Water in the Desert; Wheat in the Wilderness

6th Sunday of Pentecost          August 3, 2025

The texts for this sermon are John 20:19-22 and Psalm 126 (A Psalm of Ascent)

To help us enter into this psalm I’m going to tell a story about a season in my life. 

When in mid-life I recognized I had a call to the ministry I left Portland and moved to Kansas City Missouri in order to enroll in the Nazarene Seminary there. I’d been told by a clergy colleague of my father’s that if I hoped to become a pastor in the Church of the Nazarene, it was essential I graduate from Nazarene Theological Seminary, NTS. I’d already completed a year and a half in another non-Nazarene seminary but I accepted his advice.

Once I settled in Kansas City and started attending NTS, it did not take long for me to realize that a degree from NTS wasn’t going to help my hopes of becoming a Nazarene pastor. I might be ordained but I would not be able to secure a pastorate. When the Nazarene Church organized in 1904 it ordained women as full and equal partners in ministry. Over the decades that commitment waned and by the time I got to NTS it was clear that women were not welcome into pastoral ministry except in supporting roles.

What was I going to do? That and other factors played into my decision to leave seminary, and the Church of the Nazarene. Doing so meant I was leaving my community. My people if you will. My father, grandfather and great grandfather had been Nazarene pastors. My extended family were all Nazarenes. It’s no surprise that my father had a hard time understanding what I’d done.

I won’t go into the story behind my decision to move to Duluth Minnesota. But it was like a gravitational pull and after prayer and the counsel of wise people, I sold my house, left my job, and moved. I moved to this place where the winters could actually kill you with no job, no prospects and just enough money to rent a small apartment. I applied for jobs of every sort but without success. My modest savings would be depleted; soon. very soon.

It was when I was on this precipice of imminent disaster that I received a letter from my father. Loving father that he was, his letter was by no means encouraging. He was afraid for me, I know. But his way of expressing it just confirmed my own fear that I had done a very foolish thing. What had I done? How could I make it right?

I did the only thing I could think to do. Sitting on my couch, with my dad’s letter in my hand. I prayed.  Now understand, at the time, I did not think or feel that God had had anything to do with this venture. Rather, I felt I’d done a fanciful thing and had royally messed up; I’d turned my back on my church and the faith of my youth. I had not lost all faith but my relationship with God was befuddled. 

How to pray? To Whom to pray? All I could think of was to pray to the One I’d known as a child (because I’d had a very early and unwavering sense of God as a child). And that’s what I said, “You, I knew as a child. Help me.”

And help me God did. The help was not magical. It didn’t look like help at first. I did get a job. just in the nick of time. A terrible job with a very disturbed boss which was followed by a much better job and setting. I was able to buy a small house (converted from a 2-season cabin) on a small lake north of Duluth. It was rustic but lovely. It felt like camping only with an actual roof over my head. In that place beside a small lake in the middle of a forest, I witnessed displays of nature both small and dramatic that inspired wonder and awe.

It was in this span of what I think of as a time of sabbatical, an in-between time, that I crossed paths with a United Methodist District Superintendent who had a penchant for taking risks. I was working at the University of Minnesota at the time—far afield from my calling. He recruited me with no evidence I was suitable and before I knew it I was appointed sole pastor of Chester Park United Methodist Church. No glimpse of such a prospect had been anywhere on the horizon. There is no question in my mind that God’s providential hand brought that about and I realized God had been at work in all those years prior: Through the painful recognition that I wasn’t where I was meant to be, the leap to a strange city without a safety net, the sojourn through a desert of doubt and despair, the rescue even when I could hardly bring myself to pray. God’s gift-giving that was above and beyond all imagining.

When the Lord restored my fortunes
    I was like those who dream.
My mouth was filled with laughter,
    and my tongue with shouts of joy;

Needless to say, I have a special place in my heart for Rev. Loren Nelson and the United Methodist Church, but I also feel a resonance with Psalm 126. Being led from a captivity of sorts to the place of belonging and soul-nurturing fruitfulness.

Needless to say, I have a special place in my heart for Rev. Loren Nelson and the United Methodist Church, but I also feel a resonance with Psalm 126. Being led from a captivity of sorts to the place of belonging and soul-nurturing fruitfulness.

Many read this Psalm (and other texts) as saying that Christians are always supposed to feel happy. This leads them to believing that if they do not feel happy, something’s either wrong with them, or wrong with God. While it is true that it does describe laughter and a jubilant emotion of happiness it also speaks to the foundational disposition of gladness, joy-full-ness.

Joyfulness for this psalmist is not necessarily an elated feeling. And joyfulness does not depend upon one’s present circumstances. Joyfulness is a state of being, if you will. An outlook, an orientation that arises and is nurtured by our confidence in the God we know and trust. It springs forth from our relationship with God, not our circumstances.

This means that joyfulness can coexist with the deepest sorrow. It may not show up on the surface. It may not give rise to elation or laughter, but it holds steady in the grieving, the disappointment, the confusion of losing one’s bearings. It trusts. It waits.

Waiting is hard. Holding trust as we wait is difficult. And the tempo of this Psalm can cause us to think that the relief we pray for will be immediate. God restored and the people laughed and sang songs of joy. We tend to skip over the we were like those who dream; a description that speaks to a people who had been in duress and now, at last, are experiencing what they’d longed dream would come. We were like those who dream. Now comes the laughter and the songs of joy.

Long periods of duress are not foreign to us and people of faith are by no means spared. It is the case that those seasons are seasoning if you will. Our seasons of sorrow, pain, disappointment and feelings of emptiness carry seeds that when sown in trusting dependence on God, yield a fruitful harvest but this harvest can be a long time in coming. We need to be prepared to wait, a waiting undergirded by joyfulness.

It’s also easy to read this Psalm as saying that joyfulness depends entirely on God. It does in the sense that this kind of joy is not of our own making, but in another sense, it rests with us to make ourselves accessible to the joy God gives.

This Psalm tells us how to make ourselves accessible.

There is a past, present and future trajectory in this psalm: The verbs in the first 2 verses are in the past tense. God restored, we were, our mouths filled, then in verse 3: God has done: Remember? God did great things for us so We ARE glad; present tense.  We are glad now. This We are Glad is the hinge if you will, linking the past with the future, a future as yet unrealized.

In verses 4 through 6, the psalmist describes an envisioned future. We are glad now because we remember God’s faithfulness in the past. So we are glad now because we believe God will be faithful again.

But take note: the Psalmist doesn’t just reminisce. He remembers, he embraces Gladness/ Joyfulness and He prays. I’d say he prays with ‘anticipatory gladness’ restore our fortunes, O Lord. Bring relief to us this time around, we pray, like you did when you restored the fortunes of Zion.

What does he anticipate? Water, life-preserving refreshment in the middle of a bone-dry desert. Bread, life-enriching nourishment springing forth from seeds sown in tears (tears shed in our bleak present). In God’s economy what looks like a desert, isn’t. What appears to be barren, isn’t.

This psalmist tells us that when we’re living in a desert-like season, bereft by the barrenness of it all. We can choose to proclaim: We ARE glad for we know there is, unseen, a geyser of God’s great grace.

That We are glad to proclaim then, moves us to pray:  Restore us. We pray for a restoration Your making, O God (not of our own) and we know we shall in time, be jubilant.

This Psalm offers great encouragement but it also poses a question to everyone who reads it: Do we believe this?  Do we believe we are not bereft but that we already have seeds for sowing and that God will water and feed them if we sow them? Will we embrace a faith-feeding, soul nourishing joyfulness by bringing into our present, memories of when God was faithful in the past? And in our joyfulness, pray that God will give what is needed for a harvest of God’s own making?

If we’re not sure, we can borrow a prayer from the New Testament, Lord, help my unbelief.

Postscript

Psalm 126 falls in line with the trajectory of Psalms 120, 121 and 123.

Psalm 120 describes our awakening to and acknowledging the true state of our situation, prompting us to embark on a journey.

Psalms 121 and 123 both talk of seeking and then attending to the One who will protect us on this journey. 

Psalm 126 reminds us that though the journey has its trials, we can undertake it with joy knowing that God will be faithful to protect us, yes, and that God will lead us to a verdant place. 

I hope we can find these psalms helpful at this time in our church’s life—and guide us as we move forward.

Linda Quanstrom, Pastor

Cornelius UMC

Cornelius OR