The Cycles of Life

         There is much wisdom in those who say that life is not really linear, but rather is more like a spiral: cycling in and around the same issues again and again.  I find this in my own life in many ways: the things that challenge me seem to come back repeatedly until I really get a handle on them and then they stop appearing.  The problems that I've faced repeat until I get them "right".
         I find this fascinating at several levels.  There is a popular song, Breathe, by Anna Nalick with the words,
"'Cause you can't jump the track, we're like cars on a cable
And life's like an hourglass, glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button girl,
So cradle your head in you hands
And breathe, just breathe."

        There have been many times when I have related to those words and find myself wishing, hoping, praying that there were some way I could go back and do things differently.... my son missed his SAT test last week, for example, when I was gone and that is one of those stupid mistakes that has haunted me... "If I'd only remembered to call and wake him up that morning... if I'd only hounded him...."  But I can't fix it and it bothers me.  

         But what is interesting as I reflect on the big picture is that while I cannot go back and fix these instances, fix these mistakes in the specific circumstances, through the course of my life I am coming to see that I will have another opportunity to "get it right" or rather, a situation similar to this will happen again.  It will.  And perhaps I will have learned from the past mistakes and do better.  Anna Nalick wrote the song when she was 17.  She hadn't been given the experience yet of life cycling.  But I have no doubt that if she lives long enough, she will.  We can't go back, but we can go forward, and we will have the chance to learn from those mistakes and respond to similar situations differently in the future.

         But the other way in which I experience this cycling as true is that we also have the opportunities to learn that when something feels similar to a time in the past, it is an invitation to look at it with the eyes of someone who has survived and hopefully thrived through those earlier experiences.  We can then see those situations with the gift of the hindsight that we gained then and apply it to the situation now.

         I've found myself reflecting on a time when my body was telling me that a situation was the same as a nightmare I had experienced a decade before.  It felt the same: I couldn't sleep, wasn't eating right, and had become very sick.  I was anxious all the time.  I couldn't figure out what was going on.  Why did this feel absolutely the same as what I had gone through before?  Why was I in so much pain and wanting desperately to run away just like I had felt before?  But through the wisdom of an amazing person in my life I was able to hear and see that my body was telling me that this was the same situation as what I had gone through before.  Yes, the specifics were very different.  The people involved were different and in very different roles in my life than those who were the players before.  For those on the outside, they would have seen nothing similar at all in the two situations.  But many of the important key stressors were the same: lies, secrets, abuse, a situation that felt completely unsafe in which I did not know where or when the next hit would come; only that it would come.  My body was telling me that I had ridden this ride before.  And as a result, I had the gift of being able to choose what to do with that information.  What worked for me last time to navigate these waters?  What didn't?  How would I choose to move through this in this instance that was not "doing the same thing over and over and insanely expecting different results"?  What built relationships?  What severed relationships?  Which relationships were important to boost up and which ones should I have let go of much, much sooner?  These were all questions that I needed to navigate again as I steered through them the first time.  I didn't like it at the time, but I was given  the gift of the past to help me make better choices, informed choices and to move forward with eyes open this second time.  My body let me know I was back in the cycle, with another chance to learn, to grow and to navigate the waters differently.  

            I would not wish on anyone that we would have to repeat painful things.  I don't like that when we haven't learned all that we need to from a situation we are given the "opportunity" to learn it better a second time round.  But this is the life we've been given.  Each of us has been given opportunities to learn specific lessons.  And we will keep being given these chances until we get the lessons learned.  It's a gift, it's a curse - it's life.  

Lament and Faith

                        Job 14:7-15; 19:23-27

Matthew 10:24-39

               Today we continue with our study of Job.  At this point in Job we come to see a man who is suffering intensely.  And his friends have been worse than useless: they have been adding to his pain.  Rather than being supportive listeners, they have basically been telling Job that it must be his fault, that he would not be suffering if he hadn’t deserved it somehow, that God was punishing him for crimes that he must have in his heart if nowhere else, and that he needs to repent in order to be released from his suffering.  Again, the book of Job confronts this idea.  One of the ways in which it does that is to show the errors of it in the form of Job’s friends’ speeches.  Like most of us when someone we care about is in pain, they are unable to do what is most helpful and most needed in difficult times, which is to simply be present with the person who is suffering.  Job’s friends also, unhelpfully, tell him to keep quiet, to shut up.  They tell Job that he has no right to express his pain and even less right to speak his frustration about his situation to God. 

But Job’s pain is total and all compelling.  And while his first response was silence, we have moved far beyond that at this point in the story into a totally different stage of grief.  As I said last week, he doesn’t ever curse God, but his pain is so full that he does curse his own life: the day he was conceived.  His pain has become so intolerable to him that he cries out in unbearable anguish.  He starts by yelling at his friends – who are you to tell me to shut up?  I’m upset, things are bad, I am in PAIN.  And finally in today’s passages he turns in his crying to God.

We are familiar with Job’s cries.  Especially now in this time and in this place.  Job’s cry is the cry that we have been hearing in our communities the last few weeks.  Job moves in today’s passage also from a crying out of sheer pain into a demand for justice, into an anguished request for things to be righted, for a system that is broken (in Job’s case, he believes God’s system is what is broken) to be fixed.  It is too much to bear.  We are seeing this now in our own communities.  The cries of the black community and those who care about them have moved from a place of deep pain into a lament and a long, deep waling that is a crying out for justice, for an unjust system of prejudice, racism, and oppression to change.  Job is crying out about a relationship that is so broken he can’t take it, and so intense that he can’t be rid of it.  And this is the cry of God’s people now. 

Job’s friends believe this to be unfaithful.  But Job’s pain declares that he is beyond caring if that is the case.  He demands for God to hear him.  He will be heard and he will not be silenced. 

But what I want to say to you today is two things.  First, I want to note the immense power that his speaking out gives to Job, for his own life, for his own experience.  Jewish belief at this time was that death was final.  It was absolute.  It was an ending and a separation from all that one had known, all that one had cared about.  It was THE END – written with capital letters. 

Job talks about the tree that, once cut down will sprout again.  I think about the fact that many of the trees in the middle east are olive trees.  At our house we had this huge olive tree that was a problem for a number of reasons.  First, it blocked the sun from coming into the family room.  But second, it also caused a huge host of allergy problems for my family as well as a huge olive stain mess in the house.  So we had it cut down.  But every year since we cut it down, little olive branches have begun to grow from under the ground around the stump.  The stump, the sign and symbol of what was a full life but is no longer is still there.  The stump is the scar that shows that the plant suffered the tragedy of being cut down.  But it kept trying to live again through these little branches growing up.  This is what Job would have experienced too – that cutting down the tree did not end the possibility of life, of renewal of new growth.  Job says that in contrast humans are more like a dried-up lake that can no longer hold water.  He expresses this as a reality, one that he has been taught through his cultural and religious heritage.  When he begins to speak he is in ultimate despair of the dried up water that will never regenerate.

As I read this, I again found myself thinking about our world at this time.  It is so easy for us to lose hope when there are so many problems that seem beyond healing.  The racism, the destruction of the environment, the huge growing discrepancy between the rich and the poor, the undeniable oppression of the most vulnerable in our society… it is too much.  Holding on to hope in these times feels difficult to say the least.

Job is right there with us.  Remember that he has lost everything: his home, his riches, but also those who worked for him and finally, his family – his children.  They are gone.  They are dead.  And no matter what follows, the loss of one’s children, and in his case it was all of his children – that is a pain beyond any I could imagine.  I found myself remembering a quote from the book The Life of Pi.  “My suffering was taking place in a grand setting.  I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant, and I was still.  My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized.  And I could accept this.  It was all right.  [But] It was daylight that brought my protest: ‘No! No! No! My suffering does matter.  I want to live!’” (177) 

Job had lost everything.  And the despair that comes with that is obvious.  Hope is more elusive.  And yet, we see in this passage an alternating between his despair and moments of hope.  How did he find it when he believe that death was the end?  How could he hold on to hope when everything looked so dark, so foreboding.  When there is no guarantee that things will end well, but many signs that things will end badly, how does one hold on to hope?  Talk of hope without facing the reality of death is dishonest.  So when faced with death, what do you hope for?  To heal relationships?  To find peace?  At the heart of Job’s despair is a sense of isolation which death will only further. Again, the idea of resurrection was not part of this Jewish reality.   For Christians, this passage is often used on Holy Saturday, or the day before Easter in the Catholic church.  These passages reflect the quiet of a deserted road in the middle of nowhere: shock, danger, fear.  Despair.

But what I want to point out here is that in his speaking, this place, this idea of the ultimate end moves.  In chapter three Job was yearning and begging for death.  But here, he is hoping for and envisioning something beyond it.  There comes a point in the deepest of unjust suffering, which is what Job has been experiencing, in which the accused, the one suffering, the one being oppressed must make an ultimate decision: to give up and die in despair, or to find the will to fight.  Job at first was giving in, because one cannot choose to stand up and fight that kind of ultimate despair alone.  But he changes.  In these passages he comes to a certainty that a redeemer will stand with him.  And he comes to this through his own speaking, through his lament, through his decision to confront the God he believes is harming him.

I remember reading a book about trauma and the effects and scars left by deep trauma.  The author was following children in war times and now was looking at the children in Syria who had lost house, family, source of food, etc.  And one of the things he found was that children who were able to write, and who journaled their experienced, were psychologically much more able to handle the crises than those who had no place to voice their pain, no place to name it, to speak it.  Job is expressing his pain through words to God.  And the very expression of those words changes him. 

In his remembering the image of the resurrection that the tree offers, he also calls to his own mind another possibility.  “If someone dies, will they live again?  All the days of my hard service I will wait for my renewal to come.  You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made.”  And then, with even more conviction he continues, “I know that my redeemer lives,… and after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God.  I myself will see him with my own eyes – I, and not another.  How my heart yearns within me!” 

There is hope here: deep, and sometimes inexplicable hope given where he comes from and what he has believed previously.  But it is there.  His expression of his pain has allowed him to move beyond complete despair and into the possibilities that he has not seen or understood the whole picture and that it might be bigger than he can imagine, more connected and more healing than he can imagine.

His words seek more than just hope for his own life: they speak of redeeming a compromised system.  A commentator from Feasting on the Word said it this way: “Such stories provide a nuanced and complex way of exploring the elements that lead to a failure of justice.  They allow for an honest confrontation of the corruption that besets even the best systems of law.  They also provide an alternative to the complacency of those who refuse to see evil and the cynicism of those who refuse to believe that anything can be done about it.” 

His words are incredible expressions from a man whose faith tradition is such that death is the end.  These are declarations of faith in a God whose love extends beyond any suffering, beyond any grave, beyond even death.  Despite everything, Job finds hope.  He finds hope in his own laments and speeches to God.  And that hope is on a grand scale.

               I’m reminded of these words by Rienhold Niebuhr in The Irony of American History:

“Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love.

No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.”

               Job’s crying out is healing of him.  Job’s crying out is what brings him hope.  Job’s crying out is the beginning of an insistence on justice, on help, on reconciliation and healing.

               Job’s crying out, his decision to finally speak to God, to say what he is feeling in all its fullness, his insistence that God hear him: these are acts of deep faith.  The practice of lament, of speaking out to God, of raising our voices in our pain: these practices are rooted deeply in our psalms, in the book of Lamentations, and here in the book of Job.

               Next week and the week following we will be talking about God’s response to this.  But for this week what I want to make clear is that lament is one of the truest expressions of faith because it declares a number of things:

1.        That God is sovereign (or there would be no reason to speak to God!)

2.       That God does hear us (or again there would be no reason to cry out to God!)

3.       That God’s love is big enough to handle even our complaints against God. 

4.       That speaking our truth to God is a way of being more deeply invested in the relationship we have with God: of pulling close to God, of trusting God with all of who we are.

5.        That speaking our truth to God is healing, empowering, and moves us into hope.

Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is that thing with feathers -that perches in the soul- and sings the tune without words-and never stops- at all.”

The book of Job in so many ways is an expression of lament, one echoed in psalms and lamentations and even by Jesus himself when he cries out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me!”  And we are in a time when the whole community is lamenting and begging for change.  We can join in that lament, that crying out to God, that crying out for justice.  Lament itself inspires us in hope, inspires us to action, and inspires us to our own healing.  Lament, crying out, expressing our truth – these are the acts of  faithful people trusting in God’s ability to hear, to move within us and to respond with resurrection, they are a way of trusting in God’s love. 

I want to end with a modern day lament about the book of Job.  You may not agree with everything in this poem.  Indeed, I don’t necessarily agree with everything in this poem.  But again, it is the voicing of lament, and so I would like to share it with you today:

Editing Job

By Carl Denis

I'd cut the prologue, where God agrees

To let his opponent, Satan,

Torment our hero merely to prove

What omniscience must know already:

That Job's devotion isn't dependent

On his prosperity. And how foolish of God

If he supposes that Satan, once proven wrong,

Will agree to forego his spite against creation

For even a minute.

I'd keep the part where Job disdains

His friends' assumption that somehow

He must be to blame for his suffering,

And the part where he makes a moving appeal

To God for an explanation.

I'd drop God's irrelevant, angry tirade

About might and majesty versus weakness.

The issue is justice. Is our hero

Impertinent for expecting his god

To practice justice as well as preach it,

For assuming the definition of justice

That holds on earth holds as well above?

Abraham isn't reproved in Genesis

For asking, when God decides to burn Sodom,

If it's fair to lump the good with the wicked.

Let Job be allowed to complain

About his treatment as long as he wants to,

For months, for decades,

And in this way secure his place forever

In the hearts of all who believe

That suffering shouldn't be silent,

That grievances ought to be aired completely,

Whether heard or not.

As for the end, if it's meant to suggest

That patience will be rewarded, I'd cut it too.

Or else I suggest at least adding a passage

Where God, after replenishing Job's possessions,

Comes to the tent where the man sits grieving

To ask his pardon. How foolish of majesty

To have assumed that Job's new family,

New wife and children and servants,

Would be an ample substitute for the old.

Everything is Harder Now

          I've been thinking about how hard everything is right now.  But more, why we are taking everything in such a hard way.  The small things seem to get blown up into gigantic proportions, big things threaten to tear apart or end relationships, communal problems are escalating into violence and destruction.  Everything is, truly, hard right now.  But even things that a person would normally allow to just roll off one's back are sticking and threatening and overwhelming.
         I think about this at a personal level.  My family has lived through so much hard stuff, and yet we did live through it.  As I've said in other posts, we had support, coping skills and strategies that made it possible to survive and we chose not only survival but took the opportunities to grow, learn and deepen in our commitments to loving God, each other and life to the fullest.  We survived and chose to thrive through much worse, personally, that what we are experiencing now.  Yes, there is chaos in the community - but there always has been.  Yes, the church is struggling, but again, we've gone through worse.  Yes, it's affecting my personal life, but it is not throwing our lives completely up in the air like dice tossed into the wind as had happened before.  I'm not trying to care for everyone on my own: I have a husband and my family locally all around to help now as well as a community of friends.
         And yet, the truth is that now feels harder.  On the outside it isn't.  But it sure feels harder.  What I mean is that I struggle to breathe through these challenges. I struggle to see where God is leading us, and me, in this.  I struggle to discern how to proceed, and frankly, I struggle with whether or not I am still called to this work because it feels overwhelming right now.  I am sick and not improving, and I'm certain that much of that is the stress of these times.  And so I have to ask myself the very basic question, "Why?"  Why now?  Why is this different?  Why is this harder?  And of course, the bigger question - And then what?
         Perhaps for today I will leave this here.  I ran this by my family, asking them, informing them, that I didn't know where to go from here, in the writing or in my thinking.  Their unanimous response was "leave it there."  So, maybe, for today, I will.
         There is power in staying with the questions.  There is power in sitting with the truth of our experience.  So for today, my experience of this being hard, of having no answers, and of struggling to BE is what I am offering to you.  And if you are experiencing some of this as well, you can rest in the knowledge that you are not alone...

Sorrow and Compassion

Job 1:1-22, 3:1-10

Matthew 9:35-10:8, (9-23)

               As my own congregation will remember, I have chosen to use the Narrative lectionary this last year as a change from the three year cycle of the revised common lectionary that I’ve used for the last 20 some years.  The narrative lectionary is on a four year schedule and it looks more intensively at each book of the bible, following it through with longer readings, skipping a lot less material, in order for us to get a real look at these books.  For this next month, the narrative lectionary is looking in depth at the book of Job, which is not a scripture that we usually give much of our time.  When we do look at Job, we usually will give it a single week of our attention, rather than spreading it out over a number of weeks.  It is an uncomfortable book for many of us in many ways.  So today I want to give a bit of an overview.

               The book of Job is one of my favorite books in the bible, for reasons that we will explore more in the coming weeks.  One reason, which we will explore more today, is that many people have come to understand it as a book that addresses the question of why bad things happen to good people, or, to put it another way: many have understood it as a book that seeks to explore the age-old question of evil.  The question of evil is, in many ways, THE theological problem that people of faith face.  As many theologians explain it, in particular, Rabbi Kushner in his book, Why Bad Things Happen to Good People, and Frederick Buechner puts it in his book Wishful thinking, A Theological ABC, there are three statements that people of faith generally believe to be true:

1.       God is all Powerful

2.       God is all Good

3.       Bad things happen.

One of these three statements has to go.  They can’t all work together.  If God is all powerful and all good, then even things that look bad must in fact not be.  If God is all powerful but bad things happen, then God, the creator and controller of all things, must be the author of those bad things so God can’t be all good.  And finally, if God is all good but bad things happen, then God must not be all powerful.  There must be other forces at work in the world, in our lives and in the universe that have some sway and some say over what happens and that make for bad things to happen. 

People are uncomfortable with this.  And in general people strive and desperately want to believe that all three statements must be true.  We don’t want to believe that God is other than all powerful and all good.  But we also experience that bad things happen, every day, all around us.  And so we often jump through huge hoops in our thinking in order to make all three of these statements work.  And what we tend to discount can be a strong indicator of where we stand in our theology.

More fundamentalist and evangelicals, for example, tend to discount the statement that bad things happen.  They try to find ways in which the terrible things that happen are not really bad, or they say that the bad things didn’t really happen.  This often ends up with the devastating result that people say the most inhumane and unkind things to other people who are suffering.  Have you ever heard someone say to a person who has just lost a child, for example, “God needed that child more in heaven.”?  What a horrible thing to say to someone grieving: that they shouldn’t feel sad at the devastation they have just experienced because God somehow needs the baby more than they do!  Why would God “need” this child in heaven?    Or how about, “Everything happens for a reason” to someone who has just gone through an experience of loss or worse, has experienced some kind of truly torturous situation.  Their agony had a reason behind it?  Another favorite of mine is, “God never gives us more than we can handle” as if God had given us something bad in order to test our ability to handle things.  And we all know that people DO, all too often, experience more than they can handle.  People commit suicide because they are experiencing more than they can handle, they lose their minds, they become bitter or cynical, they DIE, overcome by disease or despair.  Every day people experience more than they can handle.  To tell someone who is on the verge of collapse that they haven’t been given more than they can handle is cruel because it declares their inability to handle the situation as a personal flaw.  And all of this points to a theology that says that the things that we experience as horrible are not, in fact horrible. 

Other times, people deal with the “bad things happen” part by assuming that anything bad that comes their way is punishment for bad behavior on their part.  This, too, is problematic for many reasons.  First of all, if God is all powerful, why would God allow us to act out bad behaviors that God then punishes?  Also, what kind of god is it that would hurt us because we made mistakes?  Not a very loving God, for sure.  But many people go to this place, don’t they?  Kushner himself tells the story of a parishioner who came to him after his daughter had died saying he had missed a high holy day at the temple and that this must be why God had punished him by killing his daughter.  Again, what kind of god does that describe?

Other faiths, perhaps, come to the conclusion that perhaps God is not all good, but is more like humans: a creator of good and evil who gets jealous, angry, vengeful and altogether destructive at times.  Since this is not a Christian understanding of God, people who believe God to be all good and all powerful but then experience terrible things sometimes end up chucking out faith in God at all.  They cannot believe in an all powerful god who would allow these terrible things to happen, so God must not be real, or must not be an entity worth worshiping. 

Finally, then, as we have discussed before, we come to the theology of people like Kushner and Buechner, and, frankly, of Job.  The story of Job does not describe a God who is punishing Job for bad behaviors.  The book of Job emphasizes repeatedly that Job is righteous.  And while some might say that perhaps the book of Job is describing a God who is perhaps not all good, who in fact makes an unfair contract with the devil even, there is a different way to understand this. 

I want to start, though, with a little historical critical look at Job.  The passages we read from the very beginning of Job has this word that is often translated “Satan” or “the Adversary” but is more accurately, from the Hebrew, translated as “the Accuser”.  There is no sense here of this accuser as being an “evil” one, or one who was working against God in the original.  Rather the sense is that this is a being whose job it is to see the truth in humanity and to hold people accountable for their actions, one who works with God in doing so.  This is very important distinction and it is how the Hebrew people would have originally heard and understood this.  To restate, this text is not a story of God somehow agreeing to the Devil’s demands.  This is a story in which the motives of Job, the deep understanding of Job is being questioned.  Additionally, when you look at what then happens, it is not that the Accuser goes down and causes problems for Job.  Some of what is described is natural disasters.  But most of it is the humans around Job doing damage.  As we hear, “A messenger came to Job and said: “The oxen were plowing, and the donkeys were grazing nearby when the Sabeans took them and killed the young men with swords. I alone escaped to tell you.”  And then, “Chaldeans set up three companies, raided the camels and took them, killing the young men with swords. I alone escaped to tell you.”  In other words, this is not a story about two gods: a good god we call “God” who made everything good and a bad god whom we call “Satan” who makes everything bad that we can’t handle, and who somehow makes an agreement with the good god to torture an innocent man.  I know the story, especially in our English translations, can sound that way, but that misses the intention of the story.

               Instead this is, and again was intended to be, a story that invites us more deeply into the question of good and evil.  As we move through the book of Job, we will explore this in more depth.  But the point of this intro, as well as Job’s angry rant in reaction to the suffering that he has experienced, is that bad things happen to good people.  Job did not deserve his suffering, the intro makes that clear.  He was a good and righteous man.  His suffering was not punishment, his suffering was not revenge, his suffering was not God, nor some “devil character” lashing out.

                Much of my study leave last week was spent taking a class on process theology.  Process theology has many facets, but the main point of process theology is that God is NOT all powerful.  God has released power in favor of freewill.  I have said this before, but God wants genuine relationship with creation.  If we are controlled, there is no genuine relationship.  If we are puppets, there is no real relationship.  God has given us, and all creation, choices, our own personal power to act and react in this world.  We have the power to act, nature has the power to act.  Each of us chooses how we will be in the world, what we will do with the time given to us, what choices we will make.  That means that when people make bad choices or do bad things (like the Sabeans and Chaldeans in the Job story), people suffer.  And God has no power to prevent those people from making those choices.  God’s power at this point in time, is one of persuasion.  When people listen to God, when people lean into the mandates to love all others as one loves oneself, then good comes.  When people such as the Sabeans and Chaldeans in this story do not see others as brothers and sisters, do not feel the call to love them as themselves, do not treat them kindly or well, but instead abuse them and take what they want for themselves, raping the land and killing those they see as “other”, God is powerless to prevent it. 

I realize that for some, this is a scary thought.  It came up in one of our conversations during my study leave class that some people say, “If God can’t fix everything, if God is not all powerful, that is not a God I want to worship!”  The instructor’s response (and mine as well), “If God is not all Good, if God is not on the side of the suffering, if God has power and just stands by while terrible things happen, THAT is not a god I want to worship.”  (the third statement that bad things happen is not in question here: Job experienced them, I’ve experienced them and our world is experiencing them: so that is not the point in question here.)

(On a side note, this is the power we give to pastors in the Presbyterian church as well – we do not have the power to make decisions, though we usually take the crap when decisions don’t go the direction everyone wants, which is always – you just can’t please all the people all the time, EVER.  Pastors, too, in the Presbyterian church at least, are only given the power of persuasion.  That’s it.)

So, the idea here is that God does not interfere or prevent the bad things from happening.  The earth, just like humans, is active and alive and so things we call “natural disasters” because they devastate us happen.  Earthquakes happen.  Floods happen. Virus’ happen.  Sometimes, many times lately, humans make these things worse.  We affect the weather, we set up our societies in such a way that those most likely to get sick are also those least likely to get health care and therefore more than likely to spread disease to the rest of us.  But these are things WE do.  Not things God has done to us. 

“Let us not ask God to take away what we have been given responsibility to handle,” someone once said.  It’s our responsibility to prevent as many deaths as possible.  It is our responsibility to act in ways that limit our potential for earth’s destruction.  When we fail to take that responsibility, bad things will and do happen.  The world has been set up in such a way that there are consequences, in the big picture, for our actions; not because God is punishing, but because we have been given co-creative power and when we use that for evil, for destruction, for bad, then bad things come.  In a sense we are punished BY our sins, not FOR our sins.  On an individual basis, though, this means that life is not fair and there is suffering. 

Where is God in that suffering?  God is on the cross.  And this is the part that we have to understand.  Jesus, too, did not die because he deserved it.  His suffering, too, was not punishment, and it was not revenge.  His suffering, too, was deeply unfair.  When it comes to suffering and Christianity, it is clear that God did not prevent even the cross, but gave humans the freewill that enabled them to even kill the Son of God.  Barbara Brown Taylor in God in Pain said it like this, “Christianity is the only world religion that confesses a God who suffers.  It is not that popular an idea, even among Christians.  We prefer a God who prevents suffering, only that is not the God we have got.  What the cross teaches us is that God’s power is not the power to force human choices and end human pain.  It is, instead, the power to pick up the shattered pieces and make something holy out of them – not from a distance, but right close up.”

The question for us, then, is how do we respond in that suffering?  How do we respond when others suffer?  In relation to God, it is easy to praise God in the good times, but harder in the bad times.  We see this in Job.  He eventually gets upset.  His crisis of suffering is a spiritual crisis too, because he, as a member of his community, also had believed that the world was just and that suffering was punishment.  But now he sees otherwise: from his own experience, he is seeing things differently.  And while he doesn’t curse God, he never steps to the place in which he curses God like his wife suggests he do, he does curse his own life.  He rues the day he was born.  He laments.  He pours out his pain.  We will look more at this next week.  For today, though, my call for us is to sit in the question of evil.  Do you see, experience, feel suffering and evil in this world?  And if you do, do you choose to believe in a God who is all good, or a God who is all powerful?  Are you quick to blame God when things go badly?  Do you see a God who is angry and vengeful?  Or do you see a God who has loved you so deeply into being that God has given each of us free-will with the cost being that suffering comes?  These are hard questions.  They are questions that are not easily answered.   And for today, I invite you into the questions, into the exploration.  Unlike for many, I am not going to give you quick answers because I think God is in the very questions, pulling us closer, inviting us to listen, to hear, and to grow in our love for God.  I think that IS Good News.  A God in the questions.  Amen.

Struggles with the World

        I have to say that I am disappointed in my world.  The older I get, the more I live through, the more this is true.  Disappointed, by the way, is a very understated word in this case. It pains me, it devastates me, to see the ways people justify destroying the earth, brutalize people of color, refuse to help refugees, don't hesitate to increase the divide between the rich and the poor by giving more and more to those who already are rich and taking away from the poor, the underprivileged and the oppressed even the little that they have.  The more I see, the more I have come to believe that there really are people who choose evil in this world: they choose to "otherize" anyone who does not look like them or have the same wealth, power or general life situation as them: they "otherize", then villainize, then work to actively oppress, injure, destroy and damage anything that gets in the way of them acquiring more money and more power for themselves.  I've spent years trying to understand the fear that could cause this kind of behavior, and I have no doubt that I will continue to try to understand it.  But as I read in one of my study leave books this week, "it is problematic to refuse to see willful intent to commit evil." (p73 of Sustaining Hope in An Unjust World by Timothy Charles Murphy. MA: Chalice Press, 2019).  I don't like to see it that way.  But as I read his arguments, I had to agree.  There is evil here: intentionality in harming the earth and other people to obtain what a person wants for themself.  The author goes on to say, "progressives have the bias that education will solve most problems," and I admit that I, too, have had this bias.  I have mistakenly assumed that people are cruel and do horrible things to others because they just don't understand.  And I've had to come to a new awareness that many do understand. And are choosing to do harm, because it serves them.  That awareness is devastating to me.  I don't understand it.  I can't comprehend it.  But I am having to accept it.
       I have to admit that those moments of acceptance of this reality often lead me to a place of abject despair, in which I see the upcoming destruction of our planet (probably through climate change, and probably much sooner than many imagine) as the natural and logical consequential ending for a species that has, itself, become a virus: one that feeds off of the earth, other creatures and even other people by destroying them.  In those moments of despair I think "Well, we deserve this.  Maybe once we've wiped ourselves out the earth can begin to heal."  But then I look at my children, and I hear the birds, and I see pictures of elephants and forests and I cannot bear the thought of all of them being wiped out because of our selfishness and greed.
        More, I have come to realize that the choice to NOT act, the choice to just sit and do nothing while the earth spins out of control; this is a choice that comes from a place of privilege.  Black people do not have the choice to avoid involvement when their families, their friends, their communities are being slaughtered in this country.  Those who are already being devastated by climate change were not given the choice to avoid being devastated by the climate chaos. Those who are refugees escaping deadly home situations do not have a choice about being affected by policies that refuse to grant them safe spaces to live and raise their children.  And the list goes on.
       So, in spite of my devastation, in spite of my sense of despair, in spite of the grief that I feel on a daily basis now for my image of what our world could be, should be, would be, I have to choose to act on behalf of the "least of these" to the best of my ability, to stand with the disenfranchised, exploited, oppressed and poor, no matter what the cost to my personal life.  As a post I saw recently said, "Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are."  Because I believe deeply that we are all connected, that when you hurt, I am hurting too (whether I know it or not!), in some ways I think this comment is inaccurate.  So perhaps, I would say it this way, "Justice will not be served until those who are oblivious to their own personal damage at the hands of the injustice are as outraged as those who are obviously and outwardly devastated by the injustice."  Either way, I feel called to action.  And I hope that you will join me.