Passing Through the Hour Glass of Faith

Miss Brookes was an experienced 4th grade teacher when I entered her classroom. She had taught my father over a quarter century before – in the same 2nd story room, in the same old brick schoolhouse. There was no fooling Miss Brooks; she had heard every excuse, and she had honed her teaching methods and materials to a fine and engaging art. She was a tough but marvelous teacher with a fearless love of learning - and she was also a woman of deep, lived faith (we could talk about God in public schools back then.) Miss Brookes did everything in her power to make that love – of learning and God - contagious and relevant.

One of the many learning tools in her classroom was a huge, ancient, wooden hour-glass, set right at the front of her desk. With each subject-change throughout the day, she would turn that hour-glass, providing the visual guide to all her students that for the next one hour, we were going to diagram English sentences, or learn about Greek Mythology, or practice our times-tables, or whatever. The good news in her system was that if you hated math tables, for example (as I did), you could watch the hour pass – grain by grain through the waist of that hour glass – until we could finally move on to a more interesting subject.

In late winter of that year, a serious nor’easter blew through the coastal towns of VA, and the school flooded. Among the many things saturated was Miss Brookes’ hour glass, so that when we finally returned to class, the sand in her time calculator had clumped with moisture. For the next month or so, until the sand thoroughly dried, instead of smoothly flowing through the tiny waist at the center of the glass, minute clumps of sand blocked the sand’s flow - and we were stuck – in what seemed a changeless classroom eternity – usually, it seemed to me - involving math facts! The single narrow path through the hour glass – leading from one chamber of sand to the other – was blocked by only the smallest of obstacles - and as a result, the hourglass became useless. Time itself was stopped – and there was no way out of math facts!

In the end, Miss Brookes’ hourglass taught us a much different lesson, beyond time-keeping, which she (I feel sure) had fully intended. Her hourglass taught us something about the importance of the narrow path in making life work properly. Every now and then she herself would become aware of the clumped sand, and she would grab the wooden sides of her hourglass, lift it to the heavens and rattle the poor-old-thing back and forth, repeating a single word: “Obedience! Obedience!”

On some level, Miss Brooks cleverly suggested to us, a lesson every human seems repeatedly to have to learn: obedience matters. Specifically, in my 4th grade mind, I learned that, if I clumped up the hourglass, if I was not obedient - then something less than desirable would happen. At the least some poor 4th grader was likely to get stuck doing math facts forever and ever amen! In the end, the image of Miss Brookes’ hour glass began a life-long tutorial … that obedience - to what is right, and good, and is of God is important. I learned that my own obedience matters - not just for my own life - but for the lives around me. I learned the importance of one single grain of sand – the importance of one single life – my life – your life – in obediently following the guidance of a larger, deeper – sometimes mysterious – Obedience. The way of obedience to God - I later realized - was at least part of what Miss Brookes was really trying to show us… “Obedience, obedience” was a call less to the sand in her hourglass, than to the souls of her students.

As we meditate on any of today’s readings, we find that they too seem to take the shape of a spiritual hourglass. Jeremiah sparkles with the future, expansive hope of the One yet to come - whose coming is so sure and certain that Jeremiah speaks of it as a done deal. Written while Israel’s best and brightest were still in exiled Babylonian captivity, Jeremiah’s vision was of a people restored by One yet-to-come who would lead them by a “straight path, in which they will not stumble,” and which leads them back to the Promised Land. But their path too was through their own narrowing hour-glass – with weeping (in repentance) and the gift of redemption and “ransom.” Like the single grains of sand that must pass through the hour-glass, Jeremiah tells us that the Israelites will pass from Babylon to the Promised Land - via weeping for their disobedience, and God’s own redemption.

Similarly, in Ephesians, Paul speaks of the “us” who have faith in Christ, and offers his prayer that those Believers in Ephesus would continue to grow and strengthen their understanding and faith in Christ – moving them along the narrow path toward wisdom and revelation. Paul reminds us of all that we have already received through faith in Jesus Christ: we have been given every spiritual gift, we are adopted as children, and have been bestowed with God’s Grace. All this happens through the narrow gate of faith in Christ. Yet, Paul reminds us that there is always more to this mysterious, gracious relationship with God - through Christ and the Holy Spirit. As we get to know the 3-in-1 LORD through a relationship of faith and attentive obedience, we receive the Lord’s wisdom, guidance, hope and peace.

In both readings, we are reminded that there is a life of captivity, and a new life of freedom – and that there is a path – a single path between the two.

Which brings us to Joseph.

The Gospel tells us the remarkable – if thin – story of Joseph. We really know very little about him, except through the extraordinary events of Jesus’ birth and deliverance. Yet, I can think of no one in Scripture, outside Jesus, who was any more steadfastly obedient, under any more difficult and dangerous circumstances - than Joseph. Joseph has already once followed the Angel’s command - by marrying the pregnant Mary, the Messiah-bearer. Surely, at the least, he had already faced criticism – if not outright derision – in the globe of his culture. Now, he is told to race for Egypt in the dark of night, through the sandy threats of the desert – and he immediately - and without question - obeys – in order to save (notice the order) “the baby and His mother.” Then, a few years later, he is told to bring Jesus back to Israel, in a new and sinless Exodus – this time of the Perfect Israelite who will redeem as only God himself could. Three times Joseph is given God’s orders, and three times he unquestioningly obeys; three times he is willing to obediently pass through the narrowest of waists of all history…
And then he is gone.

Culturally, I wish this story of Joseph’s selfless obedience were the reading for Father’s Day - or Mother’s Day for that matter. We parents all need to hear again of the selfless, protecting love offered by this parent – by both these parents. We hear not a word about “irreconcilable differences” from Joseph. We see not an inkling of Joseph’s wanting to “find his bliss” or “be himself” – at the betraying cost of his child’s tender sense of safety and trust. There is no mention of “self-expression” or boredom with his life of responsibility. Only submission to the God he trusted, the vow he made, the wife he married, and the child he was responsible for.

The thing about the issue of obedience is that – on the front end – we humans can only see our choice as “obedience, obedience,” when the fact is that, once we’ve passed through that narrow waist line of our own hour–glass, we suddenly find out that, it was not our obedience that made the difference at all. It was all God’s Grace… “for those who believe.” It was never about us at all. It was all always about God, and His unmerited desire to bless us.

That is what Joseph teaches us. Choose to follow the LORD’s directions, and the very shape of history (your history, your family’s history, perhaps even the world’s history) is altered. This is an extraordinary and bold proclamation. Your response to God – my response to God – in obedience – can make that much difference. I’m not implying that our works – of faith or obedience – pay our admission through the narrow waistlines of life. Nor am I suggesting that when we choose not to obey (had Joseph chosen not to obey) that God’s plans and purposes are somehow thwarted. To the contrary.

When we choose to behave in obedience to God’s commands, we are simply responding behaviorally to the gifts Paul speaks of in today’s Epistle reading. We are simply responding to the wonder that – through the narrow path of Christ - our souls, our Lives have been redeemed – eternally! Submission of your will to God’s ordinances is simply a way you reply – with your being – to the precious gift of your adoption. By consciously and unselfishly living as He would wish, by living into the next generation unselfishly and with delighted expectation, by trusting the One who called us - as Joseph did …low and behold, we get through the “narrow path” – whatever that “narrow path” may be - and there we are – standing in awe and thanksgiving for the Great God we have come to know and trust completely as His own beloved children.

Miss Brookes was a wise woman. She wanted her young students to learn – to learn Greek mythology, and English sentence structure, and heaven help me, math facts. She did her best to prepare our minds to grow into life-long learners. And, just like Paul, and Jeremiah, and our LORD himself, she also wanted us to enter a spiritual journey – a journey also of life-long learning and maturity. She knew, and Jeremiah saw, and Paul prayed – and Joseph lived - the truth that there is always a narrow waist-line in every person’s life – often there are many narrow tests in the hour-glass of our lives. And we are called to obedience – Joseph’s obedience, Christ’s obedience – not because we earn our place in the crystalline globe of God’s kingdom and his Love – but because, when we choose to compress our Self and our Wills, in order to move through our particular moment of obedience, we come through to find we were never alone; we were never doing it on our own, by our own will or effort. Rather, we find that we were being held in the very hand of God, transported by the examples of faithful saints, and messenger angels, and prophets’ visions, and apostles’ prayers. By God’s ongoing Grace, we see for ourselves the extraordinary lengths to which our LORD has made straight all sorts of narrow hour-glass paths – for ourselves and others – in order to redeem and restore our captive, exiled lives through Christ.

Thanks be to God. AMEN