Romans 8:26-39
At first go-through, the words of this passage sound tame and sweet. Nothing can separate us from God. All things work for good. They sound like benign platitudes: It’s all okay, This happened for a reason, It’s all a part of God’s plan. Oftentimes, these well-meant words, are empty. A baby just died and that’s God’s plan? Yet another person has been diagnosed with cancer and we’re supposed to accept that “all things work for good”? A lot of things are down right awful and unacceptable.
For people of faith, the concept of theodicy is an important one. Theodicy is a relatively new term for me it’s a “seminary” word, so don’t feel bad if you don’t recognize it yet. It’s the word used to talk about God’s role and action in relation to suffering. It’s Greek: Theo: for God, dicy: meaning justice. God’s justice. Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good things happen to bad people? How can God allow suffering? The question of whether or not God causes illness or disaster or healing and blessing are all issues of theodicy
Last summer, I worked as a chaplain in a hospital in Atlanta. I spoke to a very religious man one evening in the hospital lobby. He told me how his wife was in the hospital recovering from a stroke. To my efforts of sympathy he said “oh well, she had it coming.” He seemed like a loving, concerned husband. Why was he pleased with his wife’s suffering? He continued to explain that he and his wife worked as evangelists, they were traveling preachers and his wife had not been living up to her full potential. He had known this for quite some time, and this stroke was God’s way of giving his wife the wake-up call that she needed.
Unfortunately, when we try to figure out where God is in our sufferings, sometimes this is the answer that we get. God is trying to tell us something, trying to wake us or scare us or elicit some sort of desirable response out of us miserable creatures. We know that we are frequently deaf to God’s voice and we think God must be like an impatient two year old who suddenly has to throw something at our head to get our attention. Or God is the abusive partner who chooses to use physical violence to “get the point across.” Or God is a teacher who makes us go through trials to learn the hard way.
Friends, this is not a faithful portrayal of God. Sometimes, we’re just wrong. We can’t look at natural, national, and personal disasters and say “well, they had it coming.”
But what do we do with God? God has to be in this mess somewhere and if not causing it, then what is God doing? Are we just on our own, hugging our free will tightly to our chests?
In Romans 8, Paul tries to be comforting, but slips in a few places. Toward the end of the scripture, he quotes Psalm 44. In this passage, the Israelites lament that they are being killed like sheep for the slaughter for God’s sake. And Paul says, that even in these situations, we are not separated form God. The problem, though, is that Psalm 44 actually places God to blame. The Israelites aren’t just being killed because of God, instead, they are being killed BY God. God is handing them over to their enemies. God is wielding the sword against them. They aren’t worried about being too far away from God, instead, they are feeling too close to God and to God’s sword.
Paul’s message, is that even in the midst of all the terrible things we can imagine, God is with us. Indeed, in Jesus, we have Emmanuel: “God with us.” Nothing we can do, nothing that can happen, can put distance between us and God. No matter what, God is with us and will never leave us.
Paul also points to Jesus’ death as an example of the depth of the gifts that God will give us. This image is also mixed. Like the slaughter of the Israelites, Jesus’ death is also portrayed as God’s divine action. In some interpretations, God needs the death of Jesus to appease a blood sacrifice. In order for us to get to the resurrection, we need death first. But does that mean that God needed Jesus’ death for the sake of that death? It helps to remember that Jesus faced his death willingly. He wasn’t thrilled about it, but he didn’t see any alternative. Remember, too, that Jesus is also God. They are one and the same being. The cross is what happened to Jesus, when he lived his crazy, radical life, and the powers that be were threatened. The divine met humanity and humanity sentenced it to death.
On the cross, instead of an abusive God, we see God in the midst of suffering—deep down in the lowest point of history . .
As Christians, this is our big fat paradox: a loving God who allows the death of Christ.
A cruel God would have left Jesus on the cross, end of story. That would be the lesson, life is hard and in the end you die. But God doesn’t stop there, and the cross is not the point of the story. The point is 3 days later. The point is the resurrection, the eternal life and union with God. God watches that violence with us, and then works to redeem it in the resurrection. In death, we cannot be separated from God.
Theologian Paul Tillich writes that “Faith in divine Providence is the faith that nothing can prevent us from fulfilling the ultimate meaning of our existence . . . that there is a creative and saving possibility implied in every situation, which cannot be destroyed by any event. . . that the daemonic and destructive forces within ourselves and our world can never have an unbreakable grasp upon us, and that the bond which connects us with the fulfilling love can never be disrupted.” (The Shaking of the Foundations)
When we look at our lives, at the way things happen, we take the events, and sort them out into the patterns of our lives. We weave them until we have a story of what has happened and how we got here. If anything had been different, this current moment might not exist. And how you feel about the present, will shape how you interpret that path. The bumps may become necessarily, character building teaching moments. But if you’re in a rough place, then those times may still be the cause of your downfall.
If the holy spirit comes in and expresses sighs too deep for words, then God suffers with us. God sighs when we are distressed. God also wishes for a better world.
The other hospital story I’ll share today was that of a father and his two young adult children. The children had had to make the difficult decision of taking their unconscious father off of life support. I stood with them in the room, as the machines were turned off, and waited for a couple of hours, as their father breathed his last ragged breaths. We waited, in the holy space of near death, agonizing, terrible, devastating death. As this brother and sister said goodbye to their last living parent, the spirit of God was in that room. It was not the spirit of the angel of death or the grim reaper anxiously awaiting its prey. It was not that of a God who selfishly needed this man to come live in heaven. It was of God, who mourned with those children who would never again be hugged by their dad.
The same way, in Christ’s death, God was not pleased. God cried that day too. God was happy on Easter. But that does not make suffering pleasing. God does not delight in our suffering and death.
God is present in the tears and the sighs. When we are so helpless that our mouths cannot form a prayer, that is when the Holy Spirit prays for us. God shares our sorrow and gives us comfort.
The point of the resurrection, is that God turned suffering into a thing of beauty and wonder and amazement. God didn’t require a payment in blood, but God took the raw material of a bloody death, and gave us a living savior.
God doesn’t sit down and map out a messy pattern to our lives.
Instead, god has a lot of mess to sort out and weave into a pattern. Like a woman gathering her skirts to sit down to her weaving, weary and heavy, with the toil of the world and the sadness of her task. God pulls out our broken strands, smoothes them, and lovingly weaves them together into a magnificent tapestry. Without the blood and tears, the artwork would not be as beautiful.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Friday, July 11, 2008
Calling
The following is my "Call" story or Faith story or autobiographical statement. I wrote most of it in January 2005 when I was applying to seminary. It took me several weeks. The fun thing about trying to become a minister is the frequent need to tell or write about one's calling to the ministry. It's a deeply personal story of a painful and wonderful journey.
My faith story begins at my baptism with all of the mystery and promise through which my infant self slept. My father is an ordained minister and my mother is his active partner in life and ministry. Church, specifically the United Methodist Church, has always been a natural and familiar part of my life. My presence and participation was always expected, though not particularly forced, and I was happy to perform my role as the perfect daughter. My parents and I form somewhat of a triumvirate. I identify closely with both of them, and in personality and appearance I am a decent reflection of both. Their excuse for only having one child is that “You don’t mess with perfection if you got it right the first time.” I did not really challenge my parents’ faith in my early years. My father has a very active, exhausting faith in God. He never sits still and runs around all day from visiting the sick to running the community food pantry to writing his sermon to changing the oil in our cars. My mother’s faith is somewhat more relaxed and patient. If the answer to the question one is pondering is a fruit that is still hanging on the tree, my mother is likely to look at it for awhile, and then sit by the tree and wait for the fruit to fall. My father, on the other hand, is going to be trying his hardest to climb the tree and pick it or, at the very least, shake the tree with all his might until the prize drops. I tend to be a tree-shaker myself, but I’m trying to cultivate patience, especially as I have come to realize that the answer may not even be in the tree at all.
My childhood was what I would call fairly uneventful. I grew up in the lovely small town of Orange, Virginia. I was an imaginative, fairly content only child. There were no great tragedies that pierced my awareness. My paternal grandparents died when I was old enough only to know that something was wrong and someone was missing. The grief touched me in a mild irritation that my grandfather was not around to kiss me. I spent many hours in the back yard, climbing trees and making up stories to tell myself, always wishing for a big brother.
I usually do not have dramatic, lightening bolt flashes of truth. Inspiration and revelation tends to come in the moments of quiet truth, comfort, relief, happiness. I was always intrigued by the mystery of our stories, of Creation, the Psalms, the birth of Jesus. I loved stories of angels. There was one time when my grandmother heard voices singing a wonderful song that was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place. She claims she heard angels. When I was in third grade, I really wanted my own angel experience. My mother advised me to pray for a sign and so I did. After a while, I forgot about my request, but one morning I awoke to a moving image on my bedroom wall of a laughing, shimmering girl. I was imaginative, but I knew that that was something from outside of my own self. God had given me a glimpse of my guardian angel.
I went to the University of Virginia and basically plowed straight through four years of anthropology and English literature, loving most minutes of study and critique and writing. When I first got to college, it was very important for me to be on my own. I wanted to be as independent as possible and chart my own course of life. I desired a complete separation from my parents and childhood to prove my individuality. While I still felt connected to God, I did not want to participate in a faith community. I entered the Wesley Foundation only a few times in my first year mainly because I had known the director, a fellow Orange county native, for most of my life.
In my classes at UVa, I met brilliant thinkers and new evidence. In my anthropology and cultural criticism courses, I found a new language for expressing the injustices in our world and society. I was better able to understand how we create our own worlds. Our less than wonderful society, national and global, is a combination of many different forces, and is thus something that can be analyzed and understood and eventually improved. I loved studying other cultures and stories, but I most valued the backward light that those stories cast on my own. I didn’t want to go off to document and “preserve” culture, which I think is and ought to be fluid and constantly changing. My concerns were more for the people. Everyone deserves to be able to write her or his own story. I liked the power of stories, which brought my interest in literature and culture together. We create ourselves and our worlds with our words and our stories that can be narratives of power and dominance, or submissiveness, or we can tell stories of hope and action and justice and love.
During Christmas of my second year in college, I experienced a sadness and longing. I felt distant from God and wanted to get closer. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I was hesitant to join a college group, having never been part of a large peer faith group. I wanted genuine grounding and acceptance. I went to the Wesley Foundation and found a welcoming, understanding community that was deeply concerned for caring for our world and each other. I was a cautious participant, and it took many hard months outside of my introverted social comfort zone, but eventually a mission/service trip to Mexico helped form the bonds that would keep me connected to this community even after college. That was one of the first times I can recall feeling absolutely insane trying to explain to boyfriend and friends that I had to go eat and talk and play with people I was unsure of yet strangely drawn. Once back to the church, I reexamined the language of my faith, the things I’d learned to say and memorized. I found that I really liked that language, that’s it’s one that I not only know, but also feel. In a roundabout way, I came to discover that my yearnings to help heal humanity had a great deal in common with Methodist ideas of Social Justice.
I found myself in crisis as my final year of college came to a close. I was happy with my life thus far. I was content with my plan to enter the archaeological field. At this point, God was more of an advisor. I picked my course, planned my life, and God would sign the release papers of approval. However, God started nudging me in a different direction. I was restless as graduation approached. I likened the experience to falling off the edge of a cliff. I had gone to college because that’s what I was supposed to do. But I didn’t have a template for afterwards. I felt I was supposed to go to graduate school or get a real job, but nothing inspired me. As radical as I felt archaeology was, I was depressed by the fact that all of this amazing information is almost only read by other scholars, when it should be out in the general public. I was more involved in the Foundation than ever, participating in Disciple Bible Study and a baptism small group. This intense theological study gave me a thirst for more, and I started entertaining ideas about seminary. Gradually, I began to think more of vocation and the possibility of ordained ministry. I had two very distinct choices before me. There is always grace and promise in the very presence of options. I felt that I could continue with my male, advisor type vision of God, or I could embrace a fuller, complicated, seemingly contradictory vision of God, both male and female, leading and testing. I knew that I hadn’t been living my fullest, God-desired life. I had not been as bold and brave.
My choice, ultimately, came down to courage. Instead of worrying about a serious job, I took a summer internship with the Wesley Foundation’s program Project Transformation. I had the chance to put my faith and action together as I helped to lead day camps for children. Project Transformation gave me the opportunity to work with children and churches and communities and to see firsthand, some of the prejudices that our very churches harbor. Something is wrong when a church will not allow Hispanic children to play in the front lawn for fear of their self-image. It would be terrible indeed if a church was a safe-haven for society’s undesirables.
If a language of love and justice is to be found, it ought to be first in the churches. If we all live our truest lives, out of concern and love and care, the rest will fall into place. The church is where this all makes sense to me. At it’s best, the church community reflects a micro-vision of the world: an inclusive family that takes care of each other, shares a story and a language of God, and holds a responsibility to live as radically as Christ. Church is a place to be known and held, where each question leads to another, until we can shape and test and transform our view of God and ourselves. Being in ministry is a part of being in the church. All members participate in ministry because it’s our call. The least we can do is be willing and available for God.
I spent a couple of years working at Barnes and Noble, figuring myself out, learning to love myself as my own and no one else’s, learning to be more outgoing and confident. I went to Candler in Atlanta for seminary. Married Shawn, graduated, and moved back to Virginia. I know there will always be a learning curve and I’ll always be growing and changing and assessing my self and figuring out where to go next. I’ve learned that most people don’t know what they want out of life, and that is part of the mystery. We are all restless and searching in our own ways and we need each other, we strange, fragile humans. We need to be understood and loved and listened to and held. We need to take care of each other, our coworkers and next door neighbors, and those in other countries. We need to be conscious and careful in our living.
I know that I have followed the God who called to me out of the darkness, and will continue to do so, along my own unique journey that our creator has graciously designed for me.
My faith story begins at my baptism with all of the mystery and promise through which my infant self slept. My father is an ordained minister and my mother is his active partner in life and ministry. Church, specifically the United Methodist Church, has always been a natural and familiar part of my life. My presence and participation was always expected, though not particularly forced, and I was happy to perform my role as the perfect daughter. My parents and I form somewhat of a triumvirate. I identify closely with both of them, and in personality and appearance I am a decent reflection of both. Their excuse for only having one child is that “You don’t mess with perfection if you got it right the first time.” I did not really challenge my parents’ faith in my early years. My father has a very active, exhausting faith in God. He never sits still and runs around all day from visiting the sick to running the community food pantry to writing his sermon to changing the oil in our cars. My mother’s faith is somewhat more relaxed and patient. If the answer to the question one is pondering is a fruit that is still hanging on the tree, my mother is likely to look at it for awhile, and then sit by the tree and wait for the fruit to fall. My father, on the other hand, is going to be trying his hardest to climb the tree and pick it or, at the very least, shake the tree with all his might until the prize drops. I tend to be a tree-shaker myself, but I’m trying to cultivate patience, especially as I have come to realize that the answer may not even be in the tree at all.
My childhood was what I would call fairly uneventful. I grew up in the lovely small town of Orange, Virginia. I was an imaginative, fairly content only child. There were no great tragedies that pierced my awareness. My paternal grandparents died when I was old enough only to know that something was wrong and someone was missing. The grief touched me in a mild irritation that my grandfather was not around to kiss me. I spent many hours in the back yard, climbing trees and making up stories to tell myself, always wishing for a big brother.
I usually do not have dramatic, lightening bolt flashes of truth. Inspiration and revelation tends to come in the moments of quiet truth, comfort, relief, happiness. I was always intrigued by the mystery of our stories, of Creation, the Psalms, the birth of Jesus. I loved stories of angels. There was one time when my grandmother heard voices singing a wonderful song that was familiar, but she couldn’t quite place. She claims she heard angels. When I was in third grade, I really wanted my own angel experience. My mother advised me to pray for a sign and so I did. After a while, I forgot about my request, but one morning I awoke to a moving image on my bedroom wall of a laughing, shimmering girl. I was imaginative, but I knew that that was something from outside of my own self. God had given me a glimpse of my guardian angel.
I went to the University of Virginia and basically plowed straight through four years of anthropology and English literature, loving most minutes of study and critique and writing. When I first got to college, it was very important for me to be on my own. I wanted to be as independent as possible and chart my own course of life. I desired a complete separation from my parents and childhood to prove my individuality. While I still felt connected to God, I did not want to participate in a faith community. I entered the Wesley Foundation only a few times in my first year mainly because I had known the director, a fellow Orange county native, for most of my life.
In my classes at UVa, I met brilliant thinkers and new evidence. In my anthropology and cultural criticism courses, I found a new language for expressing the injustices in our world and society. I was better able to understand how we create our own worlds. Our less than wonderful society, national and global, is a combination of many different forces, and is thus something that can be analyzed and understood and eventually improved. I loved studying other cultures and stories, but I most valued the backward light that those stories cast on my own. I didn’t want to go off to document and “preserve” culture, which I think is and ought to be fluid and constantly changing. My concerns were more for the people. Everyone deserves to be able to write her or his own story. I liked the power of stories, which brought my interest in literature and culture together. We create ourselves and our worlds with our words and our stories that can be narratives of power and dominance, or submissiveness, or we can tell stories of hope and action and justice and love.
During Christmas of my second year in college, I experienced a sadness and longing. I felt distant from God and wanted to get closer. I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted. I was hesitant to join a college group, having never been part of a large peer faith group. I wanted genuine grounding and acceptance. I went to the Wesley Foundation and found a welcoming, understanding community that was deeply concerned for caring for our world and each other. I was a cautious participant, and it took many hard months outside of my introverted social comfort zone, but eventually a mission/service trip to Mexico helped form the bonds that would keep me connected to this community even after college. That was one of the first times I can recall feeling absolutely insane trying to explain to boyfriend and friends that I had to go eat and talk and play with people I was unsure of yet strangely drawn. Once back to the church, I reexamined the language of my faith, the things I’d learned to say and memorized. I found that I really liked that language, that’s it’s one that I not only know, but also feel. In a roundabout way, I came to discover that my yearnings to help heal humanity had a great deal in common with Methodist ideas of Social Justice.
I found myself in crisis as my final year of college came to a close. I was happy with my life thus far. I was content with my plan to enter the archaeological field. At this point, God was more of an advisor. I picked my course, planned my life, and God would sign the release papers of approval. However, God started nudging me in a different direction. I was restless as graduation approached. I likened the experience to falling off the edge of a cliff. I had gone to college because that’s what I was supposed to do. But I didn’t have a template for afterwards. I felt I was supposed to go to graduate school or get a real job, but nothing inspired me. As radical as I felt archaeology was, I was depressed by the fact that all of this amazing information is almost only read by other scholars, when it should be out in the general public. I was more involved in the Foundation than ever, participating in Disciple Bible Study and a baptism small group. This intense theological study gave me a thirst for more, and I started entertaining ideas about seminary. Gradually, I began to think more of vocation and the possibility of ordained ministry. I had two very distinct choices before me. There is always grace and promise in the very presence of options. I felt that I could continue with my male, advisor type vision of God, or I could embrace a fuller, complicated, seemingly contradictory vision of God, both male and female, leading and testing. I knew that I hadn’t been living my fullest, God-desired life. I had not been as bold and brave.
My choice, ultimately, came down to courage. Instead of worrying about a serious job, I took a summer internship with the Wesley Foundation’s program Project Transformation. I had the chance to put my faith and action together as I helped to lead day camps for children. Project Transformation gave me the opportunity to work with children and churches and communities and to see firsthand, some of the prejudices that our very churches harbor. Something is wrong when a church will not allow Hispanic children to play in the front lawn for fear of their self-image. It would be terrible indeed if a church was a safe-haven for society’s undesirables.
If a language of love and justice is to be found, it ought to be first in the churches. If we all live our truest lives, out of concern and love and care, the rest will fall into place. The church is where this all makes sense to me. At it’s best, the church community reflects a micro-vision of the world: an inclusive family that takes care of each other, shares a story and a language of God, and holds a responsibility to live as radically as Christ. Church is a place to be known and held, where each question leads to another, until we can shape and test and transform our view of God and ourselves. Being in ministry is a part of being in the church. All members participate in ministry because it’s our call. The least we can do is be willing and available for God.
I spent a couple of years working at Barnes and Noble, figuring myself out, learning to love myself as my own and no one else’s, learning to be more outgoing and confident. I went to Candler in Atlanta for seminary. Married Shawn, graduated, and moved back to Virginia. I know there will always be a learning curve and I’ll always be growing and changing and assessing my self and figuring out where to go next. I’ve learned that most people don’t know what they want out of life, and that is part of the mystery. We are all restless and searching in our own ways and we need each other, we strange, fragile humans. We need to be understood and loved and listened to and held. We need to take care of each other, our coworkers and next door neighbors, and those in other countries. We need to be conscious and careful in our living.
I know that I have followed the God who called to me out of the darkness, and will continue to do so, along my own unique journey that our creator has graciously designed for me.
Welcome!
I'm Sara Keeling, Associate Pastor at Washington Street UMC in Alexandria, Va. I'm glad you've found me and I hope that we can get to know each other a little better. My hope is to be able to share a little bit of myself--not everything I had for dinner, but more than I will share in my sermons. Please feel free to leave comments, send email, or stop by the office. My door and my inbox are always open. Blessings!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)