Sermon delivered Sunday, June 21, 2015, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN at The Gathering Eucharist (alternative service), 10 a.m., held outside the side courtyard (usually in Otey Hall). 4 Pentecost, Proper 7, Year B (1 Samuel 17:(1a, 4-11, 19-23), 32-49, 2 Cor. 6:1-13, Mark 4:35-41)
The loose offering from this service was designated for the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund, to provide support to the families of the victims of the shootings in Charleston, SC.
Afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger.
Paul’s list in today’s passage from 2 Corinthians of all he has endured for the sake of the Gospel is not exactly a great selling point for following Jesus. “Come join us, and you too can experience afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger!” Oh goodie, where do I sign up?
Many of us often think that if we are following God and doing all the right things, no harm will come to us, and perhaps it’s not surprising we think this way, since there are many parts of the scriptures that affirm this correlation between good behavior or righteousness and prosperity and safety. Countless times throughout the “wisdom literature” of the Bible, which includes the books of Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the psalms, we hear some version of the idea that the righteous will prosper and the wicked will perish, that those who follow God will be rewarded and those who do not will be punished. That certainly sounds like an appealing system, one where our experiences are predictable and directly related to our actions, where people “get what they deserve,” so to speak, where the world is just.
But the reality of life is often quite different. It is easy to claim from an abstract philosophical perspective that we will be rewarded if we do good and punished if we do bad, but often our experiences don’t line up with those beliefs. A pillar of the community who has supported countless people and changed lives receives a diagnosis of a life-threatening illness and is dead within six months. A tornado drops out of nowhere and destroys the home of a young, struggling family who had just managed to purchase their first house. A young man from my hometown in South Carolina walks into a church in Charleston and kills nine people while they are gathered for prayer and Bible study.
Our reaction when we encounter such tragedies is often, “Why me?” or “Why them?”– especially if we think we or they were good people who didn’t “deserve” this. We can see this reaction from the disciples in today’s Gospel passage. Despite the fact that they have done everything “right” by following Jesus and doing what he asked in getting into the boat to cross to the other side of the lake, they are indignant with him when they encounter calamity along the way. When a storm threatens to capsize their boat, they wake up Jesus with the accusing statement, “Do you not care that we are perishing?” This is often our reaction to what we see as undeserved suffering. “What did I ever do to you, God? Do you not CARE that we are suffering? Why don’t you do something to stop it?” But our passage from 2 Corinthians offers another approach.
The suffering Paul and his companions experienced is not insignificant. We’re not talking about so-called “first world problems” like getting pickles on their sandwiches when they asked for no pickles, or their houses being so big they had to get two wireless routers. We’re talking some pretty horrific things -- afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, and hunger – and yet, he nonetheless proclaims that even in the midst of such suffering, they are truly blessed. No matter how awful their circumstances may appear from the outside, they are able to continue to praise God because they know the paradoxical truth of the Gospel, that through suffering can come new life, that there can be blessings even in the most unspeakable suffering. Although they are punished, they are not killed; although they are sorrowful, they always rejoice even in the midst of it; although they are poor, they are making many rich – maybe not literally, but in the truest sense of the word, through spiritual transformation; although they have nothing by physical standards, they actually possess everything that matters by spiritual standards through their faith in Jesus Christ and the assurance of new life that they have through him. No matter what people may say about them or what suffering they might encounter, their faith is not shaken.
Our passage from the Hebrew Bible today also gives us an example of keeping the faith in the midst of adversity. In the classic story of David and Goliath, David does not cower before a seemingly unconquerable obstacle. Though he is young and small and by all external standards seems a poor match for the giant warrior Goliath, he steps forward and agrees to meet Goliath’s challenge, trusting that God is with him despite his youth and lack of experience in battle.
Paul’s inspiring proclamation of faith and David’s heroism stand in direct contrast to the disciples in the Gospel passage, who panic in the face of the storm, who expect Jesus to keep them from ever suffering, who cannot trust that they will come through the storm with God’s help.
Where are you in these stories? Are you cowering with the disciples in the boat or proclaiming faith boldly in the midst of adversity with Paul? Are you like the disciples indignant that trouble has come their way, or like David striding confidently forward with only a few stones to defend himself?
Those of us who have had the good fortune of not experiencing much pain and suffering in this life are more likely to find ourselves cowering and indignant with the disciples in the boat when trouble comes our way. But those of us who have been people of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3) are likely to know something about what it takes to muster up courage and faith in the midst of adversity.
This weekend, the world is watching and mourning with our brothers and sisters in the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, after the horrific shootings there on Wednesday night. Unfortunately, our brothers and sisters in the black church are no strangers to suffering and grief. Their list of all they have endured over the years in terms of violence and intimidation could rival Paul’s list from 2 Corinthians, especially during the years of slavery and the civil rights movement: afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger. This list, foreign to so many of us in predominantly white churches, is all too familiar to many of our brothers and sisters in the black churches. And yet, somehow, many of them have managed to draw upon a deep reserve of faith that has seen them through these adversities and kept their hearts from being hardened by resentment and hate. On Friday, at the court hearing of shooter Dylann Roof, family members of those killed gathered to speak to him and told him they forgave him. What kind of faith gives you the strength to look your mother or son’s killer in the eyes and say, “I forgive you, may God have mercy on your soul?” Faith that has been refined through hardship; faith that knows that hate will never drive out hate, only love can do that; faith that knows that God can make a way where there is no way, as the saying goes.
And that’s exactly the kind of faith Paul and David had in our readings for today. They put their trust in God and drew upon the resources they had to find a way when many would have said there was no way.
In the story of David and Goliath, there is one small detail I have always overlooked that I’d like to lift up as a metaphor for our own abilities to overcome adversity. After rejecting Saul’s heavy armor because he wasn’t used to it, David goes to the river and picks out five smooth stones that he carries with them as his only weapons as he goes out to meet Goliath. Rather than putting his trust in the sword and spear and javelin, as his enemies did, David put his trust in God, and walks out completely unprotected, holding only a few stones. But those seemingly ineffective weapons actually give him victory over the giant.
The question in our walk of faith is not if we will suffer, but when. It’s not, “What can we do to avoid suffering?”, but, “How will we deal with suffering when it comes?” What resources will we draw upon to enable us to be able to say with the members of Emmanuel AME and the apostle Paul, “we are punished, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything”? Those resources might be our faith, the scriptures, our friends and families, a good counselor or spiritual director, spiritual practices that ground and center us, a special place we can go that brings us peace and comfort, or any number of other things. Those resources are the “stones” in our arsenal, or in our “toolkit,” if you prefer a less violent metaphor, that we put in our shepherd’s bag to take with us as we walk boldly toward the obstacles and the adversities that come our way.
What are your five smooth stones that you take with you to confront the adversities in your life? What resources help you to defeat the giant enemies in your spiritual walk?
In your bulletins you may have noticed a yellow piece of paper labeled, “My Five Smooth Stones.” If you noticed it, you probably had no idea what that was about, but now it should all be becoming clear to you. I’d like to invite you all to take a few moments to reflect on what your five smooth stones are (it doesn’t have to be exactly five; it could be more or less) that equip you to face adversity with faith and courage. And as you do that, I’ll be passing around this bowl full of candy stones, and ask you to each take a few to remind you of those resources in your lives that keep you strong. And if you’re missing any resources or think of ones you don’t have, make a commitment to reaching out and establishing those support systems for yourselves so you will be ready for the next giant or storm that comes your way.
Showing posts with label problem of evil. Show all posts
Showing posts with label problem of evil. Show all posts
Sunday, June 21, 2015
Sunday, July 20, 2014
Parable of the wheat and the weeds: Let God be the judge
Sermon delivered Sunday, July 20, 2014 (6th Sunday After Pentecost, Year A, Proper 11), at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, TN (Romans 8:12-25, Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43).
“Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?”
This question from the parable in today’s Gospel reading gives voice to one of the oldest questions known to humanity. If God is good and intends good for the world, why do bad things happen? It is the classic “problem of evil,” the problem of why evil exists if there is an all-powerful and all-good God in control of the world.
There are two aspects to the problem of evil: one is the question of why people do bad things, and the other is the question of why bad things happen outside of human initiative: natural disasters and the like, things that no person or people caused to happen and so they are called “acts of God” by the insurance companies because there is no one else to blame. Today’s parable deals with the first aspect of the problem of evil: why people do bad things, or why there are “bad people,” so to speak, in our world.
The answer we get from the parable is that the bad people, the “weeds” in our world, to follow the parable’s analogy, are put there by the “evil one,” or the devil. According to the parable, God only planted the good seeds; the weeds were planted by an enemy trying to sabotage God’s harvest. This explanation gets God off the hook in that it attributes responsibility for the existence of the “bad people,” the “weeds,” to someone other than God, but the question still remains as to why God allows these weeds to continue to grow in his field – why not go out and pull them up? In fact, that’s exactly what the slaves in the parable suggest – “Do you want us to go and gather them?” they ask about the weeds. But the master says “no, because in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” He instructs them to let the two grow together until the harvest, at which time they will separate the wheat and the weeds.
In the original Greek, the word translated as “weed” in this parable does not mean just any weed in general, but a specific plant, most likely a plant called bearded darnel [1]. The darnel plant is a weed that is bitter and mildly toxic, but in its early stages it looks almost identical to wheat, so that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart [2]. This is why the master says that in gathering the weeds the slaves would uproot the wheat along with them – they wouldn’t be able to tell what was wheat and what was weeds. It is only after the plant has reached maturity that the darnel turns a slightly different color and is distinguishable from the wheat. But by then, the roots of the two plants have become intertwined and it would be impossible to uproot one without uprooting the other: so the master’s solution is a wise one: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest,” and at the harvest the two can be separated. The wheat and the weeds are allowed to coexist together for the good of the wheat – so that the wheat is not destroyed accidentally in the attempt to destroy the weeds.
Thus, the parable’s answer as to why bad people are allowed to coexist along with good people is twofold: first, it is often impossible to distinguish the two. We can’t always tell which people are the “wheat” and which are the “weeds” in the fields of our lives. Only God truly knows, the God who, as our psalm says, knows us intimately, all our thoughts and motivations and desires.
Secondly, it would be impossible to get rid of the “bad people” without also harming the good – a truth that we see illustrated in the way most of our armed conflicts play out in this world. Every time we as human beings try to “kill the bad people,” we usually wind up killing a lot of innocent people along with them, the so-called “collateral damage” of war. But the master in the parable is not willing to take the risk of “collateral damage.” He knows that every grain of wheat in that field is precious to him and wants to bring them all to the harvest.
And so, we are asked to have a lot of patience, and a lot of trust. Paul says in our reading from Romans that “we hope for what we do not see,” and we “wait for it with patience.” Sometimes when we look around us and we see the weeds growing along with the wheat, we can feel like there is no justice, there is no order or purpose, there is no God. But we are asked to trust that although the wicked seem to prosper and we do not yet see justice in this world, that ultimately God will straighten things out in the end. It is easy to be tempted to take matters into our own hands and try to pull up what we think are the “weeds” in the world around us, but in doing so we may actually do more harm than good. This parable is as much a warning against being judgmental as it is an answer to the problem of evil. We cannot distinguish the wheat from the weeds, so we have to trust the one who knows us the most intimately to make that call.
And even though Jesus explains the parable by saying that the “good seed” are “the children of the kingdom” and the “weeds” are the “children of the evil one,” I’m not so sure that there isn’t a bit of “good seed” and a bit of “weeds” inside each one of us. Our myths, both religious and secular, tend to split the world into the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” but I think a more accurate word would be that there is a bit of “good guy” and “bad guy” in each one of us. Although the moralisms of the Bible always assume there are two clear-cut categories of people, “the righteous” and “the wicked,” the actual people in the Bible are hardly ever so cut and dried. Take Jacob, for example. In our passages from the Hebrew scriptures over the past few weeks, we’ve been reading along in the history of the people of Israel, starting with Abraham and Sarah and moving along through their descendants, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau. Just last week we saw Jacob, the man after whom the entire people of Israel comes to be named, cheating his brother out of his birthright. Not exactly hero behavior, is it? Two chapters after that story, Jacob also steals his father’s blessing from his brother Esau. While his father is on his deathbed, Jacob can think of nothing but tricking him into doing something for his own personal gain. And then this week we have a nice story about Jacob encountering the Lord at Bethel, where God tells him that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you,” this man who was a such a liar and a cheater! Although Jacob had a lot of unsavory personality traits, God allowed the wheat and the weeds to grow together in Jacob until the harvest. (We can only hope that God straightened Jacob out for all his dishonest dealings when the time came for him to meet his maker!)
The Jewish tradition teaches that inside each one of us is the yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, and the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil, and both those inclinations compete for our attention. Our spiritual task is to choose to follow our yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, rather than the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil. If we apply this understanding to the parable of the wheat and the weeds, perhaps it tells us that the reason God does not do away with what we think are the bad parts of ourselves is that in uprooting those parts of us, he would also uproot and destroy the good parts of us. And maybe, just maybe, those thoughts and actions that we think are “weeds” might just be wheat. Perhaps we’re not any better at telling apart the good from the bad inside ourselves than we are at telling it apart in others. And so, we leave it to God to do the judging – about what is “good” and “evil” in other people and about what is “good” and “evil” in ourselves, trusting that at the final harvest, the One who knows all of our innermost thoughts will separate the weeds from the wheat.
---
[1] Nolland, John. The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text. (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), p. 545. Accessed online via Google Books, 15 Jul 2014.
[2] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer, July 20, 2014 (Proper 11A).
“Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?”
This question from the parable in today’s Gospel reading gives voice to one of the oldest questions known to humanity. If God is good and intends good for the world, why do bad things happen? It is the classic “problem of evil,” the problem of why evil exists if there is an all-powerful and all-good God in control of the world.
There are two aspects to the problem of evil: one is the question of why people do bad things, and the other is the question of why bad things happen outside of human initiative: natural disasters and the like, things that no person or people caused to happen and so they are called “acts of God” by the insurance companies because there is no one else to blame. Today’s parable deals with the first aspect of the problem of evil: why people do bad things, or why there are “bad people,” so to speak, in our world.
The answer we get from the parable is that the bad people, the “weeds” in our world, to follow the parable’s analogy, are put there by the “evil one,” or the devil. According to the parable, God only planted the good seeds; the weeds were planted by an enemy trying to sabotage God’s harvest. This explanation gets God off the hook in that it attributes responsibility for the existence of the “bad people,” the “weeds,” to someone other than God, but the question still remains as to why God allows these weeds to continue to grow in his field – why not go out and pull them up? In fact, that’s exactly what the slaves in the parable suggest – “Do you want us to go and gather them?” they ask about the weeds. But the master says “no, because in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them.” He instructs them to let the two grow together until the harvest, at which time they will separate the wheat and the weeds.
In the original Greek, the word translated as “weed” in this parable does not mean just any weed in general, but a specific plant, most likely a plant called bearded darnel [1]. The darnel plant is a weed that is bitter and mildly toxic, but in its early stages it looks almost identical to wheat, so that it is nearly impossible to tell the two apart [2]. This is why the master says that in gathering the weeds the slaves would uproot the wheat along with them – they wouldn’t be able to tell what was wheat and what was weeds. It is only after the plant has reached maturity that the darnel turns a slightly different color and is distinguishable from the wheat. But by then, the roots of the two plants have become intertwined and it would be impossible to uproot one without uprooting the other: so the master’s solution is a wise one: “Let both of them grow together until the harvest,” and at the harvest the two can be separated. The wheat and the weeds are allowed to coexist together for the good of the wheat – so that the wheat is not destroyed accidentally in the attempt to destroy the weeds.
Thus, the parable’s answer as to why bad people are allowed to coexist along with good people is twofold: first, it is often impossible to distinguish the two. We can’t always tell which people are the “wheat” and which are the “weeds” in the fields of our lives. Only God truly knows, the God who, as our psalm says, knows us intimately, all our thoughts and motivations and desires.
Secondly, it would be impossible to get rid of the “bad people” without also harming the good – a truth that we see illustrated in the way most of our armed conflicts play out in this world. Every time we as human beings try to “kill the bad people,” we usually wind up killing a lot of innocent people along with them, the so-called “collateral damage” of war. But the master in the parable is not willing to take the risk of “collateral damage.” He knows that every grain of wheat in that field is precious to him and wants to bring them all to the harvest.
And so, we are asked to have a lot of patience, and a lot of trust. Paul says in our reading from Romans that “we hope for what we do not see,” and we “wait for it with patience.” Sometimes when we look around us and we see the weeds growing along with the wheat, we can feel like there is no justice, there is no order or purpose, there is no God. But we are asked to trust that although the wicked seem to prosper and we do not yet see justice in this world, that ultimately God will straighten things out in the end. It is easy to be tempted to take matters into our own hands and try to pull up what we think are the “weeds” in the world around us, but in doing so we may actually do more harm than good. This parable is as much a warning against being judgmental as it is an answer to the problem of evil. We cannot distinguish the wheat from the weeds, so we have to trust the one who knows us the most intimately to make that call.
And even though Jesus explains the parable by saying that the “good seed” are “the children of the kingdom” and the “weeds” are the “children of the evil one,” I’m not so sure that there isn’t a bit of “good seed” and a bit of “weeds” inside each one of us. Our myths, both religious and secular, tend to split the world into the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” but I think a more accurate word would be that there is a bit of “good guy” and “bad guy” in each one of us. Although the moralisms of the Bible always assume there are two clear-cut categories of people, “the righteous” and “the wicked,” the actual people in the Bible are hardly ever so cut and dried. Take Jacob, for example. In our passages from the Hebrew scriptures over the past few weeks, we’ve been reading along in the history of the people of Israel, starting with Abraham and Sarah and moving along through their descendants, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Esau. Just last week we saw Jacob, the man after whom the entire people of Israel comes to be named, cheating his brother out of his birthright. Not exactly hero behavior, is it? Two chapters after that story, Jacob also steals his father’s blessing from his brother Esau. While his father is on his deathbed, Jacob can think of nothing but tricking him into doing something for his own personal gain. And then this week we have a nice story about Jacob encountering the Lord at Bethel, where God tells him that “all the families of the earth shall be blessed in you,” this man who was a such a liar and a cheater! Although Jacob had a lot of unsavory personality traits, God allowed the wheat and the weeds to grow together in Jacob until the harvest. (We can only hope that God straightened Jacob out for all his dishonest dealings when the time came for him to meet his maker!)
The Jewish tradition teaches that inside each one of us is the yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, and the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil, and both those inclinations compete for our attention. Our spiritual task is to choose to follow our yatzer ha-tov, the inclination to do good, rather than the yatzer ha-rah, the inclination to do evil. If we apply this understanding to the parable of the wheat and the weeds, perhaps it tells us that the reason God does not do away with what we think are the bad parts of ourselves is that in uprooting those parts of us, he would also uproot and destroy the good parts of us. And maybe, just maybe, those thoughts and actions that we think are “weeds” might just be wheat. Perhaps we’re not any better at telling apart the good from the bad inside ourselves than we are at telling it apart in others. And so, we leave it to God to do the judging – about what is “good” and “evil” in other people and about what is “good” and “evil” in ourselves, trusting that at the final harvest, the One who knows all of our innermost thoughts will separate the weeds from the wheat.
---
[1] Nolland, John. The Gospel of Matthew: A Commentary on the Greek Text. (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), p. 545. Accessed online via Google Books, 15 Jul 2014.
[2] Dick Donovan, Sermon Writer, July 20, 2014 (Proper 11A).
Sunday, October 21, 2012
Shifting from a human-centered to a God-centered view of the universe
Sermon delivered Sunday, Oct. 21, 2012, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Franklin, Tenn.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)
As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.
“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”
And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”
He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.
Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.
Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:
“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)
In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.
Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.
Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.
Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.
In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.
Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”
There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.
21 Pentecost, Proper 24, Year B (Job 38:1-7, 34-41; Psalm 104:1-9, 25, 37b)
As we continue in our reading from Job this Sunday, we get to the part where God finally responds to Job’s cries of despair. And, interestingly enough, God does not directly address any of Job’s complaints or questions about the injustice of Job’s suffering or the senseless suffering in the wider world. Instead, God’s answer to Job is a creation story.
“Why has all this pain come upon me for no reason?” Job cries, “And what about all those orphans and widows starving out there, and all the wars, and the people who exploit and abuse others and get away with it? I demand an answer!”
And God replies, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Can you create lightning and make it rain? Can you provide food for all the creatures of the earth?”
He draws Job’s attention to the intricate workings of the wider world outside of Job’s small realm of existence and reminds Job that Job is not God, nor does the entire world revolve around Job. The story of Job seems to be suggesting that one possible solution to the “problem of evil,” the question of why suffering exists if the world is created by a benevolent God, is to shift our perspective from a human-centered point of view to a God-centered point of view. To “zoom out,” if you will, to see the bigger picture of how all the elements of the natural world fit together in an amazingly intricate and awe-inspiring configuration, of which humans are just one part. It can be humbling but comforting to realize that we are not the center of the universe.
Sewanee biologist David Haskell recently published a book called The Forest Unseen, in which he records his observations of one square meter of forest on the Cumberland Plateau over the course of a year. Although chock-full of scientific facts and figures, his approach is contemplative: his goal is to “search for the universal within the infinitesimally small” in the same way as Tibetan monks see the entire universe within the circular meditation aids called mandalas that they create out of colored sand, or in the same way as the Christian mystic Julian of Norwich saw the divine love and design of God in meditating on a hazelnut.
Whether describing the atomic physics behind the consistent hexagonal shape of snowflakes or the ways in which plants warn other plants about approaching insect predators by sending out chemical signals, Haskell’s meditations make fascinating scientific insights about the interconnectedness of all life accessible to a general audience. Although Haskell speaks of the inner workings of cells and organisms evolving through natural selection, not of God “tilting the waterskins of the heavens” to make it rain, his meditations on the greater workings of the universe put things in perspective for me in a similar way to what I think the story of Job intends to communicate in imagining God’s response to Job as an account of creation. Meditating on the wonders of creation reminds us that we are part of something much bigger than any of our individual lives.
Other authors of biblical texts turn to creation narratives in times of suffering as well. The “Song of the Three Young Men,” one of the canticles optional for use at Morning Prayer, is a passage from the Old Testament Book of Daniel that appears in the Greek version of the text but not the Hebrew. It details the song sung by Shadrach, Meshach, and Abendego after they are thrown in the fiery furnace for refusing to worship the golden image created by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon. Significantly, their song in a moment of persecution and near-death is an extensive meditation on creation and a call for all creation to praise and worship the Lord:
“Glorify the Lord, every shower of rain and fall of dew, all winds and fire and heat,” they sing. “Storm clouds and thunderbolts, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever… Glorify the Lord, O mountains and hills and all that grows upon the earth… O springs of water, seas and streams, O whales and all that move in the waters. All birds of the air, glorify the Lord, praise him and highly exalt him forever.”(BCP 88-89)
In the face of possible death, they sing about the glories of creation. They recognize that the vastness of creation over which God is sovereign is much bigger than their individual lives and that the created order will continue to give glory to God, whether or not they personally survive to continue to give witness to him.
Many of the psalms also recount beautiful creation narratives, sometimes in the midst of a lament or struggle with God’s apparent absence or silence. Today’s psalm, 104, is a song entirely of thanksgiving and praise, with no verses of lament, but taken within the entire corpus of the psalms as a whole, they represent a body of poetic literature that both cries out to God in times of despair and finds hope through remembering and recounting the sacred stories of Israel’s history and recalling God’s creation of the world. During times of suffering, when, like Job, we wonder where God is and cannot feel his presence, we remember the places we’ve seen and experienced God in the past to find comfort – and creation or the natural world around us seems to be one of the primary places that many people, both ancients and moderns, find testament to God’s presence.
Meditating on creation can be comforting because it relieves us of any notion that it is our job to rule the world, to manage or control or “fix” things. Although we see many things that may seem wrong or broken with the world, we are reminded that that “God is God and we are not,” and that can be a very liberating thought for those of us who sometimes feel like Atlas, holding the weight of the world on our shoulders.
Meditating on creation can also help us to see that what may seem evil or horrific from one perspective might actually be quite magnificent and awe-inspiring when seen in the greater scheme of things. Watching a lion devour a gazelle might seem to be cruel, and certainly that moment is one of great suffering for the gazelle, but in the death of the gazelle comes nourishment for the lion. And the lion’s eventual death will provide nourishment for vultures or other birds of prey. Nothing is wasted. The energy bound up in each of these living creatures will not cease to exist, but be transformed, serving another purpose in the great cycle of life that many cultures and religions regard as sacred.
In leading a recent Quiet Day (9/28/12, at St. Mary's Sewanee) on the Song of the Three Young Men, that canticle of creation from Morning Prayer, Episcopal priest and author Barbara Cawthorne Crafton commented on the peace that comes from spending time meditating on creation. “The more time we spend with plants and animals, the more at peace we will be with our own end,” she said. Observing the cycle of life reminds us that, as we say on Ash Wednesday, we are dust and to dust we shall return.
God answers Job’s cries of despair with a song of creation because an awareness of our own mortality and our place in the great cycle of life has the potential to bring great comfort. And there is some indication in the text that Job does find comfort in reflecting on these things.
Although most translations of the final chapter of Job, which we will read in the lectionary next week, say that Job responds to God’s speech by repenting, by apologizing and “taking back” everything he’d said before, Hebrew Bible scholar Rebecca Abts Wright suggests a different translation. She is convinced that Job never repents, since he has done nothing wrong of which to repent – and even God acknowledges this in the final chapter when he says that Job has spoken truth about God while Job’s friends have not. Instead, she points out that the root of the Hebrew word translated as “repent,” while it can mean “to change the mind,” is never used in calls for people to repent elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. The root also means “to comfort,” and indeed, that same word is translated as “comfort” just a few verses later when Job’s relatives come to him and comfort him after the ordeal is over. Wright suggests that rather than translating the final verse of Job’s response to God’s speech as “therefore, I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes,” it could more accurately be translated as “therefore, I melt away and am comforted concerning dust and ashes.”
There’s a very different message there if she is correct. In Wright’s interpretation, the message is not that Job gets put in his place for questioning God and submits after receiving a divine “smack down.” Instead, after being reminded of the vastness of God’s creation and his small place in the grand scheme of things, he finally “lets go,” so to speak – that’s what I hear in the “melt away” part – and is “comforted concerning dust and ashes” – he is comforted about the fact of his own mortality and the human condition. He is reminded that he is dust and to dust he shall return, and he is “at peace with his own end.” He is comforted knowing that God is in control of the universe, and that God has heard his cries of pain, even if he does not understand the reasons for his suffering.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself struggling with something difficult, you might remember God’s answer to Job from the whirlwind and take a step outside to contemplate the movement of an ant on the pavement or the intricacies of the veins of the leaves on the trees around you. Step out of your mind for a moment and contemplate the bigger picture of God’s wondrous creation. Cultivating a sense of awe and respect for creation over time may bring you deepening waves of peace and a holy sense of connectedness with all life.
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