A number of years ago I had to go to the hospital for some routine tests.  I don’t even remember now just exactly what it was.  It wasn’t anything really, I don’t think, it never came to anything.  I just really can’t remember.  What I do remember is being given one of those hospital gowns, and being told by the nurse to take off all my clothes and put on this hospital gown.  This was, I think, my first experience with a hospital gown, and I just kind of held it up and looked at it.  Some of you have had a lot of experience with hospital gowns.  You know the kind of gown, I mean.  There are no buttons or zippers.  You have those little strings that tie together, but you can never tie the strings quite tight enough, there’s always a little opening there that you don’t want, always a little more of yourself showing than you do want, always a little bit of a breeze blowing up your leg.  So I’m looking at this thing, this gown, and I say to the nurse, I’m mostly kidding, but I’m a little serious, I say, “Does the opening for this gown go in the front or the back?”  And her response was, “It doesn’t matter.  You can’t win either way.”           

Do you ever feel like this, that it doesn’t matter, on whatever it is; you can’t win either way?  Life is just sort of happening to you, it seems, and you don’t really have any good options.  You feel this way sometimes as you get older, so I hear.  There was a Family Circus cartoon in the newspaper not long ago.  The grandmother is sitting there with her young granddaughter, and the granddaughter is looking at a picture of the grandmother from when she was just a young woman, many years ago.  The little girl, looking at the picture, and comparing it to her grandmother as she is now, says, “Grandma, is this you?  Grandma, what happened?”           

Sometimes it’s age; we are swept along in this current of time, seemingly, we can hardly believe that time has gone by so fast, but eventually time has passed.  Sometimes it’s illness or infirmity.  Sometimes things in our lives just simply do not work out.  I heard about this one man who went to the doctor with a headache.  So the doctor ran some tests and came back and told the man, “Well, I’ve analyzed both sides of your brain and the news is not good.  You’ve got nothing right on your left side, and you’ve got nothing left on your right side.”           

We have those moments in life, we go through those periods of time, when it seems like there’s nothing right going on in our lives, or there’s nothing left, we simply have nothing left.  We are exhausted, we’ve given all we have, we’ve given it all, and maybe it hasn’t even worked out all that well, and there’s just nothing left.  We have nothing left.           

I want to tell you about Abraham Lincoln.  I warned you last week that I might tell you about Abraham Lincoln sometime in the future.  Well the future has arrived.  Abraham Lincoln was my grandfather’s favorite president, and he had all these books on Lincoln, which I inherited.  And over the years I’ve added a number of books of my own to the collection.  There’s a recent book with the title, Lincoln’s Melancholy, which I read not long ago.  This book is not a real pick-me-up, let me tell you.  Lincoln had frequent bouts of what they called then melancholy, what we call now depression.  We don’t know precisely what caused this, there was a great deal of tragedy in Lincoln’s life, but we do know that he went through significant periods of depression and emotional suffering.  In his diary he once wrote, “I am now the most miserable man living.  If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth.”           

And yet Lincoln was perhaps our greatest president.  He would probably be unelectable today, but he was able to use that depression, that suffering, he was not only able to overcome it and get over it, he was able to work through it and use it so that his suffering became a time of insight and learning and preparation that led to a new period of growth in his life.  Lincoln was able, not just to endure his suffering, not just somehow manage to get through it, survive, he was able to use his times of suffering to grow.  For Lincoln, there was always some greater good to be gained through suffering.           

Some experts claim that Lincoln ought to be a model for all of us, that any low time for an individual, any time of being down, any time of melancholy or depression or suffering might actually be seen as a time of incubation, a time of preparation, a catalyst or catharsis, a time of creative brooding, I’ve heard someone call it.  Whenever I feel low, or I’m in kind of a bad mood, I’ll tell Brenda, “I’m not in a bad mood, I’m just creatively brooding.”  But our suffering, our struggles in life, might be seen as a period that will lead, if we allow it, to some greater growth that one day will come, a greater depth of being, a greater understanding or insight.           

Now, of course, we don’t really like to go through these periods of suffering.  I remember Walter Mondale.  Do you remember Walter Mondale?  He was a senator from Minnesota and then vice president, and then he ran for president.  I believe it was 1984, and he was the front runner, and yet for one reason or another he was losing primary after primary.  He was expected to win, but he was losing.  And it was hard for him to take.  And someone said, “You know Walter, suffering builds character.”  And Mondale said, “I know, I know, but I think I’ve built all the character I can stand.”           

We hate to suffer.  It’s not easy and yet it is true, as someone has said, that your heart is revealed and your character is forged when life doesn’t turn out the way you planned.  The ancient Greeks apparently would say that we suffer our way to wisdom.           

Someone once told me that they were out in California and they saw this enormous rock that was hanging somehow from a rope, and next to this enormous rock was a sign that said, “Weather forecasting for dummies.  Check the rock.  If the rock is wet, it’s raining.  If the rock is moving, it’s windy.  If you can’t see the rock, it’s foggy.  If the rock is gone, it’s a tornado.”           

All kinds of things might happen to us, from something small and mostly inconvenient to the equivalent of a tornado passing through our lives and ripping practically everything apart.  But the question is this: how will you respond?  How will you respond, what choices will you make?  How might you use this time of suffering, this creative brooding, to lead to some growth or insight or understanding?  How might you use this time to develop some secret strength almost so that you might be able to meet suffering again and not be defeated by it, or to share your strength with someone else, so that they might not be defeated by their suffering?           

I heard about a woman out in California who worked in a big office building, and there was an earthquake.  Nothing major really, but they had to evacuate the building, and she was just kind of panicky.  She got to the top of a long flight of stairs and just froze up, she panicked, and she cried out, “I can’t do this!  I can’t do it!  I’m scared!”  So the woman behind her said, “Then do it scared!”  And there may be those times in life that are scary, but in order not to stay frozen and paralyzed, we may just have to do it, endure it, go through it, even though we may have to do it scared.           

I know this one family who went through such trying and difficult times that they even came up with something of a family motto.  They told themselves, “We are fearful, but we continue to move forward.”           

We don’t have to do it alone, you know.  We have friends and family.  We have the church.  We have Jesus. 

We think that David wrote this Psalm 57, and we think we know why he wrote it.  We think David wrote this when King Saul was after him; David was running for his life because Saul wanted to find him and kill him.  David writes using these images: destroying storms and lions that devour their prey, and pits that we can fall into, in some cases pits that someone else has dug to try and make us fall into them.  These are metaphors for all of the evil things that have happened to him; they are metaphors for all the evil things that can happen to us.  But in the middle of it, in the middle of all the evil that can happen, we find this verse, “My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast.  I will sing and make melody.”           

I got the title for this sermon, “Making Music with What You Have Left”, from a story I read about the great violinist, Itzhak Perlman. Now Itzhak Perlman was stricken with polio at the age of four.  He wears braces on both legs.  He can only walk with crutches.  But he has been called the greatest violinist of our age.  He recently performed at the White House for the state dinner in honor of Queen Elizabeth during her visit to the United States.           

Once he was giving a concert at Lincoln Center with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and while he was playing, one of the strings on his violin broke.  You could hear the snap of it evidently throughout the auditorium.  The conductor looked over to see if maybe they should stop playing, did Perlman want to take a break to fix his violin?  But Perlman signaled for him to continue.  A music critic who witnessed this event wrote about it this way, he wrote, “I know that it’s impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings.  I know that and you know that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that.  You could see him up there modulating, changing, re-composing the piece in his head.”  When he finished, first there was just this awesome, stunned silence in the auditorium.  But then everyone was on their feet, clapping and screaming and cheering for this incredible performance.  When the crowd quieted down, Perlman just very modestly said, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s opportunity to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”           

Sometimes it is the artist’s opportunity, he said, and sometimes it is the opportunity of the individual, the human being, the child of God, and with God’s help, to see how much music you can still make with what you have left.