Sermons In Time Reflections On Faith

By the Skin of Our Teeth

In one of the most colorful stories of the Old Testament, "Job," Job had adversity after adversity poured upon him. He lost his cattle, his sons, his possessions, and even his wife. His body was scourged with sickness and sores until he came to the place where life was utterly and completely miserable.

As Job experienced these adversities, he looked at what had happened to him, and what he now had, and said, "We exist by the skin of our teeth." That’s pretty thin! Life had become miserable for this man.

We, too, come to the end of a year and that phrase, "Living by the skin of our teeth," seems an appropriate phrase for the time now past. We have made it through one more year. We made it economically, we made it physically. We made it in many more ways.

We’re here, but just barely. There were just a few years back those who were saying that the world cannot survive past 1975 ecologically that we are on a collision course with nature and by the end of this year there won’t be enough food, our streams will all be polluted, the air will be so filled with smog it won’t be possible to live. As the song put it, "Don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air!" Well, we still do - Probably by the skin of our teeth!

Thornton Wilder picked up on Job’s theme in a play he wrote in 1942. He called it, "By the Skin of Our Teeth." At that time America was going through another disaster period. The Society had just emerged from the 1930’s depression, the economy was still broken, and many were living literally from hand to mouth. Rainfall had returned to the fields, and life was just becoming reordered when the second World War started. 1942 was the year when Guadalcanal, the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and other parts of the world were telling of the heroism and struggle of American Troops in that bloody war. They were facing the worst defeat of American troops ever until Vietnam. It was a dismal year.

Wilder’s Allegory "By the Skin of our Teeth" was like an apocalyptic foreboding of the future. The story is of a family -(Adam and Eve and Children?) living in a new Ice Age moving down on New York City. Their pets are mastodons and dinosaurs. The whole world is totally mixed up: Madison Avenue and New Jersey and caves of Paleontology. What Wilder is trying to say is that the condition of man from his earliest beginnings to this present day has been the story of the brink of disaster that we have always lived with.

There is a pervasive note of dismay and sadness and heartache. We have always anticipated a bright tomorrow, or a dismal future, depending on the mood of the moment, and reality breaks in upon us when we realize that this is our life. That few in the history of mankind have been able to do what one man in the New Testament said he would do: That is, he had harvested his crops well, and had built larger barns and he was able to say, "Soul, take it easy. You have enough and to spare." Even that man heard the word: "You fool, this night your soul is required of you."

Now, Wilder is not unique, for the New Testament comes at this same ambiguous theme in an important way. Jesus, talking to his Disciples as they struggled with the longing for the Kingdom of God to break in on them, said, "The Kingdom of God is in your midst. The Kingdom of God is among you. The Kingdom of God is within you. The Kingdom of God is here."

Now, I believe that Jesus was not just trying to talk about a Spiritual realm which was separate from the life which his Disciples and the early Church lived. Rather, he was trying to say that in the midst of life as it is, life as it is experienced, life as it comes to us, in whatever form, the Kingdom of God is present, breaking in, revealing itself. God in His mercy, God in His love, God in his steadfastness, comes to us, not just in life as we anticipate it, but rather in the midst of life as it is - so we experience the Kingdom in all that happens.

Jesus was born not at an opportune time, but rather in the fullness of time. He was born in the midst of the turmoil of life. He lived his own life in that turmoil, and he died in that turmoil. And he is still with us in the midst of that turmoil: The Kingdom of God, breaking in and redeeming our lives. Now, whether we read Thornton Wilder or the New Testament, or whether we experience the life we have had in the year past, it is important for us to realize most of us have lived "By the Skin of Our Teeth!" Economically, we have stretched it out and made it, physically, the health has been so so, the tragedy, it’ s been there too. The sadness, the sorrow, and yes, the happiness, the good times, they’re all there. They are a part of the wholeness of life.

Which lead us to reflect that when we want to say," perhaps next week or tomorrow, or next year, things will be just like I want them," we are living in a false and unreal world. To look forward to the future with all the problems solved and all the solutions there, and all the good things about to happen are a false way of looking at life. I find no reason or ability to look back across the years that have been and say I regret what has happened. Nor do I look to the future and say, "Perhaps tomorrow life will be better." Jesus reminds us again and again that today is the day of salvation. Today is the moment when we experience the fullness of God’s presence in our lives. At the same time, we do live by the skin of our teeth.

What, then, do we do with these experience which are ours? How do we let them unfold before us? Certainly, I’d like for some things that happen not to be there. I’d like for the tragedies of life to be eliminated. I wish they weren’t there. I wish the pain and sickness that is so much a part of a congregation to lessen. I’d like for life to be different. That is, I think I would. But I’ve discovered something about like as it comes and life as it is. In the midst off tragedy and in the midst of sorrow, in the midst of heartache, even in the midst of the most difficult kinds of times the presence of friends, the sharing of love and concern, rather than taking away from life, these enrich life. In the midst of the struggle to "stay above the water" there is the presence of the redeeming Spirit of God. So, when people gather together in prayer for others, or whether we are speaking with others in the midst of our sadness or joy, God’s redeeming presence is there and that which at the moment seems so difficult, become gifts of the Spirit.

A friend in the midst of great personal crisis said to me recently, "I’ve been a student all my life, and right now I am paying the highest tuition for learning I’ve ever paid in my life." He was talking about a personal crisis in his life which had cost dearly just to stay alive, just to stay above board economically, and he saw it as a gift, as I think we must. The gifts that are received give us to us a maturity we cannot have otherwise.

I shall never forget in Seminary when my wife was expecting our first child. I was taking a course in New Testament reading. I was reading the story of the prodigal son glibly and easily and the professor was quite critical. He said, "You’ve never suffered have you? I questioned myself, "What will it take? What suffering will I have to go through that will make it possible for me to minister to people. I wondered if I would have to lose a child. I wondered if we’d have to have some great personal loss.

Through the years I’ve learned what that suffering is. Because it is there, I am more of a person because of it. It has become a gift of the Spirit. There have been many times of sadness and sorrow. There have also been many times of great overwhelming joy, and each in its turn has added to the richness of life.

These gifts, which God has given, are not there just to be held onto. Rather, they are to be shared. Even our sorrow and our sufferings. Many times persons have said to me in their grief, "You just can’t know what it is like until you have been through it. I agree. There is a dimension that I cannot fathom, because I have not been there and the only way I can experience their sorrow is for them to share it with me. Each of us, as we experience life it becomes a resource to be used. As you pass through times of struggle, heartache, sadness, as you discover ways of knowing joy and gladness and the fullness of life in sharing you become a minister of the spirit. I think God calls us to be Ministers of his Grace. We literally become living Christs on behalf of the world.

We see the world struggling, getting by on the skin of its teeth, generation in and generation out, and even with the increase of knowledge and the increase of resources , still this story of man is not unlike Thorton Wilder’s play, in the drama of life, in the best of times and the worst of times, God is present. Amen

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