Hilton Head Island, SC
January 13, 2013
The Chapel Without Walls
Isaiah 40:21-26; Isaiah 40:27-31
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint. – Isaiah 40:31 (RSV)
In every movie in which he appeared, John Wayne was always John Wayne, whatever character he may have been playing. In that respect he was quite like Jimmie Stewart, or Edward G. Robinson, or Mae West, or Doris Day.
In the 1969 classic film, True Grit, John Wayne played John Wayne at his best. For his role he received his first and only Oscar. The movie was based on a novel of the same name by Charles Portis. Briefly, it is the story of a teenage girl in the Old West whose father had been murdered by a very bad hombre. She wants to pay someone to seek his killer, and to take vengeance on him. The someone she enlists is Rooster Cogburn, a.k.a. John Wayne, who reluctantly takes on the assignment. Lots of things happen, but Rooster gets his man, saving the girl’s life in the meantime. At some point in the movie, when Mattie has seen how tough and resourceful the old has-been marshal is, she says, “Mr. Cogburn, you have true grit.”
I have no idea how old the expression “true grit” is. I assume it predates both the novel and the movie, but I don’t think I ever heard it before seeing the first True Grit movie. “Grit” I had often heard, but not “true grit.” There was a second version of the movie made in 2010 by the Coen brothers. In many respects it differed from the first version, which is not surprising since, after all, it was the Coens who produced it. Still, it followed the same basic story line. Rooster Cogburn in 2010 was played by Jeff Bridges, who is not always Jeff Bridges in his movies, unlike John Wayne in his. Anyway, both Rooster Cogburns had true grit in wondrous abundance, especially when push came to shove, which in the novel and both movies it did frequently. All three Roosters in all three versions, one literary and two cinematic, had an inner resolve which served them and Mattie very well in the clutch.
Old Testament scholars divide the prophecy of Isaiah into at least two parts, and some say three or even four. They are convinced not all 66 chapters were written by the same person. The Isaiah of Isaiah, chapters 1-39, was the actual prophet who occasionally tells about himself in those chapters. That man lived about 750 BCE or so. But, say these academics, whoever wrote Isaiah 40 on, whether it was one or more people, lived at the time of and after the so-called Babylonian Captivity. In 587 BCE, the Babylonians came and conquered all of Judah, destroying Jerusalem and the temple in the process. They carted the leading citizens off to Babylon, where they lived under a kind of not-so-benign house arrest for the next 55 years or so. Then Babylon itself was conquered, by the Medes and Persians. The king of the Medes, Cyrus, who is favorably mentioned several in the Bible, freed the Jews, and allowed them to go home. There, under Ezra and Nehemiah, they rebuilt Jerusalem and the temple.
We know the opening verses of Isaiah 40 because of Handel’s Messiah. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my people, saith your God. Speak ye comfortably to Jerusalem, and cry unto her that her warfare is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned.” And then the tenor soloist sings words which we know both from Isaiah 40 and from the opening chapters of each of the Synoptic Gospels: “The voice of one that crieth in the wilderness, ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” Then there’s the part about the mountains and hills being made low, and the rough places plain.
To the Jews in Babylon, these words were like manna from heaven. They were the balm in Gilead, the voice of angels from on high. It was over! The dark night of the soul for every captive in the capital of Mesopotamia was over!
No doubt the Jews in Babylon felt the way Jews or Austrians or Poles or Czechs felt in April of 1945 when the Americans, British, and Russians liberated the death camps and the captive nations of central and eastern Europe. But what did it take for those people to survive the terrible years of World War II? It took huge infusions of grit, true grit. It took extraordinary courage and tenacity and resolution and hope. Millions had already died, but the emaciated people who greeted the Allies with weak waves of their hands had the kind of inner strength which allowed them to live through unspeakable hardships until they were liberated.
Isaiah went on this hymn of hope: “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning? …It is [the Lord] who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers” (40:21-22). It is God who governs events! It is the Lord of Israel who liberates you!
And then those ever memorable words in the last verses of this magnificent opening paean of praise to God, “The Lord is the everlasting God, the creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary, his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power the faint, and to him who has no might he increases strength. Even youths shall faint and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted. But they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint” (40:28-31).
It is grit which gets people through really hard times, true grit. The Jews in Babylon made it through 55 years of being under the thumb of merciless captors, but most of them survived. But where does such tenacity come from? What is origin? It comes from Him who enables us to mount up with wings like eagles, to run and not be weary.
I have referred before to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who recently retired as the chief rabbi of Britain. He frequently writes columns for The Times of London. In October Rabbi Sacks wrote a column which he entitled, “The source of true grit is faith in God’s abiding faith in us.” I underlined the column, and put it in my “Future Sermons” file. Today is the day it comes out as the centerpiece of the sermon, along with John Wayne, Jeff Bridges, et al.
The good rabbi referred to a book by an American writer who is named, appropriately, Paul Tough. The book is called How Children Succeed. How is it that some people achieve great things, and others don’t? Dr. Sacks said, “Tough discovered that what makes the difference is not intelligence, skill or native ability. It isn’t cognitive at all. The difference lies in character, in traits such as discipline, persistence, self-control, gratitude…, courage and conscientiousness. One dimension, though, matters more than all the others. He calls it grit: the ability to keep going despite repeated failures.” Then Jonathan Sacks tells about William Golding, the Nobel prizewinner for literature, who had 21 rejections from publishers before he found someone willing to publish Lord of the Flies. J.K. Rowling sent a book about a young boy with glasses to 12 publishers before anyone was willing to give Harry Potter a life in print. There were similar stories about Steve Jobs and the Beatles facing setbacks early in their careers.
Do you remember Phidippedes? He was the man who ran all the way from the Plain of Marathon in Greece back to Athens to warn the Athenians that the Persians had invaded the Greek mainland, and they needed to come quickly to repel the invasion. It was Phidippedes’ display of athletic true grit which inspired the running of the marathon, a grueling 26-mile race. Now, every year many thousands of runners all over the world run their marathons, the vast majority of whom know they cannot win, but they simply run to finish. More power to all of them! It takes grit by the barrelful to run 26 miles.
Is true grit a genetic given, or is it learned? Is it something some people have via their own personal nature, or did they somehow manage to acquire it by observing others who also have it? Or, might it be that all of us have the necessary tenacity to carry us through the most difficult of circumstances, but we need to be open to the leading of God to transform our innate grit into get-up-and-go?
On March 28, 2010, a 19-year-old young man named Conor McBride walked into a police station in Tallahassee and announced that he had just shot his girlfriend in the head. “You need to arrest me,” he said. “This is not a joke.” And indeed it wasn’t. He and Ann Grosmaire had been fighting almost constantly for 38 hours, in person and on the phone, and Conor simply snapped. When the police arrived, they found Ann unconscious, but still alive. She lived for four days, and then her parents had the ventilator turned off.
When Ann’s father first went into her hospital room, he felt that he heard her say to him, “Forgive him.” She meant her parents should forgive Conor. Andy Grosmaire said, “No way. It’s impossible.” But Andy kept hearing Ann say, even though she actually said nothing, “Forgive him; forgive him.” Amazingly, Kate Grosmaire was able to forgive her daughter’s killer within days of the shooting, but it took Andy considerably longer.
The story of the Grosmaire and the McBride families is chronicled in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine in a long article by Paul Tillis. For our purposes, the essence of it is this: When the Grosmaires and McBrides first met with Jack Campbell, the assistant state prosecutor, Mr. Campbell happened to mention well into their conversation that he had the power to suggest a sentence as low as five years for the murder, but that he was likely to ask for a life sentence or the death penalty. When Kate Grosmaire heard that, her mind went in another direction altogether. One thing led to another, and the Grosmaires sought a process known as restorative justice. It wasn’t Conor’s parents who asked for this; it was Ann’s parents. An expert in this fairly new legal notion flew into Tallahassee to meet with Conor, his parents, and the Grosmaires. The dialogue was grueling for everyone, each in her or his own way, but the Grosmaires insisted on carrying it through to its conclusion. They said they had forgiven Conor, and Conor knew it. It was most painful for Conor to know how much he had hurt Kate and Andy Grosmaire, and also to know that they truly had forgiven him for his terrible and irrational act, and that certainly was overwhelming to him.
This left it up to Jack Campbell, the prosecutor. Should he go ahead and recommend a life sentence without parole, or even the death penalty? After all, this murder happened in Florida, and Florida has one of the highest rates of execution in the country. But Jack Campbell decided to recommend a 20-year sentence to the judge, who accepted it. There was no jury who heard the case; the prosecutor and judge decided it themselves. Conor is now working in the prison’s law library, and he meets regularly with his prison classmates who participated with him in an anger-management course to see how all are progressing. When he is paroled, he plans to work in an animal shelter, because Ann loved animals. As a condition of his probation, he will be required to speak to teenagers about teen-dating violence.
The writer, Paul Tillis, said that not everyone was happy with the outcome of this situation. There were angry responses in the local media that the sentence was far too light. But for the five people most involved, Conor, the killer, Conor’s parents, who were distraught beyond description that their son had committed this heinous crime, and especially for Ann’s parents, Andy and Kate Grosmaire, restorative justice was the best solution possible to a horrible situation.
If you were either of the Grosmaires, could you forgive your daughter’s murderer? If you were Conor McBride, could you accept being truly forgiven? If you were Conor’s parents, could you continue to love a son who has murdered his girlfriend of three years who pleaded with him not to shoot when he pointed the pistol at her face? Paul Tillis wrote, “I talked a lot to Kate and Andy over several months. They don’t intellectualize what happened or repress emotions – I saw them cry and I heard them laugh – but they were always able to speak thoughtfully about Ann’s death and its aftermath.”
It took grit for the Grosmaires to do what they have done --- highly admirable, inestimable, almost incredible true grit. What inner determination they had that could really forgive the troubled young man who, in a moment of mindless rage, snuffed out the life of their daughter. But where did their true grit originate?
I believe it came from God. As Jonathan Sacks said, “The source of true grit is faith in God’s abiding faith in us.” God wants all of us to be the best we can be. Sometimes that means striving to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds when life gangs up on us. Other times it means forgiving someone we feel is unforgivable.
Those who do not believe in God are forced to try to find true grit within themselves, using only their own resources to combat the circumstances they find arrayed against them. But those of us who believe in God believe that God will enable us to call on the inner reserves of courage He has placed within us to do what we never thought we could do. A few days after Ann Grosmaire’s death, her father, Andy Grosmaire, said, “I realized it was not just Ann asking me to forgive Conor, it was Jesus Christ.” Many might question that, but would --- or should --- people of faith doubt it?
“Even youths shall faint, and be weary, and young men shall fall exhausted; but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.”