Great is Thy Faithfulness
Category: Sundays after Pentecost
Speaker: The Rev. John Shellito
May my imperfect words give witness to your perfect Word, in the name of God, Creator, Redeemer, and Inspirer. Amen.
The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.
A friend recently said “great is thy faithfulness?” That comes from the Bible? I never knew!” She had recognized the phrase from our recessional hymn today. Martin Luther illustrated her point in one of his sermons.
Holding up a Bible in one hand, he said “This is the Gospel”. And holding up a hymnal in his other hand, he said “and this is how we remember it!” It’s a truth revealed by the power of our President breaking out into Amazing Grace during the Eulogy he offered on Friday.
I’m grateful for his leadership and I’m also grateful for other movements of the Holy Spirit during the past week. Bishop Michael Curry of North Carolina has been elected to be our next our Presiding Bishop, leading us, God willing, into the year 2024. Marriage is a possibility for same-gender couples across the country, along with heterosexual couples. And right here, a passionate group of St. Georgians are sharing together right here during the forum time about racial reconciliation in writings of James Cone. If I’m gonna be waving my bible from the pulpit, I wanna be waving it in celebration on a day like today.
Great is thy faithfulness.
Thomas Chisholm wrote the words to this familiar hymn. Reading those words, it might be tempting to think that they are simply the witness of a man whose faith and life is completely ‘put together”— we might be tempted to think that its easy for him to talk about God’s faithfulness being great because we imagine that things have always been going his way. Maybe he had a special “in” with God that brought him to easy street. It was not the case.
Chisholm wrote later in life: "My income has not been large at any time due to impaired health in the earlier years which has followed me on until now. Although, I must not fail to record here the unfailing faithfulness of a covenant-keeping God and that He has given me many wonderful displays of His providing care, for which I am filled with astonishing gratefulness" [Osbeck, 101 Hymn Stories, p. 84].
Chisholm gave witness to God amid the challenges of life. He described growing up “dirt poor” in Kentucky. He educated himself after elementary school, and by age 16 was teaching elementary school. He became associate editor of the local newspaper. At age 27 he answered a call to faith in the words of a dynamic preacher, following him to Louisville, helping to edit a magazine focused on spreading the good news. He was subsequently ordained, although he only served in a church for less than a year due to his ill health.
He eventually found his way to a perhaps related field, selling life insurance in New Jersey. He would put in long days when he could because he knew there were also be those days where his health would confine him to his bed. He raised children with his spouse and wrote in his spare time. Chisholm wrote over 1,200 poems, 800 of which were published, and many of which were set to music. He lived to 94. He wrote “I have sought to be true to the Word, and to avoid flippant and catchy titles and treatment. " [Osbeck, 101 More Hymn Stories, p. 179]. Chisholm frequently worked with his friend William Runyan, a gifted musician, who set his words to music. Both were relatively unknown when they started working together, although it didn’t stay that way.
Runyan wrote of the poem: "This particular poem held such an appeal that I prayed most earnestly that my tune might carry over its message in a worthy way, and the subsequent history of its use indicates that God answered [my] prayer.
We often don’t know how strong our faith can be, until we start praying in the midst of challenge. We don’t know how tough we are until we are tested. And even in those times when we feel like our faith has failed, or been broken, those are precisely the times where we have an opportunity to pick up the pieces, give them over to God, and recognize that as children of God we are called forth as people who are going to make missteps, as well as great strides forward in our faith. We can be honest about offering up our victories and our shortcomings to the one who already knows us better than we know ourselves, and loves us right where we are, here and now. We need to forgive ourselves and others, allowing the Spirit to transform of our mistakes, and knowing that God will lead us forward and continue to redeem our broken life for the purposes of new and eternal life.
One place I see new life is in our new Community of Hope ministry. Between our two services eleven individuals will be commissioned as lay chaplains this morning.
Pastoral care in any form is about working on our own relationship with the Source of all care, and then as an outgrowth of that relationship, to seek to be part of God’s care for others. Sometimes it means sitting shoulder to shoulder with one or more individuals in pain. Other times it means we are seeking to show one another that we hear what they are sharing, that we want to help them work through what they are facing.
We care for one another as part of our life, and as part of our life of faith. Whether formal or informal, spiritual care is not about having the “perfect” answers to “fix” someone’s pain or get rid of it. It is about showing up with our presence and our spoken or unspoken prayers, and allowing space for the other person to share, and perhaps see God at work planting surprising new life in the midst of disappointment and death.
When I hear our Gospel today, I hear a story of a powerful religious leader, someone like the senior warden in our community, reaching out to a radical outcast for help because he was a parent who was afraid of his child dying. He went to the radical teacher because he was desperate. He was desperate for his twelve year old daughter to have life, even if the healing was going to come from a man who was on the margins of social acceptability.
And on his way to help, we get another story of healing unbounded by social norms. Christ’s journey is interrupted by a woman who steps forward to claim her own healing after twelve years of suffering. She was ritually unclean, by the established rules of the time she was not supposed touch others, certainly not a teacher or a holy man. And yet, she reached out because she was in need. And Christ stopped what he was doing because sometimes our most productive work happens in the interruptions we do not plan. I love the image of Jesus feeling the spiritual power going out from him, and of the woman knowing in her guts that she has been made well.
Whenever I am tempted to overintellectualize my faith, this story grounds me and reminds me that God’s healing power can be felt and known in our creatureliness. Indeed, Christ took his body up on the mountain alone before the dawn of the day to pray, to recharge, to ready himself, just as we take ourselves up to church on the first day of the week to pray, to recharge, to be nourished and inspired for the work ahead.
We are one Body, broken and also celebrating God’s wholeness in our diversity. No matter how many challenges we may have seen, or how many challenges we have yet to face, we too can celebrate today and say:
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!
Amen.