Living Letters of Hope and Peace

There is smoke. People are running. Weeping rises in the air matching the upward flow of dust. An uneasy tension permeates the very core of a person’s body seeping deep within it.  Questions spew forth like a summer rainstorm from every person.

          What will happen next? Where is a brother, father, sister, wife, mother, aunt, uncle, cousin, grandmother, grandfather?  How could this have happened to us?  How will we live? How will we know what to do?  Will I ever feel safe again? Where is God?

          Underlying the questions are the emotions washing over each person like a spring flood in a dry riverbed.  Anger, fear, sadness, despair, abandonment, vulnerability, uncertainty, uneasiness, loneliness, denial, bewilderment, disorientation.

           The weeping, the questions, the dust, and the emotions congeal together into the loud cry of lament, “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces. She weeps bitterly in the night. She has no one to comfort her. Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude. My soul is bereft of peace. I have forgotten what happiness is, so I say gone is my glory.”

          In 587 BCE Jerusalem was reduced to rubble and ashes. The Temple was destroyed, and all the royal family, the high government officials, priests, and craftspeople were led off as prisoners by the Babylonian army, walking naked for the arduous journey to Babylon. It will become the Hebrew trail of tears. Their prayers in psalms of lament tell later generations of their suffering. Laments that cry out, “Why have you forgotten us completely? My groans are many and my heart is faint.”

 Psalms that tell us the story, “By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. On the willows there we hung up our harps. For there, our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” How could we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?”

          Their homes are gone. Their land is gone. The Temple is gone. The priests are gone. No longer will they bring sacrifices to the Temple. No longer will Passover be celebrated as it was. Gone are most of the external symbols that gave them identity and defined them as a people. And worst of all the Babylonians think it is self-evident that their god is stronger and more powerful than the Lord. After all, it is the victors who write history, not the vanquished. Israelites knew how the world was supposed to work, how their life was oriented in a direction they understood, lived, found comfortable and meaningful. But not now.

          We know how they feel, don’t we? Their plight, their tears, questions, and emotions are all familiar to us because we too have felt them in some way. We have felt dazed, angry, abandoned, vulnerable, scared, uncertain, uneasiness, loneliness, and bewilderment. Whether it was the aftermath of 9/11, a train wreck, an explosion, a mass murder in a school or synagogue, a car wreck, or the Jan.6 riot at the Capitol. We have all experienced loss whether a friendship breaking apart, moving to a different place, disease robbing us of the ability to do that one thing we have a passion to do, or even the death of a father, mother, brother, sister, husband, or wife. Some of you remember when Kodak, Xerox, Bausch and Lomb, Carrier Corp, or other major manufacturers were all doing great. I am sure many of you remember when your church sanctuary was filled with worshippers on Sunday mornings. When there was an Adult Choir, a Junior Choir, and a children’s choir.

Indeed, I suspect some of you might be right this minute experiencing some disorientation in your life. You, too, may be asking how did this happen? Why did this happen to me? What do I do now?

I don’t know about you, but when I have those questions, then I recall the Israelites’ situation and the one question that comes to my mind is, “What did the Israelites do at this moment of exile?” What made it possible for them to cope in a strange, foreign place?

Well, strangely enough the answer dwells in the psalm Jesus quotes while he is dying on the cross and being mocked and derided by the crowds of people.  Rather than simply quote the psalm to you I want you to please open your bibles to Psalm 22. Look at how Psalm 22 begins as a lament, “My God, my God why have you forsaken me.” As you read the rest of the psalm, you notice the intensity and the anguish of the lament. Then, we get to verses twenty-one. “Save me from the mouth of the lion,” it begins. Then, notice verse twenty-two we hear the psalmist, “I will tell of thy name to my brethren, in the midst of the congregation I will praise thee.” 

Something has happened between verse twenty-one and verse twenty-two. Notice the space between the two verses because what changes the psalmist’s lament to praise, and thanksgiving happens right there. There in that space God acts. There in that space is where God does whatever God might do to cause a transformation, a healing in the psalmist. A healing that restores life to the psalmist as God promised to do for the people Israel. God has heard the palmist’s lament and God acts. We don’t see what God did. Nor, does the psalmist ever say exactly what God did or when God did it. The mystery of all of that is left as a mystery because the what’s and the when’s are not important. What is important is that this space is where faith resides.  Where faith leads to hope and hope leads to peace.

This isn’t the faith that says put a smile on your face and act as if everything is simply fine because, “I have my Jesus.”

Nor can faith be treated as a commodity that can be increased or decreased. That was Jesus’ lesson to his disciples when they cried out to him, “Increase our faith!” They thought Jesus’ demand for radical forgiveness was beyond their ability because their faith was quantifiably too small. So, they cry out to him, “Increase our faith!”  As if they were near empty vessels that Jesus could just pour faith into. Like one would pour water into a pot or a pan. But Jesus says your faith could be the size of a tiny mustard seed and it would be enough to transplant an oak tree into the sea. You see, faith is not about quantity.

Faith is a gift from God in the same way grace is gift from God. Faith does not spring up out of the person as intellectual acceptance or by some act that a person does, but it is a response to what God has done, is doing and promises to be doing throughout people’s lives.

  As Rev. Robert McAfee Brown, pastor and theologian explains, “the gospel does not say ‘Trust God and God will love you,’ the gospel says, ‘God already loves you, so trust God.” Indeed, our word faith comes from the Hebrew word “amn” and the Greek word “pistis” both meaning trust, reliability, loyalty, and obedience. Faith says we can trust God because we know God always keeps the promises God makes. Faith says we can rely on God because we know God does not abandon us in times of sorrow or trial but is present with us always. Faith says we can do our best to be loyal and obedient to God and God’s way of being persons in community because we know God’s love is steadfast; it cannot ever be lost, diminished, or destroyed.

It is faith, in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness that empowers the Israelites during exile to truthfully name all their losses aloud, to say aloud all their questions, and all the emotions they experience, so these questions and emotions could be publicly faced in all the depth of their pain as an act of faith. Only a people who expect God to be listening can do this. Only a people who expect God to act for their well-being as God promises to do can do such a thing. Because it is only by facing the reality of their pain, their wounds, and their sorrow in lament, that the Israelites will find solace, comfort, healing, and hope.

Hope that rises out of the depths of lament heated by faith that asserts “tears may come in the night, but joy comes in the morning,” boiling over in praise to God as the Israelites creatively reconstruct their reality by defiantly asserting that reality, is not as it appears to be. Defiantly asserting that those who are in positions of power are not powerful at all. Defiantly asserting that today they will live their new future grounded in God’s promises of restoration spoken through the prophet Isaiah, “but be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating. For I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy and its people as a delight. I will rejoice in Jerusalem and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it or the cry of distress.”

Hope captured by the writer of Lamentations, “O Lord, my suffering and my homelessness is bitter and filled with sorrow. Still, when I remember your love for me and remember your love never ceases and we can never be cut off from you, O Lord, hope calms me. For I know each morning is a new day to experience the mercy of the Lord. You, O Lord are faithful beyond measure. I will hope in the Lord, waiting patiently for salvation, for the saving grace of the Lord to be given to me, to be showered upon me.”

This is a faith that trusts and relies exclusively on God in the total and complete surrendering of the Israelites lives to God. Trusting God’s way of living together in community will equip the Israelites to creatively live in this foreign land in a new way. They may no longer be able to worship in the Temple, but they can still worship God. They may no longer celebrate Passover in the exact same way as before, but they can still celebrate Passover. God is still with them showing them a way, even if it is distinctively different than the way they lived in Judah.

This was good news for the exiled Israelites.  It is the good news Paul spoke about in his letter to Timothy when he wrote about being thankful for Timothy. For Timothy’s distinctive personal being and friendship, for being a co-worker in ministry, for his unfeigned faith, and for the personal gifts of ministry given this young man. These gifts are lifted by Paul in a prayer of gratitude. Gratitude for Timothy’s mother and grandmother who nurtured him and his faith in the same way Paul’s family nurtured him in his faith, which opened him to Christ and the new life of hope leading to peace that Christ brings into the world. Paul is also grateful to God for his own apostolic calling and the people who bring him food, necessities, and companionship amid his suffering in a Roman prison. Theologian and professor Cornel West echoed this same gratitude when he said at the Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, “We do create ourselves, we did not give ourselves language. We did not fall from the sky. We came out of a faith tradition. I am here because somebody loved me, somebody cared for me, somebody was attentive to me and taught me how to live.”

Acknowledging and being grateful for our faith and the tradition of being committed to love-love for God and love for neighbor- no matter what the circumstances of our lives are, means saying yes, we did not fall out of the sky. We are here because somebody loved us, somebody cared for us, somebody was attentive to us and taught us how to live faith-filled lives empowering us to be the love letters from those earlier generations on whose shoulders we stand to the younger generations of our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren because we want them to know that somebody loves them, somebody cares about them and somebody is being attentive to them and wants them to know how to live faith-filled lives of integrity, courage and peace. This is what creating an environment where God’s gift of faith and grace through Christ can be received is all about. You see faith cannot be taught, but what can be taught is the way faith empowers us to tell the truth-to have integrity, naming truthfully our losses and speaking aloud our questions and emotions right here in our worship through our prayers and our songs.

What can be taught is how faith empowers us to turn our prayers and songs of lamentation into hope. Hope freeing us to creatively see our world in a new way. Hope freeing us to live our lives in a new and distinctively unique way as we respond with the complete surrendering and commitment of our lives to God in Jesus Christ. Hope freeing us to live God’s peace.

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“God’s Wisdom in Flora and Fauna”

“The sky is full of blue and full of the mind of God,” exclaimed an elementary age girl, who moved from Louisiana to North Dakota wrote Kathleen Norris in her book “Dakota.”

        A truth spoken by a young girl confirms the truth sung by the psalmist who sings aloud, “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.”

          In this song, the psalmist cannot contain or control the effusive, joyful, evocative flow of images any more than a person seeing a bright blue sky or a stunning sunrise coloring the horizon in hues of orange, red, and yellow against the backdrop of green trees and white and purple flowers carpeting a meadow can contain or control their joy and the awareness that something deeper, something profound is happening.

Psalm 104 is the continuing witness begun in Psalm 103. In Psalm 104, the poet is extolling God’s blessings pouring over all creation’s great biodiversity in a hymn of praise to God as the creator of life that is remarkably comprehensive in its expansive vision of space and earth, flora and fauna, topography, and geology.

This vision is sung with words of praise aiming to describe God and describe God’s creative act in bringing a non-hierarchical and classless eco-system into being with power and control.

This is not scientific analysis reducing creation and life to its smallest size, its lowest common denominator, or its sparse causality, as one commentator has said. Nor, is it a dry reciting of the names of plants, animals, fish, or birds. Instead like a painter trying to capture the vision of a landscape, the poet uses the bold colors of visual imagery and powerful metaphors such as God’s hand reaching out to touch mountains; God watering the mountains like a gardener feeding the flowers and grasses just planted in fertile soil, rich with nutrients; God’s open hand holding out the food for the lions and the birds of the air and the dismay all creation experiences when God hides God’s face from it.

One could almost see, as one commentator has noted, the poet standing with God on a beach like two old friends with the poet waving his arm across the horizon, drawing attention to the vastness of the life above the surface of the oceans and the life below the surface of the oceans. The ships bobbing on the waves and the whales diving deep below the waves. The poet exclaiming amazement at all the creatures, flora and fauna, oceans, rivers, and mountains dependent upon God for everything necessary for life and the uniqueness of every life captured in the uniqueness of every snowflake, the unique configuration of each sea coral plant, or the iris of every mammal’s eye. God makes no two things exactly alike. Creation is filled with great diversity even among creatures possessing surprising similarities.

How does God provide for all life? How did God conceive of all life from giant sequoias to Greenland sharks to pelicans and bluebirds to pansies and periwinkle to granite and volcanic rock?

In this wonderment, we recall the stories of Genesis 2 when God took dirt and shaped and molded human beings, reminding us how intricately connected to creation we really are. The way God breathed life into the first human to animate him and how God knew that a human alone was not fully alive, but needed the community of other humans, who are similar, yet quite different. The evening strolls God took in the Garden in search of the man and the woman, calling us to recognize God’s desire for community with us, wanting conversations with us at the end of the day in a moment of Sabbath-a moment of rest and reflection.  

Yet, the psalmist also calls us to remember God taming the chaos with the verses about the leviathan-the sea monster depicted as chaos and evil in other portions of the biblical story, but here depicted as playing with God in a frolic of joy and carefree enjoyment of life. Then, as we recall the Genesis 1 story of God taking a mass of unformed, lifeless gunk, we discover the order, limits, boundaries, and the separation of light and dark; water below and water above-oceans and sky; wild animals and domestic animals; waters from the dry land; and the cosmic order of stars, sun, and moon, each with a purpose in the sustaining of life.

However, each verse the psalmist sings tells us not only about creation they also describe something about God. God, like creation, is not to be described in simple or superficial words. God, like creation, is not to be exploited for human gain or agendas. Nor can God be known from a parochial or narrow perspective, or a set of propositions laid out in an easy digestible menu of characteristics that fit neatly into human devised categories like those of Christian nationalists.

God is not to be fully known without first seeking to know fully the bio-diverse creation God created because God, like creation, is complex. God’s complexity is apparent when we realize some aspects of God’s nature are fully visible like the Andes or the Rockies while others are hidden from us like the mountain ranges at the bottom of the ocean or the light emitting ocean creatures dwelling in the deep darkness of the ocean. Creatures we have only just begun to comprehend.

This is what God is trying to get Job to understand with all the different speeches-mythic, powerfully dominating, playful, royal- as well as the conversation that moves first from how life was created and formed and molded in the beginning before moving on to the wild and fearful creatures like the leviathan. God is trying to transform Job’s narrow perspective about who God is and who Job is and what this life we are gifted is to be about. God wants to bring Job face to face with his fear, so he might confront the reality of a chaotic existence of joy and suffering and discover that his limited belief and his limited trust in God is a trap ensnaring him in isolation and moral bitterness, preventing him from the transformation God intends for him. That is, also, what Paul is trying to teach the Corinthians as they struggle with conflicting teachers who declare they are the authoritative ones, the ones with right teaching and the other teachers are just charlatans as the Corinthians struggle with their own spiritual arrogance and the inability to discern God’s wisdom amidst the swirl of human thought masquerading as wisdom.

The expansive, bio-diverse, no one thing exactly alike, cosmic-earth creation carries within itself God’s wisdom, which we will discover if we just stop our drive for certainty long enough to realize that great diversity is what sustains all life, not mono-culture, homogenous community, uniformity, and conformity. that is why God calls the church to reach out to all nations, not just a few that look like us. That is why the church reached out from its Jewish roots to the Gentiles. That is why the people of God cannot be pictured as one particular people, but must include the great diversity of all people

We, the church now, must recognize that every creature, flora and fauna, geography, topology, star and planets, oceans and sea monsters-have their birth, death and very existence as the result of God’s personal, wise, and sovereign action. We, the church now, must affirm that we are called as Christ’s body to be good stewards of creation by protecting habitats of biodiversity in all its life forms, so all may thrive together as expressions of the glory of God’s kingdom here and now.

Witnessing that God is the source of all life, physical life, spiritual life, eternal life, and the life of the church and that all these spheres of life are inseparable from one another.

Witnessing that all creation, including the church, lives by the power of God’s renewing Spirit, not by its own ability, merit, or ingenuity. Witnessing that all creation, including the church, exists to praise and serve God.”

So, yes let us sing, “Bless the Lord, all our souls.” Amen.

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Ocean Sunday

Did you know that we have learned more about the oceans in the last 50 years than we have learned in all the previous centuries? One of the most recent discoveries is that the Greenland Shark is the vertebrae creature that lives the longest. It lives to be about four hundred years old. Did you know that the Fibonacci sequence of numbers, which is simply each number after O is the sum of the two preceding numbers such as 0 + 1= 1, 1+2=3, 2+3= 5, 3+5=8 and so on, occurs repeatedly in nature from the petals on a daisy to the seeds of a sunflower to pinecones and pineapples? That the golden ratio of 1.618 occurs in the bones of our fingers, the measurements of our forearms and hands and is used in architecture like the Parthenon? Did you know that no matter how large or small a circle you make that diameter divided by the circumference will always approximately equal pi or 3.14? Do you know that we don’t know how many prime numbers there really are?

            All of this is to say that God’s questions to Job just might be more relevant to us than we might have thought. The question – where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Who determined its measurements? Or, who shuts in the sea with doors when it bursts from its womb? Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place? All of these questions speak about knowledge God’s and our own, the identity of God and human beings and the relationship of God and human beings and all creation. Yet, they also speak about the totality and complexity of life and how it is to be comprehended and sustained.

           These questions begin God’s conversation with Job starting at chapter 38 and continuing to the end of the book of Job. In this conversation God’s speeches to Job move from wisdom language, mythic discourses of creation and the divine warrior, to honor and shame language and royal language of king to subject.

The broad range of these speeches ought to tell us there is not one way of simply interpreting what God is saying to Job and to all of God’s people, including us. Too often interpreters have tried to boil down Job to find the one, single point God is making to reorient Job away from his complaints about how he has been treated toward a new understanding of God. The speeches could be interpreted as dominating power, playful mockery, or exasperated teaching. The rich visual language contributes to the variety of meanings, since visual imagery is evocative and leads us to discover many meanings, the complexity of life, and resists the temptation to reduce the meanings to a set of propositions. Also, these speeches do fit smoothly together, they do not seem to be compatible with each other, which drives some interpreters and readers to latch onto one phrase or a couple of phrases and make that phrase or phrases the key to opening the meaning of the God’s speeches as a whole, while discounting, repressing or silencing the significance of all the other speeches.

But this is what we humans do. We boil everything down to its simplest, smallest component or part then think we can discern the whole of life from it. Isn’t that why politicians defined the whole of immigration policy to be about building a wall? Isn’t that what we do with gun control, economic inequality, welfare reform, poverty, lock ‘em up and throw away the key justice system, and race relations? Isn’t that why we learned history as all about great men and great events back in the day? Isn’t that what happened to the people of Flint, Michigan when the leaders simply traded one water supply for another to save money? Isn’t that why we have miles and miles of plastic floating in the Pacific Ocean because one plastic bottle thrown overboard won’t matter much? Isn’t that why we have polluted the oceans with raw sewage because we think well, one little bit can’t harm anything, after all the oceans are so vast?

This is also what Job does throughout the entire book of Job leading up to Chapter 38. Job is focused on his suffering, which isn’t surprising, and the reason he is suffering based upon his narrow perspective about how life is supposed to work. His friends who come to join him in his suffering do the same thing. They have a narrow, simplistic understanding of life and they want to use that as the sole basis for telling Job why he is suffering and how he can end his suffering. All of them claim to know how life works and why Job is suffering and how he ought to end his suffering, which rests on actions that Job can take. Job is angry with God because he feels he has been faithful to God and should never have had to suffer because he was faithful to God. His friends blame Job for being sinful, even if he didn’t know he was sinful-like a double secret sinfulness- leading them to tell him he must confess his sin, if he wants to be forgiven and if he doesn’t confess his sin then he cannot be forgiven. Except that Job doesn’t believe he sinned, so Job won’t confess to doing something he didn’t do.

Within this context neither Job nor his friends are correct. Their perspective is limited by a knowledge and understanding of God and life that is narrow, limited and only focused on using their own understanding, wisdom and self-defined wise actions for coping and controlling life as they live it.

This is, of course, not so far away from what we do as Wendell Berry suggests in his essay “Paragraphs from a Notebook” included in his essay collection “Our Only World.” Berry states, “We need to acknowledge the formlessness inherent in the analytic science that divides creatures into organs, cells, and ever smaller parts or particles according to their technological capacities.”

Now, Berry isn’t anti-science or technology, rather he is suggesting that our drive toward specialization and a focus on increasingly narrow parts leads us away from truth complexity, and the knowledge needed to adequately sustain human life or the health of the ecosphere because we no longer see the whole, complexity of the integral connections between one part and another part of creation that can be disrupted and destroyed when we are only looking at a single portion of creation. Indeed, the phrase unintended consequences may be an apt description for the blindness of seeing only the parts and not the whole, not the relationships within creation. It isn’t because we intended for destructive consequences to happen, but because we didn’t even bother to consider that destructive consequences could occur, even when we are trying to help others.

This is, as Berry writes, what has happened when we look at creation as only being valuable as market commodities to be exploited in the progression of an industrial revolution aimed at constantly selling new products in order for corporations to survive instead of seeing the sanctity and intrinsic value of the world and all creatures created to be interdependent in a vast and deep community of compassion, forgiveness and self-giving love.

It is the problem of seeing only the parts and not the whole, which is part of what God is trying to do through the variety of divine speeches that begins with words describing a secure and well-ordered creation, such as boundary, path, way, and place, but that will give way in the next speech to images of wildness, chaos and fear that are also present in creation.

Over the next few weeks of September, I will be exploring Creation and why God’s speeches are so varied and how they speak about God’s wisdom versus human wisdom, God’s perspective and our limited perspective, God’s intention for life and our intention for life more deeply. For now, I leave you with this prayer from Benedict,

“O gracious and holy Creator, give us wisdom to perceive you, intelligence to understand you, diligence to seek you, patience to wait for you, eyes to see you, a heart to meditate on you, and a life to proclaim you, through power of Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.”

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