Pentecost 13
31 August 2025
Vineville Baptist Church
Macon, Georgia
Gregory Pope
A BIG GOD FOR HARD DAYS
Isaiah 40.21-31
Ephesians 3.14-21
A man who lives out in the country called the highway department repeatedly to complain about the potholes in front of his house. But they would never do anything. The man called so many times that finally the director of the highway department says to him, “Okay, you’ve convinced us. We’ll do something about it.” But instead of repairing the street, they put up a sign that says, “Rough Road Ahead.”
Every newborn should be given a sign that says, “Rough Road Ahead.” We are all of us born naked, wet, and hungry – and soon discover there are difficult days in front of us. If only every day Taylor Swift got engaged! If only every day was the first Saturday of the college football season. If only every Saturday Georgia and Georgia Tech, Florida State and Tennessee could win and Alabama lose.
But no, it doesn’t always work out that way. Sometimes the Presbyterians beat the Baptists in the last minute of the game. Eventually, we all have rough roads to travel and we all hit potholes. It may be that down the road from your house, you’ve not seen your new neighbors, but you’ve heard them – or at least you’ve heard their favorite bands. They like 90s metal – Megadeth, Metallica, Alice in Chains. These are not bands you enjoy. Or here it is Labor Day Weekend and you are still recovering from your family’s Hatfield and McCoy’s Memorial Day barbecue. Your sister-in-law thinks it would clear the air if the whole family went on Dr. Phil’s television show. OR you step out of the shower in the morning, look in the mirror and realize that time may be a great teacher, but it’s a lousy personal trainer.
As you dry off you overhear the news – which is miserable – with Israel’s evil genocide being visited upon Gaza and Russia’s evil aggression being visited upon Ukraine, and the school shooting tragedy in Minnesota this week while the world does relatively nothing about it. Did you know that some gyms are now blocking news channels because watching the news is unhealthy?
What are we to do? In his autobiography Ways of Escape, the author Graham Greene writes: “Sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic which is inherent in the human condition.”
And while Greene suggests writing, composing, and painting – all worthy and helpful avenues of coping – the apostle Paul turned to prayer when life grew dark. He writes to the Ephesians, I bow my knees before God. Devout Jews prayed standing with hands out and palms up. They would only kneel in emergencies.
When was the last time you knelt to pray? What does it take to drive you to your knees? Someone we love gets sick and we pray fervently. We struggle with the reality that some of the most prayed-for people die too soon and some of the people who wanted to check out years ago keep suffering. We often pray when we face a big decision or during times of national crises. And what parent ever stops praying for their children? Being a parent is so constant. You feel responsible for another person’s happiness. When does that stop? Many people have health concerns. Some have aging parents to care for. It may be that your job is not everything you hoped. You might be ready for something new, but you don’t know what it is.
You don’t have to live very long to realize that life does not arrange itself for our convenience. We don’t get to set everything in place and know that it will stay in place. Things fall apart. The hard days are plenteous. But how often do we stop along the road and pour out our hearts in honest prayer? Some of us have not been on our knees in years.
The apostle Paul was on his knees quite often. He had suffered five public whippings and three beatings. He had been stoned once, shipwrecked three times, and imprisoned more often than he can remember. Now he’s on death row, likely to be executed soon. The only light in his cell seeps through a small square window above his head. Paul sets the parchment on the floor in the middle of the light and writes a letter to his friends, to a church where he had once visited, maybe even served as pastor.
If I was writing this letter from jail, I would begin: “Dear Church, Get me out of here! Don’t we have some big-time lawyers among us? Bill Self or Charlie Jay must know somebody. You gotta spring me from this place!”
But listen to what Paul writes to his church from prison. He says to them: “When I think of everything that’s going on: I get down on my knees. I ask God to give you the power to live by the Spirit. I pray that you feel Christ’s hope in your hearts. I pray that you have the heart to grasp the boundless love of God that surpasses our understanding. I pray that God’s goodness will fill your life.”
Paul’s life is most likely coming to a violent end. But nevertheless he prays that the people in this church he loves will have a guiding sense of God’s presence and goodness. Paul has gone through hell on earth. But what he feels more than anything else is God with him.
When we pray, we do not usually pray for what Paul prays for. We pray that what we want to happen will happen. We pray that the people who get in our way will get out of our way. We pray that people will be smart enough to agree with us. We pray that our lives will not be so hard. We pray that we will find happiness through the right school, the right job, the right relationship.
Perhaps we should try praying for the one thing we need most of all. And what we need most of all – more than health, more than wealth, more than easier lives – is the assurance that God will carry us through what we don’t get to go around.
I want to encourage you to be very intentional about your prayer life: To pray for yourself and the concerns of your life. To pray for a bigger vision of God. To pray with all the imagination you’ve been given. To pray for the world and to pray for our church. Pray that we will see our life together in the center of God’s providential goodness. Pray that we will be faithful to the way of Jesus and the leading of the Spirit. Pray that Christ’s love will dwell in our hearts. Pray that the Spirit will overwhelm us with hope. Pray knowing that at the heart of every genuine prayer what we are praying for most of all is God – for a sense of God’s presence, to feel that the Spirit will carry us.
We are all of us broken – every last one of us. Part of everyone’s inner world is a sense of incompleteness. Perhaps that feeling of restlessness is a word from God. Maybe we know God through missing God.
The Hebrew people of the sixth century before Christ are missing God. They know how hard life can be. They have been forced from their homes to travel the rough road into Babylonian exile. They wonder if they will ever get back home. They are close to giving up, close to believing that God has forgotten them.
The prophet Isaiah preaches hope in the midst of their despair. He says that God will bring them home: “Don’t you know?” he asks them, “haven’t you heard? God is beneath, within, and over everything. We are grasshoppers by comparison. Creation is beyond our comprehension. Our God encompasses the universe. When we compare the greatness of God with the puny powers that seem so frightening, the pompous rulers of this earth are like plants that last only a season. They wither and blow away like dust in the wind. The One who sits above it all is unequaled. Is there any power to which we can compare God’s ever-present care? Look at the night sky. Who do you think made that? God created the stars and calls them to their places every night. Though they can hardly be counted, God knows them by name. God knows what’s going on in your life and in the world. God has no disposable children or untended corners of the universe. We are all precious in God’s sight. God does not come and go. God lasts. God does not grow weary. While God does not seem to control the events of the world, God does give power to the faint, strengthen the weak, and pick up the exhausted. Those who wonder if they have been forgotten by God, but who wait on God nonetheless, Isaiah says: they will fly like eagles, they will run and not be weary, they will walk and not faint.”
But sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. We don’t always experience eagle flight. We run and get weary. We walk and get weary. We don’t even move and get weary.
To wait for God is to hope anyway. To wait for God is to trust that God is with us to the very end. To wait for God is to believe that though life can be at times a dark ride, we are headed toward the light. So we wait among the silent tears of prayer.
Prayer is opening our lives to God. Prayer is the pain we feel at another’s pain and the joy we feel at another’s joy. Prayer is the strength to do something healing in the world. Prayer is an exercise in imagination.
What could God help you imagine? Paul says God is able to do far beyond all we could ever imagine. God can heal what seems broken beyond repair. God can provide grace that covers our most haunting sins. When all hope seems lost, God can change the world. What could God help you imagine? What could God help you see? When we give ourselves in prayer, did you know that our vision changes?
We begin to see others differently. The jerk who cuts in front of us on Forsyth Street we realize is a single mother who just worked ten hours and is rushing home from her second job to spend a few precious moments with her children before they go to bed. The pierced, tattooed, disinterested young man who cannot make change correctly is a worried eighteen-year-old who wants to go to college but is still waiting for news about the financial aid he has to have. The scary looking homeless man asking for money who looks fully capable of work is suffering from mental illness or is a slave to addictions most of us cannot picture in our worst nightmares. The person who says or does something that brings great harm may be scared of how life is changing. When we give ourselves in prayer, we see others differently.
Prayer also enables us to see our own lives differently. When we are weary from all of our responsibilities, the hope of God gives us a place to rest. When the hard realities break in, when we are feeling broken, we can pray knowing that God is working to put us back together. When we pray God gives us the courage to endure. We learn to trust not in ourselves, but in something bigger than we are.
When we are alone, God is with us. When our heart is broken, God is at work to heal us. When we have been through too much sadness and still resolve to move forward, God is our strength. When two old friends have gone months without speaking and one decides to try once more, God offers the grace of encouragement. When someone we love is in trouble and there seems to be nothing we can do, God helps in ways we often cannot see. When a parent devastated by the death of a child begins to believe that somehow life can go on, God is the desire to keep going. When we think we cannot keep going God is the power to endure. When we think we cannot overcome, God is the strength to survive. When we are lost, God is our way home. When we are tired, when we are worried about our health or the health of someone we love, when we are concerned about our children, our parents, our best friend, our church, when we are troubled about the future, God is our hope.
When we are overwhelmed, we have a choice: We can either continue in despair, because God knows we have enough reasons to give up. Or we can pray for eyes to see and hearts to trust that we are in the hands of the God who created us, the Christ whose love will not let us go. God holds the whole world in arms of infinite love. And in the midst of sorrow and uncertainty, it is enough to live in God’s hand, grateful to be loved.