Sunday, October 7, 2012

What does it mean?




 
Back during my seminary days, when I was doing a summer residency as a chaplain at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco, I met a man who told me he was cursed by God.  He said this with such matter-of-factness, such conviction that this was the only possible explanation for his life, that I felt a responsibility to hear more of his story.  He was being prepped for surgery on his back, which had given him constant pain since his car had been struck by a drunk driver.  His best friend, who was a passenger with him, had been killed.  He then ran briskly through the rest of the catalogue of tragedies, catastrophes, and misfortunes that was his life.  He finished by repeating his summary judgment—for some reason unknown and unknowable, he had been cursed by God, and his life of torment was the ironclad evidence.  When he had given his defiant testimony, he made it clear that it was time for me to leave, and so I did.   
But that man has been a symbol to me ever since.  Not only a symbol of human suffering, though of course my heart went out to him for all the terrible things he’d been made to endure; but also a symbol of how powerfully we human beings desire to make meaning of our pain.  Rather than having to wrestle with the terrible ambiguity of a good God who could allow him to undergo such devastation, that man chose to believe in a God who hated him and cursed him.  That was the way he made meaning of his life.   But it limited his relationship with God to that of the victim to his torturer.  In a sense his own suffering became his idol.   And any face of the divine that might be turned toward him in love—bearer of impossible hope, sorrowing witness, seeker of forgiveness, compassionate fellow-sufferer—was ruled out.
The story of Job was a folktale that circulated in various forms in the ancient Near East.  It was about a righteous man who was tested in a wager of the Gods and afflicted with all kinds of undeserved calamities.  But he was patient.  He didn’t lose faith, and he didn’t seek relief in immoral acts.  He remained upright in his conduct, and pious in his speech, and in the end he passed the test, and was rewarded by having all that he’d lost restored to him, with interest.  The moral of that story was pretty conventional—if bad things happen to you, don’t waver—just endure.  Keep doing right and sooner or later your luck will change, and it will all turn out okay for you in the end.
But when the Hebrew sages adapted this story and made it part of their own sacred scripture, they weren’t satisfied with the simple moral lesson of the old fable.  They seemed to think that it didn’t do justice either to the problem of suffering or to the struggle of faith.  In the character of Job they created a model, not of long-suffering patience, but of dogged persistence in demanding an answer from God.  The other characters in the Book of Job try to get him to settle for a simple rationalization for what is happening to him.  In the excerpt we read today it is Job’s wife who counsels him to take the attitude of my acquaintance in the hospital—“curse God,” she says, “and die.”  Later in the book, it will be Job’s friends who keep telling him that he must have done something wrong to deserve the punishment that he is receiving, and that if he will just admit his fault and repent, all will be forgiven. 
But Job’s integrity is such that neither of these easy ways out will satisfy him.  He persists in arguing with God, demanding an accounting of the charges against him, in short, seeking a relationship with God that is founded on the truth of what they mean to each other.  Job has the courage to accept that God is more than a simple mechanism for dispensing rewards to people who are good and punishments to people who are bad.  Nevertheless, the reality of his own pain bears down on him, and he still wants to know who God is and who God will be—as his creator, as a God who still cares for him.  
In this way, Job becomes a model of the religious person whose faith does not depend on material prosperity, good health, or reputation.   Neither does he make an idol of his suffering.  Such a person does not seek God out of fear of punishment or hope of reward, but because of the desire to know God for the sake of a living relationship.  To be like Job is to bring into conversation with God the whole truth of who we are, which can include all kinds of paradoxes.  We can insist on our own worth, even as we are stricken with a sense of our failings.  We can struggle and anguish, and then find ourselves suddenly still and at peace; we might cry out angrily for justice one moment, and at the next be on our knees weeping for mercy.   
Maybe that’s in part why Jesus presents his disciples with children as their model for entering the kingdom of God.  In the family values of Jesus’ time a child was the person with the lowest status.  The people of those days did not see children as having any admirable character of their own, whether of innocence, or wonder, or spontaneity, or anything else.  Only once they started taking on adult responsibilities and making a productive contribution to the family did people have any value at all. 
And yet Jesus embraces and blesses the children as if to say that God comes into our lives precisely in those places where there can be no question of deserving or not deserving.  God meets us in the simplicity of our hearts’ seeking for blessing, our reaching out to know and to be known, to love and to be loved.  And this means that the real meaning of who God is for us is always ahead of us, always a potential that is yet to be fully realized, like that of a child.  No experience of suffering, any more than any great satisfaction or accomplishment, ever sets the final seal on the possibilities of a relationship with God.
And yet we recognize that such a life of integrity and openness is not easy, and it’s not something we can do by ourselves.  The story of Job is a story told by people who have suffered to one another, to help them sustain and deepen their faith.  The teaching of Jesus is for a community of disciples, to invite them to enter together a kingdom that is coming to be on earth as it is in heaven.  From this Sunday through All Saints’ Sunday on November 4th we will celebrate our life together as people who support one another to live with integrity in our relationships with God and each other. 
We call it our Stewardship Season because we take time this month to acknowledge that everything we are and everything we have really belongs to God.  That acknowledgment is not a cause for cursing and lamentation, but for celebration, because if everything really belongs to God, there isn’t any part of our lives we have to leave out of our religion.  Our relationships with God have room for our suffering as well as our contentment, and our anger along with our sweetness.  They include our poverty as well as our wealth, our limitations as well as our abilities, our weaknesses along with our strengths. 
A community of integrity embraces the whole variety of individual gifts and experiences.  It encourages us to be honest about our needs, and about our capacity to give.  It invites us to bless every part of our selves and every person in our lives with faith in God’s potential to make it mean something true.    

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About Me

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Petaluma, California, United States
I am a priest in the Episcopal Church, and have been (among other things) an organic farmer and gardener, and a Zen monk. I have a lifelong interest in social and spiritual renewal on the basis of contemplative discipline, creative nonviolence, and ecological practice. In recent years my work has focused intensely on the responsibility of pastoral ministry in the humanistic, evangelical, and catholic branch of Christianity known as Anglicanism. I'm married with a daughter, and have three brothers and two parents.