May 2006

Romans 8:26-28

Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during World War Two, was a bigger-than-life character and one of the great leaders of the twentieth century. Without him the war undoubtedly would have been more disastrous than it was. Early on, when Hitler was invading and conquering most of the European continent, Churchill's advisors painted a bleak picture in which victory and the survival of England as an independent nation were nearly impossible. Perhaps knowing he had to project strength and confidence, Churchill responded, "Gentlemen, I find this rather inspiring!"

There is another great Churchill story, one my predecessor, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, often told in his sermons, and that is where I first heard it. Churchill was asked to speak to the student body of the grammar school he had attended as a boy. He sat there on the stage, eyeing the little boys with their scrubbed faces and neat school uniforms. Then he stood up, looked straight at his young audience, and began his speech. "Never, never, never give up," he said, and sat down. Some have said that was his greatest speech. Can you imagine the impression it must have made on those young lives?

I have a weathered wooden sign in my office with the words in gold: Never, Never, Never Give Up! I love that sign. For as long as I have life and breath, it will sit in my office so I can see it and everybody who comes in will see it as well. It was given to me by June LeBell, a long-time member of this church who, when she lived in New York, was an announcer at WXQR, New York's classical radio station. She found it in a gift shop, and it reminded her of the Churchill story from my sermons, and also of her own story. In the years that I knew her, I watched how she held up and came back from the struggles, disappointments, rejections and depressions of life.

My title today is Giving Up Is Not an Option. I believe there isn't a person here today who, at some time, in a depressed, lonely, hard moment, has not asked, "Is it worth it? Should I really continue, or should I consider ending my life?" For most of us it has been more an intellectual question arising from a momentary anguish. But others have come much closer to the possibility of just cashing in, and giving it up.

Yet every one of us has experienced the times when we have given up and later realized we had given up too soon. If we had waited just a little bit longer, something significant might have happened.

I am glad my father didn't give up too soon. When he came to America from Italy, he had no money, was in a strange place, didn't know the language, and knew hardly anyone. Later he would talk about the discouragement, isolation, and loneliness he felt during that time. I am sure he was tempted to go back to Italy, where things were familiar and in some ways easier. But I am glad he didn't. I'm glad that my mother, who came to this country from Sicily as an eighteen-year-old girl and worked in a sweat shop twelve hours a day, six days a week, a couple of blocks away on West 27th Street--I am glad she didn't give up, didn't decide, "I'm going to go back to Sicily where I know everybody, and things may be a little bit easier." She hung on.

I am glad that Martin Luther King, Jr., did not cave in and run from the intense hostility and murderous action of the people who opposed his crusade for equality. I am glad he didn't give up when his advisors worried that he might go too far and endanger himself or fail at his task. I am glad he held on. I am glad that Abraham Lincoln, with his many defeats, losses, and struggles with depression, as well as vilification from very smart people who had no trust in his leadership--I am glad, I am glad, Lincoln didn't give up.

I am glad the Apostle Paul didn't give up. From his letters we know about the struggles--beatings, shipwreck, prison--betrayals and disappointments--sometimes it must have seemed easier to call it quits and just do something else. I am glad he didn't.

There is a scriptural truth which has been as important to me as any verse in the Bible from the time I became aware of it at eight or ten years old. It is life-changing, transforming, and strengthening.

Romans 8:28 -- "All things work together for good to those who love God and are called according to God's purpose."

This is not a statement from a Pollyanna, that "[e]verything will work out; we are not to worry about a thing." As we all know, things don't always work out. But it does mean that when you trust God, understanding that whatever happens, whatever makes life difficult, God can find a way to make something good come from the trouble.

Many of you know exactly what I'm talking about, because you live that kind of faith. You know that no experience is wasted, nothing that you have ever done, whether it was a good or bad thing, nothing is wasted. God weaves everything into the fabric of a greater and wiser and stronger character. Things can work out for good.

In the same chapter of Romans, Paul says, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" Who can be against you? There is no power, there is no presence, there is nothing strong enough to defeat the presence and the power of God in your life.

To this we can add something Paul said in his letter to the Philippians: "I can do all things through Christ who gives me the strength."

Some weeks ago, when I was in conversation with Dorothy Booker, the chair-person of our Board of Elders and Deacons, she mentioned some disruptive changes and challenges in her life. She was feeling a combination of anxiety at the uncertainty surrounding her and curiosity about how it would all turn out. Dorothy, a women of very strong faith, commented, "You never know, in a difficult time, if God isn't setting you up for the next great thing in your life."

Instead of panicking or seeking a sense of false security, Dorothy was using this time to think, watch, wait, and trust. Thinking, using your head, is a big part of not giving up. You know the statistics on thinking, don't you? 5% of the people think, 10% think they think, and the rest would rather die than think. Someone once remarked that if such a small proportion of people are thinking, all you have to do is think a little bit and you will succeed. Look around you at all the people who don't think, and remember how important it is to use your head.

Everybody can identify with the experience when an idea, an inspiration, or a dream comes to you, and you get excited about it. You can feel it is good, it is right, and you can say, "This is of God. God wants me to do this!" It is a tremendous feeling. So you proceed, and then you run into difficulty and you wonder what happened. If this was a God thing, where was God?

I remember a couple who came to see me once. When they met, they fell madly in love with each other. They thought, "We have finally met our soul mates." They went three or four months in a blissful state. No problems, everything was wonderful. As you are aware, with this level of emotional bliss, one's boundaries tend to get blurred. Then people get back to their daily lives, and things begin to come apart.

So this couple came to talk to me. They had their differences and disagreements; their personal histories were conflicting. The woman asked me, "If God brought us together, why is it so difficult?" The answer I gave her was: "God did bring you together, and then God said, 'Now you must get busy and work things out.'"

This is what God does with us. God gives us these gifts--and God also gives us brains. Use your head. Do some thinking.

I hope you'll bear with me while I use a sports analogy. Not everyone likes them--they may tune out when I start to talk about sports--but there is a lesson here that is important. In football each team has four attempts to advance the ball ten yards. They try every angle, coming from the right, the left, the middle, trying a variety of techniques to make the ten yards. They might choose to throw a pass. If by the third down they feel they won't make it on the fourth try, they will kick the ball and try again the next time.

In football, a team will use a variety of approaches to reach the goal line. Often in life we don't do that. Instead of examining the nature of the problem, planning carefully, and using other approaches if the first ones don't work, we decide we already know what the situation is and that we are going to deal with it in our own way. How many times have we come crashing down because we insisted on doing it our own way. We didn't use our heads, we didn't try different approaches, we didn't think.

Here at Marble Church over the years I have known two women who had cancer who were determined they would be healed by faith and faith alone. They refused to go to doctors or go to hospitals. They got no medical help at all. Within a very short time, each of these two women died. I sometimes think that if they had used their heads, trying different approaches, they would still be alive today, because God uses the brilliance of the human mind to create medical advances.

At times we can be stubbornly determined that our way will work despite evidence that we are wrong. Let's say I want to make a phone call. I will use the church number, 212-686-2770 for my example. Let's say I keep dialing 212-685-2770. I could dial that number forever and I wouldn't get the church. Nevertheless I insist I am right, that this is the way to dial the church. It doesn't matter that I am only one digit off--I will never reach the church. We all do that kind of thing, and wonder why we aren't successful.

My four-year-old granddaughter Claudia has figured out how to try an alternative way if she wants something. She is more present, more passionate about life, than anybody I've ever known. Everything that she does, she is fully involved. She loves life; my sense is she will never have a self-esteem problem. She has mastered the art of overcoming obstacles in order to get what she wants. Her mother, whose name is Birgit, told me that this past summer Claudia had developed a habit of calling from her bed at dawn, "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" Birgit would say to her, "Claudia, I don't want you to yell "Mommy' in the morning. If you need to see me, you can get up and come into my room." The next morning it would be the same thing: "Mommy, Mommy, Mommy!" Finally, one day, Birgit said very firmly, "Claudia, I do not want you to call me Mommy early in the morning." The next morning Claudia woke up and called out, "Birgit, Birgit, Birgit!" Birgit said all she could do was laugh.

If you are looking for inspiration when you are discouraged, you might go to the wonderful Chicken Soup for the Soul books, which usually have a chapter called Consider This. Recently I read there about a meeting in 1959 at Universal Studios where an executive dismissed Burt Reynolds and Clint Eastwood in the same meeting. To Reynolds he said, "You have no talent." To Eastwood, "You have a chip on your tooth, your Adam's apple sticks out too far, and you talk too slowly."

Here are two more: When Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, he tried over two thousand experiments before he got it right. A young reporter asked him how it felt to have failed so many times. Edison said, "I didn't fail. I invented the light bulb. It just happened to be a two-thousand-step process."

In 1952, Edmund Hilary attempted and failed to climb Mt. Everest, the world's tallest mountain. Some time afterwards he was asked to address a group in England. At one side of the stage was a picture of Mt. Everest. As he stood up to begin his talk, he pointed to the mountain and said loudly, "You beat me the first time, but I'll beat you the next time. You have grown all that you're going to grow, and I am still growing." Within a year he had conquered Mt. Everest. Asked about his exploit later, he said, "You don't conquer the mountain; you conquer yourself."

Never, never, never give up. Let us pray.

LORD, For the gift of life, for the challenges, even for the temptations and fears, Lord, we ask that You give us the strength, wisdom, and tenacity to hang in there and never give up. AMEN