September 7, 2025 - Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost: Healing: Patience and Perseverance

September 7, 2025  Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost
Ladue Chapel Presbyterian Church
Romans 5:1-5
“Healing: Patience and Perseverance”
Douglas T. King

Forgive me if the start of this sermon hearkens back to your English Lit course in college.  The poem, “my dream, my works, must wait till after hell,” on the cover of our bulletin this morning is described by the literary critic A. O. Scott as “a proper old-school sonnet orderly elegant: 14 lines of iambic pentameter, crisply punctuated, with syllables cut to measure.”  Scott goes on to write, “This poem is also the opposite of everything I’ve described.  It’s as wild a piece of verse as you’ll ever read, seething and unruly in spite of its ostensibly sensible theme and painstakingly precise decorum.  A sonnet at war with itself.” (New York Times, February 21, 2025)

In her poetry collection, “A Street in Bronzeville” the author, Gwendolyn Brooks, writes from the perspective of a group of African American soldiers fighting in World War II as they face the challenges of fighting fascism on the battlefield and racism back in their working-class neighborhood in Chicago.  These characters are well acquainted with deprivation and suffering.  

Listen, as I read it aloud,
“I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry.  I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light.  I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.”

The poem begins with an image that is charming and idyllic and so very orderly.

“I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid be firm…”

But by the conclusion of the fourth line the mood shifts dramatically.  The pristine scene of sweetness is now only viewed at a distance.  There is a journey to complete before honey may be spread upon bread once more.

And that journey begins in the darkest of places.  

“…Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry.  I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light.  I keep eyes pointed in;”

These are the words of a man trapped in the midst of warfare and all of the anguish and suffering that accompany it; the words of a man that cannot yet see an end in sight.
 
In the midst of that deep hopelessness, he seeks to envision a time beyond this cruel time.  But he does not kid himself that he will not be forever changed by the suffering he experiences.  He only hopes that in all the ways he has been changed, that he can still return to the sweet and pristine blessings he knew in earlier times; that he can still find his way home.  

“Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.”

Today is the first in a four-sermon series on healing that Melissa and I will be preaching as we step into this program year with its theme of healing.  Today we are considering how patience and perseverance have a role to play in our journey toward healing.  Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem speaks in the voice of a soldier seeking patience and perseverance by reminding themselves of the simple pleasures that await them, if and when they are released from their suffering.  

This is a helpful and effective strategy for us in the midst of pains both physical and emotional.  Reminding ourselves that there is the potential for relief and pleasure beyond the suffering of this time can sustain us and motivate us to move forward even when the struggle is deep and long.  

But, the hopes of the soldier in the poem are solely possibility hopes.  Now do not get me wrong, possibility hopes are wonderful and helpful.  However this is a bit of verse from another poet, “Possibility is a bird I once knew—it had one wing…” (“Final Poem for My Father Misnamed in My Mouth by Phillip B. Williams)  

If we put Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem in conversation with our reading from the book of Romans we hear of another level of hope.  The most famous line of this text is “…we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope…”  It is a tricky bit of wording.  The danger is that we hear this line as proscriptive.  We could make the mistake to believe that suffering is a good in itself which should be cultivated to make the journey from suffering to endurance, to character, to hope.  But it is not proscriptive, it is descriptive.  Suffering is a reality that none of us will ever entirely avoid. The question is how we choose to step into the suffering moments of our lives.  The question is how we enter into and journey through suffering.  

It is important that as we hear this potentially audacious claim of suffering to endurance to character to hope, that we remember the beginning of our text.  The language is a little theologically thick, speaking of being “justified by faith.”  In essence what we are told is that the foundation upon which we stand is God’s grace in Jesus Christ which means we are forgiven and made whole in all times for all time.  And this forgiveness offers us a peace and restoration that no manner of worldly circumstance need steal away, even to the point that we somehow share in God’s glorious perfection.  In our life’s journey and on into eternity we will never be separated from God’s love which will one day heal all our wounds.  This is the bedrock of our faith.  

Suffering will come into our lives.  We will have times when our bodies will fail us.  We will have situations arise when our spirits and our hearts will be threatened to be broken by circumstance.  There is just no way to inoculate us from these realities.  And when such times occur we all seek to cope the best we can.  One tool we have is our personal patience and perseverance.  We heard of this in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem.  We can remember the honey we have held and the bread we have stored.  We can envision a time when those pleasures will be experienced once more.  And in that envisioning find a hope that the journey will lead us past our current suffering and on to brighter days.  Changed by our suffering but still capable of joy.  

This is an invaluable tool in helping us persevere on toward healing.  But it is hope in a possibility.  Our text from Romans offers us hope in a certainty.  When we are journeying through suffering, particularly if it is not clear when or if it will ever cease, we are desperate for something sure to which we can cling.  The promise in Romans that God clearly and completely claims us in loving grace and is leading us to wholeness is a guiding star on even the darkest nights of our lives.  

We would be foolish to ever minimize the challenges we may and will face as limited mortals.  We would be foolish to discount our pain and particularly each other’s pain.  However, we can be so deeply wise to hold fast to the healing promise of God’s grace and to share that promise with one another when we are in pain.  

There are no guarantees on a timeline for when we will be healed from the ailments and wounds of both body and soul in this life.  But there is a sure guarantee that in the end we will be healed, deeply and completely.    We will be led home.  We will be fed and complete.  We will revel in our blessings.  And when we hold fast to that knowledge we are given the opportunity to journey through our suffering with true patience and perseverance; a patience and perseverance not merely grounded in possibility, but in the guaranteed promises of our God in Jesus Christ.

And the taste of that is so much sweeter than any honey.  Come to the table and be fed.  Taste and see that the Lord is good.

  Thanks be to God.  Amen.