This Week's Sermon: "What About Feeling Abandoned?"

To the director, with stringed instruments. (Common English Bible)

“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Four

There was an affectionately humorous story being shared about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg after her passing—that her food-loving children kicked her out of the kitchen very early on in favor of her husband Marty Ginsburg’s cooking—which reminded me of my own upbringing. My dad’s dad—my paternal grandfather—is a retired professional chef, and those skills were inherited by my dad, who did all the grocery shopping and cooking in my family. 

As a kid, accompanying my dad grocery shopping was a common occurrence, so much so that going grocery shopping remains to this day one of my favorite household chores to perform. Even after I crashed our grocery cart into a pyramid of 12-packs of Bud Light and had my cart-driving license revoked, grocery shopping with my dad was something I enjoyed.

Except when I would get lost in the grocery store and separated from my dad. 

Of course, he was never far away—sometimes it was just a matter of him being a couple of aisles over. But you can’t see over those aisles, and so I couldn’t see my dad. Fortunately, he had taught me what to do in those situations in an age before cell phones (and yes, I am old enough to recall such a time). I would find a store employee, who would have my dad paged over the store’s public address system, and then the grocery shopping would continue.

I was never abandoned, but in the moment, I still felt alone. I was a small child, and I couldn’t see over aisles to know where my dad was relative to me. I couldn’t hear him, or at least hear anything unique to him, that made him stand out. But he taught me what to do when I did find myself alone, and it minimized that time spent alone.

I think there is something in that image for each of us at some point in our faith journey as we tackle today’s question, “What about feeling abandoned?”

This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.

The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.

Today’s question is, “What about feeling abandoned?” This question—like all of the questions we’re talking about—is a valid one to ask. Just because God may be ever-present does not mean that we are always at our best to perceive that divine presence.  We are more sensitive to some things than others—some of us are more sensitive to heat than cold, or vice versa, and sometimes we are more sensitive to it on a given day. The same can be true for our sensitivity to God, or to God’s presence.

But that does not mean that God’s own presence or faithfulness has to wax and wane, and navigating those dual realities is at the heart of the conversation the prophet Habakkuk has with God, which encompasses the three chapters of the prophet’s book.

Habakkuk is my personal hidden gem in Scripture—only three chapters long, but it communicates gobs about the plight we as people face when we witness pain and hurt take place and wonder where our creator is. This is how the prophet begins the book, and it spurs this back-and-forth between the prophet and God, which culminates in this vivid, joyous song of praise that the prophet composes to God because, in spite of all other ills around him or that might befall him, the prophet simply cannot help but be loved by God and to love God in return.

Habakkuk is a contemporary of Ezekiel, whom we heard from last week, and Jeremiah. He, too, experienced in real time the fall of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah to Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon. When Habakkuk opens his book by asking God how much the prophet must cry out to God before God saves, what anguished Ezekiel and Jeremiah is what anguishes Habakkuk as well.

Yet where Ezekiel and Jeremiah directed their reactions outward—towards Jerusalem, and specifically, to the king who sat there, whether Jehoiakim or Zedekiah—Habakkuk directs his concerns upward, directly to God. And God answers the prophet.

Initially, Habakkuk is unconvinced by God’s replies, even as he remains convinced of God’s power and might. But by the end of the three chapters, Habakkuk does reach a point of reassurance. He knows that even if God does not halt the Babylonians, that God remains worthy of the prophet’s praise as a God who guides the prophet to walk upon such great heights with feet like a nimble deer.

How enviable is Habakkuk’s walk upon the heights if you yourself feel abandoned out in the desert (or in the grocery store, as it were), believing that God is up there, and we are stuck down here, and that's the way it must be.

Except it isn’t. It never was.

It is easy, perhaps far too easy, for us to associate God’s presence with us as God’s favor, as though God rewards us or give us the silent treatment arbitrarily. Yet some of the people who have brought low the most in this life are also the most faithful, and so that cannot be how God operates. 

This is not the first time I have preached on this passage—the first was just over nine years ago, on the tenth anniversary of 9/11, with my childhood friend, Rev. McKinna Shinners, at the Disciples congregation in Kansas we were both raised in, which was then in the throes of a deep and painful schism. McKinna and I drew the unenviable task of preaching in that context on September 11.

I chose this passage from Habakkuk. McKinna chose Psalm 42, in which the Psalmist’s repeated refrain is, “Hope in God, because I will again give him thanks—my saving presence and my God.”

After her sermon, that psalm became one of my favorites of not just the Psalms, but of any passage. 

My saving presence and my God. I knew I needed that God—that I’ve always needed that God.

Truthfully, I did not need so much to be saved from as a child—I had a stable home, a family that raised me with love, and I benefited from so many advantages. While I can look back on my early childhood and see some early instances of anti-Middle Eastern racism, I was too young then to understand them for what they were, even if they pinged my spidey-sense even then. 

But then 9/11 happened. And oh, did my insides tremble as Habakkuk says. Not only for my country, but for what my skin and hair suddenly communicated to the world, especially in airports.

It was a small glimpse into something much deeper, but I had something I needed to be delivered from—I needed out from the prejudices I began to see with new eyes, even within myself—prejudices that would need years to be exorcised. I, in short, had still needed saving all along. That exorcising, that saving, is why our denomination engages in reconciliation ministry, and why each year at this time we have a special offering to raise much-needed funds for our reconciliation ministry.

One of the worst parts, for me was knowing, after the first instance of being mortified and brought low because of someone else’s prejudices, and then a second time and a third time, was the inevitability of still more of it—that more prejudice awaited me at some point to be determined. 

That dread, that I needed to be saved from. And ten years later, in the preaching of my dear friend and colleague, I was. God, my saving presence and my God, finally made me walk upon the heights.

Habakkuk saw that inevitability in the rousing of the Babylonians. He, too, knew what lay on the horizon. And he eventually realizes that this did not mean that God had abandoned him. 

So, what about feeling abandoned? As inevitable as the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem may have been, the one thing it did not do was conquer God. The city may have been sacked, the people may have been exiled, but God went into exile with the people, even as God also sat on the throne.

God may rule from on high where prophets tread, but God also descends to our depths, in our famines when the plants do not blossom, when the flowers do not bloom, where the trees wither up. Though these things may happen, sings Habakkuk, it is God who will deliver him should they come to pass. Not God who caused them—but God who will make all things right and new. God who will make you right and new, a new creation, because God is never, ever far from your midst, and God loves you far too much to ever leave you abandoned.

May it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

October 4, 2020