absorbed Rattle and Hum, a truly epic experience .
One of the lesser known songs from Rattle and Hum is a moving blues number Bono co-wrote with none other than Bob Dylan, “Love Rescue Me.” With Dylan backing him up, Bono sings the following prayer:
Love rescue me
Come forth and speak to me
Raise me up and don't let me fall
No man is my enemy
My own hands imprison me
Love rescue me
Today I’m preaching on Psalm 91, one of the most comforting passages in the entire Bible.
Psalm 91 speaks about God as being our shelter and deliverer, our shield and buckler—about God covering us with his protective wings, sending his angels to help us.
In this sermon, I am focusing on just one verse from Psalm 91, verse 15, where God promises he is with us in trouble and that he will rescue us.
God is with you in trouble.
Being in trouble can be an isolating experience, whether you’re sitting alone in the principal’s office in elementary school, or sitting alone in your car on the side of the highway as a state trooper writes you a speeding ticket, neither of which of course I have experienced—they happened to “a friend of mine .”
Every day, the news reveals yet another person who is in trouble, someone new to judge or gawk at, someone new to serve as an object lesson or cautionary tale.
But trouble is not reserved for those in the news—everyone gets in on the fun .
If your life is anything like mine there is some trouble, or drama, every day—there may be high-drama days or low-drama days, but there are never no-drama days—as Jesus preached in his Sermon on the Mount, “Today’s trouble is enough for today” (Matthew 6:34).
Have you ever played the game Whack-A-Mole at an amusement park? You have a hammer and are supposed to whack the various moles that are randomly and rapidly popping up out of their respective holes—it is impossible to keep up.Troubles tend to keep popping up in the same way.
In his masterpiece novel, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo describes the never-ending troubles in our lives this way:
“Every day has its great chagrin or its small worry. Yesterday you were trembling for the health of someone dear to you; today you fear for your own; tomorrow it will be anxiety over money, the day after tomorrow the vicious attack of some slanderer, the day after that, the misfortune of a friend; then the weather, then something broken or lost, then some pleasure that your conscience holds against you…. And on it goes… One cloud disperses, another forms” (Modern Library translation, p. 810).
Have you ever had that foreboding sense that trouble is brewing? It reminds me of the classic 1989 film, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, and Ted’s immortal words to Bill, “Strange things are afoot at the Circle K” .
Sometimes trouble takes the form of a train wreck in a relationship.
Last summer, I read a fascinating book of letters between two iconic Southern writers: Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. In the early 1950’s Shelby Foote was reeling from a divorce, and wrote the following to Walker Percy:
“I am settling down, still with a mountain of woe upon my head… this was the first real suffering in my life. I lost fifteen pounds and came out all gaunt and hollow-eyed… I touched absolute bottom... Man, its dark down there!” (The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy, p. 87).
Sometimes the trouble takes the form of an incurable illness.
In the latest issue of Rolling Stone magazine, there is a poignant interview with Michael J. Fox, best known for his roles in the Back to the Future films and his TV shows,Family Ties and Spin City. He is now in his early 50’s and has been suffering from Parkinson’s disease for quite some time. He made the gutsy decision to return to television in The Michael J. Fox Show. The interviewer, Brian Hiatt, describes Michael’s suffering during the actual interview:
“He is starting to experience an intense bout of symptoms right now. This is as bad as it gets,’ he says, pulling his jaw tight with discomfort. His body is simultaneously tensing and shuddering, as if he’s experiencing a highly localized earthquake. His right arm is a streak of constant motion.”
Listen to what Michael then says:
“People look at me and have fear and sadness in their eyes, which they think they’re seeing reflected back at them… It’s like someone was telling me the other day about someone they knew with Parkinson’s, and he didn’t go out of the house. He said, ‘I don’t want anyone to see me this way,’ to which I respond, ‘What way? The way you are?’… I don’t know what normal is anymore. I mean, my natural state is this.”
Trouble can also occur in your career.
My favorite late night talk show host is Conan O’Brien, hands down. It began quite a few years ago when I was up in the wee hours with my oldest daughter, Cate, a baby at the time who tended to schedule her teething episodes when Conan used to be on at 12:30 on NBC. We would hang out on the couch. I would laugh at Conan while she would gnaw on my thumb . A few years ago, for a very short time, Conan succeeded Jay Leno as the host of The Tonight Show, which NBC had promised him five years earlier—but then NBC changed its mind, fired Conan, and put Jay Leno back as host, leaving Conan high and dry.
In 2011, Conan gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College, and after about fifteen minutes of hysterical comedy, he vulnerably shared about this season of trouble in his life:
“By definition, commencement speakers at an Ivy League college are considered successful. But a little over a year ago, I experienced a profound and very public disappointment… I left a system that had nurtured and helped define me for the better part of seventeen years. I went from being in the center of the grid to not only off the grid, but underneath the coffee table that the grid sits on, lost in the shag carpeting that is underneath the coffee table, supporting the grid. It was the making of a career disaster, and a terrible analogy.”
And of course, trouble can come in many other forms—major financial setbacks, tragic accidents, toxic family dysfunction—or internal trouble like anxiety, depression, guilt.
And trying to dodge trouble, whether external or internal, is like trying to dodge traffic—like the dog Rusty in The Far Side cartoon who successfully joins his canine buddies after somehow crossing a street with heavy traffic—his eyes are wide and his tongue is hanging out, but somehow he made it—and his friends exclaim, “All right! Rusty’s in the club!”
But what about the times when you can’t dodge the trouble?
What about the times when you don’t make it across the street?
When you get in trouble, are you still in the club?
The answer is a resounding “Yes!”—because the good news is that God is with you in trouble. And God doesn’t stop there, because not only are we assured in Psalm 91 that God is with us in trouble, we are also assured that God rescues us.
In his book, Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller describes what happened during a rescue operation conducted by Navy Seals:
“The room was filthy and dark. The hostages were curled up in a corner, terrified. When the SEALs entered the room, they heard the gasps of the hostages. They stood at the door and called to the prisoners, telling them they were Americans. The SEALs asked the hostages to follow them, but the hostages wouldn’t. They sat there on the floor and hid their eyes in fear. They were not of healthy mind and didn’t believe their rescuers were really Americans…The SEALs stood there, not knowing what to do. They couldn’t possibly carry everybody out.
One of the SEALs got an idea. He put down his weapon, took off his helmet, and curled up tightly next to the other hostages, getting so close his body was touching some of theirs. He softened the look on his face and put his arms around them. He was trying to show them he was one of them. None of the prison guards would have done this. He stayed there for a little while until some of the hostages started to look at him, finally meeting his eyes. The Navy SEAL whispered that they were Americans and were there to rescue them. ‘Will you follow us?’ he said. (He) stood to his feet and one of the hostages did the same, then another, until all of them were willing to go. The story ends with all the hostages safe on an American aircraft carrier” (Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz, 33-34).
In his Letter to the Romans, the Apostle Paul, who was no stranger to trouble, describes the propensity toward trouble that even he experienced:
“I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate… For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (7:15, 18-19).
Paul continues with a cry for help, “Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me?” (7:24).
Love.
Love rescued Paul, and love rescues you and me too.
The good news of the gospel is that Jesus is not only with you in trouble, he rescues you as well. In his incarnation, death, and resurrection, Jesus laid down his power, showed us he was one of us, and rescued us, who are often held hostage by the trouble in our lives. Scripture tells us that in Christ, God “has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son” (Colossians 1:13).
And in the same way that troubles keep occurring in our lives, one way or another God keeps rescuing us—as Scripture also tells us, “He who rescued us… will continue to rescue us; on him we have set our hope that he will rescue us again” (2 Corinthians 1:10).
And often God does not rescue us from something, but rescues us through it.
Back to Conan O’Brien’s commencement speech…after describing his “profound and very public disappointment,” he continues:
“But then something spectacular happened. Fogbound, with no compass, and adrift, I started trying things. I grew a strange, cinnamon beard. I dove into the world of social media and started tweeting my comedy. I threw together a national tour. I played the guitar, did stand—up, wore a skin—tight blue leather suit, recorded an album, made a documentary, and frightened my friends and family. Ultimately, I abandoned all preconceived perceptions of my career path and stature and took a job on basic cable... I did a lot of silly, unconventional, spontaneous and seemingly irrational things and guess what? With the exception of the blue leather suit, it was the most satisfying and fascinating year of my professional life… there are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized.”
So what about you today?
Perhaps you are feeling isolated in some kind of trouble—“fogbound, with no compass, and adrift,” or maybe you’ve experienced so much trouble in your life that you “don’t know what normal is anymore.”
Unlike Rusty the dog, maybe you haven’t been able to dodge all the traffic. Perhaps in one way or another, trouble has knocked you sideways.
The good news of the gospel is that you are not alone in your trouble—even if it involves having your worst fear realized. God is with you, and one way or another, in God’s time, you will be rescued through that trouble.
And God will even rescue you through the greatest trouble of all, death.
I’ll conclude with one more illustration.
One of my heroes is John Donne (1572-1631), the seventeenth century Anglican priest and poet.A month before he died he preached his final sermon, Death’s Duel, before King Charles I. If you had one last sermon to preach, what would you say? Donne concluded this final sermon by pointing to the cross to encourage us that God is both with us and rescues us even through death:
“There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears, and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion which are so conspicuous, so manifested as that you may see them through his wounds. There those glorious eyes grew faint in their sight, so as the sun, ashamed to survive them, departed with his light too...There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears… and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which He hath prepared for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.”
Amen.
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