Blessed Rage for Order

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.