"Sighs too Deep For Words"

Dr. George R. Sinclair, Pastor

Gen. 29:15-28; Ps. 105:1-11, 45b or Ps. 128  Rom. 8:26-39; Matt. 13:31-33, 44-52

July 27, 2008

             When words won’t do we sigh, we groan, we expel air from our lungs, it crosses our larynx but there is no speech. Sometimes words won’t do. Sometimes words can’t express the deepest parts of us, complex feelings, hurts, hopes, loves, or pain.

                 Many of you know that our daughter is expecting her first child in December.  They’re about to take a picture of the baby.  Paula and I are still debating—we’re not sure we want to know whether it’s a boy or a girl. I kind of want to wait and be surprised.  Paula’s leaning toward knowing.  Anyway, I wanted to tell Meredith—“Just wait.  You’re in for the experience of a lifetime. When you get through labor you won’t care whether it’s a boy or a girl.”  But I didn’t. I kept quiet.

Bill Cosby’s wife helped him understand labor.  She told Bill to take his lower lip and stretch it over his head and he’d have some idea.  I didn’t tell Meredith that.  I wanted to, but I didn’t. 

I’ve seen labor twice.  Actually, the second time I slept through the biggest part.  Our babies were stubborn.  Meredith was 36 hours in coming and Sean was almost that long. 

Women will say some things in labor, some of them you can’t repeat—and they do a lot of groaning, a lot of sighing.  Pain will do that. I’ve never been in labor, but I once got my hand stuck in a mixer.  My mother was making a cake.  And for some reason I put my hand on the beaters. Next thing I knew my hand went right in. The beaters stopped and the motor hummed.  That hurt.  That made me sigh.

Another time I broke my nose.  I was nine years old.  My dad took me to the doctor. It was on a Saturday morning and we had been playing football. I tackled a guy and then got into a fight—broke my nose.  Two hours later I’m in the doctor’s office—just the doctor, me, and my dad.  It was after hours.  And I’m sitting there in this chair, kind of like a dentist chair. And the doctor’s saying, “Yeah, your nose is broken—green stick fracture.  You know what a green stick is, don’t you, son?  Your nose is bent like that and I’ve got to straighten it out.” 

So he takes this stainless steel rod and puts it up my nose and pulls my nose straight.  No Novocain.  No nothing. No time for that—“Just grab hold of your daddy’s finger here while I straighten you out.”  When the doctor’s finished with the rod he takes gauze that’s been soaking in Vaseline. I don’t know; it’s maybe a half inch wide and three feet long. And he crams it up my nose—again using his stainless steel rod.  He then stuck tape across my nose and sent me home.  “Pete, you might give the boy some aspirin when he gets home.”  I sighed then too.

My sister sighed whenever she did math homework with my father.  My sister had a weakness for math.  And my father had a weakness for patience.  He’d say, “Well, you do this and this and this and there you have it.”

And Stephanie would say, “I don’t understand.  That’s not the way the teacher said to do it.” 

And then my father would scratch out the answer and do another problem the same way.  And Stephanie would sigh.  And Daddy would yell and Stephanie would cry. 

Sighing is intensely physical.  Take a gulp of air, several gulps.  If you let it out just right, it makes a whooshing sound.  Lower the octave and the sigh becomes more of a groan.  Raise the octave and it becomes a whine, a whimper. 

Sighing links body and spirit.  Speech also links body and spirit, but sighs do so in ways words can’t or don’t. We sigh when we’re groping for the right words.  We sigh before thoughts are formed.  Sighs come out of the depths, which is why sighs precede statements like: “I don’t know what to do.  I’ve reached the end of my rope. I’m at my wits end.  We’ve tried everything.  I can’t see any light at the end of the tunnel.  We’ve been down this road before.  I can’t believe this has happened. I can’t believe this has happened again.  Where do we go from here?” 

I think about our Urban Mission Campers—they’re in for some sighing—not just this week when they get up at 5:30 or contend with the heat and the long hours but also what they will see and experience.  Poverty can take the wind right out of a person.  Poverty disappoints.  You will meet some whose detours have become dead-ends and others whose vices are now death-bringing habits. You will meet still others who’ve never caught a lucky break, those who were broken before they ever got started.  You will meet sorrow this week which brings no easy answers. And you will meet things in your own personal life that will produce no easy answers.  Your own hope will be disappointed.  If you love life at all, you will meet tragedy, you will see and experience injustice; you will, if you haven’t already, learn that life is not always fair. If you love life at all, which I’m counting you will, your heart will sometimes break.  If your heart never breaks, if you’re never disappointed or outraged by the inequities you see, by the promise of what life should and could be for all of God’s children then you’re not looking or you’re looking and not seeing, you are sleep walking.

But if your eyes are open and if you are listening not only to your own life but more importantly to life on this planet, you will hear the world’s pain, its sorrow, its large sadness.  And when you do you will also hear the Spirit praying.  You will hear the Spirit interceding with you and for you and with and for God’s world with sighs too deep for words.

That sounds embarrassingly anthropomorphic.  “The Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” That sounds way too human, too much above what God ought to do. But there it is, “the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”  Paul says the Spirit does this because “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” 

Paul didn’t have in mind “prayer correctness,” as if there was or is a right posture for prayer, a right time to pray, a right way to pray. And if we only knew this right time or posture for prayer we would get results.  It goes much deeper than that.  Paul has in view what happens when we genuinely don’t know what to pray.  When we’ve run out of answers, when we’ve run out of hope, when we’ve exhausted ourselves because the pain is too large or the odds for success are overwhelmingly small; it is then that the Spirit prays for us.  It is then that the Spirit’s prays with “sighs too deep for words.” 

God knows us at the depths.  God knows us when we’re at our wit’s end, when we’ve run out of choices or when our choices will only make matters worse or when not choosing only prolongs pain. That’s when the Spirit intercedes for us. The Spirit intercedes for us when we don’t know “how to pray as we ought.”  And when the Spirit prays, God, “who searches the heart,” hears us. When the Spirit prays, God hears our cry. 

The ‘Heart Searcher’ knows us. God knows us. It’s not like God keeps a file, a  record.  It’s not that kind of knowing. Maybe you saw the Jim Carey movie, “Bruce        Almighty?”  There’s a scene where Bruce meets God. God, played by Morgan Freeman, pulls out a long file drawer, thirty, maybe forty feet long.  And the file contains every thought Bruce has ever had. It contains a   record of every thing good and every bad thing Bruce has ever done.  That’s one kind of knowing.  And I suppose we might say God “knows” us that way.  God knows everything about us, all of our secrets, all of our data, our record.  But to truly know a person, you’ve got to know more than the facts about them.  Henry Mobley said somewhere that when we get to heaven God will ask us to show him our pictures.  “Show me your life.  I want to see your pictures.”

I don’t know the context for Henry’s remark, but I think it’s a wonderful example of God’s knowledge. God does not spy or snoop or eavesdrop.  God knows us like a friend who wants to see our pictures, a friend who is genuinely interested in the details of our lives, the things we most cherish, the things we worry about, the things which bring us anguish.

God does not keep a file on us, but God does know us.  The ‘Heart Searcher’ knows us from the inside out.  God comes alongside us so that when we meet futility and decay we are not alone.  God suffers with us.  Parents know this.  Parents suffer in the worst way for their children.  When your children hurt you hurt.

When I broke my nose and lay there squeezing my father’s hand—afraid, hurting, tears running down my face—my father hurt every bit as much as I did, only differently.  He couldn’t change the fact of my broken nose, but he could hold my hand.  He couldn’t undo what I had done, but he could stand by my side. God stands with us. And because God stands with us “all things work together” for our good.  All things.

Everything that happens is not God’s will, but in everything God works for our good.  Paul catalogues all sorts of bad things—hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril, the sword.  Paul never says these things are good or that they are God’s will.  But he does say that in all of these things we are “more than conquerors through [Christ] who loved us.”

In making his case for God’s love, Paul uses a very Presbyterian word—predestined.   We misunderstand Paul if we think God cherry picks those he will love, as if God draws a circle around some people and says, “These are mine. And these over here are not mine.”  We also misunderstand Paul if we equate predestination with fate. Predestination is not fatalism.  Predestination says God loves us ahead of time, that God loves us before we love him, that God’s love is our destiny, that God’s love determines our destiny. Predestination says very simply, “Stop worrying, nothing can separate the world, nothing can separate you from God’s love—that’s your destiny, that’s the world’s destiny—God’s love in Jesus Christ.

God does not give us a free ride, but God does give us his Spirit.  God does not give us a pass on suffering, but God never lets us go.  God does not ward off distress, but God does assure us that nothing can ever separate us from his love.  The Son has entered our suffering.  Jesus is God’s “sigh.” Jesus is the very breath of God, the promise of all we will ever need. And in him we are “more than conquerors.” 

Sometimes a sigh is all we can manage, but sighing is not the end.  Sighing is the beginning. Sighs are birth pangs of new creation. Sighs are birth pangs of hope, for when the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words, we are born anew. We are given living hope and can meet any challenge, any obstacle, any threat.  God does not want us to roll over and play dead. God wants us to stand up and fight. God wants us to meet the world’s sorrow and suffering and our own sorrow and suffering head on. God wants us to meet it head on in his love.

In “all things” God works for our good. When words won’t do, “the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”  When words won’t do, God’s love is sufficient and we are more than conquerors. We are beloved children of God.  Amen.