Not long ago I was driving my
daughter home at the end of the day and I had the news playing on the car
radio. And I was just turning onto our
street when Risa asked me from the back seat, “Daddy, why is the news always
bad? Why do they always talk about wars
and people shooting each other and things like that? Why don’t they ever have news about the good
things that people do?” Well, there were
a lot of different ways I could have answered.
I could have given her a dose of cynicism about the media. Or I could have said something jaded about human
nature, and the fascination that violence and catastrophe seem to hold for us. But she’s nine years old. So what I did was to agree with her that it just
doesn’t seem right that the news is always bad.
I said I thought she was right that there must be a different way to
talk about what’s going on in the world, that there must be more to the story.
Some of us at St. John’s have been taking
part this year in a program of reading the Bible from cover to cover. And along with this so-called “Bible
Challenge” I’ve been reading books about the Bible, and also leading courses of
study at the church on especially important pieces of the Bible. So I’ve been reflecting on the Bible in
recent months even more than I usually do.
And this week as I was reading the lectionary texts for this morning,
and remembering that conversation with Risa about the news, it struck me that
things haven’t really changed all that much since the Bible was written. People often fault the scriptures because
they contain so much violence and catastrophe and terror. But it doesn’t seem to occur to them that
this is still what the world is like, and it wasn’t any different in Bible
times. In some ways, it was worse.
The other thing we sometimes forget
is that when the Bible was written there was nothing else in print. The Bible was not shelved in a specialized
section of the bookstore labeled “Inspirational.” And there was no idea at that time of a
dimension of human experience called “spirituality” or “religion,” that only had
to do with lofty, uplifting, and comforting subjects. In
fact the Bible speaks out again and again against the notion that religion is
somehow unconcerned with all the ugly and disturbing things that people think and
do. What the people who wrote the Bible
said is that there is one world of human experience and knowledge, and the
whole thing, the good, the bad, the ugly and the beautiful, belongs to God.
Which sounds kind of reassuring until you
start to think about all the stuff that happens, and what that says about God. And the prophets and sages of ancient Israel
knew they had to think about it. They had
to make room in their understanding of God’s sovereignty and holiness, for the
bad news. Their experience of God’s
goodness and faithfulness had to allow somehow for the arrogance and greed of
the rich and powerful, and the sufferings of the poor, for apostasy and
injustice, and the devastation of their land by invading empires, and the
wholesale slaughter of their people. And
when you read the Bible you start to see that they didn’t give themselves an
easy out. If you go to it looking for a
simple explanation for why the world is the way it is, or a straightforward solution
to its problems, you will be disappointed.
They are not there.
What you will find is a record of the thoughts and words and deeds of men
and women seized by a profound awareness of God, an awareness that comes to
bear on every aspect of human experience, from the most exalted states of
religious vision, or worldly triumph, or erotic love, to the depths of physical
agony, emotional abandonment, terror and despair. It’s
not always easy for us to see the value of this kind of faith. We are powerfully conditioned by the modern
mind, which only wants to allow meaning to that which can be explained. But the truth is that most of our experience,
and in particular that part that affects us most deeply, is inexplicable.
We will never know why that
particular sunset was different from all the others, or why we’ve never
forgotten that particular meal. We will
never understand exactly why we fell in love with that person out of all the men
and women in the world, or why that
child came to be ours, or why we got sick, or that one had to die, or why
people make such foolish choices, or rise up with murder in their hearts. But the faith of the Bible is that in spite
of the limits of our comprehension, everything that happens, every that is, every
last bit of it, down to the hairs on your head, means something to God.
So when we talk, as we have been
doing this month during our Stewardship Season, about the abundance that we
share as a faith community, we might consider this: our greatest gift may be that
here, in a world where wonder and reverence are melting away under the hot wind
of shallow explanations, is a place where there is always more to the story. St. John’s is like a little wilderness
preserve, where we keep alive the possibility that everything means more than
we know. And the way we do this is we
pray. Praying is where we meet the
limits of our understanding of why things happen the way they do, and we go beyond
them into God.
Prayer is more than asking God to solve
our problems. It is also asking God to
make meaning of things that are beyond our comprehension. That goes for the good things as well as the
bad. Every day we receive blessings that
we did not obtain for ourselves and can’t say with assurance we deserve. When we make prayers of thanksgiving we stop
sleepwalking numbly through the miracle that is our lives. Giving thanks, we make even the most ordinary
day a journey of discovery, the discovery of meaning.
And as for the bad news, the
personal struggles and the mass suffering, to pray about it is to stop
explaining it away. It is to acknowledge
that it affects us deeply, and is more than we can handle by ourselves. We could come up with explanations, but they
wouldn’t really satisfy. And knowing that,
in itself, is the first step toward taking responsibility. I don’t mean so much “responsibility” as in “guilt.”
Or as in, “it’s up to us to fix it.” I
mean respons-ability just like the word says—the ability to respond.
Prayer is empowering, because it
says that we are able to respond to what happens, no matter how
incomprehensible it is, because we know the world is God’s. That’s what gives us the confidence and the
mandate to keep praying for peace in a nation in a state of endless war, to
keep praying for healing, though the doctor says it is hopeless, to keep
praying for justice when inequality and corruption are on the rise.
It is this knowledge that world is
God’s, that keeps us praying for the safety and dignity of women and girls, that
keeps us praying for the survival of species, for sight for the blind, and
liberty for the captives, and good news for the poor, and for the resurrection
of the dead, and the coming of the Kingdom.
Sometimes it doesn’t seem like enough just to pray, but it’s a whole lot
better than nothing. And I like to think
that persistence in prayer makes it more likely, and maybe it happens more than
we care to admit, that we will, from time-to-time, hear an answering voice in
our hearts that says, “okay—here’s what we can do.”
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