Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church
Unforgettable Edgehill
July 20, 2014
John M. Buchanan
The battle of Edgehill, September 20, 1643, is mostly forgotten, assigned to the dustbin of history, except for a prayer a man wrote before fighting in it. It was during the first English Civil War, which pitted forces loyal to the monarchy against Parliament. Sr. Jacob Assley was an officer in the Royalist Army led by King Charles. The Parliamentary force was led by the Lord of Essex. It was a crucial battle in the long conflict that led to the signing of the Solemn League and Covenant that brought our Presbyterian ancestors, the Scottish Covenanters, in on the side of the Parliamentary force. That’s way more than you need – or want – to know. My children say, “Don’t ever ask Dad a question about history unless you have a lot of time.”
The battle is of interest because Jacob Assley, as he strapped on his armour and prepared for the fight, sat down and wrote a little prayer:
Lord, I shall be verie busie this day.
I may forget Thee, but do not Thou forget me.
For a long time that prayer was on our refrigerator door amidst a wonderful collage of family memorabilia, including pictures of the most spectacularly beautiful grandchildren in the history of the world. It was at eye level so I saw it every morning of my life as I reached for the orange juice. It was – and still is – the one prayer I pray every day of my life.
Lord, I shall be very busy today,
I may forget you.
But do not Thou forget me.
I love that little prayer because of its remarkable reminder of God’s presence in the midst of human life at its most human – and busiest. I love it because it affirms the basic hopefulness of our faith; namely that there is nowhere you and I can go that is God-forsaken, forgotten, not even those places where human life is profane and violent and tragic – not even Chicago when fifty people were shot two weekends ago, not even Jerusalem and Gaza. I love – and need – the reminder of the promise that God is not dependent on my attentiveness, my piety, my faith. I love that prayer because, like you, I am very busy – even though I am supposed to be retired. That is another subject. But, not unlike you, I am so occupied, preoccupied, that I do not live with a constant, minute-by-minute awareness of God as a presence, a companion.
In her fine new book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, Barbara Brown Taylor describes the night she and her husband, Ed, and their Labrador retriever, Dancer, walked to the highest point on their Georgia farm to see the moon rise. She writes: “I sit where Dancer can lay his head on my lap, and Ed sits behind me so I can lean on him. There is nothing to hear but our own breathing…The darkness around us is thickening like syrup…The evening is so beautiful…Then I see it: a thin slice of persimmon…Her face is perfectly round, perfectly orange, perfectly huge…She is the loveliest thing I have seen all day, all week, all year…’How long since we have done this?’ Ed says in my ear…How long since we have sat next to each other in the dark? How long since we have sat quietly under such enormous space?
‘Twenty years,’ I say.
‘Why is that?’ he says.
He and I both know why, but the answer makes me so sad I cannot say it out loud. We’ve been busy. For twenty years.
Busy? The word loses all meaning under the canopy of the sky.” (pp 168-169)
You and I are so busy with our Battles of Edgehill that we do forget everything but the urgent demands of the moment, forget God – totally, absolutely. And so I love this little prayer that reminds me that though I may have forgotten, God has not forgotten me. And I love even more the provocative suggestion that it is in those times and places and circumstances where we forget God, that God is most immediately present and involved in our lives.
Conventional wisdom is that to be religious you have to step back from life, shut your eyes, go inward. To get in touch with God, to be accessible to God you have to find a place apart from life. Conventional assumption is that God is remote, not immediately involved, certainly not involved in human life at its most human – maybe life at its most sublime, maybe listening to great music, admiring a sunset, pondering the mystery of a newborn, greeting a bright yellow Day Lily first thing in the morning – but surely not selling bonds, trading stocks, changing a diaper, doing the dishes, delivering a lecture, arguing a case, fighting a battle.
Actually our religious tradition – the Judeo Christian tradition – says two things about this. Yes, God comes in the moonrise, looking in wonder at a night sky full of stars pondering the wonder of a galaxy in our infinite, expanding universe, sitting quietly and meditating. But the tradition says the opposite of that as well. It is both/and - and it is the alternative that I want us to think about this morning.
At its most basic level, in the oldest formative stories our religion asserts that God is not only out there – in the expanding universe – but also here, surprisingly and unexpectedly close at hand, that human life in all its moments and experiences is lived out in the presence of God, and that the purpose of religion is to remind us of that amazing fact, the radical presence and involvement of God in human life, in your life and mine.
One of the best of those ancient, formative stories is about Jacob, son of Isaac, grandson of Abraham and Sarah. They are our progenitors, the parents of Jews and Christians back on the edge of history. Abraham and Sarah hear God call and in their old age pick up and move. Sarah, in one of the more unlikely and delightful incidents becomes pregnant and they have a son, finally. They name him Isaac. Isaac and his wife, Rebekah have 2 sons, twins: Esau and Jacob. Esau is his father’s favorite – a real outdoorsman; Jacob is his mother’s, but he is not a saint. In fact, he’s greedy, selfish, self-serving. With his mother’s connivance he deceives his elderly, now blind, father and cheats his brother, Esau, out of his birthright. He and his mama work up a disguise and trick old Isaac into thinking he’s Esau and Isaac grants Jacob – thinking he’s Esau – the mantle of family leadership and al the inheritance.
It’s not pretty. When he discovers what has happened, Esau is understandably upset. With masterful literary restraint the Genesis writer observes: “Now Esau hated his brother.” In fact he planned to kill Jacob on the day their father died. Rebekah intercedes, helps Jacob get away. And that is the situation. Jacob on the run, essentially banished form his family, home, community, running for his life from his murderously furious brother. [Parenthetically, dear friend Jack Stotts, President of Austin Seminary and before that, McCormick, liked to chide preachers who became sentimental about the church as a family. Read the Bible, Jack used to say. Families in the Bible are disasters – starting with Jacob and Esau.]
Jacob is running for his life. He’s not on a wilderness prayer retreat. His only agenda is survival. He’s out in the world at its most threatening and dangerous. He is alone. It’s dark and he’s exhausted from running. He lies down and sleeps on the ground. He could not be more vulnerable. And in a dream he sees a ladder extending from heaven to earth and angels and the voice of God: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go.”
Distinguished Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says that this statement and promise is a game changer, requiring a whole fresh and new idea of God. Most religions agree that God is high and almighty, transcendent, omnipotent, and that God is to be approached in fear and trembling. But here is a God who descends, a God who comes down to be with a human being in a lot of trouble, worldly trouble, a human being trying to survive.
“I will be with you and keep you wherever you go.” It is the theological forerunner of the first prayer I learned as a child and prayed with my mother at bedtimes. “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”
You and I are living in what sociologists are calling an unprecedentedly secular time. Church membership is down across the board. In a recent religious opinion poll the only segment of the population that is growing is the “nones”: the people who answer “none” to the question about religious preference. We seem more aware of God’s absence than God’s presence and we find ourselves asking: Where is God in all of this, in genocide in Africa, in the breakdown of our Iraq and Afghanistan project, in the hellish suffering in Gaza, in the street crimes of Chicago – or Dallas – where innocent children are caught in gang warfare? Is the radical secularization of our time merely evidence that God has abandoned us, forgotten us, that we are finally, ultimately alone, that there is no one there?
And into our sense of abandonment comes an alternate word, a word from God. “I will be with you and keep you wherever you go.”
It is this world that God comes into. It is into human life, raw, earthy, worldly human life that God promises to come. Here, 2000 years before Jesus is the first hint of incarnation, the very foundation of Christian faith: God with us; the Word made flesh; God coming to be with us in, of all things, not a clap of thunder, a natural cataclysm, but the most human experience of all, the birth of a baby. Emmanuel, God with us.
Pay attention to the fact that Jacob wasn’t doing anything religious, wasn’t praying or signing hymns. He wasn’t in a place where religious experiences are expected to happen, wasn’t in a temple, at a sacred altar, wasn’t in church. Pay attention to how worldly and unreligious Jacob’s situation was – fleeing for his life after lying to his father and cheating his brother.
That is when and where and how this God comes to us: unplanned, unexpected, in the dark night of the soul when we are most vulnerable, out of options, most frightened.
Life does put us in those situations: the service man or woman in a lonely outpost or hostile territory;
 a patient waiting for surgery;
 the man or woman, suddenly, unexpectedly unemployed, no longer needed;
 the person, in midlife, suddenly abandoned and alone;
 the one who has just been told the bad news, that the condition is life-threatening and will require week and months of arduous chemotherapy.
Talking with a woman in her hospital room, trying to come to terms with a mysterious life-threatening syndrome the doctors had not been able to diagnose or treat, she pointed to a wall full of pictures of grandchildren. “When I’m feeling frightened,” she said, “I look at my angels and I sing a little song I learned a long time ago:
All night, all day
angels watchin’ over me, my Lord.
All night, all day
angels watchin’ over me.”
It’s a good little song to keep handy for the dark nights when you are afraid. As are the Psalmist’s words
The Lord is my shepherd
I shall not want…
Even though I walk through the darkest valley
I fear no evil, for you are with me.
And,
Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
If I ascend to heaven, you are there.
If I make my bed in hell you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning
and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me,
and your right hand shall hold me fast.
If I say, Surely darkness shall cover me,
- even the darkness is not dark to you: the night is as bright as the day.
That is the promise. That is the good news. There is nowhere we can go where God is not present. God will come into our lives wherever we are to keep us and love us – even and particularly in our preoccupation, our frantic, distracted busyness.
Lord,
I shall be
verie busie
this day.
I may forget
Thee. But do
not Thou forget me.