Sermon 3 was originally presented on Sunday, November 8, 2009, at Vestavia Hills Baptist Church in Birmingham. The title of this message is “Hard Times,” based on the biblical story of the Prophet Elijah and the widow of Zarephath. That text is found in the book of 1 Kings 17:8-16.

Hard times, hard times. Hard times are when we find out what’s in us. I’ve been using a little musical text, so I’ll use this one today. It’s from Stephen Foster, who wrote all those good old Southern songs, even though he only came to the South one time. He had one called “Hard Times,” and it goes like this:

Let us pause in life’s pleasures and count its many tears,

While we all sup sorrow with the poor.

There’s a song that will linger forever in our ears,

Oh, hard times, come again no more.

‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary,

Hard times, hard times, come again no more.

Many days you have lingered around our cabin door,

Oh, hard times, come again no more.

Well, I’ve been hearing that song lately. Not exactly that song, but I’ve been hearing it in conversations. There’s a lot of worry, there’s a lot of worry in a lot of people about a lot of things.

It was 1931 when Son House went into the studio and recorded a lot of songs, among them a song called “Dry Spell Blues.” In “Dry Spell Blues,” he was writing about what had begun to be called the Dust Bowl. Some of you may remember the Dust Bowl; you may remember reading about it, you may have experienced it. Most of it really happened west of here—mostly out in Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico, and in those areas of the Great Southwestern Plains.

The Dust Bowl was part of a perfect storm that hit the United States of America and the world at that time. The collapse of Wall Street in 1929, probably combined with prolonged depression and sustained drought that happened for several years, and developments in the mechanization of agriculture that changed the farm world of the 1920s where so many were hired to work on the farms and they began to migrate in search of labor.

And so, you had millions of people moving from the Southern Plains out to California. You had millions of people, mostly African-Americans in the South, who left the farms where once twelve people would do the work, now with tractors and mechanization and the mechanical cotton picker, one person could do the same thing, and suddenly millions of people were displaced.

And along with that, when you have the catastrophe of an environmental disaster like the Dust Bowl, and you have a disaster like the other things that were going on economically, you had people in a perfect mess. In that place, it was really tough, and it was caused in part by the things people had done in farming. They had overplanted, they had failed to rotate crops, they had failed for years and years and years to take good care of the land.

And then on top of that, when a drought came, what began to happen is that the topsoil died and just blew wherever it would, and there were dust storms—you’ve seen pictures of them, maybe—where it was as horrible and frightening as what you see of the sandstorms in Saudi Arabia and Iraq. That happened in the United States during the Dust Bowl, and suddenly all these people migrated west. Farmers planted, but nothing would grow.

And in the middle of that, he wrote this song, and he said:

I throwed up my hands, Lord, and solemnly swore,

I throwed up my hands, Lord, and solemnly swore,

Well, ain’t no need of me changing towns,

It’s drought everywhere I go.

Stood in my backyard, wrung my hands and screamed,

Well, I couldn’t see nothing, couldn’t see nothing green.

Oh Lord, have mercy if you please.

Oh Lord, have mercy if you please.

Let your rain come down and give our poor hearts ease.

Hard times here and everywhere you go,

Hard times, times harder than ever been before.

And the people are drifting from door to door,

Can’t find no help, Lord, I don’t care where they go.

Oh, hmm.

And in a later version, of course, as his craft developed:

Lord, I fold my arms and walk away,

Fold my arms and walk away just like I tell you,

Somebody’s got to pray.

Pork chops forty-five cents a pound,

Cotton only ten.

Pork chops forty-five cents a pound,

Cotton only ten.

And then this line: I can’t keep no women, not one of them.

The blues is singing about hard times, hard lives. It is turning our pain into prayer. And there are only two conclusions if you’re not praying: one is that you’re not having any pain, and the other is that you’re having it and you’re not paying any attention to it. Because if you’re paying attention to it, it will drive you to grace, and you will say, “Lord have mercy” in a different way than when you mumble it here at church. It will come out of a place of deep passion and conviction, and not rote.

One blues singer down in Mississippi was said to have launched an effort to teach the blues to young boys and girls. Somebody asked him why he did that, and he said, “I’m putting guitars in their hands instead of guns.” Because he realized that something needed to happen to turn pain into music and prayer so there could be something different.

There’s way too much killing. Killing breeds more killing, despair leads to desperate things. We’ve seen it this week in our own country—terrible, terrible tragedy. What is wrong with us when life is so cheap? Well, the blues is our choice to listen to that pain and to turn it into something. And if we’ll let it, it will turn our pain into prayer.

You know one of the most famous blues lines—lots of songs have it in them—is actually an ancient Christian cry. It is “Lord, have mercy. Lord, have mercy on me.” Now, we’re familiar with this term in the South; we say it a lot. It’s when we don’t know what else to say. Sort of like “Bless his heart,” which someone told me means “You crazy fool.” I don’t know.

It is also a line that Christians have said. The phrases we said in the confession of sin this morning go back about 1,800 years. And Christians have been saying this for 1,800 years: “Lord have mercy, God have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy on us.” Only we don’t say it like that because we are, well, we are button-down, uptight, suburban folks. And so we come in here and we say, “Lord have mercy,” and then the service can go on.

But the way you really say it is like, “Lord have mercy!” Now, your mama said it that way, didn’t she? “Lord have mercy, child, what are you doing? What are you—what are y’all—Lord have mercy!” It was a prayer; it came from her heart. Now, since we are more liturgically bent, I need you to say this a few times during the sermon, but I’m just going to point to you when it’s your turn to say it. All right? Now, I don’t want you to say “Lord have mercy”; I want you to say it like you mean it: “Lord have mercy!” Now try it.

(Congregation: “Lord have mercy.”)

Well, that’s all right. You’re not in trouble yet, but you’re getting there. So when I say “Lord have mercy,” you say, “Lord have mercy.” Lord have mercy. Okay.

So here’s this widow in Zarephath—foreigner, outsider, immigrant, whatever you want to call her. She’s a stranger. She’s the most vulnerable. There’s been three and a half years of drought. Why has there been three and a half years of drought? Well, because God is not pleased with that nation and God is judging them through Elijah because they have aligned themselves with another god and not with the true God. And so they’re going through a time in which there is, in some sense, some kind of judgment coming because of all the compromise and spiritual failure in their life.

And so he comes to this poor old woman who is the most vulnerable in society, a person who has no husband, no family, has only this one child. And so Elijah comes to her and he asks her to give him some water, and she goes to get that. And then he says, “Oh, and bring me some bread.” And she said, “Oh sir, I don’t have any bread. I’m about to die myself. I’m running out. I just have a little bit of oil, a little bit of meal. I’m going to make our last meal and die.” Now that is a blues song right there.

I thought about turning that verse into a blues song:

As the Lord your God lives, got nothing to cook and eat,

Handful of meal in a jar, just some cooking oil in a jug,

No wine, no eggs, no meat.

Gather me a couple of sticks, then I’m going home to die.

Yeah, just me and my boy and a little bit of bread,

Last meal before we die. Lord have mercy.

(Congregation: “Lord have mercy.“)

Now, that’s what it felt like. You ever been there? I have. You ever been there? Well, I’ll tell you some good news. When you get there, God has a chance with you. God has a chance to turn your life in a new way if you let yourself go there. Now, we’re really good—and for whatever reason the Lord has given us just enough freedom—that we can wall ourselves off from it, we can anesthetize ourselves to it, we can buffer ourselves from it, we can lose ourselves in the wrong things trying to forget about it.

But when we let ourselves go to hard times and what they have to say, then God’s grace has a chance. It can help us change in several ways. First of all, it can move us from self-congratulations to real gratitude. It can move us from self-congratulations to real gratitude. What do I mean by that? I—we’re approaching Thanksgiving. Y’all going to have Thanksgiving at your house?

And you know, a lot of times I have thought the way we talk about thankfulness in this country—because we have been so prosperous—is to sit around and add up our blessings and think that we ought to be thankful because we have so much. And that is one kind of thankfulness, but if we’re not careful, it’s just a half-step over to self-congratulations. “You know, we’re pretty good people. We’ve done well. We have been blessed. We must be really, really good people.”

Hard times moves us away from believing that into the possibility of real gratitude. Self-congratulations is sort of like what you do when you’re three or four. “Mommy, look what I made!” You ever gotten one of those? “Well, that’s wonderful, darling! Uh, what is it? Tell me about—” I always say that with children; that’s helpful to you. “Well, tell me all about this,” because I’m sitting there thinking, “I don’t know what in the world they just drew.” But when they tell me about it, I say, “Oh, I see it! There it is right there, right there in that green blob right there in the middle.”

Someone has said we don’t like real gratitude because it is the awareness that we are obligated to someone else for everything. If you are thankful—truly thankful—you know that you didn’t deserve it and didn’t do all that much to get it. Yeah, we work hard, but the truth is we live in a place where hard work gets rewarded. We often come from families that have set us far ahead in the competition. We have been helped by friends down through the years, and we have a great educational system. We’ve got every reason in the world for things to go well, and the truth is, if we stop and think about it, a lot of it didn’t come from me.

We ought to give thanks for everything. That’s what Paul said, and that includes the hard times. Because they peel away all the pretenses and the delusions, the pride, the vanity, the lack of concern for each other and concern for the things of God. We start wringing our hands sometimes when things get a little tough, when we should be getting down on our knees. We begin to blame everything and everybody, pointing fingers at everything on the earth when the thing to do in hard times is go in your bathroom and look in the mirror and begin to think of what you can face to move life in a new place. Hard times is a time of seeing things as they really are. Lord have mercy.

(Congregation: “Lord have mercy.“)

Oh, we’re going to have to practice one of these days. But you’re getting there. The second thing is that hard times can turn us from temptation to despair to the discovery of genuine faith and trust.

Son House was a Baptist preacher that lost his way. Fact is, I’ve been doing these sermons, I’ve been very disturbed at how many Baptist preachers turned into blues people. Or they were children of Baptist preachers who went bad. I don’t know what to make of all of that. But hard times are that place where we have the temptation to fall into despair of life—to give up on life—instead of finding genuine trust.

Of course, the opposite is also true: we can fall from trust into anguish and despair. It can get us down, or it can get us down to the place of turning around where there’s nothing left to lose, and we begin to cry out as though we really meant it: “Lord have mercy!“

(Congregation: “Lord have mercy.“)

Now, hard times, thirdly, call us from what seems to be to what will be and what really is. Now, this widow is a person who does not see things as they are. That long before she has reached this point of desperation and giving up on life, God said to his prophet, “I want you to go out of your country to this place called Zarephath, and I want you to find this helpless woman, and I want to help her through you.”

You see, if we really know how things are, then the provident God of this creation is working far ahead of you and me. Long before we reach our point of despair, God saw it coming. Long before you messed your life up, God knew you were going to. Long before it all came to final consequence, God understood what was going to happen and began to prepare the way. And so when we get to those places, we have the possibility of seeing not what seems to be, or but rather what really is and what will be.

There is always a song to sing, there is always a prayer to cry in the life of faithfulness. Obedience, we say, is at the core of discipleship, but the power to do it comes from God when we discover God’s grace in the midst of hard times. And so we are told she went and did as Elijah said.

Later, Jesus commends her in his sermon at Nazareth. And the reason he commends her is that she is one in a series of examples that he makes, saying to the people of his town: “Listen, it’s not because you’re related to me, it’s not because you know each other, it’s not because you’re Jews, it’s not because of anything that God will work in your lives. It is purely because God, who is love, is willing to work in your lives. There’s no other reason.”

God chooses to help you. God chooses to love you. God chooses to bless you. Way too much church in our time is about what we can do and how talented and wonderful we are—and we do have many wonderful talents. But the truth is, most of the gospel is about what God can do. Hard times is when we have a chance to find out what God can do when we don’t know what to do.

So Jesus in his sermon at first pronounces the wonderful news and everybody speaks well, but then he goes on and he tells them this truth, and it’s a hard word. It made them mad because they were convinced that there was some intrinsic quality in themselves which is what made them so lovable to God. And if we’re not careful, that attitude leads pretty quickly to an “us and them” in the world: “us good’uns that God loves and those bad’uns that God doesn’t.”

And that’s why Paul has to take three whole chapters in the book of Romans to demolish that argument completely. He starts with the Gentiles and he moves to the Jews, and finally he says nobody has a claim on God. Nobody has a reason to deserve grace. Nobody has one single reason to be helped in the world except that’s the way God is. And so he finally concludes that long argument in Chapter 3, verse 23, and slaps us in the face with “For all have sinned and come short of the glory of God, but they are now justified by his grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.”

So Jesus’ family, friends, and neighbors were a little aggravated at what he said. What did he say? Sometimes those who didn’t start out with it get it. Those outside understand it—those who are purely in need. Because we have to give up that sense of claim on God to find the power of grace working in us. All the pretenses, all the delusions, all the natural advantages—they keep us from knowing that we need his grace.

I came across this text and I love it. It’s a song by Duke Ellington:

I thought I was really someone.        

I thought I was really someone.

But I found out I’m just a nobody. I’m just a nobody.

But Lord, you are somebody. Lord, you are somebody.

And since I’m yours, I’m somebody too.