March 8, 2009 + Spiritual Foundations: Faith, Suffering, Inclusiveness + Frank Alton

MP3 File


Gen. 17:1-6; Psalm 22:23-31; Rom. 4:13-19

I don’t know how many of you listen to Garrison Keeler on A Prairie Home Companion, but each week he gives “The News from Lake Wobegon. He begins each monologue with the words, “It’s been a quiet week in Lake Wobegon.” Well, my friends, it hasn’t been a very quiet week on Planet Earth. The stock market fell as if there were no bottom. We learned that another 681,000 people lost their jobs in February. More death in Iraq comes at the same time as the promise to reduce troops by 12,000 within a few months. Threatened invasion of Afghanistan is joined with the possibility of negotiating with part of the Taliban. Wow! If your head isn’t spinning from the flu, the week’s news ought to do the trick.
Those of us who managed to remember to turn our clocks forward and get our weary bodies to church are wondering whether it was worth it. Might God have a word for us in the midst of so much drama? Today’s texts invite us to ground our lives in faith at a time when faith seems like the last thing that makes any sense. Joe Queenan, in an editorial in yesterday’s LA Times, concluded that this is definitely a time to panic: “One thing that encourages me to panic is the steady cascade of admonitions from luminaries urging me not to panic … This is a little bit like the chief petty officer on the Titanic offering up survival tips: Whatever you do, don’t abandon ship; it’s cold out there in the North Atlantic.”
Do we really feel any better when it’s the Bible rather than a financial advisor that is telling us to choose faith over panic? You’ll have to be the judge of that. But, hey, we’re here. We showed up. We might as well listen. So, we’ve framed Lent as a journey toward resurrection life that necessarily passes through death. The journey is a preparation and a reorientation toward that path that leads to life by facing death. We need the journey because that path is anything but intuitive. Throughout this season we are inviting people to share the spiritual practices that help them stay on the path, or get back on it, and we are actually trying out some spiritual practices during our morning worship.
The three passages we read describe resurrection life in terms of inclusiveness: God’s vision includes the whole world, and it always has. But in order to reach that vision, people must suffer (a form of death), because there is great resistance to including everyone in the community of life. And remember: the resistance exists both in ourselves and in those who oppose our efforts to include a particular group. Overcoming that resistance requires great faith to believe that the vision will be accomplished against all odds. So faith is the means, suffering is the path, and inclusivity is a major sign of resurrection life; and all three are inextricably intertwined.
Faith comes in stages. We don’t start out with fully developed faith, and the stages don’t come in a straight line. Young faith misses the point by focusing on us above others (as Noah’s generation is described as doing). We start out believing that it’s all up to us, that we even need to protect ourselves from God. In the moment, that seems like the most logical option (as Adam and Eve showed us).
The Bible reveals God responding to the stages of our faith through a series of covenants. Covenants are agreements that order our lives, our faith communities, and, in the best of times, our nations. Marriage, baptism, ordination, and church membership are religious covenants that echo the great historic covenants. God’s covenant with Abraham is actually God’s third attempt to reach humanity—the first ended when we disobeyed God and were expelled from paradise and the second when we sinned against one another so severely that God elected to wash away most of humanity & start again. But Abraham and Sarah are different. They make a “leap to faith.” Seemingly without reason, they trust God and accept God’s invitation. From this great faith, a covenant, and a people, is born.
Over time, the laws of feudal societies, kingdoms, and nation-states replaced biblical covenants. I wonder if the fragmented, anxious times we’re living in are not crying out once again for the justice, security, and compassion of covenantal living. The biblical covenants are relevant to our lives today because their wisdom—& power to order societies—has much to teach us about a covenantal way of relating to God, to others, and to the created order. They offer a two-way street of rights, responsibilities and relationships. From international treaties to new economic agreements to church polity, do we not see the desire of peoples to have what a community bound by covenant provides? (Robert Roth, Sojourners)
Covenantal living calls for faith in response to God’s promises. In Genesis 17, God pledges an everlasting involvement with & blessing of, Abraham and Sarah’s descendants. The covenant was a social structure to which Abraham and Sarah responded with a faith that is commended years later by the Apostle Paul. Paul points out that both the external structure and the internal faith response are necessary.
The promises to Abraham surpass oaths and formal acts, writes Paul in Romans 4. They become real not “through law but through the righteousness of faith.” The promise rests on grace and is guaranteed to all descendants (Romans 4:13-16). Change occurs in history through a combination of laws and policies on the one hand, and growth in faith on the other. As long as we’re talking about human beings rather than angels, we will need both.
I remember when I was part of a fundamentalist group in college we had a slogan that said, “Solution: spiritual revolution.” What we meant was that the changes that were being demanded in society required a transformation of the heart more than a revolution in society. Our call came against a background of liberation movements. Those were years of liberation struggles that called for revolution in every aspect of life. (I’m not going to tell you which years of revolution, but there was the women’s liberation movement, civil rights movements for blacks & gays, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, to name a few).
The revolution we really needed was to move from either-or thinking to both-and thinking. Changing hearts never happens fast enough to bring out the social change that is required to actually bring about changed hearts in the majority of the population. We never would have outgrown our racism if we hadn’t had laws that made it illegal to deny a person based on race. But we cannot say we’ve overcome racism until our hearts have changed. So change is a dance that happens on the inside and the outside. It requires trust and losing one’s life to save it. We are fully connected to God & salvation history if we’ll but let go. In Lenten terms, spiritual practices cultivate a faith that keeps on growing rather than stagnating or detouring away from the path.
Suffering is what most tempts us to abandon the path. It confronts us with situations that demand faith in order to continue the journey. The current economic crisis is inflicting a lot of pain on people. How we respond determines whether it becomes redemptive suffering or pointless pain. We need strength and flexibility for what the fullness of life presents us with. We cannot develop both unless we engage suffering in ways that are not immediately intuitive nor even logically consistent. Kahlil Gibran says “Your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” We need to be strong in broken places.
Psalm 22 and the Act of Praise we just sang sing to a real God in a real world, expressing the very human experience of being disoriented in the midst of life. The Psalmist has obviously experienced the rejection that suffering often evokes. He also has experienced something different from the Holy One. Psalm 22 reveals the complex experience of being human around suffering with its punctuations of praise between descriptions of abandonment and oppression. It moves from complaining of God’s abandonment to praising God for not putting us to shame, to begging God to be close in the time of trouble to acknowledging that it is God who has laid him in the dust of death, to calling God’s people to join him in glorifying God.
The Act of Praise sings, “Praise to God our saving Wisdom, meeting us with love and grace, helping us to grow in wholeness, giving freedom, room and space. In our hurting, in our risking, in the thoughts we dare not name, God is present, growing with us, healing us from sin and shame.” How we relate to each other in our suffering is a very important issue in times of insecurity. Everyone wonders what the world will look like next year or the next. When will I lose my job? When will my losses make it impossible to keep living as I do? We have to help each other in community to deal with pain and suffering. When we engage and accept the cruel things that have happened to us in our lives life works with rather than against us. We live with the universe rather than against it.
The evidence of which road we took comes in the sign of inclusivity. How much paradox can we embrace? How much diversity can we celebrate? The God that spoke to Abraham and Sarah promised to be God of many nations – a new thing in human history at that point. God showed that inclusive spirit in calling both Abraham and Sarah as partners in the call. Both received new names; both were seen as ancestors of nations that would arise from them.
It is challenging to live into our new names and our new vocations to be people who welcome all kinds of people. Abraham and Sarah didn’t go all the way, and neither will we. They struggled to integrate the reality of two sons from two mothers. God promised both Sarah and Hagar, both Isaac and Ishmael that they would be ancestors of many nations. We continue to struggle to make that a reality. We have been taught that we are right and they are wrong – whoever “we” are and whoever “they” are. I believe that part of the Kairos moment in which we are living is that the time has finally come when our very survival depends on our ability to embrace the spirit of inclusivity. The phrase “One World” used to be a slogan for radicals. Now our understanding of the environment, patterns of migration, the nature of our armaments, and the global economy make “One World” an overly-obvious expression of our reality.
But our life habits still haven’t caught up with our understanding. We still use water, pollute air, and consume goods as if our behavior had no effect on future generations and people across the globe. We still build fences to keep people out, when our economic interdependence makes that not only unwise but impossible. We still invest in weapons designed for a kind of war that no longer exists with the result that we create more enemies. The need for spiritual practices that help our behavior catch up with our understanding is great. May the journey of Lent continue to deepen in our hearts and bodies the truth that God has the whole world in her hands.