God’s encounters and defeats evil

The news is full of evil. If you have any doubt about the reality of evil in the world turn on the news.  Here you’ll hear about suffering among the poor, the drought-stricken and famine-stricken.  Agony among people on whom is inflicted excruciating death.  The airwaves, webpages and newspapers are filled with betrayals on personal, social and global scales. Gratuitous cruelty in families and neighborhoods.  Outrageous grabs by the powerful who disenfranchise, oppress and impoverish the less powerful.

We see all this around us – locally, regionally, globally.  The headlines need no recitation. There you have it – evil.

In this world-scape, human-scape, suffering-scape people often ask – in puzzlement, despair, or rage – ‘Where is God in all this?!  Where are you, God – that is, if you even exist?!’  And when they’re calmer and more analytical, many conclude, ‘Look at all this!  Obviously  God can’t exist, or if God exists God doesn’t care!’

On this Sunday of the Passion of Jesus, at the start of Holy Week, a very different conclusion emerges.  Where is God in the suffering?  The Gospel answers, right here!

The story of Holy Week is a disgraceful story of jealousy, rage, conspiracy, manipulation, violence, slander – and then condemnation, cruelty, mockery, torture, abandonment and, finally, excruciating death.  The story is dark and shameful.

At the center of that story is Jesus – Jesus to whom all that happens, Jesus on whom all that is heaped, Jesus who feels it all so keenly that he cries out in desperation from the cross, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?!’  That cry resonates with the cry of so many who ask, ‘Where is God in the suffering?’  The Jesus who asks that question with us was a human being like all of us, yet at the same time the very being of God become flesh and living among us as one of us.  He lived among us, yet he set aside all of the of the prerogatives of God and so Jesus was genuinely alone, authentically vulnerable as he gaped into the darkness.

We often see ourselves on pilgrimage into God.  The Incarnation was God’s pilgrimage into humanity.  The primary mode of that pilgrimage was sharing – God sharing our life, God sharing our weakness, God sharing our anxiety, God sharing our unknowingness, God sharing our vulnerability to contingency and catastrophe.  Solidarity is a fancier name for it, properly popular in mission discussions, but ‘sharing’ says it more simply.  As Eucharistic Prayer A has it, Jesus was sent ‘to share our human nature, to live and die as one of us, to reconcile us to you, the God and Father of all.’

Jesus was sent first to share our life – that was his mission, his sent-ness.  Yes, there were the mighty words and the mighty acts, the preaching and the healing, yet Jesus could not preach to everyone, nor could he heal everyone.  The words and deeds were harbingers of a cosmic healing yet to come.  Underlying his ministry was sheer presence – Immanuel, God simply with us, the sharing.

And that turned out to be costly, as sharing always is.  Where is God in the suffering? – Well, right here in the midst of it.  A task in Holy Week is simply to contemplate God’s sharing the human journey.

I recall how Scott Simon, the host of National Public Radio’s ‘Weekend Edition,’ talk about a Canadian general who once encountered evil face to face.

“[I] interviewed Romeo Dallaire, the former Canadian general who commanded U.N. peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1993 and 1994. General Dallaire discovered Hutu soldiers were getting ready to massacre Tutsi civilians. But he was prevented by U.N. leadership from using his troops to try to stop the murders before they could take place. More than 800,000 Tutsi Rwandans were then slaughtered over three months.

“[General] Dallaire said that what happened made him believe in evil, and even a force he called the devil. “I’ve negotiated with him,” he told us, “shaken his hand. Yes. There is no doubt in my mind …. and the expression of evil to me is through the devil and the devil at work and possessing human beings and turning them into machines of destruction. … And one of the evenings in my office, I was looking out the window and my senses felt that something was there with me that shifted me. I think that evil and good are playing themselves out and God is monitoring and looking at how we respond to it.”

God monitoring and looking at how we respond.  Yes. 

And what we are about to walk into this Holy Week is nothing short that the ultimate batter between good and evil. But God does more than monitor, God gets involved. God comes to us as a fully human person, born in poverty, raised in a backwater town under military and economic occupation. And Jesus goes out among the people, living and eating, making a living and staying with them as he travels and teaches, and people will come to him to experiencing healing, transformed lives, and even new life out of death. But eventually those very people who proclaimed him king will turn around and crucify him. And when that happens, He will take every sin, every shame, every betrayal, every evasion, every abuse, every hypocrisy that humanity has to offer to that cross and he will die. 

Again, this week, We will walk this week to that cross and to that death. Even death cannot contain him.  We will discover that a week from now, but now we see only his betrayal, arrest, torture, and death.

This week we will discover again and experience anew how God has immersed Godself into all of human living, all of human suffering, and all of human dying. Christ will also immerse himself into the glory of our love and creativity, as well as the darkness of our fear and our capacity for evil. He will die and go among the dead so that we may live and share in his life.

But first comes God’s encounter with evil, and its’ defeat.

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Bulletin for Worship for Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023 at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida.

Scripture Lessons for the Palm Sunday/Sunday of the Passion, 2023.

Here is a video of the Sermon at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.

Here is a video of the Liturgy at St. John's, Clearwater, Florida on April 2, 2023.

Bad news travels fast

Bad news sure travels fast, doesn’t it? 

In today’s Gospel, Luke tells us about some people who ran up to Jesus to tell him about some Galileans who were not only executed by Pilate, but how Pilate mingled their blood with his sacrifices. Jesus verbalizes what’s on their minds: "Do you think that... these Galilean were worse sinners than all other Galileans?"

It’s a common misconception. Take today’s Epistle. Please!

It contains one of the most misused passages in all the New Testament (and that’s saying something!): that God never tests us more than we can handle.

Saying to a suffering person that “God never gives us more than we can handle” backfires in three ways: first because it teaches that bad things only happen to bad people; second, it says that if we are feel as if we are buckling under the weight of grief or pain, that we somehow lack faith; and third, it teaches us that God deliberately does horrendous things as a cruel expression of love. In short, it teaches us to hate God. 

By saying that the suffering somehow deserves their fate has the dubious virtue of putting you out of my misery. It’s a platitude that creates a comfortable distance between us and the pain of the moment. It preserves the illusion of control when things are clearly out of control.

But Jesus doesn’t go there. When people ran up to tell him all the bad news, they asked him if those Galileans executed by Pilate were above-average sinners? "No," he tells the crowd, "but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did." 

When a tower in a village called Siloam collapsed killing eighteen people who were in the wrong place at the time, was that because they were all sinners? Jesus says “no.”

When Jesus is presented with a man born blind, they asked Jesus “Who sinned, this man or his parents?”

“Neither.” says Jesus. And when he cures the man, Jesus denies a correlation between the man’s problem and someone’s sin.

A long time ago a science teacher once taught me that correlation is not causation. Sometimes, he said, it’s not even correlation... just dumb luck or bad data.

And that’s true in everyday theology, too. We often act as if God keeps a big ledger and, like Santa Claus, keeps track of who’s been naughty or nice and decides to send earthly punishments or rewards accordingly! To this, Jesus says “no.”

Does God cause tyrants to kill people by dropping bombs on theaters sheltering refugees or make it so church people riding in a van on a highway are killed in a head-on collision because they’ve done something to deserve it? No!

Does God send illness or catastrophe as object lessons in behaving well? Jesus says “no!”

But while Jesus says, there is no connection between the suffering and the sin, he reminds us that the death rate for all humanity is still 100%, that is enough for Jesus to urge us to line up our lives with God.

Yes, I hear your “but”… But there is suffering that comes out of our actions! We see it all the time, you tell me!

But... sometimes we do choose to do things that harm us: like cigarette smoking, not caring for our health, exploiting others, abusing power, driving drunk, carelessly polluting our planet, or dealing with our rage with violence.

But... it is possible for us to inflict our sin on ourselves and others!

And you would be right! After all, we did just say the Penitential Order for a reason, right?

Okay... but think about it. Is God the one doing that? Or are these part and parcel of what we confess to God as sin? 

Underneath all the rationalizations there is terror. If I had a nickel for everyone I’ve heard tell a grieving person that God needed a deceased loved one more than we do, or when someone says that God only gives us what we can handle, then I’d have a Brinks truck for a piggy bank.

Listen. I get it. Life can be scary, and tragedy knocks the wind out of our sails. People say stuff like that because by giving every random calamity or violence a motive, no matter how lame, we are attempting with our heads to keep the terror in our hearts at bay.

But instead of shifting all the blame on God or even on us, Jesus invites us to go deeper. He goes to our most vulnerable spot and invites us to peer into those scary spaces in our souls. It is okay to feel the full fragility of life – but instead of staying in the place of fear, Jesus calls us to turn toward the light. And that takes courage.

Jesus invites us to turn towards God and gives us the courage to face our fear. Terrible things happen, and you are not always to blame. But don’t let that stop you from cultivating the good. You know that fearful place you feel at the pit of your stomach? That is also a holy place inside you, nurture it. 

Many years ago, Rabbi Harold Kushner said in his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, that God willingly gives up one of God’s three attributes—that God knows everything, that God is all powerful, and that God is all loving—in order that we might be free. I am indebted to him for this insight. Over the years, I have taken it on a different, and, I hope, a more Trinitarian track. 

Some Christians like to have God be the one behind every circumstance and every event…the cosmic manager (or puppeteer, some will sneer). Others understand God as the one who makes the clock, winds it, and walks away. That’s because we humans are binary. We like things to be either one or zero. Yankees or Red Sox. Ford or Chevy. One way or the other. Our brains cannot wrap themselves around too much contradiction. 

But instead of living in an either/or, one or zero world, I believe we live in a universe of concurrent realities. This ought not to surprise us. After all, we know Jesus to be fully human and fully God. Christians know that God is a Trinity of three distinct persons—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-- who contain the fullness of the one God without diluting the personhood of the three. When we say the creed or close a collect, we acknowledge in shorthand that the nature of God is a unity of concurrent realities. 

And it is true in nature, too. Physics tells us that concurrent realities are part and parcel of the created order: light is at once a wave and a particle. Today we live in a world that at once makes use of Newtonian and quantum mechanics—Newton shows us how to launch and keep things in orbit, drive your car, or play ping pong, while quantum theory helps us scan our groceries and makes our GPS and cell phones work.

And just as concurrent realities live in the physical world and in the person of God, they are part and parcel of the mystery of living. 

We see in Jesus one who is 100% God and 100% human in the same package undiluted. In the person of Jesus, we see that God is at once intimately and fully involved with every aspect of our living and in every element of creation; and, at the very same time, we and the entire universe are completely and utterly free. 

But just because we are completely free and nature happens, does not mean that God is apathetic to our suffering or distant from our reality. God is very much involved and has given us a solution.

Jesus’ incarnation shows us that God is truly with us. And Jesus’ story about the gardener who talks the householder into giving the unfruitful fig tree another chance by cultivating and watering it tells us something of how this works. In Jesus’ parable the owner is ready to give up on the unfruitful tree on and cut it down. But the gardener pleads for the tree, saying that he will care for it—give the tree another chance. Think of the ground around that tree as holy ground, manure and all!

And when God appeared to Moses in the form of another plant, a bush that was on fire but not being burned up. Moses saw this strange sight while minding his father-in-law’s sheep, and he goes to check it out. Having gotten Moses’ attention, God tells him that he is on holy ground, and God is about to directly intervene to liberate the Israelites from their bondage in Egypt and lead them to a land of promise. 

Holy ground is where God shows up, doing things miraculous things outside our expectation.

Holy ground appears to be quite ordinary, but it is ground that has been disturbed, into which is spread food, water, and manure… and a plant that has been pruned, all so that we may bear fruit and grow as God intends.

Jesus’ parable reminds us that we cannot stop suffering but we can in be attentive and caring to one another, focused in our prayer and in tune with the world around. Above all (and this is the real reason why we confess our sins in Lent) we can honest about what we know or don’t know; about what we fear; what we ignore and what we hope we have mastered; what we have tried and where we have failed. We confess not to grovel but to allow Christ into our vulnerable places so that in his passion we may accompany him to the cross. Giving God our honesty will feel like dying. Recognizing that we are not in control can feel like darkness. Cultivating the things we can do—our love, our relationships, our attentiveness— is how we discover resurrection and receive the strength that turns our frailties into our greatest strengths.

Bad news travels fast. But the good news is that God is with us in all of life…when things go right, and more importantly, when things go wrong…in Christ we know that God is intimately involved in all of it. God suffers with us, accompanies us, dies with us, and rises with us. 

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Here is a link to the bulletin for the Third Sunday in Lent, Year C, March 20, 2022.

Here is a link to a video of the liturgy at St. John's Episcopal Church, Clearwater

Here is a link to a video of the sermon.