“Power and Glory from Above, Part I: Trusting God in Hard Times” by the Rev. Don Wahlig, February 4, Epiphany 5, Year B - Isaiah 40:21-31 • Psalm 147:1-11, 20c • 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 • Mark 1:29-39

THEME:  Trust God to lift us up in hard times.
 

Today we begin a 2-part sermon series on God’s power and glory. Over the next two Sundays we are going to see how God lifts us up from the depths when we are down, and how he leads us back down when we’ve been up on the Mountain top. The thing about preaching is that you never know where and from whom the Holy Spirit is going to offer you inspiration. As I was preparing this sermon, I got my inspiration from an unlikely source.   I am talking about none other than Charlie Brown, and the man who created him, Charles Schulz. Do we have any Peanuts fans out there?  Did you know that Charles Schulz would have turned 100 years old this year? It made me curious to learn more about his life.

As a young boy, Charles Schulz was fascinated with comics. He loved Popeye and Mickey Mouse. School, however, was an altogether different story. Schulz failed the eighth grade and had to repeat it. In high school, he flunked several subjects.  He wasn't very good at sports, either. Socially, he was awkward. Other kids tended to avoid him. He was a serious introvert, a loner who often felt like a loser. He spent most of his free time drawing. His fondest dream was to become an comic artist. But when he offered his sketches to the high school yearbook, they were rejected.  His hopes were dashed. At age 20, his mother suddenly died, sending him into depression.  Shortly afterward, Schulz was drafted into World War II.  He later said, "The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness."  

After the war, he suffered more loneliness and rejection.  The woman he was dating turned down his marriage proposal only to accept someone else’s proposal a year later.  At the same time, he submitted his cartoons to numerous publications and studios, including Walt Disney. Every single one turned him down. About the same time, he became active in church. He came to love the Bible. He filled the margins with notes. He led Bible studies. He preached, and he did street evangelism. A local newspaper finally agreed to publish some of his comic strips, but it was hardly enough to make a living. So, he took a job teaching in a correspondence course for art. Once again, he felt like a failure. He had more than a few heart-to-heart conversations with God, but he never gave up on his faith or his passion for creating comic strips.  Finally, in 1950 at the age of 28, he got his big break. A syndication service picked up his Peanuts comic strips and published them in newspapers nationwide.  But even then, when he was an unquestioned success, the feelings of failure, anxiety, and depression never left him. His outlet for those feelings was Charlie Brown, the lovable loser who made his way into millions of homes and hearts. 

Almost 50 years later at the age of 75, Schulz told an interviewer, "I suppose there's a melancholy feeling in a lot of cartoonists, because cartooning, like all other humor, comes from bad things happening.”  Plenty of bad things happened to Charlie Brown, but he never gave up.  Nor did Charles Schulz. He was patient. He waited on God and eventually God came through, as he always does. In the process, Schulz’s faith matured and got stronger. Which is exactly what Isaiah intends for his fellow exiles. 

Isaiah writes to a people who have been beaten down by life and are about as low as you can get. They have been defeated, humiliated, and exiled to a foreign land. They are the former elite of Jerusalem, but now they are anything but elite. Like victims of war everywhere, they are traumatized, haunted by memories. And it’s not hard to see why. They watched in horror as pagan invaders burnt their city, destroyed their temple, and marched them off through the desert to Babylon. And there, in a land far from home filled with people who worship foreign gods, the exiles try to make sense of what happened to them. Where is God, they ask? How could God allow this to happen to us?  So, they come to Isaiah, God’s spokesperson, to voice their dispute with God. 

Either Yahweh, the God of Israel, has been defeated by the pagan gods of Babylon, or God has simply forgotten them. In other words, God is either unable or unwilling to deliver them from their suffering. It’s not clear which of those is worse. They are scared. They are angry. They want answers.  Have you ever felt like that? I have. I think we all have. It happens in our lowest moments, when the inconceivable suddenly becomes real. A relationship ends, or a marriage falls apart; a loved one dies, or we get a frightening diagnosis; we lose a job or a home. First, we are in shock. Then we get angry. We want to know why. Just like the exiles, we want answers. “God, where are you? How could you let this happen? Either you are not as powerful as I thought, or you are not as good as I thought.”

Isaiah puts this pain and doubt into perspective. He assures the exiles that neither of those is true. “Remember what you learned in Sabbath School,” he tells them, “God is the Creator.  When God made us and the world we live in, he needed no one else’s wisdom. He needed no one else’s help, because he alone is God.”  God sustains everything and everyone in the world he created.  He may be seated far above the heavens, but he never loses sight of his creatures below. In his sight, we may be as small as grasshoppers, but he knows us all by name, and he loves us as his own. He hears every cry and prayer we utter.  And he responds. Trust in God, Isaiah writes, and when the time is right, God will lift you up on eagles’ wings and deliver you from your suffering.   Those are some very bold claims.  They were probably hard for the exiles to believe, especially given their circumstances. 

Isn’t that true of us, too? When you and I are down in the dumps, mired in the muck of despair, it is hard to believe there’s a way out. As the old Nancy Sinatra song goes, I’ve been down so long it looks like up to me. And that is the challenge for us. God asks us to be patient. We have to wait on the Lord.  That is not easy, especially when we are in the midst of hard times, doubtful and discouraged. Which reminds me of a Peanuts cartoon.  You may have seen it. Lucy is complaining to Charlie Brown about her hard life.  She says, “I am discouraged.” Charlie Brown tries to cheer her up by putting things into perspective.  He says, "Well, Lucy, life does have its ups and downs, you know."  But that just aggravates Lucy.  She replies, "Why? Why can’t life be all ups?! Why can’t I go from an up to an upper-up? All I want is ups and ups and ups!" Aren’t we all like that?

But Charlie Brown is right.  As the saying goes, into every life some rain must fall.  And sometimes, it feels like you’re in the middle of a hurricane. But when it feels like God is not answering our prayers, and we start to wonder whether he is there at all, the truth is that he is at work in us, strengthening our faith so we can soar on eagles’ wings. When we wait on God, our faith gets stronger.  It’s like working out at the gym. In order to build muscle, we stress the muscle tissue in order to break it down. That triggers the body to rebuild bigger and stronger tissue. The same thing is true of our faith.  In hard times, our faith breaks down a little bit. Just like lifting weights, it is painful.  But what emerges is a stronger, more mature, more resilient faith. 

Suddenly, this week, I realized that is what Charles Schulz was doing in Peanuts. Life shook his faith. He processed his pain and his doubts through Charlie Brown. You can see him working out his faith in Peanuts. Of the 18,000 Peanuts comic strips he published, 600 had religious themes. He dealt with scripture, prayer, and the end times. Toward the end of his life, these references became more and more frequent.  Which is why, a few years back, an article in the Atlantic Magazine put it this way, “Charles Schulz was a devoted Christian; un-shell the Peanuts and you will find the fingerprints of his faith.” He made his readers laugh as he invited them into a deeper conversation about faith.

Friends, Isaiah is inviting us into that same conversation. In hard times, he is asking you and me to wait on the Lord, to trust that God is working in us, to strengthen our faith, while we wait for him to deliver us. It may be painful, but that is how we build the kind of faith that that lets us soar with eagles.

May it be so.