| Tura Satana |
Grand View University chapel sermon based on Matthew 11:28-30 and Romans 8:31-39
Public Radio this morning included a tribute to the actress Tura Satana who died last week. Just in case you didn’t know it, Tura Satana was the star of Russ Meyer’s low-budget 1965 exploitation movie Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! It’s the story of three strippers-slash-gogo dancers on a crime spree with three souped up cars. Tura Satana was also in The Haunted World of El Superbeasto and The Astro-Zombies and its two sequels. All this is to say that Tura Satana was no Lina Sandell.
Lina Sandell wrote the text of our three hymns today [Day by Day, The Numberless Gifts of God's Mercies and Children of the Heavenly Father]. She’s my favorite hymn writer. If I’m not allowed to have Home on the Range sung at my funeral, give me Lina Sandell’s Children of the Heavenly Father. Her hymns stand quite well on their own. They’re sung to lilting Scandanavian melodies. Their language is lucid, their theology is keen-edged, and they’re just plain pretty. But once you learn Lina Sandell’s story, her hymns become true witnesses to the gospel – to the promises proclaimed in our two readings today.
Lina Sandell’s full name was Karolina Wilhelmina Sandell Berg. She was a pastor’s daughter in Sweden who lived over the course of the last three quarters of the 1800s. When she was twelve, she suffered some kind of paralysis and was told she’d never walk again. In the following years, as she was recovering and regaining her ability to walk, she began writing hymns. Even though it was published later in her life, some people think Children of the Heavenly Father, with its confidence in God’s care in the face of adversity, was written during those years. When Sandell was in her 20s, she took a trip with her father from her town of Jönköping to Gotheborg in Sweden. It required a trip on a boat. The boat hit some choppy water, apparently, and when the boat lurched forward Pastor Sandell fell overboard and Lina watched as her father drowned. Not long afterward she faced her mother’s death as well.
This was a woman who knew how hard life can be. She understood deeply the crosses we bear. Yet what is it that allows someone who has experienced such incredible loss to say, “Day by day, your mercies, Lord, attend me.” “Savior, help me bear life’s pain and sorrow till in glory I behold your face.” “Though he giveth or he taketh, God his children ne’er forsaketh.” How can a woman who has watched her dear father sink beneath the waves want to give God numberless praises for what she regards as God’s good mercies?
| Lina Sandell |
Lina Sandell could do it because she had been given a promise from God. It came to her in that Swedish parsonage, sitting at her parents’ feet, hearing of Jesus’ care, his death and resurrection, his claim on sinners lost in a world of sorrow. These words of faith and hope in the face of tragedy and loss can only be spoken by one who has met the Lord at the bottom of those chasms. He was there for her, because he’d already been given to her in anticipation of those days. Lina Sandell went through those things with a vocabulary of faith as a treasure in her heart. The words that come shining through her hymns were something she had already possessed. She had been claimed by the promises given to us in words like those in our two readings: We have a Lord who wants to take on our hardships. We have a God who says, “You. Yes, you! I’m the KrazyGlue God. I’m stuck on you and ain’t nothing from here to eternity that’s going to get me to let you go.”
So how about it, then? Do you have the vocabulary of faith? Do you know the Word and promise of God that will see you through and allow you to still believe and praise God? If not, let me start building your treasury of faith by telling you of our Lord, God’s Son, Jesus Christ. He is the sure and certain sign of God’s mercy and grace toward you. Jesus is the one you can count on. He’s the one who took on everything we human beings could dole out, died, and whom God vindicated by raising him from the dead. When the world cannot and will not forgive, Jesus does. When you’re past the end of your rope, you have a Lord who has the strength to hang on to you. This is God’s promise for you, so that when you face the same kinds of losses as Lina Sandell, you can say with confidence, “For I am convinced that 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, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
You don’t need to go faster, pussycat, kill, kill. You can rest in the promise now and live, live. Amen.
