John 20:1-18
April 24, 2011
Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb and saw that the stone had been removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved, and said to them, “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.” Then Peter and the other disciple set out and went toward the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first. He bent down to look in and saw the linen wrappings lying there, but he did not go in. Then Simon Peter came, following him, and went into the tomb. He saw the linen wrappings lying there, and the cloth that had been on Jesus’ head, not lying with the linen wrappings but rolled up in a place by itself. Then the other disciple, who reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed; for as yet they did not understand the scripture, that he must rise from the dead. Then the disciples returned to their homes.
But Mary stood weeping outside the tomb. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb; and she saw two angels in white, sitting where the body of Jesus had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet. They said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?” She said to them, “They have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they have laid him.” When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not know that it was Jesus. Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you looking for?” Supposing him to be the gardener, she said to him, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.” Jesus said to her, “Mary!” She turned and said to him in Hebrew, “Rabbouni!” (which means Teacher). Jesus said to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord”; and she told them that he had said these things to her.
The week after Easter, several years ago, I received an e-mail from someone who had attended the Easter service. He wrote, “Graham, I’ve been thinking about your Easter sermon. Do you really believe in the resurrection?” I wrote back, “Yep, I do. It would be hard for me to be a pastor and do what I do if I didn’t.”
He wrote back that he had always thought I was such an intelligent person, and that my belief surprised him. He then said that he would have a hard time attending the church of a pastor who actually believed in the resurrection. He had hoped that I would have been more enlightened. I guess the reason I feel comfortable telling this story is that he didn’t come back. But beyond that, he really exemplified one of the basic truths about Jesus Christ. The fact is that Jesus was and is the most transforming and controversial person ever born.
If you look at the impact of his life on the world, it is truly amazing. Because of his teachings, the world was transformed from an “eye for an eye” world to one that, over the centuries, has become more compassionate and caring. This transformation has been uneven and often has looked like two steps forward, one step back. But it’s undeniable that the world has been transformed. Look at our culture. We do things collectively now to help the poor, to reach out to victims of tragedies, to improve care of the sick, and to forgive enemies, that are the result of seeds planted by Christ in the gospels. Whether it is giving to charities, Welfare, the rebuilding of Germany and Japan after World War II, or helping to relieve AIDS in Africa, all have happened because of the influence of Jesus Christ. It’s the incarnation of his self-sacrificing love in the world.
Despite his impact on the world, what we know about his life and resurrection has led to so much doubt. Skeptics abound both about all aspects of Jesus’ life and resurrection. Whether you’re talking about the beliefs of Christians or non-Christians, there’s no real clarity on who Jesus was. Even among Christians there’s dispute. Many of us believe that Jesus was the incarnation of God on earth, and believe that he was resurrected. But there are also many who see themselves as Christian who believe that he was mainly a great prophet, and a great moral teacher. They can’t believe in his divinity or his resurrection. Still, they see themselves as Christians because they are committed to following his teachings. And I’m rarely critical of them because I recognize that they also produce good fruit in their lives by living out Jesus’ teachings. But what they demonstrate is that even among Christians Jesus is controversial and people have a hard time agreeing.
Muslims also have their views about Jesus. For example, most Christians don’t know that in the Muslim religion Jesus is considered to have been the second greatest prophet behind Mohammed. They revere Jesus, but not as the Son of God. They believe that Christians are deluded by their belief that God could be incarnate in a man, which they see as a blasphemy. Still, they believe that to be a good Muslim also means following the teachings of Jesus.
Many Buddhists also have their views about Jesus. They believe that Jesus was a buddha himself, which means that he was a bodhisattva, or enlightened being, who returned to lead others to enlightenment. Buddhists believe that some people eventually reach an enlightened state, and attaining that state choose to return to this life to lead others to enlightenment. Many Buddhists believe Jesus was an enlightened one.
Many agnostics believe that Jesus was simply a great man like Martin Luther King, Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi. They would say that if Jesus lived today, we’d recognize him as a great transformational figure, and nothing more.
There are also many atheists who would tell you that they’re not even sure Jesus existed. They would tell you that there is no historical record of Jesus outside of the Bible, which points to the fact that he was made up. It doesn’t matter that no one really wrote history back then, and the study of history is an Age of Enlightenment discipline that arose only when cultures became economically strong enough that certain people had the leisure to study and write history. In other words, there’s no historical record outside the Bible because people didn’t write history (actually, the Jewish writer, Josephus, did write about a person named Chrestou who caused trouble in Israel and was executed).
Just as there is controversy and confusion about Jesus’ life, there’s also just as much controversy and confusion about his resurrection. You have those who believe he was resurrected, and because of their beliefs they’ve actually had spiritual experiences that lead them to deepen their beliefs. Then there are those who say that Jesus was never resurrected, and that the apostles were simply lying. My struggle with that belief is that if you know the eventual fate of the apostles, all except John died terrible and painful deaths because of their beliefs. False prophets and liars rarely die for their beliefs, especially not willingly at the hands of others demanding that they give up their beliefs. Christianity is full of people dying for their beliefs.
A few years ago I had a conversation with a woman who really embodied the struggle with what to do with Jesus’s resurrection. She said that she was a Christian, and she loved to both read and tell stories about miracles that happen in people’s lives. But she told me that she didn’t believe in the resurrection because it didn’t make rational sense. I said to her, “Wait,… you believe in all these miracles that don’t make rational sense, but you don’t believe in the resurrection because it doesn’t make rational sense? You do recognize the contradiction, right?” She didn’t. She just kept insisting that the resurrection didn’t make rational sense.
Personally I’ve gone through every one of these views throughout my life. I’ve struggled with Jesus and with his resurrection. And I eventually came to the same conclusion as Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was a nineteenth century Danish philosopher who wrote a lot about what it means to be a Christian. Kierkegaard made an absolutely profound observation of the Christian life when he said that no person becomes a true Christian because it makes rational sense. He said that anyone who says that the Bible and Christian faith makes rational sense has never truly been a Christian. Instead, to be a Christian means to stand on the edge of an abyss of absurdity, with God on the other side. And at some point we need to leap across that abyss (what many now call “the leap of faith”) into God’s arms. We recognize that to do so seems like absurdity to the world at large, but we also know that until we do this we never really come to know God or live a real life lived with God. This leap is a leap of faith, not a rational choice.
What makes belief in Christ’s resurrection a leap is that it requires us to accept a truth about God and the universe. This truth is that God created everything according to certain laws of physics, and yet God gets to break these laws whenever God wants. God did not create a creation that is more powerful than God. God is beyond the created universe, and we understand, as Christians, that God often breaks into creation to do something that goes beyond the rules of creation. In other words, God both created and breaks the laws.
This ability of God to do things beyond the laws of nature is the reason why miracle stories are so prominent in both the Bible and in Christian history. If you look at both, you’ll find that for thousands of years people have been experiencing God in miraculous ways. Let me show you what I mean:
Do you know who Ben Carson is? For many years Ben Carson was the head of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Hospital. He did not start out on that path. Back when he was a kid living in the projects of Detroit, he expected little out of his life except to be dead from gun violence by the time he reached adulthood. He described himself as the dumbest kid in the fifth grade, but that all changed when a friend of his was shot. He and his family became determined that he would make something of himself. He eventually went to Yale, and then to Johns Hopkins for medical school. Today he is known worldwide for his work in separating a number of Siamese twins joined at the head.
Carson became world-renown at the end of 1997 when he and a team of specialists performed surgery in South Africa on a pair of Siamese twins from Zambia. The surgery lasted over thirty hours, and it was grueling. After nineteen hours of surgery, the surgery team took a break in the conference room, exhausted. Carson felt defeated. When they had cut through the skull and pulled the heads just a bit apart to see what the surgery required, Carson looked in and saw what he described as a mass of spaghetti. It was too complex. He had no way of knowing which vein or artery belonged where. He was overwhelmed and didn’t know what to do. The team considered stopping the operation, but they knew they couldn’t. Carson retreated to be by himself, and prayed. Carson prayed that God would take over and simply used him to accomplish what only God could do.
Carson went back into surgery. The heads were pulled back again, and again Carson looked in at the mass of spaghetti, but this time something different happened. Carson just knew what to do. It was as though God was in him, directing his hands and leading his thoughts. For the next six hours, he clipped this vein, attached that artery, cauterized this capillary, and reconnected that vein. At the very end of his part of the surgery, as he clipped the last vein connecting the twins, an amazing thing happened. The “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah played over the stereo system. God had surprised Carson and the rest of the team by being a miraculous presence in their midst.
Jim Altman also discovered how God can work miracles in ways we don’t expect. Altman is the director of a school for emotionally disturbed children in Jacksonville, Florida. Several years ago he was in Columbus, Ohio to speak at a motivational conference. The morning of his talk he went to a local diner for breakfast. Sitting at the counter next to another man, both looked at their menus. The waitress asked Altman what he wanted. Altman pointed at the man next to him and said, “He was here first. Go ahead and take his order.” The man said to Altman, “No,… you go ahead. I’ve learned to be patient in my life.” So Altman gave his order, shortly followed by the other man.
As they sat on their stools, reading their papers, Altman leaned over and said, “So tell me how you learned to be patient.” The man introduced himself as Richard, and said, “I used to work in construction. About five years ago I fell off a rooftop and struck my head hard on the ground. I was taken to the hospital for emergency surgery, and had to go through almost a year of rehabilitation. I learned to be patient doing all my rehab. I also happened to be rushed to the perfect hospital for this kind of injury—Riverside Methodist Hospital. It turns out they have one of the best neurosurgery units in the country. Some would call it luck, but I’ve learned that we call it luck only when we’re too embarrassed to call it God. My friend, this is important. If you ever have a problem with your head, go to Riverside Methodist.” Jim thought to himself, “Yeah, that will do me a lot of good, living in Jacksonville.”
Later that afternoon, Jim took a run in Union Cemetery—a beautiful, old cemetery just off of the campus of Ohio State University. Suddenly a searing pain shot through his temple and through the base of his skull. It drove him to his knees. He could barely breathe because of the pain. He crawled as best he could to find help. Eventually, after twenty minutes, he crawled into the caretaker’s office. The caretaker asked him what to do, and Altman said, “Take me to Riverside Methodist Hospital,” which just happened to be across the street from the cemetery.
If Altman had not been so close to the hospital, or if he had gone somewhere else, he probably wouldn’t have survived. He had had a massive cranial hemorrhage. But the quick work of the hospital doctors and staff saved his life. Today, Altman knows what it is like to experience a miracle—one that’s not rational, but it is a miracle nonetheless.
Let me finish with just one more miraculous story. A number of years ago an atheist was hiking through a forest in Montana. It was stunningly beautiful. The atheist was in awe of the sky, the trees, the mountains, the streams—everything. Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted something. A seven-foot grizzly appeared from behind a bush and rushed him. Now, we’re all told to freeze when rushed by a grizzly, but this man dropped everything and ran.
He ran fast, but the bear was faster. He cried out, “God, I know that I’ve never believed in you, but if you are there, please help me.” The bear rushed closer. Again, he prayed, “God, if you are there, please help me!” Suddenly everything froze—the bear, the birds flying by, the dust kicked up into the air. He heard a voice: “Sure, sure,… you pray to me now when you are in trouble. You disbelieve in me for most of your life, but now you want me to do something. You want me to save you.”
The atheist thought for a moment, and then said, “You’re right, God. Asking you to help me is quite hypocritical. And I don’t want to be a hypocrite. So how about this? Just make the bear a Christian?” God said, “Okay, it’s as you wish.”
Suddenly everything unfroze and the bear was running towards him again. But before the bear reached him, it stopped. It then dropped to its knees, folded its paws, and said in a human voice, “God is great, God is good, and we thank him for our food.”
I’ve discovered some basic truths about life that are important. First, you are what you eat. Second, you become who your friends are. Third, and this is the most important, you see what you believe. There’s so much in life that we can’t ever see until we start to believe it. But when we do believe, it’s amazing what we see. I learned this lesson several years ago right after we moved to our present home.
We live on an acre of wooded property, and one of the things I loved when we moved there was the beautiful green foliage covering the floor of the woods. A year after we moved there a person was visiting our house and asked me, “Graham, why do you let all that poison ivy grow everywhere.” I looked at him, puzzled: “What poison ivy?” “It’s everywhere,” he said, “All in those woods.” That was the beautiful green foliage covering the floor of the woods. I don’t get poison ivy, so I never saw it as poison ivy. Once I knew what it was, I saw it everywhere.
Faith is the same way. If you don’t believe, you can’t see. But once you believe, it’s amazing what you see.
We’re gathered today to celebrate a miracle that many people did witness, and it’s a miracle that has made a difference in billions of lives. But to discover he power of that miracle, believing is seeing.
Amen.
Questions for God: Do Angels Exist?
By Connie Frierson
After slugging through some tough questions for God, I nabbed the one and only question lite. “Do Angels Really Exist?” I figured for Palm Sunday after weeks of dealing with Terrorism, Tragedy, Doubts and Struggles, it would be a good thing to turn our attention to something sublime. So the question is do angels exist. Let’s start by turning that question around. Do you believe angels exist?
Let’s look at the general, ordinary population says about angels. Not that you all are representative of all America, think you all are remarkable and not at all ordinary. But if you were the folks who answered the Time Magazine poll, the polling would go something like this. About 69% of you believe angels exist. So all of you on the main sections stand up. This would be the people who believe in angels. This section, over there in the Friendship Room, are the skeptics. Of this 69% about 46% believe in personal guardian angels, Actually a Baylor University pole showed that 55% believe in guardian angels. So people in these two sections remain standing. Of this group, 32% have had some encounter or experience of an angelic presence. Look at all those people. Suppose that they were not all clumped together but spread out among you. That would mean that sitting right next to you or two people down the row is someone who has encountered an angelic presence.
But if your neighbor has met an angel they probably aren’t talking about it. Nancy Gibbs wrote an article in Time Magazine. She writes. “Maybe it is not surprising that people who believe they have had an encounter with angels are among the most reluctant to discuss them. Yet there is an uncanny similarity in the stories and a moving conviction behind them. Very often the recognition comes only in retrospect. A person is in immediate danger -- the car stalled in the deadly snowstorm, the small plane lost in the fog, the swimmer too far from shore. And emerging from the moment's desperation comes some logical form of rescue: a tow-truck driver, a voice from the radio tower, a lifeguard. But when the victim is safe and turns to give thanks, the rescuer is gone. There are no tire tracks in the snow. There is no controller in the tower. And there are no footprints on the beach.”
This experience of the mysterious presence of another, who comfort, guides and brings peace and hope, is so common in human experience that an author, John Geiger has written a book that collects hundred’s of stories of these figures. This is a secular book so he does not call them angels. The book is called, The Third Man Factor. Have any of you heard of the third man factor? If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon it is probably because you do not hang around with mountaineers or extreme climbers. But in that community the sense of another presence hiking with you when you are in danger is so strong and so common that mountaineers have coined this term, the third man factor.
The stories are populated with extraordinary people, rational people, explorers, sailors, mountain climbers, aviators, deep-sea divers and scientists. Many of the people who have had these experiences have mountains or rare species of plants and animals named after them. One of the most famous and typical of the stories is of Sir Ernst Shackleton. In 1914 Shackleton led an expedition to explore the Antarctic. The ship became ice bound and was crushed. The crew made it off the boat and became stranded on Elephant Island. In desperation Shackleton, and five others, took off to make a 680-mile voyage to South Georgia to seek rescue. By a complete miracle they made the voyage but then realized they were on the wrong side of the island and needed to cover a mountain range and glacier to reach the South Georgia whaling station. Shackleton, and two others, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, walked and climbed and slid over the mountain range. As they walked more dead than alive, each of these three men experienced a fourth man in their company. This presence encouraged them, steadied them, and led them. Each of the three had independently experienced this presence. The stories of those who sense the miraculous and mysterious presence of another are so similar. Often they involve a physical struggle that is life threatening, profound loneliness, loss and being pushed to the limit. Scientist struggle to explain this sense of presence. Some have surmised that these stories are some kind of hallucination brought about by some breakdown of brain function. But hallucinations are maladaptive. These visions lead not to mistakes but to amazing triumphs and endurance. Some have thought that they involve lost of oxygen or high altitudes and result from some organic chemical changes. But these stories transcend altitude. Some occur at sea level or in caves. Many sense this presence without any altitude or oxygen challenge. Shackleton put it this way, in these moments they have, “pierced the veneer of outside things.”
These experiences aren’t limited to mountaintops. Nancy Gibbs article in Time Magazine recounts the experience of Melissa Deal a filmmaker in Atlanta. “Melissa will never forget the day her husband Chris Deal died: it was exactly one year after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not save him, nights when she could not sleep. But she was sleeping soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room and past the nurse's station with its 360 degrees view of the ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3 a.m. by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being able to find Chris. Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions. "Where have you been? Are you okay?" Chris just smiled. "It's fine," he told her, "I'm all right." His companion remained quiet, his eyes on the floor as though not wanting to be noticed. He was tall, dressed rather like Chris usually did, in a flannel shirt, new Levis and lace-up work boots that appeared as if they, too, had just been taken off the shelf. "There was no real age to him," Melissa says. "No wrinkles. Just this perfectly smooth and pale, white, white skin and ice blue eyes. I mean I've never seen that color blue on any human before. They were more the blue like some of those Husky dogs have. I'll never forget the eyes."
Chris seemed to want to be left alone, and so she reluctantly agreed to leave. When he came back to his room, she says, "He was lit up, just vibrant. Smiling. I could see his big dimples. I hadn't seen them in so long. He didn't have the air of a terminally ill and very weak man anymore."
"Who was that guy?" she asked.
"You're not going to believe me."
"Yes, I will."
"He was an angel. My guardian angel."
Melissa did believe him. "All I had to do was to look at him to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had happened."
She searched the hospital to find the man. There was no one around, and the security guards hadn't seen anyone come or go. "After the visit, Chris told me his prayers had been answered. I worried for a while that he thought the angel had cured his cancer. I realize now it wasn't the cure, it was the blessing he brought with him. It was the peace of mind." Chris died two days later.
In the 11 years since Chris's death, Melissa says not a day has gone by when she has not thought about the angel and what he did for her husband. "Chris' life could not be saved, but the fear and pain were taken from him,"
If there is such a thing as a universal idea, common across cultures and through the centuries, the belief in angels comes close to it. Jews, Christians and Muslims have postulated endlessly about angels' nature and roles, but all three religions affirm their existence. There are angels in Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism; winged figures appear in ancient Sumerian carvings, Egyptian tombs and Assyrian reliefs.
Visible or invisible, in disguise or in full glory, angels appear in more than half the books of the Bible: it was an angel who told Abraham to spare his son from sacrifice, who saved Daniel from the lion's den, who rolled the stone away from Christ's tomb. It was a host of angels who appeared to the shepherds and the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary. It was an angel who led Peter out of jail, encouraged Paul when he was about to be shipwrecked. It was angels who fed and nurtured Elijah and Jesus in the wilderness. Jacob wrestles with an angel at Bethel and has a dream of a ladder going up and down from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending. The bible is full of angelic presence.
Perhaps the more important question is not “Do angels exist?” but rather “What difference does it make that angels exist?” Jacob’s ladder is a vision of the spiritual realm. Angel’s presence on the earth and in heaven tells us that while we live in a material world, our world is primarily and completely a spiritual world. God is reaching out in infinite ways to humanity. It is telling that the most angel rich area of the bible is Christmas and Easter. Angels proclaim and witness to the incarnation and the resurrection. There when God is coming into the world in the flesh, angels are there in hosts. When Christ vanquishes death and brings the Kingdom of heaven closer to earth, angels are there to witness to the resurrection. This shouldn’t surprise us. The very language of the bible points to the core aspect of angels. In Hebrew the word for angel is malak. In Greek the word for angel is anggelos. Both mean messenger. Angels worship God. Angels do the will of God. Angels protect and comfort and assist, because that is the will of our God. Angels are evidence of God’s love for us.
It is time to share one of my angel stories, a story without fire works or obvious supernatural elements but an angel story nonetheless. I need to show you my favorite of all the gifts I received for my graduation from seminary. This is an angel I received from Rose, my kids bus driver. You have to understand Rose to get the hilarity of this gift. This sweet little angel is from the toughest bus driver ever to get behind the wheel in the tri-state area. Rose is a law and order bus driver, hard as nails. Kids don’t get away with spit with Rose at the wheel. Rose is a character. She drives a black and white spotted Holstein painted bus in demolition school bus races. I think Rose got this angel at a truck stop on the way home from the school bus racing circuit. I was so touched that she wanted to give me something. But the shear kitsch of this gift just triggered all my anti-angel bias. This curvy angelic chick is like a Disney princess with fiber optic wings. She isn’t powerful like Michael, or frightening like Gabriel or mysterious like the visitors to Abraham or the presence of the fourth man in the fire furnace. But this is what this angel did for us. My graduation was a bittersweet time. I was celebrating an accomplishment but it was so sad not to have my dad, or my mom, or my husband there to share it with me. My whole extended family was there to help with the party the whole weekend but we all felt the loss. It brought our mourning out afresh. Yet throughout the weekend, we would set this little angel glowing and we would break out into laughter, laughter all out of proportion to the joke. I think we ran the batteries out. So who was the angel here, a little plastic and feather nick knack, or Rose, who kept my kids safe and was so kind, or this congregation that celebrated with me or is this all evidence of a God who loves me, knows me inside and out and who gave me the gift of laughter in the midst of sadness.
We are not alone. It matters that our world is filled with a community of beings who love us, encourage us and guide us. It matters that we have people like Rose, people like this congregation. It matters that Christ’s love extends to us through his spirit and through angels. We live in a rich spiritual world of God’s creation.
Amen.
After slugging through some tough questions for God, I nabbed the one and only question lite. “Do Angels Really Exist?” I figured for Palm Sunday after weeks of dealing with Terrorism, Tragedy, Doubts and Struggles, it would be a good thing to turn our attention to something sublime. So the question is do angels exist. Let’s start by turning that question around. Do you believe angels exist?
Let’s look at the general, ordinary population says about angels. Not that you all are representative of all America, think you all are remarkable and not at all ordinary. But if you were the folks who answered the Time Magazine poll, the polling would go something like this. About 69% of you believe angels exist. So all of you on the main sections stand up. This would be the people who believe in angels. This section, over there in the Friendship Room, are the skeptics. Of this 69% about 46% believe in personal guardian angels, Actually a Baylor University pole showed that 55% believe in guardian angels. So people in these two sections remain standing. Of this group, 32% have had some encounter or experience of an angelic presence. Look at all those people. Suppose that they were not all clumped together but spread out among you. That would mean that sitting right next to you or two people down the row is someone who has encountered an angelic presence.
But if your neighbor has met an angel they probably aren’t talking about it. Nancy Gibbs wrote an article in Time Magazine. She writes. “Maybe it is not surprising that people who believe they have had an encounter with angels are among the most reluctant to discuss them. Yet there is an uncanny similarity in the stories and a moving conviction behind them. Very often the recognition comes only in retrospect. A person is in immediate danger -- the car stalled in the deadly snowstorm, the small plane lost in the fog, the swimmer too far from shore. And emerging from the moment's desperation comes some logical form of rescue: a tow-truck driver, a voice from the radio tower, a lifeguard. But when the victim is safe and turns to give thanks, the rescuer is gone. There are no tire tracks in the snow. There is no controller in the tower. And there are no footprints on the beach.”
This experience of the mysterious presence of another, who comfort, guides and brings peace and hope, is so common in human experience that an author, John Geiger has written a book that collects hundred’s of stories of these figures. This is a secular book so he does not call them angels. The book is called, The Third Man Factor. Have any of you heard of the third man factor? If you haven’t heard of this phenomenon it is probably because you do not hang around with mountaineers or extreme climbers. But in that community the sense of another presence hiking with you when you are in danger is so strong and so common that mountaineers have coined this term, the third man factor.
The stories are populated with extraordinary people, rational people, explorers, sailors, mountain climbers, aviators, deep-sea divers and scientists. Many of the people who have had these experiences have mountains or rare species of plants and animals named after them. One of the most famous and typical of the stories is of Sir Ernst Shackleton. In 1914 Shackleton led an expedition to explore the Antarctic. The ship became ice bound and was crushed. The crew made it off the boat and became stranded on Elephant Island. In desperation Shackleton, and five others, took off to make a 680-mile voyage to South Georgia to seek rescue. By a complete miracle they made the voyage but then realized they were on the wrong side of the island and needed to cover a mountain range and glacier to reach the South Georgia whaling station. Shackleton, and two others, Frank Worsley and Tom Crean, walked and climbed and slid over the mountain range. As they walked more dead than alive, each of these three men experienced a fourth man in their company. This presence encouraged them, steadied them, and led them. Each of the three had independently experienced this presence. The stories of those who sense the miraculous and mysterious presence of another are so similar. Often they involve a physical struggle that is life threatening, profound loneliness, loss and being pushed to the limit. Scientist struggle to explain this sense of presence. Some have surmised that these stories are some kind of hallucination brought about by some breakdown of brain function. But hallucinations are maladaptive. These visions lead not to mistakes but to amazing triumphs and endurance. Some have thought that they involve lost of oxygen or high altitudes and result from some organic chemical changes. But these stories transcend altitude. Some occur at sea level or in caves. Many sense this presence without any altitude or oxygen challenge. Shackleton put it this way, in these moments they have, “pierced the veneer of outside things.”
These experiences aren’t limited to mountaintops. Nancy Gibbs article in Time Magazine recounts the experience of Melissa Deal a filmmaker in Atlanta. “Melissa will never forget the day her husband Chris Deal died: it was exactly one year after he had been diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia. The last months had been gruesome: treatments that could not save him, nights when she could not sleep. But she was sleeping soundly at his hospital bedside on the morning of Jan. 4 when Chris managed, somehow, without being seen or heard, to maneuver himself and his portable IV pole around her, out of the room and past the nurse's station with its 360 degrees view of the ward. All Melissa remembers is being shaken awake at 3 a.m. by a frantic nurse who was saying something about not being able to find Chris. Melissa hit the floor running. As she approached the elevator she happened to glance toward the chapel, where she glimpsed Chris sitting with a man she had never seen before. Frightened and furious, she burst through the door, firing off questions. "Where have you been? Are you okay?" Chris just smiled. "It's fine," he told her, "I'm all right." His companion remained quiet, his eyes on the floor as though not wanting to be noticed. He was tall, dressed rather like Chris usually did, in a flannel shirt, new Levis and lace-up work boots that appeared as if they, too, had just been taken off the shelf. "There was no real age to him," Melissa says. "No wrinkles. Just this perfectly smooth and pale, white, white skin and ice blue eyes. I mean I've never seen that color blue on any human before. They were more the blue like some of those Husky dogs have. I'll never forget the eyes."
Chris seemed to want to be left alone, and so she reluctantly agreed to leave. When he came back to his room, she says, "He was lit up, just vibrant. Smiling. I could see his big dimples. I hadn't seen them in so long. He didn't have the air of a terminally ill and very weak man anymore."
"Who was that guy?" she asked.
"You're not going to believe me."
"Yes, I will."
"He was an angel. My guardian angel."
Melissa did believe him. "All I had to do was to look at him to know something extraordinary, something supernatural had happened."
She searched the hospital to find the man. There was no one around, and the security guards hadn't seen anyone come or go. "After the visit, Chris told me his prayers had been answered. I worried for a while that he thought the angel had cured his cancer. I realize now it wasn't the cure, it was the blessing he brought with him. It was the peace of mind." Chris died two days later.
In the 11 years since Chris's death, Melissa says not a day has gone by when she has not thought about the angel and what he did for her husband. "Chris' life could not be saved, but the fear and pain were taken from him,"
If there is such a thing as a universal idea, common across cultures and through the centuries, the belief in angels comes close to it. Jews, Christians and Muslims have postulated endlessly about angels' nature and roles, but all three religions affirm their existence. There are angels in Buddhism, Hinduism and Zoroastrianism; winged figures appear in ancient Sumerian carvings, Egyptian tombs and Assyrian reliefs.
Visible or invisible, in disguise or in full glory, angels appear in more than half the books of the Bible: it was an angel who told Abraham to spare his son from sacrifice, who saved Daniel from the lion's den, who rolled the stone away from Christ's tomb. It was a host of angels who appeared to the shepherds and the angel Gabriel spoke to Mary. It was an angel who led Peter out of jail, encouraged Paul when he was about to be shipwrecked. It was angels who fed and nurtured Elijah and Jesus in the wilderness. Jacob wrestles with an angel at Bethel and has a dream of a ladder going up and down from heaven to earth with angels ascending and descending. The bible is full of angelic presence.
Perhaps the more important question is not “Do angels exist?” but rather “What difference does it make that angels exist?” Jacob’s ladder is a vision of the spiritual realm. Angel’s presence on the earth and in heaven tells us that while we live in a material world, our world is primarily and completely a spiritual world. God is reaching out in infinite ways to humanity. It is telling that the most angel rich area of the bible is Christmas and Easter. Angels proclaim and witness to the incarnation and the resurrection. There when God is coming into the world in the flesh, angels are there in hosts. When Christ vanquishes death and brings the Kingdom of heaven closer to earth, angels are there to witness to the resurrection. This shouldn’t surprise us. The very language of the bible points to the core aspect of angels. In Hebrew the word for angel is malak. In Greek the word for angel is anggelos. Both mean messenger. Angels worship God. Angels do the will of God. Angels protect and comfort and assist, because that is the will of our God. Angels are evidence of God’s love for us.
It is time to share one of my angel stories, a story without fire works or obvious supernatural elements but an angel story nonetheless. I need to show you my favorite of all the gifts I received for my graduation from seminary. This is an angel I received from Rose, my kids bus driver. You have to understand Rose to get the hilarity of this gift. This sweet little angel is from the toughest bus driver ever to get behind the wheel in the tri-state area. Rose is a law and order bus driver, hard as nails. Kids don’t get away with spit with Rose at the wheel. Rose is a character. She drives a black and white spotted Holstein painted bus in demolition school bus races. I think Rose got this angel at a truck stop on the way home from the school bus racing circuit. I was so touched that she wanted to give me something. But the shear kitsch of this gift just triggered all my anti-angel bias. This curvy angelic chick is like a Disney princess with fiber optic wings. She isn’t powerful like Michael, or frightening like Gabriel or mysterious like the visitors to Abraham or the presence of the fourth man in the fire furnace. But this is what this angel did for us. My graduation was a bittersweet time. I was celebrating an accomplishment but it was so sad not to have my dad, or my mom, or my husband there to share it with me. My whole extended family was there to help with the party the whole weekend but we all felt the loss. It brought our mourning out afresh. Yet throughout the weekend, we would set this little angel glowing and we would break out into laughter, laughter all out of proportion to the joke. I think we ran the batteries out. So who was the angel here, a little plastic and feather nick knack, or Rose, who kept my kids safe and was so kind, or this congregation that celebrated with me or is this all evidence of a God who loves me, knows me inside and out and who gave me the gift of laughter in the midst of sadness.
We are not alone. It matters that our world is filled with a community of beings who love us, encourage us and guide us. It matters that we have people like Rose, people like this congregation. It matters that Christ’s love extends to us through his spirit and through angels. We live in a rich spiritual world of God’s creation.
Amen.
Questions for God: What Does Jesus Mean by "Turn the Other Cheek?"
Matthew 5:38-42
April 10, 2011
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
You know, there’s a fundamental problem with both Christianity and Christ’s teachings. And it’s a problem that most non-Christians easily recognize, and that most Christians grapple with. What’s the problem? It’s that Christ’s teachings, and therefore Christianity’s teachings, go so much against basic human nature that we have a really, really hard time living them out. Throughout the Bible there are just too many teachings that conflict with the ways we naturally think. And our passage for today is one of those teachings. How could Jesus have taught “turning the other cheek” in the face of the realities and practicalities of the world?
The fact is that we don’t live in a “turn the other cheek” world, nor has anyone ever lived in one. For Jesus to expect us to act like this when it would make us sacrificial lambs is unfair and unrealistic. The Jewish and Muslim faiths seem to be much more in tune with our basic human nature because they teach “an eye for an eye.” It’s not just they who live according to that nature. The realities of international affairs agree with this idea. If you attack my country, I’ll attack yours. If you shoot at me, I’ll shoot at you. This is the reality of human life. This is how humans were created to think. In fact, thousands of years ago when “an eye for an eye” was coined, it was an enlightened view. You don’t take both eyes for your loss of one eye. You respond in a measured, equal way.
Everything I’ve just said is absolutely true. Jesus’ teachings completely go against our basic human nature, and seem unrealistic in the face of the world’s realities, but so what? Living out of our basic human nature is important only if our goal in life is to live a basic human life. If our goal is simply to live as people normally live, and not live an exceptional life, this line of thinking is right on target. The problem is that both Christianity and Christ want us to live exceptional lives, and “turning the other cheek” is central to living an exceptional life.
What does it mean to live this kind of exceptional life? Let me show you. Back in 1960, Dr. Robert Coles, who has spent a career at Harvard as a psychiatrist, was a psychiatrist working for the U. S. Air Force at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was six years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of all schools. In 1960 a federal court in Louisiana ordered that the schools of the New Orleans area had to immediately desegregate. Protests erupted. Being a psychiatrist with an interest in social issues, Coles decided to drive down to the William T. Franz School in New Orleans to see what was taking place.
He arrived thirty minutes before school ended to see an angry crowd gathering. He asked some people what was happening, and they responded, “She’s coming out in half an hour.” “Who’s she?” he asked. They responded by cursing and shouting about this evil girl who had disrupted their quiet lives.
Then came the anticipated moment. The crowd erupted in fury as a little, seven-year-old African-American girl named Ruby Bridges came out of the school, surrounded by federal marshals. The crowd erupted, cursing her, shaking their fists and baseball bats, and threatening her with violence. Through it all Ruby walked calmly between the federal marshals.
Coles decided that this would be a good opportunity for him to do some good while also studying a unique situation. He went to visit with Ruby and her family. They lived in a shack in a poor neighborhood. Coles came to his first visit, armed with all the latest psychiatric techniques. Sitting down at the kitchen table with her he asked, “How are you doing, Ruby?” “I’m okay,” she replied. He looked at her mother, “Mrs. Bridges, how is Ruby doing?” “Doctor, she’s doing fine.” “Is Ruby sleeping okay?” “Oh yes, Ruby’s sleeping fine.” “How’s Ruby’s appetite?” “It’s fine.” “Are you sure she’s eating well?” “Yes, doctor.” “How do you think Ruby’s doing with her friends when she comes home from School?” “Ruby’s fine when she comes home. She plays and sometimes reads from the books they give her at school. She’s just in the first grade, learning how to read, you know.” “Yes, I know. But doesn’t she seem upset at times?” “No doctor, Ruby doesn’t seem upset.”
Mrs. Bridges’ responses baffled Coles. According to all of his training, Ruby should be exhibiting some sort of adjustment reaction to her situation. Perhaps it was due to Mrs. Bridges ignorance in not knowing what to look for because of her lack of education.
Coles kept tabs on Ruby for the next few months. Nothing much changed in their responses to him. Were they in denial, or just repressing? He wondered. One day he interviewed Ruby’s teacher, who said, “You know, I don’t understand this child. She seems so happy. She comes here so cheerfully.” Coles asked her if she ever saw anything out of the ordinary in Ruby’s reaction to the situation surrounding her. The teacher told him that the only thing she noticed was that Ruby often paused, close her eyes, and spoke to the crowd as she walked by. This was the tidbit Coles had been looking for. Obviously Ruby was cursing the crowd back. That was how she was dealing with the stress of the situation.
Coles sat down with Ruby and her family again to zero in on this symptom: “I was talking to your teacher today, and she told me that she saw you talking to the people on the street.” “Oh yes,” Ruby said, “I told her that I wasn’t talking to them. I was just saying a prayer for them.” Coles responded, “Ruby, do you pray for those people on the street?” “Yes,” she said. “Why do you do that?” “Because they need praying for.” “Do they?” “Oh yes.”
Coles then talked to Ruby’s mother about it, and she said, “We tell Ruby that it’s important to pray for those people.” She then said that they had the people on a list and prayed for them every night. Ruby had learned to pray for them in Sunday School. Coles responded, “You know, it strikes me that ‘s a lot to ask of Ruby. I mean, given what she’s been going through.” Mrs. Bridges looked at Coles and said, “She does it herself, even when we don’t want to pray for them ourselves. Don’t you think they need praying for?”
Coles didn’t know what to say. Prayer had not been discussed in any of his psychiatric training. He turned to Ruby and said, “Ruby, when you pray for those people on the street, what do you say?” She replied, “My minister told me that Jesus went through a lot of trouble too, and when people shouted at him and said bad things to him, when Jesus was on the cross, he prayed for those people. So I pray for them too.” “Ruby, what do you say when you pray?” “I say, ‘Father forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing?”
Ruby, a seven year-old girl, understood turning the other cheek. It means neither responding with violence, nor backing down. In many ways, Ruby was living out what was being taught at the time by Martin Luther King, Jr., which is that the world can be transformed by turning the other cheek. King, who based the Civil Rights protests both on the Sermon on the Mount, and the experiences and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi (who, himself, was trying to apply the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount).
King believed and taught that when we face our enemies and turn the other cheek, we hold a mirror up to them so that they can see the injustice and evil of their acts. King made a very clear distinction about the bigots of his day who wanted to maintain segregation. He believed that the practice of segregation was evil, and that the people defending it, as well as those shouting epithets at little girls like Ruby, were doing evil but were not evil. He saw these people as churchgoing folk who wanted to do right, who were trying to do God’s will, but who couldn’t distinguish good from evil. He wanted to transform them from enemy to friend, from evil acts to good acts. He knew that the key to this transformation was to change our behavior first. He called the Christians of the Civil Rights Movement to be transformed from basic human reactions in the face of evil to exceptional reactions. In essence, he was saying that by massively turning the other cheek in the face of bigotry, the bigots and the nation could be transformed, but the first step was transforming the protestors. They would turn the other cheek.
The difficulty for us is that we aren’t in the Civil Rights Movement, but that doesn’t meant that turning the other cheek has no role in our lives. For us the question is how we “turn the other cheek” in practical places, such as the workplace and elsewhere, where fighting for yourself and getting respect from others is really important. I think the basic problem is that people don’t really understand what turning the other cheek means. It doesn’t mean being weak. It means being stronger than those who are afraid of losing power. When we turn the other cheek, we are standing our ground. We are saying to others, definitively, “I will not run away from you, nor will I hurt you, but I will also not let you dominate me. I am going to be your equal. If you decide to hurt me, I’ll take your hurt, but I will not treat you the way you are treating me. And in the end I hope that we will find a way to work together—that we will become friends, colleagues, and companions.”
In the workplace it means that I will neither let you treat me disrespectfully, nor will I treat you disrespectfully. If you criticize or hurt me, I will not run away, nor will I hurt you back. I will stand before you and with you until you are willing to treat me in a way that allows us to work for what’s best. These same principles apply in every other relationship—friendships, marriages, parenting, and more. Turning the other cheek creates healthy relationships.
I learned about this aspect of turning the other cheek back in sixth grade. I remember that one of the other kids, Bruce McWilliams, got very angry at me for some reason, and wanted to fight. Being a bit of a strange kid at the time, I had chosen Martin Luther King, Jr., as my role model. He had been shot three years earlier, and I was captivated by what he did, as well as by what Mahatma Gandhi did in India. Most kids chose athletes or astronauts as their heroes. Mine were “turn-the-other-cheekers.” So trying to channel my inner MLK, Jr., I stood before Bruce and told him I wasn’t going to fight. He tried to hit me, and I grabbed his arms as he fell on top of me. I kept telling him that I wasn’t going to fight, but I wasn’t afraid. He just got more and more frustrated. But eventually he got off of me, and I saw then and there that my response puzzled him. I think that my not fighting with him actually allowed us to become friends.
Turning the other cheek doesn’t just mean standing our ground. It also means bringing about cooperation between others and us. When I think of this aspect of turning the other cheek, I think of Nelson Mandela. Here was a man who was imprisoned in hard labor for over 25 years by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, but when he was set free and then eventually became president, he turned the other cheek in a way that allowed the country to come together. With a black population that outnumbered the white population almost 17:1, he very easily could have promoted revenge. Yet when he became president he refused to act in any way other than graciously, showing through speech and behavior that he was willing to diminish his will in order to promote unity and cooperation in the nation. For a great example of this, see the film, Invictus. It wonderfully shows how turning the other cheek on a grand scale can unite people.
Finally, turning the other cheek forms and restores relationships. When we are willing to turn our cheek in the face of anger, it overcomes division and promotes connection. I had an experience of this last summer. I was driving down a road near our house, and as is sometimes the case, I was driving way too fast. As I rounded a curve, I passed a group of people standing outside while working on a house. One of the men, furious at my speed, came running towards my car, threw something at it, and yelled at me. My natural inclination was to do one of two things: to stop and yell back while thrusting the appropriate finger in the air, or to just keep driving with my finger out the window. I normally don’t do these things, but I always feel like doing them. Instead, I stopped and slowly backed up, winding down my window. I immediately said to him, “I know I was driving too fast. I’m really sorry.” His face changed from purple to normal, and he said, “No, I’m sorry. I’ve seen so many people driving so fast around that curve, and I lost my temper.” I said, “No, you’ve had every right to do that. I was going way too fast, and I know I have to slow down on this road, so you’re helping me.” We both kept doing our best Chip and Dale act, insisting that it was me, not the other, who was at fault. In then I apologized one more time and drove away. We’re able to wave and say hi now each time I pass. And it’s due to both of us turning our cheeks to each other.
When I think about turning the other cheek, I don’t only think about it in terms of protest. I think of it in terms of how we manage our lives. Turning the other cheek basically says that I am going to live a life that’s focused on love, respect, cooperation, and letting the Christ in me meet the Christ in you. I won’t back down, I won’t strike back, but I will look for a way to meet you in the middle. I just wish that this was something our politicians could learn.
Amen.
April 10, 2011
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.
You know, there’s a fundamental problem with both Christianity and Christ’s teachings. And it’s a problem that most non-Christians easily recognize, and that most Christians grapple with. What’s the problem? It’s that Christ’s teachings, and therefore Christianity’s teachings, go so much against basic human nature that we have a really, really hard time living them out. Throughout the Bible there are just too many teachings that conflict with the ways we naturally think. And our passage for today is one of those teachings. How could Jesus have taught “turning the other cheek” in the face of the realities and practicalities of the world?
The fact is that we don’t live in a “turn the other cheek” world, nor has anyone ever lived in one. For Jesus to expect us to act like this when it would make us sacrificial lambs is unfair and unrealistic. The Jewish and Muslim faiths seem to be much more in tune with our basic human nature because they teach “an eye for an eye.” It’s not just they who live according to that nature. The realities of international affairs agree with this idea. If you attack my country, I’ll attack yours. If you shoot at me, I’ll shoot at you. This is the reality of human life. This is how humans were created to think. In fact, thousands of years ago when “an eye for an eye” was coined, it was an enlightened view. You don’t take both eyes for your loss of one eye. You respond in a measured, equal way.
Everything I’ve just said is absolutely true. Jesus’ teachings completely go against our basic human nature, and seem unrealistic in the face of the world’s realities, but so what? Living out of our basic human nature is important only if our goal in life is to live a basic human life. If our goal is simply to live as people normally live, and not live an exceptional life, this line of thinking is right on target. The problem is that both Christianity and Christ want us to live exceptional lives, and “turning the other cheek” is central to living an exceptional life.
What does it mean to live this kind of exceptional life? Let me show you. Back in 1960, Dr. Robert Coles, who has spent a career at Harvard as a psychiatrist, was a psychiatrist working for the U. S. Air Force at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi. It was six years after the landmark Supreme Court decision of Brown vs. the Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of all schools. In 1960 a federal court in Louisiana ordered that the schools of the New Orleans area had to immediately desegregate. Protests erupted. Being a psychiatrist with an interest in social issues, Coles decided to drive down to the William T. Franz School in New Orleans to see what was taking place.
He arrived thirty minutes before school ended to see an angry crowd gathering. He asked some people what was happening, and they responded, “She’s coming out in half an hour.” “Who’s she?” he asked. They responded by cursing and shouting about this evil girl who had disrupted their quiet lives.
Then came the anticipated moment. The crowd erupted in fury as a little, seven-year-old African-American girl named Ruby Bridges came out of the school, surrounded by federal marshals. The crowd erupted, cursing her, shaking their fists and baseball bats, and threatening her with violence. Through it all Ruby walked calmly between the federal marshals.
Coles decided that this would be a good opportunity for him to do some good while also studying a unique situation. He went to visit with Ruby and her family. They lived in a shack in a poor neighborhood. Coles came to his first visit, armed with all the latest psychiatric techniques. Sitting down at the kitchen table with her he asked, “How are you doing, Ruby?” “I’m okay,” she replied. He looked at her mother, “Mrs. Bridges, how is Ruby doing?” “Doctor, she’s doing fine.” “Is Ruby sleeping okay?” “Oh yes, Ruby’s sleeping fine.” “How’s Ruby’s appetite?” “It’s fine.” “Are you sure she’s eating well?” “Yes, doctor.” “How do you think Ruby’s doing with her friends when she comes home from School?” “Ruby’s fine when she comes home. She plays and sometimes reads from the books they give her at school. She’s just in the first grade, learning how to read, you know.” “Yes, I know. But doesn’t she seem upset at times?” “No doctor, Ruby doesn’t seem upset.”
Mrs. Bridges’ responses baffled Coles. According to all of his training, Ruby should be exhibiting some sort of adjustment reaction to her situation. Perhaps it was due to Mrs. Bridges ignorance in not knowing what to look for because of her lack of education.
Coles kept tabs on Ruby for the next few months. Nothing much changed in their responses to him. Were they in denial, or just repressing? He wondered. One day he interviewed Ruby’s teacher, who said, “You know, I don’t understand this child. She seems so happy. She comes here so cheerfully.” Coles asked her if she ever saw anything out of the ordinary in Ruby’s reaction to the situation surrounding her. The teacher told him that the only thing she noticed was that Ruby often paused, close her eyes, and spoke to the crowd as she walked by. This was the tidbit Coles had been looking for. Obviously Ruby was cursing the crowd back. That was how she was dealing with the stress of the situation.
Coles sat down with Ruby and her family again to zero in on this symptom: “I was talking to your teacher today, and she told me that she saw you talking to the people on the street.” “Oh yes,” Ruby said, “I told her that I wasn’t talking to them. I was just saying a prayer for them.” Coles responded, “Ruby, do you pray for those people on the street?” “Yes,” she said. “Why do you do that?” “Because they need praying for.” “Do they?” “Oh yes.”
Coles then talked to Ruby’s mother about it, and she said, “We tell Ruby that it’s important to pray for those people.” She then said that they had the people on a list and prayed for them every night. Ruby had learned to pray for them in Sunday School. Coles responded, “You know, it strikes me that ‘s a lot to ask of Ruby. I mean, given what she’s been going through.” Mrs. Bridges looked at Coles and said, “She does it herself, even when we don’t want to pray for them ourselves. Don’t you think they need praying for?”
Coles didn’t know what to say. Prayer had not been discussed in any of his psychiatric training. He turned to Ruby and said, “Ruby, when you pray for those people on the street, what do you say?” She replied, “My minister told me that Jesus went through a lot of trouble too, and when people shouted at him and said bad things to him, when Jesus was on the cross, he prayed for those people. So I pray for them too.” “Ruby, what do you say when you pray?” “I say, ‘Father forgive them, because they don’t know what they are doing?”
Ruby, a seven year-old girl, understood turning the other cheek. It means neither responding with violence, nor backing down. In many ways, Ruby was living out what was being taught at the time by Martin Luther King, Jr., which is that the world can be transformed by turning the other cheek. King, who based the Civil Rights protests both on the Sermon on the Mount, and the experiences and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi (who, himself, was trying to apply the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount).
King believed and taught that when we face our enemies and turn the other cheek, we hold a mirror up to them so that they can see the injustice and evil of their acts. King made a very clear distinction about the bigots of his day who wanted to maintain segregation. He believed that the practice of segregation was evil, and that the people defending it, as well as those shouting epithets at little girls like Ruby, were doing evil but were not evil. He saw these people as churchgoing folk who wanted to do right, who were trying to do God’s will, but who couldn’t distinguish good from evil. He wanted to transform them from enemy to friend, from evil acts to good acts. He knew that the key to this transformation was to change our behavior first. He called the Christians of the Civil Rights Movement to be transformed from basic human reactions in the face of evil to exceptional reactions. In essence, he was saying that by massively turning the other cheek in the face of bigotry, the bigots and the nation could be transformed, but the first step was transforming the protestors. They would turn the other cheek.
The difficulty for us is that we aren’t in the Civil Rights Movement, but that doesn’t meant that turning the other cheek has no role in our lives. For us the question is how we “turn the other cheek” in practical places, such as the workplace and elsewhere, where fighting for yourself and getting respect from others is really important. I think the basic problem is that people don’t really understand what turning the other cheek means. It doesn’t mean being weak. It means being stronger than those who are afraid of losing power. When we turn the other cheek, we are standing our ground. We are saying to others, definitively, “I will not run away from you, nor will I hurt you, but I will also not let you dominate me. I am going to be your equal. If you decide to hurt me, I’ll take your hurt, but I will not treat you the way you are treating me. And in the end I hope that we will find a way to work together—that we will become friends, colleagues, and companions.”
In the workplace it means that I will neither let you treat me disrespectfully, nor will I treat you disrespectfully. If you criticize or hurt me, I will not run away, nor will I hurt you back. I will stand before you and with you until you are willing to treat me in a way that allows us to work for what’s best. These same principles apply in every other relationship—friendships, marriages, parenting, and more. Turning the other cheek creates healthy relationships.
I learned about this aspect of turning the other cheek back in sixth grade. I remember that one of the other kids, Bruce McWilliams, got very angry at me for some reason, and wanted to fight. Being a bit of a strange kid at the time, I had chosen Martin Luther King, Jr., as my role model. He had been shot three years earlier, and I was captivated by what he did, as well as by what Mahatma Gandhi did in India. Most kids chose athletes or astronauts as their heroes. Mine were “turn-the-other-cheekers.” So trying to channel my inner MLK, Jr., I stood before Bruce and told him I wasn’t going to fight. He tried to hit me, and I grabbed his arms as he fell on top of me. I kept telling him that I wasn’t going to fight, but I wasn’t afraid. He just got more and more frustrated. But eventually he got off of me, and I saw then and there that my response puzzled him. I think that my not fighting with him actually allowed us to become friends.
Turning the other cheek doesn’t just mean standing our ground. It also means bringing about cooperation between others and us. When I think of this aspect of turning the other cheek, I think of Nelson Mandela. Here was a man who was imprisoned in hard labor for over 25 years by the Apartheid regime in South Africa, but when he was set free and then eventually became president, he turned the other cheek in a way that allowed the country to come together. With a black population that outnumbered the white population almost 17:1, he very easily could have promoted revenge. Yet when he became president he refused to act in any way other than graciously, showing through speech and behavior that he was willing to diminish his will in order to promote unity and cooperation in the nation. For a great example of this, see the film, Invictus. It wonderfully shows how turning the other cheek on a grand scale can unite people.
Finally, turning the other cheek forms and restores relationships. When we are willing to turn our cheek in the face of anger, it overcomes division and promotes connection. I had an experience of this last summer. I was driving down a road near our house, and as is sometimes the case, I was driving way too fast. As I rounded a curve, I passed a group of people standing outside while working on a house. One of the men, furious at my speed, came running towards my car, threw something at it, and yelled at me. My natural inclination was to do one of two things: to stop and yell back while thrusting the appropriate finger in the air, or to just keep driving with my finger out the window. I normally don’t do these things, but I always feel like doing them. Instead, I stopped and slowly backed up, winding down my window. I immediately said to him, “I know I was driving too fast. I’m really sorry.” His face changed from purple to normal, and he said, “No, I’m sorry. I’ve seen so many people driving so fast around that curve, and I lost my temper.” I said, “No, you’ve had every right to do that. I was going way too fast, and I know I have to slow down on this road, so you’re helping me.” We both kept doing our best Chip and Dale act, insisting that it was me, not the other, who was at fault. In then I apologized one more time and drove away. We’re able to wave and say hi now each time I pass. And it’s due to both of us turning our cheeks to each other.
When I think about turning the other cheek, I don’t only think about it in terms of protest. I think of it in terms of how we manage our lives. Turning the other cheek basically says that I am going to live a life that’s focused on love, respect, cooperation, and letting the Christ in me meet the Christ in you. I won’t back down, I won’t strike back, but I will look for a way to meet you in the middle. I just wish that this was something our politicians could learn.
Amen.
Questions for God: Why Does God Let Good People Suffer?
2 Corinthians 12:1-10
April 3, 2011
It is necessary to boast; nothing is to be gained by it, but I will go on to visions and revelations of the Lord. I know a person in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows. And I know that such a person—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know; God knows— was caught up into Paradise and heard things that are not to be told, that no mortal is permitted to repeat. On behalf of such a one I will boast, but on my own behalf I will not boast, except of my weaknesses. But if I wish to boast, I will not be a fool, for I will be speaking the truth. But I refrain from it, so that no one may think better of me than what is seen in me or heard from me, even considering the exceptional character of the revelations. Therefore, to keep me from being too elated, a thorn was given me in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to torment me, to keep me from being too elated. Three times I appealed to the Lord about this, that it would leave me, but he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
Back in 1991, when I was an associate pastor, I received a visit one day from a troubled young man. I had been working in my office, and the secretary stepped in and said, “There’s a young man here who wants to see you. He looks really troubled and upset.” I told her to send him in. Before I could even introduce myself he said, “Why does God let good people suffer and die?” That’s not an easy question to answer even with a lot of thought, but it’s especially difficult to answer right out of the blue. I took a step back with him, asked him his name, told him mine, and then I asked, “What’s happened to you that’s causing you to wonder? It’s obvious that something bad has happened.” He said, “I don’t understand why Senator John Heinz died yesterday in a helicopter accident. He was a really good man. Why did he have to die?”
He told me that he had been a college intern in Heinz’s senate office, and that Heinz was one of his heroes. We talked for about an hour, and then he left. I don’t think that anything I said helped. I’m not sure that there was anything that I could have said that would have helped. The problem was that he really didn’t want “God” answers. He didn’t want to hear anything about the promise of Heaven, he didn’t want to hear anything about how God created the universe, and he didn’t want to hear about trusting in God. I’m not sure what kind of answer he wanted, but it was clear that nothing I could say was going to make a difference. He had questions, but he also placed restrictions on the kinds of answers I could give.
I learned early on in my ministry that it’s very difficult to answer people when they ask why God lets good people suffer and/or die because they set the parameters of the answer. Often the people asking only want answers that fit with their already-formed theologies about the way the world either does or should work. In other words, people may ask us why God lets good people suffer, but that does not mean that they are interested in our answers, especially if the answers don’t fit their already held beliefs.
So, why does God let good people suffer? I have to answer the question from within Christian parameters—from a Christian perspective. To answer the question, we have start with a basic fallacy that so many people have, which is that a good God would only let good things happen. The Bible really shows both that God is good, and that bad things happen. Looking at our primary source, the Bible, it’s clear that a good God not only lets bad things happen, but the Bible wants to teach us how to live with suffering.
Our passage for today is a great example of that. The apostle Paul, whom we can lift up as an example of the great Christian life, has this incredible experience in which he is lifted up to the third heaven (whatever that is). He goes on to say that even though he has had this experience, he still has something that causes a great deal of suffering for him. In other words, God may have given him a glimpse of Heaven, but that doesn’t take away his suffering. He calls his affliction a “thorn in the flesh.”
We don’t quite know what that thorn was. It might have been some sort of physical impediment he’s had his whole life. It might be physical damage caused by the several beatings he had received at the hands of people who saw him as a danger. It might be something else. Whatever it was, Paul prayed three times for God to heal him, and he hears something surprising. God says to him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” Paul then testifies, “So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.
Paul is saying that a good God doesn’t take away suffering. A good God, instead, uses our suffering to bring grace into our lives.
Let’s look again at the question: So, why does God let good people suffer? To answer the question we also have to look at the whole nature of Creation. If we look at the nature of Creation, we discover that suffering happens because of God’s goodness. That’s an odd statement, isn’t it? But it’s true. To understand what I mean, we have to recognize the dual nature of all of Creation, which means that everything has the potential for good and bad. God creates everything as good, but even all this good can lead to what is bad and causes suffering. You can’t have good without the potential for the bad.
For instance, look at nuclear fission—the nuclear reaction in which the splitting of an atom causes the release of great quantities of energy. Nuclear fission can lead to great good. As I write this, the electric power giving me light, allowing me to use a computer, a printer, the ability to post it on a website, and more all come from a nearby nuclear power plant. But that same fission can create bombs that have the power to destroy the whole planet.
Food has a dual nature. It keeps us alive, and it can lead to great pleasure. We’ve all had meals that were incredibly delicious. But too much food can lead to obesity that leads to chronic illness and premature death.
Music has a dual nature. It can inspire us to experience God’s presence, and lift us to live better lives. It can soothe us, too, when we are stressed. Yet it can be a destructive force, too. Look at how Communist and fascist countries use music to brainwash whole populations into obedience. Music can also be personally destructive. When I worked as a counselor with teens in a psychiatric hospital, we saw how destructive the music could be. Many of the kids who were angry and suicidal were listening to groups like AC/DC, Black Sabbath, and Ozzy Osbourne, and some talked about that music’s influence in their self-destructiveness.
Gardens have a dual nature. That beauty that you cultivate in your garden also kills and causes suffering to weeds and insects.
Earth tectonics—the movement plate of tectonic plates across the top layer of the earth—allows for life to exist on earth. The fact that the earth’s crust is flexible caused massive eruptions millions of years ago (billions?) that allowed oxygen to form in our atmosphere, and soil to accumulate on the surface. Tectonic plate movement has given us life, but it also leads to earthquakes that cause massively destructive tsunamis like the one two weeks ago in Japan. Tectonics give us life, but also takes it away.
Even pain has a dual nature. That physical or psychological pain that leads to suffering, and that we want to avoid, actually keeps us alive. You and I hate pain, but without it we would die quickly. For example, have you heard of Hansen’s disease (what we often call “leprosy”)? It’s a disease that is said to cause people to lose their extremities—fingers, toes, noses, ears, etc… In fact, it’s not the disease that causes the loss of the extremities. The disease simply kills nerve endings so that people can’t feel pain at all. And their inability to feel pain means that they bump fingers and toes, but don’t realize it. Their lack of feeling allows infections to grow in these bumped fingers and toes, but, again, they don’t realize it. Eventually the extremities become gangrenous, and need to be cut off. It’s the loss of pain that leads to the loss of fingers and limbs. Pain keeps us alive by helping us to avoid things that could hurt, maim, or kill us.
Everything has a dual nature, and that nature can bring great pleasure and joy, or pain and suffering. If God were to get rid of the suffering, God would also have to get rid of pleasure and joy. God would have to get rid of the good in order to get rid of the bad.
So, why does God let good people suffer? If you want to understand suffering, it also starts with recognizing that there are two sources of suffering, and much of our suffering comes from the latter, not the former. The first kind of suffering is the nature of nature. In other words, nature leads to illness and death. Nature leads to earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, hurricanes, and more. Nature, by being nature, can lead to suffering.
But by far the biggest cause of human suffering is the second source, which is human acts—what we inflict on each other. We humans do terrible things to each other either out of direct desire to harm others, or out of our own ignorance on how our actions hurt others. We criticize each other, neglect each other, abuse each other, commit acts of violence upon others, and fight wars with each other. Most of our acts come from selfishness, pride, and a lack of concern for others. Even much of what we see as good can cause suffering. For instance, just seeking a profit in business can lead to decisions that harm others economically and socially. In other words, most of the time suffering has nothing to do with anything God has done, but arises out of the freedom God gives us to do what we do. Human life causes suffering.
So, why does God let good people suffer? Much of it is directly due to the freedom God gives us and all of Creation. God’s given both the universe and us freedom to act in ways that bring life, beauty, destruction, and pain—all together.
So, why does God let good people suffer? Another answer is that it goes with the nature of redemption and transformation. In many cases suffering is the first step in redemption and transformation. Think about your own life. How often have you grown after a bad experience? How often has it been the failure that eventually led to success? What would Christianity look like without the cross? The Bible constantly pushes how experiences of suffering can lead us to a greater awareness of God. Think of your own life. If you are like most people, it’s periods of struggle that have led you to reach out for God.
In fact, it’s the lack of struggle among teens and young adults that often leads to an ignorance of God or the need for church and faith. For most teens and young adults, they live in safety pods either at home or at college. They have their food, shelter, entertainment, and more all taken care of. Suffering is kept to a minimum. And so their need for God is also diminished. Suffering has the ability to lead us to look for God, and to find God.
So, why does God let good people suffer? I think that the question really isn’t why God let’s good people suffer? I think for us Christians it’s a question of how we respond to suffering:
• How will we respond to the suffering of tsunami victims?
• How will we care for the grieving?
• How will we care for those who are sick and in pain?
• How will we care for the hungry, the poor, the homeless?
• How will we tend to the world’s pain?
Amen.
Questions for God: Does Everyone Get into Heaven?
Romans 5:12-21
March 27, 2011
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin.
For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
A controversy has been brewing in the Christian world the past three weeks. I’d be surprised if you were aware of it, but you may have been. The controversy regards a book coming out this week by the pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan—Rob Bell. His church is a 10,000-member church that caters mainly to younger folks. The controversy is that his new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, says that there is no Hell and implies that all are saved (at least that’s what the critics say—the book has yet to be published). Christians of all stripes have been blasting him, saying that his teaching is unbiblical and heretical.
The fallout from the book is spreading beyond just Bell’s circles. For example, a Methodist pastor, Chad Holtz, was fired from his church, Morrows Chapel in Henderson, NC, after posting on his Facebook page that he agreed with Bell. According to those in the know, he was probably fired for a pattern of statements that the members found objectionable. Still, the official reason he was let go was his saying that there is no Hell.
So, what do you think? Should Rob Bell be receiving so much criticism? Should Chad Holtz have lost his job? Is this a tempest in a teapot, or a controversy that strikes to the core of Christian belief?
Do you want to know what I find amazing about this controversy? It’s how adamant and angry people get about things they don’t know, haven’t experienced, and can’t prove. Nobody arguing their points has died, they are arguing over speculation—you can’t know what happens until you die. Rob Bell may be wrong, but so may his critics. When people get this angry I often wonder what their response will be at Heaven’s gates (if there are gates) when they find out they were wrong. Will they get upset and say to God, “Well, if it ain’t the way I thought it was gonna be, I don’t want in anyway”?
It’s not just Christians who argue about what happens to us when we die. People outside the Christian faith argue about it. Some argue that Christians are all wrong, and that when we die we are reincarnated. Others—atheists, mostly—argue that we’re all wrong and that Nada happens (you know,… nada—nothing). Whatever their theories, one thing is certain: everybody’s certain,… everybody’s right. And they’re convinced that everyone else is wrong.
No one seems to agree on who gets into heaven when we die. But I’m going to tell you something that most people aren’t even aware of when they argue about what happens to us when we die, especially Christians who are so certain about what happens. When it comes to the Bible and what it says about the afterlife, even the Bible doesn’t agree with itself. Most Christians think the Bible is clear on what happens after we die, but if you look at the Bible with biblical honesty, taking into account what it says and not what we think it says (and we Presbyterians, above all, believe in biblical honesty), you’ll find that the Bible has at least four divergent beliefs about the afterlife.
First, there’s the ancient Jewish view, which is a belief in a place called Sheol. If you look through the Old Testament, and especially the psalms, you’ll find mention of Sheol. Sheol is much like the ancient Greek belief in Hades. It is a misty place where people live shadowy existences. People really don’t have substance after they die. The soul goes there, but there’s not much life. The ancient Jews instead focused on life in this life, not the afterlife. They believed that this life was the one that mattered, and for as long as we were alive the drive was to live according to the Law and to get God to bless us in this life. Blessings, according to this Old Testament view, came in the form of property, wives, children, goats, and sheep. The belief was that if we lived a pure and holy life, God would bless us in the here and now.
The Sadducees also had a belief. They believed in nothing. They didn’t even really believe in Sheol. They believed that this life was all there was, and it was important to live a pure live so that God would bless us in this life. For them, purity came through observance of the Law and Temple sacrifices.
The apostle Paul had a different view of the afterlife. His belief emerged out of the beliefs of the Pharisees, which Paul was one of until his conversion. They believed in “resurrection of the dead.” We’re familiar with that term, and we have a tendency to think of it as meaning we go to heaven, but that’s not what they believed at all. Belief in resurrection was a belief in the idea that God created history with a beginning and an end, and that someday the end would come on what was called “the last day.” On that day the trumpet would sound and the messiah (for the Pharisees) or Jesus (for Paul) would return to create a new world. This belief is reflected in the Revelation of John that says that when Christ returns, a new city will come down from heaven, all pain would be gone, and God would wipe away every tear. Paul and the Pharisees believed that until that last day, the dead who are to be resurrected lie in the ground in something akin to suspended animation, and on the last day they would be given new bodies—imperishable bodies.
So what did Jesus believe? At times he seems to share in the idea of resurrection, but he also seems to express the belief that we’ve commonly come to accept, which is the idea of Heaven and Hell. For instance, in Luke 16, Jesus tells a parable about a poor man named Lazarus, who is covered with sores and vies with the dogs for scraps that come from the table of a rich man, who feasts sumptuously every day. They both die. Lazarus is in Heaven with Abraham, while the rich man is in Hell (well,… actually Hades) looking up at the other two. He begs Abraham to dip his finger in water to relieve him from the fiery torment. Abraham says no, that the abyss between them cannot be crossed. He then asks Abraham to let him return to life to warn his brothers, but Abraham tells him that if they would not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not listen to him. Looking at this parable, it seems that Jesus believes in the idea of Heaven and Hell.
Along with these four different views are different views on what gets you into whatever happens after we die. And each one seems to have a biblical backing. Some believe that God only lets in the most pure. These folks base their beliefs in Revelation in which it says that only the 144,000 who are righteous can get in. Of course, the folks who believe in this always place themselves among the 144,000, which means that they place themselves among the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of all of the 6 billion people alive today. It’s interesting how easy it is to justify ourselves, but not others.
Others believe that God lets you in if you’ve done enough good works in your life. They base this on different parts of the Bible, such as Jesus talking about separating the sheep and the goats and James saying that faith without works is dead.
Others believe that God lets some in and puts others in Hell. For Presbyterians there’s an augment to this, which we call “double predestination.” That’s the idea that God chooses, before birth, that some will go to Heaven and some to Hell. If you are chosen for Heaven, then you get to go there no matter how bad your life is. And if you are chosen for Hell, you get to go there no matter how good your life is. To be honest, you’d be hard-pressed to find many Presbyterians who still believe in this, but there are some.
Then there are others, such as Rob Bell and Chad Holtz, who suggest that because God loves everyone, and Jesus died for all of our sins, we’re all saved and let in.
All of this makes the topic of what happens after we die, as well as who gets in and who doesn’t, easy to argue about. So, what do you think the answer is? For us Presbyterians (who are good at arguing, too) the answer really comes down to one simple concept: the sovereignty of God. What does this concept mean? It means that when it all comes down to it, God gets to decide, and whatever the basis of God’s decision-making, we aren’t necessarily privy to it. When I came into our presbytery 15 years ago, I was asked (as part of my examination to become pastor of Calvin Presbyterian Church) whether I believed everyone got into Heaven, or some went to Heaven and some to Hell. I told them what I truly believe, which is that God gets to decide, and God does not consult with me.
So what do I believe? I believe that the God revealed in Christ is the one who wants all of us in, but that doesn’t mean that all of us get in. I’ve spent a lot of time studying this question, but I don’t only limit myself to the Bible. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading about the afterlife, especially the accounts of people who have died, had an afterlife experience, and returned to life. You’d be surprised at how many people there are who have had these experiences. I know quite a few of them. In the past 50 years there have been a lot of books published by them.
For example, there’s a recent book by a Baptist pastor named Don Piper, who wrote the book, 90 Minutes in Heaven, which chronicles his experience of being in a horrendous car wreck in which he was pronounced dead at the scene for 90 minutes, and then resuscitated. He talks of being in a place of amazing love where there is no pain. He also says that he did not come face-to-face with God, and believes that if he had he would not have been able to return to life. There are the Life after Life books by Raymond Moody, a physician who, at the University of Virginia, spent time interviewing over a thousand people who had had experiences similar to Don Piper, what we call “near-death experiences.” Not all accounts are the same, but many are similar. And in some of those books he talks about there being a Hell, but it being a place where people go who choose to be apart from God. George Ritchie, who had a near-death experience in 1941, in which he was declared dead for twenty minutes, talked of being showed Hell by Jesus. He asked Jesus what these people had done to be consigned there. Jesus said that they were not there for punishment. They were there for love. These were people who were so corrupted by their own pride and selfish desires that they would rather live in corruption than choose God’s way. Jesus implied that many of them were so selfish and self-consumed that they weren’t aware of Jesus even if he stood next to them. They didn’t want to live eternity in God’s love. But they were given eternal lives, even if it was in Hell, with the hope that eventually they would choose God.
C.S. Lewis writes of something similar in his book, The Great Divorce. In it, people from Hell visit the outskirts of Heaven, which are beautiful fields outside of a great forest with snow-capped mountains in the distance. They are constantly invited in, but so many of them would rather live in Hell (in this case, a dingy English town) than take a chance on heaven. Lewis has a great statement about them, saying in the book, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”
When it comes down to it, what I believe is that God gives everyone the opportunity to go to heaven when we die, but that we are also given the freedom to say yes or no. I believe in a God of infinite love who has an infinite desire for all to be reconciled and to be with God. I don’t agree with the idea that God gives us this possibility only in this life. I agree with George Ritchie, with the idea that God calls us constantly and eternally to say “yes,” but that there are people who would say no to God. The great 17th century poet, John Milton, captured these people when he said, in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, “It's better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
As a result of all this, I really don’t worry that much about my family and friends, or even those I think are evil, because I believe in a loving God. I believe that when Jesus was dying on the cross and said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” that same forgiving grace is extended eternally to us.
Ultimately, I believe that this loving God is in control, that God loves each and every one of us with a love we can’t imagine, and that God works eternally to bring all of us to God. God’s in control of it all, and we can trust in God’s love to take care of us and everyone else. But no one is going to be forced to live in this love.
The only question that we have to answer is this: when God gives us the opportunity after death to be with God, will we say “yes.”
Amen.
Questions for God: What Does God Think of Muslim Terrorism?
Matthew 5:43-48
March 20, 2011
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
As Connie mentioned last week, we are doing a fun, but challenging sermon series during Lent, which is “Questions for God.” Between January and Ash Wednesday, we collected over twenty questions that our members would like to ask of God. The questions were challenging, some unexpected, and all very good. Our question for this morning, “What does God think of Muslim terrorism” was one of those questions.
As I try to share what I think is God’s answer to this question, I want to start with a question of my own: Do you remember where you were on 9/11? If you were old enough to understand what was taking place on 9/11, you remember. I had a profound experience on 9/11 because of how I experienced God in the aftermath.
When the events of 9/11 began, I heard about them through our church secretary, Michelle. I was in my old office, which is now the prayer room and library of the church. She came down to my office and told me that a plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center buildings. Fifteen minutes later, she told me that another had crashed into the other building. At that point we realized that something terrible was going on. Fifteen minutes later she told me that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. All of us at the church at the time were stunned and confused.
Later that morning I went home for lunch, where our sitter was taking care of our two year-old daughters. As I sat at my kitchen table, I kept an eye on CNN on the television in our family room as it replayed the events of the morning. I was crushed by the trauma, and by the thought of all those people dying. But as I sat, I also looked outside my kitchen window, which overlooked the Zelienople airport in the valley below. Do you remember how clear and beautiful that day was? The day was stunningly crisp and clear. As I looked out the window, a flock of geese flew by. I was struck by the fact that the geese didn’t seem to know or care about the World Trade Center buildings being destroyed. In fact, the whole world outside my window was still at peace. It didn’t know to be scared, upset, and confused. I kept looking back-and-forth between the two scenes. And in the disparity of the two I sensed God’s guidance. It was as though God was saying to me, “This all looks terrible. And it is awful. But I am still in control of everything, and my will and peace will outlast all of this. Be still and know that I am God.” Since then I’ve realized that the terrorists were not doing God’s will, and that God’s will would work everything out.
A lot of things changed on 9/11, but nothing more than in how we looked at Muslims and the Islamic faith. Prior to 9/11 we generally looked at Islam as another religion rather than as an evil religion. Most people were pretty ignorant of the Muslim faith. If they thought at all, they may have thought that it was a religion much like Christianity. Or they thought that it was another religion, but inferior to Christianity. Some, thinking about the Intefada in Palestine, or Hamas, might have linked Islam with violence, but that certainly wasn’t the dominant opinion. Whatever they thought, most people never thought that the religion itself would spawn terrorists—at least not like this.
Today, many people argue over just how evil Islam is. I’ve heard so many pundits and pretend prophets proclaim Islam to be an evil religion that teaches its adherents to become terrorists or to support terrorism. This change has been kind of shocking to me because of my past experiences with Islam.
Back in 1994, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I studied Islam,… a lot. In our dissertations we were supposed to study our topic not only through the lens of Christianity, but also through two other lenses: social sciences and what was called a “non-adhered to religion”—a faith other than our own. I chose Islam. I spent a year reading whatever I could on Islam, and learned a lot about it. What I read was not books on a violent, terrorism-generating faith, but a religion of peace that called its adherents to a personal, communal, and societal struggle for God’s will, justice, and peace. I’ve had a hard time reconciling what I studied with what so many were saying, post-9/11.
After 9/11 I wondered if I had made a mistake. I read more on Islam, and did some work to engage with Muslims. You may remember that in 2003 we invited Farooq Hussaini, the president of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, to talk with our members. I had originally met him when he spoke at the dedication of the Jewell in the Woods chapel at the Woodlands Foundation. When he came and spoke, it was clear that he was a gentle man of faith, and he clearly said that what the terrorists did went against Islam. Interestingly enough, a year later, when everyone was asking why moderate Muslims weren’t speaking out against Muslim terrorism, he wrote a long letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette condemning terrorism, which was placed in the back of the paper.
This past fall, we took members of Calvin Presbyterian Church and our presbytery to the Islamic Center to visit them. It was clear from our visit that these were not terrorists in the making. They were very happy to have us there, and many of the members sat with us during the talk, and were smiling because of this Muslim/Christian dialogue. Actually, that visit cemented my belief that Islam doesn’t sponsor terrorism. Setting up the visit was a bit comical. I had called them in August to set up our visit and left a message on their voice machine. After no one called me back three weeks later, I called again. The next day I got a call from the Imam, and we set up the visit for a Thursday in September. Two hours later I got a call from the same Imam, saying to me that he picked up a message that I wanted to bring a group to visit the Islamic Center. I told him, “Yeah,… I just spoke with you two hours ago.” He said, “You did? Remind me who you are again.”
When we showed up for the visit, it was obvious that they had forgotten about us visiting. They had to scramble to get chairs for us so that we could sit and observe their evening prayers. My conclusion: if these people were terrorists, we have no fear, because they can’t even organize a visit, let alone a terrorist plot.
Since 9/11 I’ve done more reading about Islam, and what I’ve concluded is that the problem is not Muslims, but fundamentalism of every stripe, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or even what I would call political or constitutional fundamentalism. Fundamentalism creates ideologies that lead people to violent acts, whether they are physical, social, or psychological violence. But more on that later. My conclusion is that what I originally thought of Islam is the same as it was back in 1994—it is mainly a religion of peace.
The problem is that people of violence can hijack even religions of peace, and it happens not only in Islam, but in every faith, including Christianity. Look at Christian history. We have a history of violence, despite the fact that our tradition and the gospels teach non-violence. Look at what our passage says about how we are to treat our enemies: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven…” How do you turn this into some of the stuff Christians have done. For example, the Crusades of the 11th century were incredibly violent. Most people don’t realize that in the first Crusade the Christians never even made it to the Holy Lands, so they attacked the Christian city of Constantinople instead. Over time Christians took control of the Holy Lands and were much more brutal towards the Muslims and Jews than the Muslims had ever been to the Christians and Jews. We also have the Catholic Church inquisitions of the 16th through 17th centuries, which used violent torture against anyone suspected of being heretics. You had violence of the Roman Catholic Church against Protestants, and in England’s case, violence of Protestants against Catholics and vice versa. You had harshness and violence in some of the American colonies against non-Puritans or non-Anglicans. Only the colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island enforced tolerance. Even in the last century you had the rise of Christian terroristic violence by white supremacist groups against African Americans and those of other ethnicities. And today you have fundamentalists like the Rev. Fred Phelps (who, ironically has been accused of abuse by his own adult son) and the Westboro Baptist Church, which protests at the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, committing psychological terrorism against grieving families.
Islam does have one major difference with Christianity that allows terrorism to find a home in it easier than in Christianity, and this difference allows fundamentalist adherents (make no mistake, the terrorists are fundamentalists) to abuse the religion. While Christianity teaches turning the other cheek, loving enemies, and treating our persecutors well, Islam, like Judaism, does teach “ an eye for an eye,” if it is in self-defense or defense of someone innocent. Another problem, seemingly is the idea of jihad, although the term has been hijacked by Muslim fundamentalists. If you were to define the word “jihad,” what would you say it means? Most of us would say “holy war.” And you would be wrong. Only the fundamentalists interpret is at “holy war,” and it’s an interpretation that has really only existed for the past 50 years of Islam’s 1400 year history.
The term, jihad, is a term that literally means “struggle.” For 1350 years, Muslims understood that struggle to be a personal, familial, communal, and societal struggle to do God’s will in all of life, a struggle to bring peace and justice for the poor to all areas of life. It wasn’t until 1951 that the definition changed among many Muslims. A Pakistani journalist and politician named Abul Ala Mawdudi, believing that the West was looking to crush Islam, promoted jihad as an armed struggle against oppression. He was heavily influenced by Marxist thought that had spread throughout the world during the 20th century. His writings were picked up by an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb, who became influential in the Muslim Brotherhood, which many of us have heard about in connection with the democracy movement in Egypt. Qutb embraced the idea of jihad as “holy war,” which led the Muslim Brotherhood to eventually attempt to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, and to eventually assassinate Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. The vast majority of Muslims don’t believe that jihad means holy war. But, Osama bin Laden spent time in Eqypt studying with the Muslim Brotherhood, although now he has nothing but contempt for them because in the past twenty years they’ve changed and now condemn violence while promoting a democratic vision for Egypt.
So, what does God think of Muslim terrorism? God doesn’t have so much a belief about Muslim terrorism as God has a belief about terrorism in general. It is clear from our passage, and from a Christian perspective, that God is against terrorism of any kind. It goes completely against what God intends for the world. Jesus is the one who shows us what God intends. Look at his teachings. Our passage shows us. The Golden Rule shows us. The Great Command to love God with all our body, mind, heart, and soul, and others as ourselves shows it. And Jesus’ life demonstrates God’s intention. Jesus was terrorized. He was arrested as an innocent, falsely imprisoned, tortured, and crucified. Instead of calling for holy war, he said, “Father, forgive them for the do not know what they are doing.” And our belief in the resurrection shows God’s intention, which is to respond to human violence not only with peace, but with grace.
Even in Islam terrorism is against God’s will. Islam teaches that we can only wage war in self-defense, and that even in waging war or protecting ourselves, no violence can be done against the innocent. The terrorists warp this idea to say that anyone who lives in America, because it is a democracy, is no longer innocent. That’s an abuse of the Muslim faith. Also, since it’s beginning, Islam has taught a tolerance of other faiths, teaching that all other faiths are from God. They believe that their religion is the preeminent faith, but that all faiths are an attempt to live under God’s will, and so should be respected. Just as we’ve learned about Christians, that doesn’t stop some Muslim countries and governments from abusing the faith and attacking those of other faiths. But in Islam’s history, it has a better history of tolerance than Christianity does. Christian tolerance is a relatively new phenomenon of the last 100 years.
The real problem of terrorism—whether Islamic, Christian, IRA, Falun Gong, White Supremicist, Black Panther, communism, or even American constitutional terrorism—is that it devalues people while valuing only ideals. I believe the problem of terrorism is part of a bigger problem of fundamentalism in every religion. Every terrorist is a fundamentalist who cares more about their ideals than about the people their ideals are supposedly for. And this kind of fundamentalist, reductionistic thought is what promotes falseness. Let me give you an example of this kind of falseness. Back on December 6th of 2010, Glenn Beck said about Islam and terrorism that estimates of how many Muslim terrorists promoted in the media is wrong. He said that the media says that only about 1% of all Muslims are terrorists, but that the real number is 10% of Muslims are also terrorists. He then lamented that the media won’t tell the public this truth.
Doing the math on about Beck’s claims tells you how silly they are. You can Google my math if you like. There are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world (compared to about 2.2 billion Christians). If 10% of them are terrorists, that means that there are 160 Muslim terrorists in the world. Now, if you took all of the armies in the world, it adds up to only 73 million soldiers. If Beck is right, then the number of Muslim terrorists in the world is more than double all the militaries in the world. That’s preposterous, but it doesn’t stop him from falsely teaching about the connection between Islam and terrorism. In fact, even if the number is 1.6 million terrorists, that means that there are more terrorists than are presently soldiers in the U.S. military, if you include reservists. At present, there are approximately 1,136,000 members of the U.S. military. The point? There is so much misconception about Islam and it’s connection to terrorism, it hides the fact that even in Islam terrorism goes against the teachings of the Quran.
To me, here’s the reality. God’s not only against terrorism, but you can see God’s response to terrorism—especially Muslim fundamentalist terrorism—in the Middle East. The democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Bahrain, and more is how God is working. The thing you have to realize about the way God works is that God doesn’t combat terrorism like we do, with military power. God combats terrorism with time, patience, and compassion. And make no mistake, God is at work. You can see this in the fact that terrorism doesn’t work. You would have a hard time finding successful examples of terrorism of any kind actually successfully bringing about lasting, positive national change. It hasn’t worked in Northern Ireland, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, of even in America. God is at work, and God is working to overcome terrorism of every kind.
You know, back in 1976 I had a revelation in a high school class. It was on a warm spring day when our teachers took our class outside. We were sitting in the grass, having a discussion of the age our world was in, and what we thought the coming age would be. A lot of my classmates promoted that we were entering an age of peace, unity, etc… I had a moment of prophetic clarity. It doesn’t often, but occasionally I do get glimpses. When it was my turn, I said that we were going to enter into an age of terrorism. I remember this event so much because of how quickly my classmates dismissed what I said. I guess ego sharpens memory, and their dismissal bruised my ego. I look at the past three decades and I think I was right to some extent.
But I’m also having a bit of a prophetic vision now, and I see us as entering a new, post-terroristic age. I believe that we are seeing the beginnings of the death of terrorism. Make no mistake, acts of terrorism will always be around, but I see global terrorism diminishing as a force. Why? Because God is at work to overcome this violence. We just have to trust.
Amen.
Questions for God? Why do we struggle so long? Psalm 71:14-18
by Connie Frierson
Today is the first Sunday of our new sermon series, “Questions for God.” Boy! Did we get the questions! But we only have six Sundays in lent so we have got to pick and choose. Graham and I employed a very scientific method. We pulled questions out of a hat. So here is the hat. Let’s see what is inside. Hmmm. Why do we suffer? Next question, “Why do we suffer?” Next question, “Why do we suffer?” I am detecting a trend. Next question, Oh here’s one that is different, I’ll save that one for Palm Sunday. Next question, “Why do we suffer?” You see the pattern. The interesting thing is that each question isn’t exactly identical. Each reflects something personal and unique, while carrying the common thread of suffering and struggle and bad things happening. The biggest questions for God, all surround why we hurt; why does God ask us to do hard things; why does God permit terrorism. On this weekend of all weekends, the suffering in Japan from the terrible tsunami and earthquake shakes us. This suffering is almost too much to imagine. It seems too much to bear, too much to comprehend. This is when I must admit I am a small person. My mind is so small that this type of disaster is hard to take in. I don’t do well with abstract ideas, or global questions. In my experience God speaks best to me when God speaks to a question that is little, local and close. God’s great big answers often come to me in little packages. So this morning as we pray for Japan and the world, I am going to ask us to turn to one little local question by one friend that we probably all know. When we do this perhaps God will provide a blessing, so that we can then pray and act better in the face of such big tragedies. The question that I pulled from the hat is this one. “Why do we often have to struggle so long before we finally experience God?”
I have already confessed that I don’t do well with global, abstract questions. I can understand my world by thinking about it in context, in a particular situation or circumstance. What is the situation of this question? Most of these questions don’t come with names attached. But I am going to make some assumptions about this person. I am going to make predictions about this person’s context. So if you are this person forgive me if I am wrong, but here are my predictions. This person has suffered. To struggle often means to suffer. This person is concerned with how long it took them to come to faith. Notice these words, “sooooo long” and “finally.” I think this person is old. I think this person has been wrestling around with life and trials and God for a long, long time. I think this person is feisty. This person has tussled and thrashed around with God, like Jacob wrestling that angel and getting a blessing. I think this person has had true experience of grace and of God. But man, oh man, it took a while. This person is like many of us. This person is asking the age-old question, “How come we are too soon old and too late smart?”
“Too soon oldt and too late schmart.” You might have seen this expression from Amish Dutch kitsch. When I was a kid I would see this expression on a trivet or potholder, or a plaque in every other kitchen. Why did I see it everywhere? Because this silly nick knack captures something universal about our experience. Translate this to our spiritual journey. We are too soon old and too late smart. We struggle so long until finally we rest in God. The question is why is this and is this the way it has to be? I think we need to look at the young and the old, youth and age. If we have a general assumption that young people don’t have faith and old people do, let’s ask if that is actually true. Let’s see if this is the way it has to be. If it is true that people often come to faith later in life I think this is a function of two things, trust and experience.
How we view the world is so often a function of trust and experience. We come into the world primed for trust. Perhaps this may seem a fanciful notion to cynics, but I think we come from God and we return to God. I think babies have known the presence of God, that infants have had experience of God before birth. I think babies know how to attach and to trust because they came from attachment and trust in our heavenly father. I believe babies are primed to trust, just as they are primed to breathe. As babies we gaze into our mother’s and fathers eyes. Physiologically, that only place we, babies, can see, only about 12 inches in front of our eyes. That space is also the distance from a baby’s eye to a loving parent’s eyes. God has primed us to look with trust and love at our parents, and for our parents to look with love and caring at us. This loving gaze is one of the most powerful things on earth. The loving gaze is how we start to love and to trust. As babies, we start out trusting. That is the characteristic that Jesus talks about when Jesus says, “We must become like children to enter the Kingdom of God.” That openness and trust helps us enter the Kingdom of God, to have faith. We start out high on the trust chart. But then things happen. People prove untrustworthy. Our needs aren’t quite met. We get preoccupied. We seek our own way. And often trust diminishes over time.
This leads to the second universal fact of life, experience. Just living and breathing, crawling or walking or talking we have experiences. As babies we start out with very little experience. The world is a new place. But over time we learn about the world from each experience. We experience suffering. We experience joy. We experience hot and cold and fear and comfort and sickness and health. Our experience grows and grows through age. Experience is both good and bad. If our understanding of God and life is that only pleasant things are evidence of God. Experience is going to be quite confusing. The bible says, “Rain falls on the just and the unjust.” (In an arid country, rain was considered good, like a blessing.) So experience is both good and bad. Regardless whether they are experiencing good or bad we get lots of it. But this alone doesn’t lead to wisdom or to faith. So empirically we see older people who have grown in grace and wisdom and we sometimes see older people who are hard, cynical and bitter. We sometimes see young people with wisdom beyond their years. We have a saying for this, “out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom.” But we also see young people who are foolish. How do we explain this? But that’s not all we run into people who have suffered great tragedy and pain, yet they have trust and faith and joy. Or we know other people who have lived with every advantage or money, health, love, looks and education, yet they are miserable and despairing. How do we explain that? My conclusion is that experience is neutral. Experience is good and bad. But experience alone, (good or bad) doesn’t lead to faith or God. The path to faith, to experiencing God’s grace is to infuse trust into each and every experience of life. We need to take every experience and wash it in trust, let trust soak way in until we sense that God is somewhere or everywhere in that new experience. We need a chart line of high trust. This leads to faith. This leads to the God infused life.
So why does it take us so long to get this merging of trust into our experiences? When we are babies, trust is a gift. When we grow older trust is a choice. The shock of terrible things often jolts us out of the gift of trust and in that time we need to do the much harder thing. We need to choose to trust. Perhaps we are deceived by evil that tells us we cannot trust God. Perhaps we deceive ourselves by thinking we have control over everything and that we should trust ourselves. Perhaps we choose to trust money, or medicine, or science, or some person. Or perhaps we choose to trust our own philosophic worldview that God isn’t there or God can’t be trusted or God is mean. We choose.
The God that saves and heals us assures us that it is never too late to change the direction of faith. We can infuse trust into the chart of our life. We can even go back to our experience line and rewrite it with trust. We all have times when the foundation of trust is shaken to the core. Times perhaps of abuse, or of a sudden death, or of health crisis, or joblessness. A path to grace goes back to revisit that time and ask God to breath trust in God into that terrible time. This is one of those things that finally, after so long, we can look back and see the blessings, the gifts, the providences and look for the presence of God in the whole time line of our experience.
There were once two little girls who were watching their grandmother read the bible. And one little girl says to the other, “Why does Grandma read the bible so much?” The older little girl says, “I think she is studying for her final exam.” Maybe. Or maybe the older woman was rereading her life in the light of trust and faith. Can we go back after so long to finally get the trust and see the grace of God throughout our life? I think that is one of the spiritual tasks God wants us to do. It would have been better if we had lived our life trusting as each new experience comes in. If we did we would have this lovely purple high line of trust and experience flowing through life. But sometimes what we need to do is to circle back and to re-see our lives through the eyes of God’s graces.
I have a film clip that helps to illustrate this spiritual task of a life review in trust and spiritual insight. This clip is taken from the film, “The Immortal Beloved” which is a story about Beethoven’s life. At the very end of Beethoven’s life he wrote his ninth symphony, which includes the Ode to Joy. One of the things that perhaps broke Beethoven’s trust was his early experience with a brutal father. Beethoven’s father was an alcoholic and would beat him. In this film clip Beethoven is deaf, standing before the orchestra as they play his ninth symphony. He is replaying this God given music though a night in his life as he ran from his father and experienced the glory of God in a pond out in the country. He is replaying that experience and I think this illustrates how trust in the God who created the universe can break into our life in significant ways. At the end of this boys run from his father through woods and paths. The boy lies down in the pond. He lies in the pond in which all the stars are reflected and looks us at this infinite starry sky. In this moment that boy understands that he is one part of this magnificent creation. The boy touches the stars and the stars are in him and around him. This is how God heals us. This is how God uses one starry night to remind us that we are part of God’s wonderful creation. We are not alone, but the stars of all God’s beloved souls surround us too.
God wants us to wash all our experiences in life with grace and love. Why do we struggle so long before we experience God’s grace? Because we don’t live life with trust though all our experiences. But it is never too late to ask God to help us choose to trust. Amen.
Today is the first Sunday of our new sermon series, “Questions for God.” Boy! Did we get the questions! But we only have six Sundays in lent so we have got to pick and choose. Graham and I employed a very scientific method. We pulled questions out of a hat. So here is the hat. Let’s see what is inside. Hmmm. Why do we suffer? Next question, “Why do we suffer?” Next question, “Why do we suffer?” I am detecting a trend. Next question, Oh here’s one that is different, I’ll save that one for Palm Sunday. Next question, “Why do we suffer?” You see the pattern. The interesting thing is that each question isn’t exactly identical. Each reflects something personal and unique, while carrying the common thread of suffering and struggle and bad things happening. The biggest questions for God, all surround why we hurt; why does God ask us to do hard things; why does God permit terrorism. On this weekend of all weekends, the suffering in Japan from the terrible tsunami and earthquake shakes us. This suffering is almost too much to imagine. It seems too much to bear, too much to comprehend. This is when I must admit I am a small person. My mind is so small that this type of disaster is hard to take in. I don’t do well with abstract ideas, or global questions. In my experience God speaks best to me when God speaks to a question that is little, local and close. God’s great big answers often come to me in little packages. So this morning as we pray for Japan and the world, I am going to ask us to turn to one little local question by one friend that we probably all know. When we do this perhaps God will provide a blessing, so that we can then pray and act better in the face of such big tragedies. The question that I pulled from the hat is this one. “Why do we often have to struggle so long before we finally experience God?”
I have already confessed that I don’t do well with global, abstract questions. I can understand my world by thinking about it in context, in a particular situation or circumstance. What is the situation of this question? Most of these questions don’t come with names attached. But I am going to make some assumptions about this person. I am going to make predictions about this person’s context. So if you are this person forgive me if I am wrong, but here are my predictions. This person has suffered. To struggle often means to suffer. This person is concerned with how long it took them to come to faith. Notice these words, “sooooo long” and “finally.” I think this person is old. I think this person has been wrestling around with life and trials and God for a long, long time. I think this person is feisty. This person has tussled and thrashed around with God, like Jacob wrestling that angel and getting a blessing. I think this person has had true experience of grace and of God. But man, oh man, it took a while. This person is like many of us. This person is asking the age-old question, “How come we are too soon old and too late smart?”
“Too soon oldt and too late schmart.” You might have seen this expression from Amish Dutch kitsch. When I was a kid I would see this expression on a trivet or potholder, or a plaque in every other kitchen. Why did I see it everywhere? Because this silly nick knack captures something universal about our experience. Translate this to our spiritual journey. We are too soon old and too late smart. We struggle so long until finally we rest in God. The question is why is this and is this the way it has to be? I think we need to look at the young and the old, youth and age. If we have a general assumption that young people don’t have faith and old people do, let’s ask if that is actually true. Let’s see if this is the way it has to be. If it is true that people often come to faith later in life I think this is a function of two things, trust and experience.
How we view the world is so often a function of trust and experience. We come into the world primed for trust. Perhaps this may seem a fanciful notion to cynics, but I think we come from God and we return to God. I think babies have known the presence of God, that infants have had experience of God before birth. I think babies know how to attach and to trust because they came from attachment and trust in our heavenly father. I believe babies are primed to trust, just as they are primed to breathe. As babies we gaze into our mother’s and fathers eyes. Physiologically, that only place we, babies, can see, only about 12 inches in front of our eyes. That space is also the distance from a baby’s eye to a loving parent’s eyes. God has primed us to look with trust and love at our parents, and for our parents to look with love and caring at us. This loving gaze is one of the most powerful things on earth. The loving gaze is how we start to love and to trust. As babies, we start out trusting. That is the characteristic that Jesus talks about when Jesus says, “We must become like children to enter the Kingdom of God.” That openness and trust helps us enter the Kingdom of God, to have faith. We start out high on the trust chart. But then things happen. People prove untrustworthy. Our needs aren’t quite met. We get preoccupied. We seek our own way. And often trust diminishes over time.
This leads to the second universal fact of life, experience. Just living and breathing, crawling or walking or talking we have experiences. As babies we start out with very little experience. The world is a new place. But over time we learn about the world from each experience. We experience suffering. We experience joy. We experience hot and cold and fear and comfort and sickness and health. Our experience grows and grows through age. Experience is both good and bad. If our understanding of God and life is that only pleasant things are evidence of God. Experience is going to be quite confusing. The bible says, “Rain falls on the just and the unjust.” (In an arid country, rain was considered good, like a blessing.) So experience is both good and bad. Regardless whether they are experiencing good or bad we get lots of it. But this alone doesn’t lead to wisdom or to faith. So empirically we see older people who have grown in grace and wisdom and we sometimes see older people who are hard, cynical and bitter. We sometimes see young people with wisdom beyond their years. We have a saying for this, “out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom.” But we also see young people who are foolish. How do we explain this? But that’s not all we run into people who have suffered great tragedy and pain, yet they have trust and faith and joy. Or we know other people who have lived with every advantage or money, health, love, looks and education, yet they are miserable and despairing. How do we explain that? My conclusion is that experience is neutral. Experience is good and bad. But experience alone, (good or bad) doesn’t lead to faith or God. The path to faith, to experiencing God’s grace is to infuse trust into each and every experience of life. We need to take every experience and wash it in trust, let trust soak way in until we sense that God is somewhere or everywhere in that new experience. We need a chart line of high trust. This leads to faith. This leads to the God infused life.
So why does it take us so long to get this merging of trust into our experiences? When we are babies, trust is a gift. When we grow older trust is a choice. The shock of terrible things often jolts us out of the gift of trust and in that time we need to do the much harder thing. We need to choose to trust. Perhaps we are deceived by evil that tells us we cannot trust God. Perhaps we deceive ourselves by thinking we have control over everything and that we should trust ourselves. Perhaps we choose to trust money, or medicine, or science, or some person. Or perhaps we choose to trust our own philosophic worldview that God isn’t there or God can’t be trusted or God is mean. We choose.
The God that saves and heals us assures us that it is never too late to change the direction of faith. We can infuse trust into the chart of our life. We can even go back to our experience line and rewrite it with trust. We all have times when the foundation of trust is shaken to the core. Times perhaps of abuse, or of a sudden death, or of health crisis, or joblessness. A path to grace goes back to revisit that time and ask God to breath trust in God into that terrible time. This is one of those things that finally, after so long, we can look back and see the blessings, the gifts, the providences and look for the presence of God in the whole time line of our experience.
There were once two little girls who were watching their grandmother read the bible. And one little girl says to the other, “Why does Grandma read the bible so much?” The older little girl says, “I think she is studying for her final exam.” Maybe. Or maybe the older woman was rereading her life in the light of trust and faith. Can we go back after so long to finally get the trust and see the grace of God throughout our life? I think that is one of the spiritual tasks God wants us to do. It would have been better if we had lived our life trusting as each new experience comes in. If we did we would have this lovely purple high line of trust and experience flowing through life. But sometimes what we need to do is to circle back and to re-see our lives through the eyes of God’s graces.
I have a film clip that helps to illustrate this spiritual task of a life review in trust and spiritual insight. This clip is taken from the film, “The Immortal Beloved” which is a story about Beethoven’s life. At the very end of Beethoven’s life he wrote his ninth symphony, which includes the Ode to Joy. One of the things that perhaps broke Beethoven’s trust was his early experience with a brutal father. Beethoven’s father was an alcoholic and would beat him. In this film clip Beethoven is deaf, standing before the orchestra as they play his ninth symphony. He is replaying this God given music though a night in his life as he ran from his father and experienced the glory of God in a pond out in the country. He is replaying that experience and I think this illustrates how trust in the God who created the universe can break into our life in significant ways. At the end of this boys run from his father through woods and paths. The boy lies down in the pond. He lies in the pond in which all the stars are reflected and looks us at this infinite starry sky. In this moment that boy understands that he is one part of this magnificent creation. The boy touches the stars and the stars are in him and around him. This is how God heals us. This is how God uses one starry night to remind us that we are part of God’s wonderful creation. We are not alone, but the stars of all God’s beloved souls surround us too.
God wants us to wash all our experiences in life with grace and love. Why do we struggle so long before we experience God’s grace? Because we don’t live life with trust though all our experiences. But it is never too late to ask God to help us choose to trust. Amen.
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