“The Colors Through Which we Look at Life”

Third in a Series on the Sanctuary Stained Glass Windows

March 7, 2010 Des Moines

Hebrew 6:13-20

“The Anchor”

We were having some fun at staff meeting this week brainstorming hymns to sing alongside an “anchor” theme. The “Navy Hymn” was an obvious candidate:

Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm has bound the restless wave, who bid the mighty ocean deep its own appointed limits keep: O hear us when we cry to thee for those in peril on the sea.

We thought of It is Well With My Soul, with its reference to those times when “sorrows like sea billows roll.”

I recalled an old gospel song from my childhood – Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave! Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save – but with a focus on light rather than anchors, the metaphor wasn’t quite right.

Some wag in the room suggested Anchors Aweigh, but with lyrics like:

Farewell to college joys, we sail at break of day,

Through our last night ashore drink to the foam until we meet once more. Here’s wishing you a happy voyage home

…we thought the spiritual applications would be stretched a little thin. It quickly became apparent that, while the anchor has been an important spiritual image through the generations, it hasn't generated much musical enthusiasm. So, what are we to make of this evocative little symbol ensconced in glass on the north side of the room?

Let’s face it, as Midwesterners landlocked a long way from any coast, nautical metaphors aren’t central to our vocabulary. Yes, I know that Iowa has its share of perfectly lovely lakes, and Lakes Michigan and Superior aren’t that far away. People around here do fish from pontoons that need some way of “staying put”, and there are a few recreational sailors among us. But that said, precious few of us have regular experience with – or even passing knowledge of – shipboard life and the technical details of anchor shanks, flukes and crowns, and the functional nuances differentiating hook anchors, plough anchors, drogues and kedges.

But that said, we don’t really have to be graduates of the Maritime Academy to get the general idea. Anchors, for the most part, are designed to hold a ship in place instead of drifting wherever the currents might take it, or wherever stormy winds and waves might push it. And we get the metaphor because, while we may never have been off of dry land, we have some familiarity with upending turbulence and seductive currents. We know what it’s like to have your life lifted out of your hands and crashed against the waves. We have some experience with drifting off course and losing our way. It isn’t only sailors who long for some kind of anchoring stability.

What, then, does it mean to look at life through the lens of this window? What does it mean to move through our days with what the writer to the Hebrews describes as the…”sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered…”?

Whatever else it means, I suggest it teaches that there are some things we simply don’t have to worry about. Among other things, Christians, because of what we have come to understand about God’s love as revealed in Jesus the Christ, don’t have to be thrashed around by those common and perennial questions like…

o “Do I finally matter?”

o “Can God really love me?”

o “Does life have any meaning?”

o “Is there a place for me in God’s eternity?”

The stabilizing, securing, fundamentally orienting assertion of Jesus is a resounding “yes!” to all of the above. Yes, we matter. Yes, God loves us with an inexhaustible love. Yes, life itself is precious and pregnant with significance. And yes, there is nothing we can do to lose our place in God’s line. The life and witness, the death and resurrection of Jesus afford us this mooring, stabilizing anchor. There are certainly other winds in the air that try to push us off this course – other points of view – but this is the lens through which we see and bring reality into focus.

As the Apostle Paul put it to the Romans, “There is nothing – neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation – that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

This is our anchor. This confidence in an unshakable relationship with God has what the writer to the Hebrews metaphorically describes as “a stabilizing effect on the whole person” (Robert Jewett, Letter to Pilgrims: A Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews p. 112). Or to put it in more contemporary terms, “It is a basis for mental health in a world that seems to defy sanity; and it holds safe and firm when everything else deteriorates” (ibid).

That anchor is about stability in a tumultuous world, but it is also about the centering, orienting and guiding power of hope. The Nazi prisoner of war, Victor Frankl, who went on to write influentially about humankind’s inherent “search for meaning,” noticed about his fellow prisoners that “those prisoners who lost faith in the future – their future – were doomed. Along with loss of belief in the future, they also lost their spiritual hold; they let themselves decline and became subject to mental and physical decay” (quoted in Jewett, p. 113, altered for gender inclusiveness).

Which is to call attention to a very different application for anchors. It turns out that holding a vessel in place is only one way that anchors are useful. “Kedging” is a term that describes the process used when a ship finds itself situated in a place it doesn’t need to be. Perhaps it is a dangerous place from which it needs to escape, or a sandbar it needs to be freed from, or a precariously narrow stretch it needs to get through. In kedging, a long boat with a bunch of strapping young sailors is sent out in the direction the ship needs to go with a light kedging anchor and as much anchor line as the ship has aboard. The anchor is then dropped and a crew on the ship uses the capstan to pull the ship toward the anchor. It may take a series of kedging maneuvers to thread the ship through the narrow passage, or into safer waters, but ultimately the anchor succeeds not in keeping you where are, but in getting you where you need to go.

This, too, is our anchor – when we are stuck on the shoals of self-destructive behavior or threatened by confusion or paralyzing doubt: the freeing, guiding life-line of the one who said “I am the way, the truth, and the life;” the one who said “come to me all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” Strength in the storm, to be sure, but also direction for the struggling.

But aren’t there times when stabilizing strength and a guiding hand are one and the same? Walter Wangerin recalls how, once upon a time when he was a young child, he was put by his father on a train bound from Chicago to Grand Rapids. “I didn’t like the idea,” Wangerin writes, “and twice I ran off the train before it left. I was homesick already. I was terrified to be thrust alone into the dark tunnel of the future. If I had my way, I was not leaving home and my haven.

“But this is what my father had to say about it: ‘I’m going ahead of you. Do you think I would leave you alone? I’ll meet you at the station in Grand Rapids. Wait, wait, and see if I don’t.’

“And I was comforted, and I was set free to travel. I knew no more about the trip there; neither did I know how Dad would beat me there (he had to leave later and was flying). But in place of knowledge I had the promise of the one who loved me. He who hugged me now would hug me then. And so long as I loved him and believed in him, I could be liberated to go alone.” (As For Me and My House, Kindle edition pp. 245-47)

Isn’t this the way we see it, too? When we look through this lens of faith, we, too, can be liberated – shall we return to the metaphor? – to confidently, trustingly set sail.

· In the cloying opaqueness when we don't even know how to pray, “the spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Romans 8:26).

· In the drowning tears when grief threatens to engulf us, Jesus assures us that “blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

· In the cacophony of shouts over blame and retribution, Jesus reminds us that “blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called 'children of God'” (Matthew 5:9).

· In the suffocating silence of loneliness, Jesus reassures us that “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you.” Indeed, I will come...and take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:18, 3).

· In the paralyzing sobriety of the brevity of life and the fear of whatever might be beyond our horizon, Jesus reminds that “I am the resurrection and I am life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live” (John 11:25).

I am grateful that those in that newly reunited congregation, sorting out which windows to include in this room during its 1970's renovation, included the anchor – despite the fact that we are more familiar with tractors than ships.

It glows there – every time we gather here – reminding us to seize this hope set before us. It is for us a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has already entered.

A sure and steadfast and guiding anchor holding us, and leading us home.