Crossing the Valley

Hosea 2.15, John 18.1

Preached at Canberra Baptist Church - 25th September 2005

I have been preaching on mountains, but today I want to take you to a valley. It is a valley well known in Scripture, although it is found in different places and has many names. In John it is the Kidron Valley. Joel speaks of the Valley of Jehosaphat. In Jeremiah it is the Valley of Hinnom. In Hosea it is the Valley of Achor. Hosea has named it truly: “Achor” means trouble. It is the Valley of Trouble.

If ‘the mountain’ in Scripture is the place where we encounter God, ‘the valley’ is the place we run into trouble. It is the place of temptation, as it was for Lot. It is the place of Judgement, as prophesied by Joel. The valley for the Psalmist is attended by the ‘shadow of death’. In all its varied forms, trouble seems to find us in life’s valleys.

And it is not just the writers of Scripture who tell us of the Valley. The great writers and poets of the western tradition tell the story of the Valley.

Dante in the Divine Comedy wrote:

Midway upon the journey of our life

I strayed into a wooded vale

So dark the right road was completely lost.

How hard a thing it is for me to tell

Of that wild wood, so rugged and so harsh…

Bunyan in the Pilgrim’s Progress wrote of the Valley of Humiliation.

The journey of life leads through the valley of trouble: humiliation, mid-life crisis, marriage troubles, health troubles. At some time or another most of us will find ourselves in the Valley of Trouble.

Hosea found himself in marriage trouble. We’re not quite sure of the precise details of the trouble, but it was serious. Hosea’s wife was either serially unfaithful or she had turned to prostitution. Either way, it was not a case of ‘happy families’. The names Hosea gave to his children hinted at conditions in the home: one child was called “Not Mine” and another “Not Pitied” or perhaps “Unloved”.

Yet in the writings of Hosea we have some of the most profound insights into the nature of love and especially of the love of God to his people. In the midst of intense personal pain and distress Hosea is able to write that the Valley of Trouble will become a door of Hope, that out of the brokenness of his own experience new life, new possibilities will arise.

How the valley of Trouble opens into a door of hope is a great mystery, and it is not to be taken lightly. In preaching on such things we walk on holy ground because we tread amongst people’s hurts and wounds. It must be done carefully. Once a very, very senior Baptist minister preached in a refugee camp in Thailand. Cross border raids and attacks on the camp had led to some deaths and the situation remained very risky. He preached on Jesus’ statement “Be not afraid!”, a refrain confidently repeated time and again. At the end of the sermon one of the leaders of that refugee community turned to a friend of mine and said – “That’s very easy to say when you’ve got an air-conditioned car waiting to take you back into the city and a five star hotel!”

Some Christians seem never to experience the valley of trouble. I knew one Christian funeral director who was eternally optimistic and happy. He was always whistling and cheerful in the face of death, although never in the presence of the bereaved. I could never work out if he had a really deep faith or was just completely insensitive. One bright, sunny day as he was whistling happily away beside me in the front seat of the Hearse on the way to the Crematorium he looked up and said: “Oh Jim, I had a great service yesterday, a real triumph. Buried my mother!” Whatever that happiness was that he had, I knew I didn’t want it.

We cannot speak lightly about courage, or about hope, but neither can we ignore the promise that it will find us. Those of us who must walk through the valley, must also be watching for the door of hope! What can we say about finding hope in trouble that will not trample on our own experience of suffering?

In all four gospels we are told of the transition from the Last Supper in the upper room, to the lonely vigil on the Mount of Olives, the betrayal and the beginning of the end. The description is slightly different, reflecting the theologies of each gospel but there are striking similarities and a common structure.

The first thing to note is that it is there! This little ‘hinge’ verse, this connection links all that has gone before – baptism, preaching, healings, teaching, the climactic last week - with all that follows - the betrayal, the trial, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection. In the story of the gospel this is a critical turning point and nobody felt they could leave it out.

The second thing to notice is the simple but necessary structure of the verse. Despite the little differences there is a common structure: “After ….. they went out …..”.  After something had occurred they went out to a place.

What they went out from was an experience of worship and teaching: When they had sung the hymn they went out … (Mt and Mk). After Jesus had spoken these words he went out (Jn) He came out and went, as was his custom, to the Mount of Olives (Lk).

What they went out to was the place of prayer, struggle and betrayal. Mt and Mk name it as the

Mount of Olives, and then later point to the Garden. Lk has the Mount of Olives alone, and John names the crossing of the Kidron Valley and the immediate entry into the Garden.

Mt and Mk stress the singing of the hymn, the offering of praise, Lk stresses the custom of going to the mountain, the rhythm of prayer that was part of Jesus life. Jn stresses the teaching of Jesus’ words. All these relate to the worship of God’s people. And all are saying there is an intimate relationship between what we do in worship and the struggles of the garden, the troubles of the valley. Worship and trouble belong together. The gospel says that there is no point in singing the hymn unless you are prepared to go out, and there is no point in going out unless you have first sung a hymn!

There is no point in going out unless you have first sung a hymn!

Worship is not entertainment. It is not “fellowship”. It is not education – in the sense of a lecture or a classroom. It is a form of training: training in the sense of an athlete’s training, or a surgeon’s training or a pilot’s flight training. It is a form of training for endurance, of the honing of wisdom and the development of skill. In the singing of hymns and the listening to words, if we are truly engaged, we are being prepared for life, being made stronger and wiser for the tasks and the troubles before us. None of us should face life unprepared and unequipped.

What happens in worship is that we practise and prepare for the tasks of living. Those tasks are always different: the children face different questions and challenges but they are important questions and challenges. They learn about love and trust and gift, goodness and forgiveness and grace. These are things they learn deeply at home but they need to name and connect. These things are more foundational for their lives as anything they learn at school.

Young people moving into adulthood learn about freedom, and justice and responsibility and vocation and hope. People in marriages and mid-career engage with themes of faithfulness and forgiveness, ethics and courage, self-acceptance in failure and humility in triumph. And older people grapple with the mysteries of ripeness and riches, of loss and surrender, slowness and forgetting, of the wheat in full grain and the seed of tomorrow. Who can live fully without these things? They are the fruit of worship, the outworking of gratitude and praise and faithfulness!

But there is no point in singing the hymn unless you are prepared to go out! When we sing the final hymn and receive the blessing it is not a form of curtain call or a pretty ending: it is the critical transition that Jesus and his disciples embraced when they ‘went out’ to the work of that night and that week. Faithful worship is not an insurance policy against trouble, it is a preparation to meet trouble. It dares to look trouble square in the face and know that there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

There are some, like my whistling funeral director, that never want to go out across the valley. Like Peter on the Mountain of Transfiguration they want to set up camp and bask in the glory of the heavenly Jesus. The voice from Heaven said to them: this is my Beloved Son, listen to him! They had to go down and cross the valley to listen to Him! There are today many Christians who think that trouble will never find us – who invoke the idea that if two of us agree in prayer we can bind reality and God to our own little fantasy of happiness, and we will never have to cross the valley of Trouble.

Twenty years ago, as a very young minister I went to hospital with two of my Deacons to pray. A older and very respected leader in our congregation had suffered a debilitating stroke. He was paralysed and mute and no-one knew if he would live or die. As we stood outside and made some simple preparations I asked one of the Deacons to choose a passage of Scripture and then I would pray. He leaved through his Bible. I asked him what passage he had chosen, thinking perhaps one of the Psalms, or ‘underneath are the everlasting arms?’ or “what then shall separate us from the love of God?” He replied “I’m not going to tell you – just follow my lead”. At the bedside of this stricken man in intensive care he quietly read: “After Jesus had spoken these words he went out with his disciples across the Kidron Valley, to a place where there was a garden, which he and his disciples entered.”

There was no room for false promise or glib assurance. After a lifetime of faithful worship this man had crossed the Kidron Valley to his Gethsemane, and we were all just fellow disciples in the garden with Lord. It was a time of struggle and blessing. And it was a time of tremendous hope even in the face of death.

I learnt that night that the first foundation of hope is honesty. Unless we see things as they really are we are only avoiding the truth, dressing up unpalatable things with nice words. Ultimately this destroys hope because it builds bad faith. But a clear view of things, even deeply troubling things, leads through pain and distress to true hope and new beginnings.

Jeremiah lived in a time of great national trouble. He saw coming the end of the Jewish nation, the destruction of Jersualem. His people hated him because he kept talking about the trouble they were in and how bad it was. Plenty of others had comforting words but these, said Jeremiah are false prophets: “They dress my people’s wound without concern, saying ‘Peace! Peace!’ when there is no peace.” (Jer 6.14) If you read the book of Jeremiah you cannot avoid the depth of his anguish over the trouble facing his people that he saw so clearly, but neither can you avoid the profound hope he had for the future. When the time to rebuild finally came it was the honest and profoundly hopeful writing of Jeremiah that was the foundation for the new and hopeful Israel that was created.

The valley of trouble must be crossed by everybody sooner or later, as some in this congregation know full well. It might be family trouble, as experienced by Hosea. It might be the trouble facing the nation and its obtuse refusal to shape policy accordingly, as experienced by Jeremiah. It might be the valley of trouble that Jesus crossed – of deep personal fear and struggle in the shadow of death.

It is never easy, but we cross it knowing that we follow one who also passed this way, blessed by hymn and word, and accompanied by his friends, who like friends everywhere proved themselves well-meaning but not always reliable. He suffered, as we may have to suffer. He died, as we shall all die, but he rose again, to remind his followers that the valley is never the end point of the story.

If we read the story of his suffering we find that the geography of the Valley is fully mapped – over Kidron, to the Mt of Olives to Gethsemane to the High Priests House to Pilates’ Palace and the Stone Pavement of Judgement to the Cross on Golgotha. Like our own troubles it was documented, witnessed, attested, recorded. The Valley of Trouble always generates a file – of doctor’s reports, or court orders or official letters or company memoranda.

But the Resurrection happened in secret, in the dark and stony silence of an unknown tomb. No human being witnessed it or expected it. It was hidden and mysterious, and can only be appropriated by faith. There is no file on Resurrection – only faith! It cannot be mapped or predicted or forced. The power of Resurrection, of hope and new life stirring amid our fear and deathliness, comes unannounced and unscheduled.

Yet those who believe in it know that Jesus’ crossing the Kidron Valley has opened a door of hope, a door that cannot be closed by life nor death, nor human authority nor heavenly powers nor any of the troubles that assail us in life – hardship, distress, persecution, famine, nakedness, peril or sword. In all these things we are more than conquerors.

So let us sing the hymn, and then go out, with faith and hope and courage to cross whatever valleys lie before us.