Scripture: John 13:34
In the very early hours of Friday
morning, that cold and remorseless ghost that we call Tragedy paid a visit to
Aurora, Colorado. The images that have
emerged from those events have come to feel all too familiar. In a sense, it seems remarkable that after
Columbine and the Oklahoma City bombing and 911 and the Virginia Tech shootings
and the massacre at the Norwegian youth camp that we have retained our capacity
to be shocked by madness and violence.
What happens next—what is happening
now—has become fairly predictable. We
learn the terrible details of how the events unfolded; and, at some point, we
conclude that we cannot bear to know any more.
We scour the evidence to try to understand how someone could inflict so
much pain on so many innocent people; and we realize that—even after all the
psychological, social, and other explanations have been offered—we cannot
understand. We weep for the victims and
suffer with their loved ones and mourn with the community; and, all the while—let
us be honest—we hold something of ourselves back, so that the storms of
irredeemable grief do not overtake us.
As people of faith, we face hard questions;
we read them on the Internet and in newspapers, we hear them on talk radio, we are
confronted with them by our friends, we stumble over them in our own
hearts. How could God let this
happen? Why would God allow such evil to
exist? Why didn’t God protect the
innocent? What of those who somehow
managed to escape injury—did God intervene on their behalf? If so, then why did God choose them and not
others? In light of events like these,
how can we believe in any God at all—let along a God of love and compassion?
Over the years, I have prayerfully tried
to work toward answers that make sense to me.
I believe in God. But I also
think that belief is a matter of faith and not subject to objective proof. I believe that God made us free and that this
allows for most of the greatest blessings in our lives. But I also believe that this freedom
necessarily entails the possibility that things will go badly—even horribly
badly. I believe that sometimes in the
midst of calamity God does intervene.
But I also believe that He does so for reasons that we cannot hope to
comprehend and that are exclusively His department. And, perhaps most importantly, I believe that
when we suffer, God suffers along with us, beside us, within us. I believe that this is one of the primary messages of the cross.
Maybe your answers sound something like mine;
maybe not; maybe answers still seem elusive to you; maybe the entire project of
looking for answers in this context strikes you as a fool’s errand. I certainly make no special claims of truth for
the answers at which I have arrived. I
like to think that they have come out of a serious and sustained effort, but I
also recognize that laboring and succeeding are not the same things.
This reminds me of one of my first
experiences as a volunteer with Habitat for Humanity. I arrived on site with the skills of a
moderately competent rough carpenter, a collection of well-used tools, and
grand aspirations about doing something meaningful and constructive for a
family that needed a home. When I got
there, however, we were informed that the previous day’s crew had been enthusiastic
but inexperienced. We would, in essence,
be spending almost all of our time taking down everything that they had put up
the day before.
Nobody grumbled about this—or, at least,
grumbled much. Each of us had, at one
time or another, done the same thing—gone at a project with more zeal and
energy than facility or understanding.
Each of us had constructed something in our lives that later did not hold
up to closer scrutiny and inspection. Each
of us had been forced to take apart a thing, a theory, a theology that we had
worked long and hard to put together.
So I have tried to assemble what are for me workable answers to the tough
questions of our faith. But I readily acknowledge
that I cannot possibly have anticipated every strong wind that will assail the little
house that I have built. And I harbor no
illusion that, on questions of faith, I have swung my last hammer or plied my
last crowbar.
In this
regard, I will confess to a lifelong antagonism to the phrase “systematic
theology.” I understand the technical
meaning of the term. But the
juxtaposition of those words has always struck me as embarrassingly arrogant,
perhaps even oxymoronic, and strongly at odds with the human condition. I think the best that any of us can hope for
is to construct a “sort-of-systematic theology”: humble; admittedly imperfect;
constantly subject to revisiting and revising; leaving plenty of room for God
to work in unexpected and inexplicable ways.
But the bigger
problem with trying to answer the most challenging questions of our faith
systematically is that we do not experience them systematically. Something comes over us when we learn about
incidents like those in Aurora, Colorado.
We encounter feelings that are deeply unnerving, unsettling, and chaotic,
and that do not lend themselves to detached intellectual analysis.
In the last
couple of days, I have heard people say things like “I don’t know what has become of the
world” or “We just seem to go from crisis to crisis” or “I feel like everyone
has just gone crazy.” I have heard them
express their dismay in words that remind me of those amazing lines of William
Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart / the center cannot hold / mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world.” I have not heard
a single soul say “Gosh, I wish I had a systematic way to think through the
theological implications of this event.”
That is, I
think, why incidents like these pose such a confounding challenge to us. We long to bring order out of chaos—we are,
after all, the children of the living God that did so and we are made in His image. But we cannot construct unassailable
arguments that tidily dispose of the troubling questions that confront us—because we
are also imperfect human beings who see “through a glass,
darkly.”
Under these circumstances,
where can we go? What can we
believe? What can we cling to? What will help quiet the impulse that the poet Wallace
Stevens called our “blessed rage for order?”
Well, I suggested earlier that after horrible
events like these “what happens next—what is happening now—has become fairly
predictable.” But I only told part of
the story. There is another part to this narrative—one that is equally
predictable, indeed, I would say, divinely inevitable.
As time passes
after such tragedies, we start to hear other things. We hear about the victims who died trying to
protect others. We hear about police
officers who put themselves in harm’s way for strangers. We hear about the members of the community
who have blanketed the survivors and the friends and families of the victims
with support and compassion. We hear
about people from around the country—even around the world—who want to do
whatever they can to help the residents of a town that, earlier last week, they
did even not know existed. In short, we hear the
story of love.
Over and over
again, throughout the gospels, Jesus tells us this story. What is the critical message underlying God’s
commandments? Love. What is the new commandment offered to us? Love.
What do you owe to those you do not know? Love.
How should you deal with your enemies?
Love. What did the Samaritan give
to the stranger on the road? Love. What did they accuse and mock and crucify and
try to kill? Love. What rose again, and lives, and prevails over
the darkness, all the darkness, even the darkness that surrounds us now? Love.
Brothers and
sisters in Christ, do you need something to believe in? Do you need something to hold onto? Do you need a guidepost? Do you need a theology that will bring order
out of the chaos? Do you need the answer
to all of life’s hardest questions? All
these things have been given to you: Love. Love.
Love. Love. Love.
Last weekend,
I wrote a sermon to share with you today.
It obviously is not the one you just heard. On Friday morning, after I learned about the
events in Colorado, I put that sermon aside and started working on a message
that I hoped might offer some small comfort to those who needed it.
I thought that
sermon would feel technical, academic, and strangely disconnected from where our hearts and minds would
probably be this morning. That sermon looks at some of the most
legalistic texts of the Hebrew Bible (the last half of Exodus, and the books of
Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy) and tries to assess their relevance and
significance to twenty-first century Christians. It dwells on lots of textual examples. It teases out half-a-dozen interpretive
difficulties. Perhaps you will hear it
sometime, although based on what I have said you may think that would be a good
idea to sleep in on that particular Sunday.
Here, though, is
what I want you to know. The title of
that sermon was “Blessed Rage for Order.”
The scripture I was going to share with you was John 13:34. If you’ve been paying attention, you will
note that the title of the sermon and the underlying scripture are unchanged—even
though the two sermons could not, on their face, be more different. You see, in the process of building one
sermon, and then tearing it down to construct another one, I discovered that
their central messages were identical.
So I feel as
though God said this to me, and very much wants me to say this to you: “Sure.
Go ahead. Start anywhere you
like. Make this as complicated as you
want. Wander around. Seek.
Feel confused and dismayed and frustrated and sad and even angry.
“But know
this: In the end, you must find your way
to Love. That is where you will discover
the only answers that matter. That is
where you will find the only peace that this life has to offer.
“And, once you
have found Love, hold on. Grasp Love
ferociously, bravely, and tirelessly.
And cling to Love by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in
all the places you can, at all the times you can, for all the people you can,
as long as ever you can.
“It is the
Way.
"It is the Truth.
"It is the Life."
Amen.
