When I was a little girl, my favorite food was fried chicken. Because my father didn't care for poultry, Mother rarely served it. Fried chicken, therefore, was the "forbidden fruit" of my childhood. When my fifth birthday approached, Mother, as was her custom, asked me what I wanted for my special birthday meal. That was a no-brainer. "Fried chicken," I said emphatically.
"All right," my mother replied. "For a birthday treat, your godmother and I are taking you out to a restaurant for lunch and you can order fried chicken."
"You promise?" I asked.
"Yes, honey, I promise," my mother said.
The day dawned. I was a bundle of excitement imagining the chicken--its crispiness, the way the drumstick would just fit my hand, the juicy, tender meat. But the restaurant where my mother and godmother took me didn't look like a fried chicken place at all. There were funny stick-like symbols written on the menu, paper lanterns hung from the ceiling, and the figures in the pictures on the wall looked like my Chinese doll. Something was very wrong.
"Is this the fried chicken place?" I asked.
The adult conspirators smiled nervously. "Well, they have chicken here," my mother fudged. "But, Laura, isn't this exciting? This is Bo Sing's Chinese restaurant."
It was not exciting. It was betrayal. One bite of my godmother's sweet and sour chicken was NOT pan-fried, Southern chicken. Nor did the chicken chow mein they ordered for me bear any resemblance to my dream meal. I remember sticking out my bottom lip, kicking the leg of the table and saying, "But you promised. You promised fried chicken."
This is my earliest memory of a broken promise, and so vivid is it that I can take you to the precise location on the Country Club Plaza formerly occupied by Bo Sing's and tell you exactly where we sat within the restaurant. Undoubtedly the adults had craved Chinese food that day and had decided I could be manipulated by the exotic word "Chinese."
They were wrong. I had believed a promise was a promise. My trust was shattered.
In fairness I have to say that Mother must have learned something that day. For the rest of my growing up, she never again said, "I promise," about anything I wanted or needed. It was always, "We'll see."
Promises are sacred. We take them very seriously. Some examples of promises we make include these:
- "I pledge allegiance to the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands…"
- "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God."
- "I do solemnly swear that I will … obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice."
- "I take you … for better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish, until we are parted by death."
Even more sacred are the promises we make each time we renew our baptismal covenant. Promises to "proclaim by word and example the Good News of God in Christ" and "to seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving [our] neighbor as [ourselves]." The promise "to strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being."
We mean well. We fully intend to honor such promises. But, then circumstances change. We change. Telling the truth in court is difficult if it puts one's status, fortune, or life in jeopardy. Following orders in the tumult of battle can make cowards of the bravest, most well intentioned. Staying in a marriage where love has died can be intolerable.
Are we really committed to loving all of our neighbors, including those whose actions render them repellant to us; committed to getting off the sidelines to work for justice and peace; to putting Christ at the center of all of our actions? These are challenges, indeed. Yet ... we have promised.
The jaded might conclude that some promises are empty to begin with or subject to compromise where personal gain, safety, or comfort is involved. As we see public figures reinterpreting their promises or experience the disappointment of personal betrayal, gradually, inevitably, we may begin to distrust promises. To distrust others and even ourselves.
But we have absolutely no reason to distrust God's promises. The evidence of His steadfastness and compassion is overwhelming. We may fail Him, but He does not fail us.
In today's reading from Deuteronomy, the wandering Hebrews hear the commandment: " …go in and occupy the land that the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors." There is no waffling here. The land is promised: a land "flowing with streams … a land of wheat and barley … a land where you may eat bread without scarcity, where you will lack nothing."
Yet if you were one of those wandering in the wilderness for forty years, you, too, might have doubted the promise. "My feet hurt." "There is nothing to eat." "I'm thirsty." And even when food was provided as promised, you still might have complained, "I'm sick to death of manna and quail."
History, however, shows us that, in God's good time, His promise was fulfilled and the wanderers were delivered to that land of milk and honey.
If you think about it, Scripture is full of promises. For example, God's covenant with Noah, his assuring the elderly Abraham and barren Sarah of a child, Jacob's dream in which God promises his descendants will be "like the dust of the earth."
And now we come to the magnificent promise of today's passage from John: "This is indeed the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day." And further on, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
I challenge you to find a place in Scripture where a promise of God's was unfulfilled. He is Lord of All, the great I AM.
We, on the other hand, are human, and fall short, just as Judas was corrupted by greed, as a fearful Peter denied his Lord, and as the Jews in today's Gospel scoffed at the possibility that Jesus, whom they had known from boyhood, could be the "bread that came down from heaven."
And because we are human, we become impatient. We want what we are promised now. God's long view is difficult for us; so when circumstances become burdensome, we, like the wanderers in the wilderness, may question, doubt, complain, and even lose faith.
The Good News is that God is always there for us, waiting to receive us, broken promises, shortcomings and all. As we are told, " … anyone who comes to me I will never drive away."
In July when we gathered here for Allan Page's memorial service, Edie reminded us of God's promise of eternal life. On this earthly plane, we see but glimpses of the possibilities, but, as she so eloquently put it in her homily, "There is so much more."
John assures us: "This is the will of my Father, that all who see the Son and believe in him may have eternal life; and I will raise them up on the last day."
We have a choice. Reacting out of doubt and fear, we can choose to believe in all of God's promises, except this one that we cannot fully understand. Or with faith and trust, we can respond by accepting the mystery of this promise and looking forward to "so much more."
If you have ever been present at the bedside of a dying loved one as, with peace and sanctity, they make that transition from here to the unknown "there," perhaps you were blessed to come away having little reason to doubt God's promise: "I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life."
As Jesus reminds us in John's Gospel, it is not a passive God who awaits us. No, we are "drawn" by the Father, who loves us, longs for us, and desires for us the fulfillment of His promises.
We can be patient. We can take the long view. We can open ourselves to be drawn into the overwhelming love and care of our Creator.
Recently we learned of the death of our beloved former bishop of Western Kansas, William Davidson. Last week we received a note from his widow thanking us for our memorial gift. In it she said this: "Bill loved people and he loved life. And while I miss his cheery smile, I cannot mourn because he spent every day of his life looking forward to this end."
Bishop Davidson knew there was "so much more." How did he know? How can we know?
Because...
God promised.
AMEN
Laura Shoffner
August 13, 2006
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