Let God Breathe (Epiphany 5B)

12th century Coptic Icon, Christ Pantocrator

  

Let God Breathe
Fifth Sunday after Epiphany (Year B)
5 February 2012: 8 am Spoken Mass and 10:00 am Sung Mass
Homily Delivered at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

Isaiah 40:21-31; Psalm 147:1-12, 21c; 1 Corinthians 9:16-23; Mark 1:29-29

Jesus left the synagogue at Capernaum, and entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon's mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.

In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, "Everyone is searching for you." He answered, "Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do." And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. (Mark 1:29-30)

God, take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

The Hebrew Scriptures readings today deal with the majesty and power of God.  Hearing Second Isaiah, it is hard to think that God is anything but all-powerful and all mysterious:  the inhabitants of the earth look like grasshoppers to him, and even the mightiest of dynasties are mere seedlings he uproots in a second.  The Gospel reading today deals with Jesus making use of that power by healing sick people, including Peter’s mother-in-law.    

 

We often misunderstand these images, and think that somehow God is sitting out there apart from the universe, all-powerful, and, like some divine bureaucrat or mail-order operation, keeping track of prayer requests and making Good things happen for Good people and Bad things for Bad people.

But this is not the world we live in.  Here in this life, often the wicked prosper, bad things happen to good people, and prayers for vindication and health seemingly go unanswered, like those of Job.  

I was raised in a religious community that taught that Almighty God blessed the righteous, punished the wicked, and heard and answered the prayers of the righteous. My wife and I had a major trial in our faith just after we were married while we were still in college and just starting our own family. We had become friends with a young couple that went to Church with us. They were good people. After several years of unsuccessful efforts, they were able to get pregnant and had a beautiful little baby boy. After a month or so, though, it became apparent that sometime was wrong. He had been born with a genetic defect: the upper layers of his skin were not fully connected with the deeper layers. If you touched him slightly on the arm, it quickly would turn into a large blister, would easily burst and become infected. There was little that the doctors could do. Despite two months in intensive care, the baby’s body was covered with what essentially were second-degree burns. He was held suspended in a light net to prevent further damage from the bed. His parents were not allowed to touch him, so they could not even comfort him as he screamed his little life out in agony. During the ordeal, we prayed. Our friends prayed. The Church elders prayed and anointed the baby with healing oil, carefully, on the inch or so of sound skin on the side of his head. The whole community prayed. And the baby suffered and slowly died.

It is not the only time in my life when I wished that the world were as simple as I had been taught in Sunday School: my mother-in-law’s cancer, my father’s Alzheimer’s disease.

Now in fairness let me say this: I have also seen prayers answered in wonderful and miraculous ways, sometimes quickly, sometimes gradually: a deadly disease stopped in its tracks and healed, broken relationships mended and strengthened, mental illness managed.  I know that miracles happen. 

But there are just too many cases where God, if Good, seems absent or impotent, or if Almighty and All-present, seems to be a monster, some cipher far removed from the most basic demands of human goodness, let alone divine goodness.  How do we get our heads around it? 

I cannot today answer the problem of theodicy, or the justice of God in the face of evil in the world.  But let me give a few observations to might help each of us work through this.

 

Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-1572), also known by the acronym Ari (the Lion) was a key figure in the development of the Jewish mystical Kabbalah tradition.  He was part of the Sephardic Jewish community, expelled from what is now Spain and Portugal in 1492.  Much of his thought was directed to the problem of Evil, trying to make sense of how God could be Good and trustworthy in the face of the sort of evil that had forced thousands of Jews to convert to Christianity at swordpoint, killed countless thousands of others, and finally driven the Iberian Jews into exile.

A key idea in Luria’s teaching is the idea of Divine “Contraction” (tzimtzum).  He tells a story of the universe’s origin where Creation is basically a negative act in which God’s essential self must bring into being an empty space and time in which Creation can occur. The Almighty was all-Good, all-Powerful, and All-Present.  God was everywhere.  God, Goodness Itself, was all there was.   Only by contracting into itself, like a man inhaling in order to let someone pass in a narrow corridor, could God bring into existence an empty space where Creation could occur. Creation begins with a Divine exile.

Luria in part is using an idea that had been around from the 5^th century.  St. Augustine of Hippo made the point clearly that Evil was not an equal active thing standing over against Good, but rather the absence of Good.  What God created, by definition not-God, also by definition would have gaps in the All-Goodness that is God.  For Augustine, God was actively engaged with creation.  The Incarnation of Christ was the best example of this. 

The fact is, God is not a divine Santa-Claus keeping lists of the Good and Bad, deciding thereby whom to shower with gifts.  Neither is He, in the words of C.S. Lewis, some kind of wacky great uncle to whom we only need to reach out and ask for help. 

The problem in part comes from that word “Almighty.”  The Hebrew Bible pictures God as thoroughly over all things.  One of the Hebrew names for God is El Shaddai, translated into Greek as Pantokrator, or the One who holds all things, into Latin as Omnipotens “the all-powerful” and into English as “God Almighty.”

In the Creed we say “we believe in God almighty.”   This is a shallow statement indeed if all it means is ‘we believe that somewhere out there exists an unlimited power that can choose and perform anything it likes, and we need to be on the right side of it.”  “Belief” must be trust, and to be worthy of trust, you must have more than just power. 

The term El Shaddai did not refer so much to autonomy and power as to Mystery or Sustaining Comfort.  In its most ancient meaning it referred to God of the mountaintop or God of nourishing breasts.

So too the mysterious term Pantokrator in the Creed:  the Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams writes the following about what it means to call God “The One Who Holds All Things”:

“[N]owhere [is God] absent, powerless, or irrelevant; [in] no situation in the universe [is God] at a loss. … [in] no situation [is God] not to be relied upon...”  For Rowan, to say “Almighty” is not a great wish-fulfillment fantasy, rather it is “a way of saying that God always has the capacity to do something fresh and different, to bring something new out of a situation—because nothing outside of himself can finally frustrate his longing” (p. 16, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief.)



The image here is not of a God disjoined from and disinterested in creation, but intimately urging it on to its best result.   Instead of a divine clerk taking applications for favors when hearing prayers, putting some petitions into a pile marked “grant” and others into a pile marked “deny,” God here is “more of a steady swell of loving presence, always there at work in the centre of everything that is, opening the door to a future even when we can see no hope.”   

Rowan uses another idea of St. Augustine and applies it to Jesus’ miracles, which were, he says, “really just natural processes speeded up a bit, ‘fast-forwarded.’”  Thus God’s action is always at work around us, always ‘on hand’, always behind and within the universe, and not bifurcated into ‘nature’ and ‘supernatural or divine intervention.’

“But what if there were times when certain bits of the world’s processes came together in such a way that the whole cluster of happenings became a bit more open to God’s final purposes? What if the world were sometimes a bit more ‘transparent’ to the underlying act of God?” (pp. 44-45)



One of the major parts of Jesus’ ministry was healing, whether of mind or of body. The gospel stories of Jesus healing the sick—like those in today’s Gospel reading from Mark—tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ ministry of announcing the in-breaking of the reign of God focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us that God doesn’t like horror and disappointment for us any more than we do.

God the All-encompassing is always at work, but that work is not always visible. God the All-loving is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of God’s final purpose and sometimes they resist.  After all, this universe is created, and God had to hold his breath to make space for it. 

But things can come together in the world at this or that moment, and the ‘flow’ of this created world can be eased and more directly linked with God’s final purposes.  On occasion, perhaps a really fervent prayer or a particularly holy life can help the world can open up a bit more to God’s final good purpose so that unexpected things happen.

To use Luria’s image, sometimes God “exhales” a bit and reclaims some of the created world here and now, making his good purposes absolutely clear here and now.  That’s what we call a miracle. 

We’re never going to have a complete picture on how that works.   We don’t see things as God sees them.  But we owe it to God, to God’s creation, and to each other, to think, say and do those things that might give God, as it were, additional space in which he can exhale. 

We must pray, act, and serve in ways that have some chance of shaping situations so that God has more breathing space, can come more directly in the processes we see about us.  This isn’t something we can manipulate; miracles aren’t magic.  The Lord’s Book of Blessings is not a mere Book of Spells. 

It would be very comforting if we knew the formula, but we don’t.  “All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God (to live ‘holy’ lives) in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through.” (p. 45)



Jesus showed us the path here.   In emptying himself, and opening himself perfectly to God’s purposes, he got out of the way of God’s final purposes, and ended up able to be an instrument by which these were seen as breaking into everyday life.  This is what the miracle stories in the Gospels are about. 

We should amend our ways when we oppress others, and work to overcome all forms of such abuse of God’s creatures. We should pray, sometimes fast, to give God such breathing room.  Soon we will have Lent, and this is a great opportunity for denying ourselves, confessing our failings, and getting out of God's way. 

May we work to make the world and our lives a little more congruent with what God’s ultimate purposes are. For what the Almighty wants for all of us is good indeed.

In the name of Christ, Amen.