J. Douglas Dortch, Jr., Ph.D.
First Baptist Church, Tallahassee, FL
“Humankind: Hapless But Not Helpless”
From the Series "Beliefs that Build Community"
Scripture: Psalm 42:1-5
January 20, 2008
The real challenge that most of us face is that of owning up to our weakness, and of acknowledging that there is so much in this life that is totally beyond us. The real challenge is to acknowledge that we are not Supermen and Superwomen – faster than speeding bullets, more powerful than locomotives, and able to leap tall buildings at a single bound. The real challenge that the vast majority of us face is to be real enough and honest enough to admit that we are hapless.
Of course, the conventional wisdom is that we are supposed to “fake it until we make it” – that we are not supposed to “let them see us sweat.” You may not be the “Man (or Woman) of Steel,” but you can play the part, since weakness repulses people and no one likes to be around folk who can’t pull themselves up by the bootstraps.
I understand. Everyone needs to give his best, and no one is served (not even God) when people go through life trying to make others feel sorry for them. Pity is rarely an attractive emotion.
But there is something about life that has a way of humbling us. Just when you think you’ve got your life where you want it to be, something happens. You make a mistake. You miss an opportunity. You come down with an illness. You develop an enemy. And in no time, the castle you have worked so hard to construct begins to implode and you are shaken to your foundations.
Rich Doebler is a pastor in Cloquet, Minnesota. In one of his sermons he tells about while a time in his family’s life when they were vacationing in northern Minnesota. They had decided to visit a small county fair, and since there weren't many people at the fair that morning, they had “run of the house,” which normally is a really good thing for fair-goers. At least that was the case until they climbed onto the “Tilt-O-Wheel,” hoping that the operator would give them a decent ride—even though they were the only ones on it.
As Doebler explains it, little did we know what we were getting into. The first few minutes were actually quite fun. The family laughed and enjoyed that little funny feeling that such a ride makes inside your stomach. But after a while, the “Tilt-O-Wheel” got to be not so much fun. And after some more time—way past the length of an ordinary ride — Doebler began to feel downright queasy.
He wanted to get out, but he couldn't. In the first place, they were going too fast to escape. In the second place, the centrifugal force of the ride had him pressed firmly against the back of the car. He was totally immobilized. All he could do was look pleadingly at the operator of the ride, every time they spun past him. But it was to no avail. The operator kept the ride going, the operator thinking that Doebler’s pleas were for more time on the ride.
No one needs to tell you how that one turned out. Doebler staggered off the platform, only making it about 20 feet when nature began to have its way. Needless to say, Doebler was hapless, and many of us this morning know all too well the feeling.
We know it because of those times when life has been going pretty well, only to turn into a swirl of emptiness, where things are spinning out of control, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It’s like someone has turned up the throttle, and then gone off on a break.
Is there anyone out there who can help us?
Now, you understand something of what the Psalmist was going through when he offered this psalm of lament known as the 42nd Psalm. It is in many ways a cry for help, a shameless plea from a desperate soul who is in over his head. And to make matters worse, there are onlookers who are watching the action bent over double in delight at his ordeal. “Where is your God?” they taunt. “Where is your help and your strength now?”
What is it about God that requires us to be patient? What is it about our Maker that He seems to mark time more by months than by minutes?
I love what I heard comedienne Kathy Buckley once remark. “I have learned,” she said, “that faith is having the patience to wait, knowing that all things will be done in God’s time.” “But I only wished,” she went on, “that I owned one of His watches.”
We all do, but we don’t own one of those watches, and we never will. So what must we do? We must acknowledge our dependence upon God and be careful always to be walking in step with Him. We must not get ahead of Him. On the other hand, we must not fall behind Him.
That’s certainly the tack that the Psalmist took in his own life. Instead of wallowing in his misery, instead of giving in to his critics and teasers, the Psalmist sizes up his options and stakes everything on the goodness of God. “Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.”
Some of us this morning need to have a good talk with ourselves. We need to take a good look in the mirror and spend whatever time might be necessary to convince the person looking back at us that we are incapable of solving our most vexing problems and unable to satisfy our most pressing needs. We must come to the realization that in many ways we are on the “Ride to Hell,” literally speaking, and there’s no way we can get the thing to stop.
But there is someone who can. His name is Jesus. And as the Apostle Paul put it in his letter to the Galatians, “But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive the full rights of sons” (Gal. 4:4-5). We are hapless, but we are not helpless. There is grace to do for us what we could never do for ourselves – grace that is sufficient for our every need.
There is an old expression that “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity.” That is to say that when we find ourselves at the end of our ropes, as did this Psalmist, we are in a place where if we will but allow it, God can step in and do that work which gives peace. It’s not a bad phrase – “man’s extremity is God’s opportunity – at least not when it’s used in a descriptive way, as Jesus did when he spoke to the Pharisees who were asking him about his penchant for tax collectors and sinners, a seedy crowd if ever there was one. And do you remember how Jesus answered them? “It’s not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick…. (And) I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matt. 9:10-13).
Be certain that Jesus wasn’t giving the Pharisees a free pass. He wasn’t saying that they weren’t in need of what he had come to offer. If anything, Jesus was castigating them for their inability to recognize their real need. He was telling them that they were no better than the people they were looking down on.
What would he say to us? What would he say to you?
I fear that those of us who are in relatively good health, who have money in the bank (or the promise of putting money in the bank) aren’t prone to seeing ourselves as God sees us – as hapless two-legged creatures in desperate need of His grace. I fear that we live in a day when faith in Christ has come to be considered, particularly in America, as more of a cultural inheritance than a vibrant personal commitment. Witness the number of people today who when asked if they are Christian offer an unambiguous “yes,” but who when asked to share how Jesus is changing their lives, look at you as if you have just asked them to explain the makeup of the atom.
Simply put, we live in a day when so many people have lost their grasp of our human condition, which is only understood by a theology of radical grace. Our souls don’t really “pant for God,” as the Psalmist describes his own desire, because, truth be told, our assumption is that we’re actually doing pretty well on our own.
At some point life will get bumpy, or confusing, or unsettling, or just plain old, and we will come to the place where we see that there’s not one thing we can do about it. Only Jesus can.
You may be at that place today.
I love the story of the children’s Sunday School teacher who had just finished her lesson and wanted to make sure that the class had understood her point. So she asked the question, “Now, can anyone tell me what you must do to have your sins forgiven?” There was a short silence, until from the back of the room a small boy raised his hand and spoke up, confidently. “Sin,” he said.
That part we’ve got down, every one of us; it’s the other part that determines our destiny.
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.”
We may be hapless, but with God we are never helpless.