This Sacred Romance
Delivered at Madison
Chapel
Madison, Mississippi,
January 20th, 2013
The Second Sunday of
Epiphany
One of the things
often brought up in conversations I have with lapsed or lapsing believers is
about God’s love in the midst of circumstance. Pick a tragedy: the Newtown
shooting; the Aurora shooting; Hurricane Sandy; Hurricane Katrina; mom dying of
cancer; brother dying of AIDS. All of them usually bring out an editorial or
three about the goodness of God and as how a loving God could possibly cause,
allow, or permit such an atrocity to happen.
Just this past
week a prominent atheist writer offered an editorial on how her particular
non-belief system could offer comfort to the families of the dead children and
Sandy Hook Elementary School.[1]
She says, in part, that “When I try to help a loved one losing his mind to
Alzheimer’s, when I see homeless people shivering in the wake of a deadly
storm, when the news media bring me almost obscenely close to the raw grief of
bereft parents, I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an
all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen.” She goes on to argue
that hers is a non-faith that allows her to “concentrate on the fate of this
world — whether that means visiting a friend in a hospital or advocating for
tougher gun control laws — without trying to square things with an unseen
overlord in the next. Atheists do not want to deny religious believers the
comfort of their faith. We do want our fellow citizens to respect our deeply
held conviction that the absence of an afterlife lends a greater, not a lesser,
moral importance to our actions on earth.”
Ultimately,
though, I fear that the editorialist’s argument offers little consolation to
the grieving families and traumatized school and community. Her conclusion, a
quote from Robert Ingersoll, is that “the dead do not suffer.”
Where is God?
Where is the Love of the one we worship? Even in the absence of tragedy and
horror we are often want to wonder at the feeling of plainness and normality of
our lives; we live, it seems from one moment of dejected horror, crying out to
God for mercy or a sign of purpose, to the next moment of joy and celebration
at our achievements.
This
call-and-response rhythm is exhausting. Just when we allow the wounds of one
moment in our lives to stop bleeding, an arrow of outrageous fortune strikes us
afresh. It is no wonder that we are left calling out to God for proof of his
love – this life we live is hard and cruel and dangerous.
Where
is God? Where is his great Love? Is it helpless against the darkness of our
lives? Is the love of God in this world a poor image of the lives we hope to
live when we cross through to whatever is next? Are we practicing, faking,
hoping, dreaming about a God whose love actually has flesh and heart, hands and
hope?
We
get so close sometimes. With every wedding I perform I see just a glimpse of the
love of God – when people touch something beyond their natures to give of their
identities, their future, their very names to another person in that most
intimate moment of hope and love and expectation. I feel it when I miss my
daughter – unfamiliar sensations of want and longing and care – there is
something like the love and longing of God in these new experiences.
How
interesting that we frame our visions of God’s love in terms of weddings and in
the powerful parent-child relationships of Scripture. God calls Ephraim his
child, whom he takes by the hand and teaches to walk; Israel is the bride that
is showered with affection, presented to the world as a beautiful bride and as
a crown for other nations; Jesus himself, the manifestation of God’s love, makes
his miraculous ministry public with the water-to-wine moment at a wedding in
Cana.
There
is no theophany here – there is no Job-like wrangling over whether God is
really loving and present or whether he’s the “unseen overlord in the next
[world].” This is not the image of God we have when children lay murdered or
communities are washed away or when there’s an empty chair at Christmas. This
is Love in the Raw – when we see that our own constructions of Love at its best
are not enough – the wedding in Cana could have overcome the scandal of running
out of wine – but it was at that moment when Jesus launched his journey of Love
and reconciliation between the God who spoke the universe into being and the
people who speak of love as though they have a clue. The contrast is so sharp –
our moments and events of love and sorrow are the frames through which we
understand God’s love. But yet the very activity of Jesus at that wedding, the
very nature of Isaiah’s description of God’s love for the apostate Israel as a
bride to His divine Groom makes our notions of real love seem too limited and
colorless to allow us to speak of God’s.
So
where is God and his great Love? Is it too far beyond us to see? Is it only
made manifest in the man Jesus? Are we just wasting our time fighting over the
scraps of divine intent and interest when we argue over who can marry whom?
Where can I find some of that pure, uncut, divine Love in the midst of Newtown
and Aurora and Columbine and Pearl?
I
think of Jesus’ miracle at the wedding in Cana to be something of an inside
joke. Good scholarship calls this the first of Jesus’ Signs in John, the
inauguration of a program of ministry meant to confirm that Jesus is the
Messiah, the Christ, the savior, and that the reader, too, may become convinced
and believe. When Jesus underhandedly turns the water held in the stone jars of
Jewish traditionalism into the new wine of God’s love, he lets us in on a
secret – God’s love is not found in the event of the wedding, not at the
reception any more than the opposite of God’s love (whatever that would be) is
found in the events of tragedy we live through. Jesus whispers to us through
this story – “psst…over here; this is just a party – God’s love is not found
here.”
Then
where? Where is God’s love?
Tomorrow
we’ll celebrate the life and words of Martin Luther King, Jr., a preacher who
saw a vision of God’s love. His life and name have been used, referenced, and
abused even this last week in a ridiculous argument about gun regulation.[2]
When people celebrate his life and words, they often end with the tragedy that
was his murder. Enter the gun control nuts and the gun rights nuts and the
racist nuts and all the other nuts, using the life of a man fighting for his
right to be considered a human being as a cudgel for their own vision.
They
miss the point. In the life of MLK we see God’s love at work. We see in his
words, his dreams, his celebrations that there is a better, a holier, a more
Godly way to love one another not based on the color of skin – nor the content
of character – but based on the fact that humanity, God’s own created humanity,
is worth living and dying for. We can so easily see his murder as another
moment when evil, in one moment, one event, cut short the life of someone who
was making a difference. But here, in the life of this man we can see God’s
love!
Here!
Over here! I found it! It is not in the event of his preaching or in his
speeches or even in his marching – it’s in HIM! God’s love is not found in
events any more than events are proof of his non-love! God’s love is in the
people who believe and are filled with the Holy Spirit and act out of that
relationship! Neither MLK’s immortal words nor his documented deeds are proof
of God’s love – the love is in the man!
Where
is God’s love? It is in the gifts we receive from the Spirit. It is in the
services we are led to do in His name. It is in the one who utters wisdom and
the one who utters knowledge; it is in the one who has astounding faith; it is
in the one who can heal; it is in the one who works miracles; it is in the one
who can prophesy; it is in the one who can discern the spirits; it is in the
one who can speak in tongues; it is in the one who can interpret these tongues.
Where
is God’s love? It is in us. We must stop looking to externals to see the love
of God made manifest in our world. God’s love is not a wedding, or a birth; the
absence of God’s love is not in Sandy Hook Elementary or Aurora or on the
devastated East Coast – God’s love is in the people who live and act and speak
and pray in the name of the One who IS LOVE.
God’s love is not made true in
events. It is not made un-true by events. It is made true in the people who
love him and live in his Spirit. It is made true in people. It is made true in
me. It is made true in you. Amen.
[1]
Susan Jacoby, “The Blessings of Atheism.” The
New York Times, January 5th, 2013.
[2]
Larry Ward on CNN NewsRoom, January 11th, 2013. “I think Martin
Luther King, Jr. agree with would me if he were alive today that if African
Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the
country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our
history.”
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