Embracing Mystery
Lent 3C
28 February 20168:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist
28 February 20168:00 a.m. Said and 10 a.m. Sung Eucharist
Parish
Church of Trinity, Ashland (Oregon)
God, give us grace to feel and love.
Take away our hearts of stone and give
us hearts of flesh. Amen.
“Please give me a
reason to believe that I am not going to hell,” said the person under hospice
care that I was visiting. “God is in
charge of everything. And now here I
have this terrible disease: I can’t take
care of myself any more, even simple things like going to the bathroom or
swallowing food or drinking without choking.
It’s only going to get worse. I
know the wrongs I have done in life, and still do. I feel God is punishing me. I think he is going to send me to hell.”
“God is punishing
me.” We hear it or feel it much more
frequently than we admit.
That, or “God is punishing
them.” Back in Spring 2010 a devastating earthquake
struck Haiti. Television Evangelist Pat
Robertson quickly said that this was God’s punishment for the Haitians. Jerry Falwell blamed the 9-11 attacks in 2001 on
homosexuals and women who sought abortions.
God was punishing America by knocking down the symbols of our pride, the
Trade center and the Pentagon.
God the Tester and
God the Punisher. Not a pretty picture.
In today’s Gospel,
Jesus is asked about people who suffer horrible things. “Did you hear
that the Romans massacred those countrymen of yours who were worshipping in the
Temple? Their own blood was mixed with that of the animals they were sacrificing!
What evil did they do that that God punished them this way?”
This question has
hefty scriptural authority behind it. The Book of Deuteronomy and all the books
from Joshua through 2 Kings teach that if you do what is right, God will bless
you and prosper your way. If you do what
is wrong, God will punish you and bring calamity upon you. 1-2 Chronicles take the idea further: “if
something bad happens to you, you clearly have done something wrong: God is
punishing you.”
But Jesus says no—God
is not like that. He replies: “Those people did nothing any worse than
anyone else. And what about those countrymen
of yours who died in the Tower of Siloam when it collapsed? They were no
worse than anyone else. The lesson we should take here is not that they
were particularly bad, but that we all need to be better” (Luke
13:1-5).
Jesus says that God
is mystery, hard sometimes to figure out. But the one thing we can be sure
about is that God is compassionate.
Jesus too is
following scripture in this view.
The Book of Job tells
of a man “perfect in all his ways,” yet who suffers horror. Job’s friends
urge him to confess whatever hidden sin he has committed that God is so
obviously punishing him for. But Job just can’t agree: what he has
suffered just is not fair. He won’t let God off the hook. But he does
not “curse God and die.” When God at long last speaks to him from “out of
the whirlwind,” it is all so overwhelming that all Job can do is mourn and
sorrow, and yet bless God for his mysterious goodness.
Mystery. In today’s reading from Exodus, God is the
one who is, the “I am.” God remains
always somewhat hidden from us, speaking from a bush that burns, yet is not
consumed. The God whose name cannot be
said aloud is being itself that brings all things into existence. This should cause us to stand in awe, and
remove the shoes from our feet.
Jesus says that you can’t
explain the bad things in the world by chalking them up to God the great
Punisher. Jesus invites us instead to keep
confidence in God’s love and justice and embrace mystery. He knows that throughout Hebrew Scripture, God
is described as loving, compassionate, and patient. So you have to focus on God’s goodness and love,
not on God’s justice, or, worse, what feels like God’s anger when you are not
right with God. Bad things happen even
to good people. Sometimes, the wicked
prosper. But God still loves us. Embrace mystery, take off your shoes before
the burning but unconsumed bush, and keep your confidence in a loving, good,
and gracious God despite the things that go bad for us.
In our Friday evening
Lenten Soup Supper discussion, one parishioner expressed discomfort at how new
approaches to scripture have reconstructed how we understand Jesus’s birth, the
incarnation, and the atonement.
Borrowing an image from Diana Butler Bass, she said, “If we are going to
put our faith in a suitcase and then haul it over the creaky bridge of awakening
over to a reconstructed Christianity on the other side, I wonder just what
we’re going to find in that suitcase when we open it.” For this soul, and for many, I think,
progressive politics, good communal life, and maybe personal contemplative
enlightenment all appear pretty thin gruel compared to the tried and true way
of understanding the stories.
It’s a fair
question. How can we throw out the dirty
bathwater of a thousand years of overlaid tradition that have obscured God and
made faith all but impossible for many, while keeping the baby Jesus? How do we even identify the baby? And how do we know just what to throw out and
what to treasure?
Accepting ambiguity
is hard. But it is easier when we focus
on the things we are sure of. Thus we
can keep trying to be faithful to the tradition, continue to learn from the
stories that have been handed down, and actually find them newly empowered to
do better things for us than we were getting from the exact way we received
them. Again, the key is focusing on what we truly
know.
The gospel stories of
Jesus healing the sick tell us that the ultimate purpose of God does not
include disease, suffering, and death. Jesus’ announcing the reign of God
focused in large part in healing physical and mental suffering. This tells us
that God doesn’t intend horror and disappointment for those he has made.
When asked why a man
had been born blind, “was it his parents’ sin or his?” he replied, “Neither, it
wasn’t punishment for anything, but so that I would have the chance to heal
him” (John 9:2-3). They ask him why, on account of what, and he answers
why, for what purpose. Jesus' shift
between the two different kinds of 'why' is essential. It forces us to turn away from the fruitless
questioning of mystery that makes us lose sight of God’s love and instead look
for opportunities to serve and help bring the ultimate loving intentions of God
closer to what we see before us. This is what I mean by creativity and
imagination.
The basic act of
removing our shoes before the Holy is necessary if we are to keep faith and
hope. Embracing mystery means learning
to live with uncertainty and ambiguity in an ongoing act of creativity and
imagination, and doing so not reluctantly or because we are forced to by facts,
but joyfully. Incarnational acts showing
God’s love to those in need and humble prayer that listens to God more than it
asks of God—all these are the basic practices of such creativity in the
presence of ambiguity.
After the Indonesian
tsunami of 2004, theologian David Hart wrote: “As for comfort, when we
seek it, I can imagine none greater than the happy knowledge that when I see
the death of a child, I do not see the face of God but the face of his
enemy.” William Pike, writing on the Haiti earthquake, said that he had
been reminded of the story of Elijah’s flight to Mount Horeb in 1 Kings 19,
where God spoke to Elijah not out of an earthquake, whirlwind, or fire, but out
of the whispering of the still breeze. Against Pat Robertson’s God the
Punisher, Pike remembers the text’s words—“The Lord was not in the earthquake.”
All I could say to my
friend in hospice is that Jesus showed us God. God is love. God is forgiveness.
Then I prayed, using a collect on page
831 of the Prayer Book: “O merciful Father, you have taught us in your holy
Word that you do not willingly afflict or grieve the children of men: Look with pity upon the sorrows of this your
servant… Remember him O Lord in mercy, nourish his soul with patience, comfort
him (and notice this especially!) with a sense of your goodness. Lift up your
countenance upon him and give him peace.”
God is a healer, not a punisher.
God indeed is not in
the earthquake, not in the horror. He is not in towers falling, or sickness
and suffering. These things show us how far the world is from God's intention,
not God’s will. Rather, God is in
the efforts of people trying to help the victims of such things. He, or
should I say She is a nurturer. She is
in reconciliation and service. He is in efforts to build justice and
peace, in caregiving.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
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