Of Storms and Saints

 Revelation 21:1-6a

            It ought never to be true of the Church that we live in a bubble, unfazed by what is going on in the world around us.  I cannot imagine that there is anyone here today that has not in some way been touched by the effects of Superstorm Sandy.  And yet I can well imagine that we could put all that aside and concentrate on All Saints, our glorious litany, our marvelous sacraments of baptism and eucharist with not so much as a word about Sandy.

            Tragically, the Church sometimes goes to the other extreme.  We are so overcome with the scale of human tragedy in such experiences as 9/11, the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, and various catastrophes (wars come to mind), that frequently we stop everything to address the concerns that arise out of those crises.  Because we often fail to connect what is happening in the outer world and what we are focusing on and celebrating in church, people rightly get the idea that what gets us worked up in church is really not terribly relevant to life’s real concerns.

            There really is a connection between the devastation of a storm like Sandy and what we are celebrating on the Feast of All Saints.  In fact there is more than one connection—indeed a whole string of connections. 

Suffering

            Most obviously, there is a connection called suffering.  The much misunderstood and misappropriated Book of Revelation assumes that the Christian community will continue to undergo great suffering.  Most scholars believe that Revelation indeed was written during one of the waves of persecution when the Early Church was threatened to the point of possible annihilation in some places.  Surely it is clearly written to encourage perseverance during times of great duress.  

            Most of the time, in my experience, we miss this element of All Saints.  If we are paying attention, we might hear the phrase, “these are they who have come out of the great tribulation.  They have made their robes white in the blood of the Lamb.”  That passage is not even read today, though it sometimes makes it into the All Saints celebration.  It refers, of course, to the host of martyrs that have given their lives because they clung steadfastly to their faith in Christ Jesus.  Some of them we remember[ed[] in the Litany [that we frequently use to begin][that began] the Liturgy [on All Saints] [this morning].   Names like Jawani Luwum, Martin Luther King, Oscar Romero bring not only themselves to mind but scores of others who have similarly died for their faith.    

            Not all suffering, of course, is martyrdom, and not all suffering arises from persecution.  Indeed not all people of faith suffer for their faith, and not all who suffer are people of faith.  Yet the deep bond between suffering and faith abides because few things help us to get through suffering, to endure it, and possibly even to transform it more than faith.  You know this.  And you particularly know it if you have hung around the Christian community for very long.  Prayers and hymns remind us of it continually.  Collects in the Book of Common Prayer resound with phrases like, “suffer patiently for the truth’s sake,” “…those who, following the example of their Savior, laid down their lives for their friends…,” “proclaim Christ in suffering and joy alike,” “who, in a time of plague and pestilence, were steadfast in their care for the sick and dying, and loved not their own lives, even unto death….”  Who has not dwelt on the words of Negro spirituals, songs of exhortation that have kept people hoping and living during impossibly difficult times?  A host of hymns and spiritual songs attest to the strength of faith to pull us through with words like, “…who trusts in God’s unchanging love builds on a rock that naught can move,” and  “why should I feel discouraged,…when Jesus is my portion?” 

            An event like Hurricane Sandy exposes our weaknesses.  Suddenly people realize they should never have built houses on barrier islands.  We quickly learn that the things we are so dependent on—electricity and all that it makes possible, like cell phone service, internet communication, transportation, food distribution, potable water supplies—may disappear within minutes.  Nature wallops us.  Rain and wind can completely tear up the most stable infrastructure in a couple of hours.  Life is wrecked.  Life is lost.  We have seen it time and again in the last year or so.  Haiti, New Zealand, Japan, and just last week the Philippines have endured major earthquakes.  Many people seem to have the idea that suffering is something that should not happen in the world.  Inadequate and primitive theology tries to assign blame, on the theory that God directly wills such disasters (though one would imagine that God would have better aim than is apparently the case).  Blame, shmame.  We are quite lucky if we don’t get clobbered by one thing or another.  And suffer we shall.

            We have to be careful when talking about suffering.  It is easy to lump all suffering together and speak of it as if it is all of one kind.  It is not.  Some things are clearly worse than others.  But what is true for all the saints and martyrs, as well as for the shopkeeper with rotting food in New York City last week, is that suffering is the only thing capable of cracking our persistent fantasy of being self-sufficient.  Suffering, even a little bit of it, takes us down a buttonhole or two.  Intense suffering makes us realize just how vulnerable we are.  Prolonged suffering will either make us find our inner strength or drive us to despair.

Providence

            That brings us to a second connection.  There is an answer to suffering, but it is not an answer to the question of why we suffer.  The answer is to place suffering in the larger context of the relationship of God and the world, and specifically the relationship of God and human beings.  The name I give to the nature of God in relationship with the world and us is “Providence.”  God provides.  God is a present reality in every situation, from the least to the most significant, in which we find ourselves.  That is vastly different from saying that God plans or wills the stuff that happens to us.  But there is no place we can go where God is not, and nothing that can happen to us that can seal us off from God’s caring presence.  That is a basic truth that you can rely on.  And how do you know it is true?  Because the divine reality—God—lives in you whoever you are and wherever you go.  It is not that God must come to you to help or save you.  God is already in, with, under, over, beside, in front of and behind you, nearer than the air you breathe.  The provident, caring God is in it with you.  If anything makes a saint, it is knowing that truth and wearing it daily, like an old, comfortable pair of shoes.  Knowing it and living it, day after day, until it becomes like an old wristwatch, if you are still familiar with such a thing:  something that you keep noticing and depending on throughout the day, unconscious or dimly conscious of just how much it is a part of you, and something that you miss the moment you take it off, never having guessed how much attention you really paid to it.  That is the way it is with God’s Providence.

            I’ll never forget the night I was in the shower in my college dorm and heard the awful sound of crunching, dragging metal, a collision, as it turned out, of a train barreling down the RF&P tracks through Ashland, Virginia, with the automobile of two first-year students.  The college chapel was packed for the funeral of the one who was killed.  I don’t know who the homilist was that day, but I’ll never forget his message. The death of Henry, he said, was tragic, senseless, and totally unnecessary.  But even in the midst of tragic, senseless, and unnecessary events, the holy God is walking, stirring, bringing about forgiveness and redemption and healing, giving birth and nurturing us.  Such is the provident God. 

Hope

            And so we come to hope, a third connection.  This week a plethora of stories has come in the wake of Sandy attesting to selflessness, sharing, sacrifice, deliverance.  People wonder aloud why it takes a disaster to bring us together.  Wonder we may, but that is what disasters do—always have, always will.  In her recent book A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit writes

Disaster requires an ability to embrace contradiction in both the minds of those undergoing it and those trying to understand it from afar.  In each disaster, there is suffering, there are psychic scars that will be felt most when the emergency is over.  There are deaths and losses.  Satisfactions, newborn social bonds, and liberations are often also profound.  Of course one factor in the gap between the usual accounts of disaster and the actual experience is that those accounts focus on the small percentage of people who are wounded, killed, orphaned, and otherwise devastated, often in the epicenter of the disaster, along with the officials involved.  Surrounding them, often in the same city and neighborhood, is a periphery of many  more who are largely undamaged but profoundly disrupted, and it is the disruptive power of disaster that matters here, the ability of disasters to topple old orders and open new possibilities.  This broader effect is what disaster does to society. In the moment of disaster, the old order no longer exists, and people improvise rescues, shelters, and communities.  Thereafter, a struggle takes place over whether the old order with all its shortcomings and injustices will be reimposed, or a new one, perhaps more oppressive and perhaps more just and free, like the disaster utopia, will arise.[1]

            I don’t know that it can be said of all the saints that they consciously held the hope of a new heaven and a new earth; but I do know that the Christian hope is profoundly anchored in the belief that we are on our way with Christ to a more just society.  Some have always imagined that to be another world after this one.  Others have imagined it as a possibility in this world.  The verdict is still out on that one.  Perhaps it is both.  But the saints in the Book of Revelation hold palm branches in their hands because they are victorious.  They know that their victory is not something that was planned and executed by smart generals in culture wars, but rather a victory that came when the Lamb of God moved heaven and earth to bring humanity into community with God.  There is no more mourning or crying or pain any more, nor death, because the one seated on the throne is making all things new.  That is the hope that sustains the saints.  Ironically it is also the hope that something will arise from each new disaster, pushing us towards a new heaven and a new earth, not least a combination of both right here in this life. 

            The home of God is with mortals.  God is dwelling with us.  The Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.  Though they may lose everything, the saints will dwell secure; for all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well. [2]

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2012

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[1] Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell:  The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster (New York:  Penguin Books, 2010), 15-16. 

[2] Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love (Amazon:  Kindle ed.), Chapter xxvii.92.

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Mark 10:35-45

            Be careful what you ask for. 

            James and John, for example, we can fairly guess, had no idea of what they were saying when they rather glibly answered Jesus, “We are able” when he asked them if they were able to drink the cup that he would drink or be baptized with the baptism with which he was baptized.  That cup and that baptism would most definitely take them to and through suffering and good deal more.  All they knew was that they wanted two good seats in glory.  It seemed simple enough.  You know what you want; go for it. 

            But life is not so simple.  Neither is the life of Christ nor the life in Christ.  Mark’s gospel is particularly concerned with suffering, especially suffering that comes along with persecution.  Best we can tell, Mark was motivated to write his gospel to encourage a young church experiencing its first wave of big-time persecution.  And you know what that means.  It means that people were busy looking for ways to survive, because that is what every living thing is always trying to do.  And the quickest way to survive persecution is to flee it.  If that doesn’t work, renounce whatever cause it is you are being persecuted for.  Mark puts into perspective what it is about Jesus and his cause that actually makes suffering worthwhile, to put it bluntly.   Mark wants his readers to understand that Jesus is in fact the Son of God, and thus the Truth from which there is no fleeing, and thus the ultimate reason for giving one’s heart and soul and life to follow this Man.  Mark wants us to see that Jesus’ own journey led him to suffering and death, and that anyone who follows him can reasonably expect to go through the same thing.

            There is not a one of us here today that is not interested in suffering, principally in how to avoid it.  But how real is the threat of suffering brought on by persecution?   That depends.  A great many Christians in this country frequently imagine themselves to be persecuted, victimized.  What they generally mean is that they resent the fact that they cannot impose their will and their religious values upon the rest of American society with impunity.  That people with different religious ideas and customs as well as those with none are protected by the Constitution in this pluralistic, designedly secular society is onerous to them to the point that they flatly deny that this is a secular society at all.  Limits to what one can do in the name of one’s religion does not equal persecution.  But there are other pieces of contemporary life where persecution raises its head.  Bullying, for example.  My heart breaks when I read the too plentiful stories about kids who don’t fit in with their peers being bullied and badgered, sometimes to the point of suicide, or sometimes murder.  Not only kids but a great many adults are persecuted for being lesbian, gay, or transgender.  Ethnic minorities are persecuted simply for being who they are.  Race inspired persecution is something ingrained in societies and cultures the world over.  Pogroms and genocide, not to mention the slaughter of people who dare to dissent from authoritarian overlords, are no less common now than they ever have been, and are possibly increasing.  Hate groups in this country alone grew from 602 in 2000 to 1018 in 2011.  While they do not document a growth in persecution per se, these figures suggest that for a great many people in this country, the possibility of being persecuted as well was the possibility of being a persecutor is by no means insignificant.

            But general persecution, even persecution for one’s political beliefs or one’s sexual orientation or one’s racial identity, is not what Mark is talking about, though it might be connected.  Mark—and Jesus—are talking about persecution, and thus suffering, for “righteousness’ sake,” for the sake of the gospel, for the sake of the Kingdom or reign of God.  An example of this today might be the suffering that a person undergoes precisely because that person takes on the forces of hate or stands up against inequality or organizes people to fight injustice or speaks up for those who are easy prey to the powers of hate and evil.  When we begin fighting oppression and injustice, speaking up for those who are essentially voiceless, threatening power structures, then quite likely we have begun doing exactly what Jesus was talking about when he talks about denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following him. 

            I say “quite likely” for two reasons.  One is that not everyone who fights against injustice and oppression or who strives for justice and peace is or wants to be identified as a follower of Jesus.  To my mind, that is quite all right.  “They who are not against us are for us,” Jesus once said.  In other words, the cause of Jesus—the Kingdom or Reign of God—extends beyond the particular dues-paying adherents of Jesus.  The cause of Truth is single but its forms are manifold and its supporters far flung throughout the world and history.  The other reason is that those who pick up the sword of righteousness to strike against evil sometimes become more enamored of the sword than they are enamored of righteousness.   Those who strive against powers and principalities run the risk of becoming more self-righteous than righteous.  That is not to say they ought not to run that risk.  But the only way around the danger is to become consciousness of it, and to invest considerable energy in cleaning oneself of pride and self-justification.

            Are you beginning to see how James and John had no idea of what they were asking?  Not only were they asking for places in a kingdom where places don’t matter except in relation to selfless service, but they had no clue about the kind of courage involved in risking precisely the kind of suffering that Jesus himself had multiple times predicted would result for him.

            But we have left something dangling here, haven’t we?  What about generic suffering, suffering that is not a product of persecution, suffering that has nothing much to do with relinquishing one’s place for another, or being a willing slave, or giving one’s life as a ransom?  What about difficult, even torturous suffering, that comes to many of us simply because we are living, vulnerable creatures in this universe?  You and I would like for there to be a guaranteed way to avoid that pain and suffering, and we would pay handsome sums to buy that way if we could.  But we know better.  We know that we are not immune to suffering.  We have the choice of blaming God, protesting our innocence, railing against the injustice of the universe, or hunkering down and taking what comes.

            To be honest, I need to hear something more than either that I will suffer (I already know that) or that I might be persecuted (I know something about being bullied at least).  I get that living in the Kingdom of God means giving up self-centered competition, letting go, living life by a completely different standard from that of the world’s default.  I understand that the issue is how well I follow my Master’s example in serving rather than being served.  But what I want to know is how living in the Kingdom actually makes a difference in the way I respond to suffering, whatever form it might take.  I want to know what I do in order to “drink the cup” which Jesus drinks and to “be baptized with the baptism with which he is baptized,” which I take to mean his willingness to follow his deepest Self, consonant with his Abba’s will, wherever that took him.  How do I do that? 

            As I look back on it, I got from early childhood a very clear message—not least from the preacher of my childhood—that God was a God I could trust.  I did not have to fear being deserted by God.  I did not have to worry about whether God loved me.  And I did not have to do more than speak the holy name itself than I had the full attention of all heaven.   I suppose, as a kid in an alcoholic family, I needed that kind of assurance, because God knows at times life was terrifying, uncertain, to the point of being almost unbearably painful.  There have been some—a few—times since then that I have had to draw on all the resources I could summon in order to get me through.  I imagine that before my time on earth is up, I will have other valleys to go through, nights of sweat, and days parched and barren.  I do not know, as you cannot know, what the future holds. As Thomas Merton once prayed, “ My Lord God, I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe the desire to please you does in fact please you, and I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope I never do anything apart from that desire.  And I believe that if I do this, you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” 

            A young friend of mine, a singer, told me this week that when he is passing through times of great challenge and tribulation he sings a particular song that anchors him.  I said that I did not know his song, but that I had one of my own, a hymn that I have been singing for years. 

            I know not what the future hath

              Of marvel or surprise,

            Assured alone that life and death

              God’s mercy underlies.

           

            And if my heart and flesh are weak    

              To bear an untried pain,

            The bruised reed God will not break

              But strengthen and sustain.

            I know not where God’s islands lift

              Their fronded palms in air;

            I only know I cannot drift

              Beyond God’s love and care.*

            Find your song to sing, one that will keep you anchored, centered.  And, freed of worry and anxiety, look about you, not for the best seats in glory, but for someone who needs you.  They are not all that far away.

* John Greenleaf Whittier, "I know not what the future hath," in The Hymnal 1940 (New York: Church Publishing Company, 1940), 441.

© Frank Gasque Dunn 2012

Cross Ways

A sermon preached at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church, Washington, DC, Good Friday, April 2, 2010

In a few minutes we will gather around the font and venerate the cross. In one of the anthems at the veneration, the people say, “We will glory in the cross of Christ.” That makes no sense whatsoever—if you believe that God is all-powerful or if you believe that God is all-wise. For the cross suggests that God comes to us not in power but in weakness. And the cross suggests as well that God does not stun us with wisdom like the best of human wisdom, but rather arrests us with an image and a story that to the world is foolishness. So said St. Paul: “Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are being called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.”

Try as you may, you will never make “sense” of the cross of Christ. All you can do is stumble over it, dismiss it, or glory in it. It is better to stumble over it or to dismiss it than to glory in it for the wrong reasons. And chief among those reasons would be to imagine that the cross was the way a blood-thirsty god needed to be avenged with a death as payment for human sin. (Not to say that many Christians have not or do not believe that.) But the cross we glorify and venerate is the cross on which God joins in our suffering, becomes one with us at our weakest, experiences the distance that we experience when we are as far away from the Good as we can possibly be, identifies with us when we are most helpless, and literally sets aside thorough innocence in order to take the part of whoever among us deserves the worst.

Not surprisingly, a story says it best, one of the many that we have created to reflect on this stupendous act of enormous cruelty and suffering asking what it can possibly mean. Listen to the story in Helen Waddell’s historical novel, Peter Abelard.

From somewhere near them in the woods a cry rose, a thin cry, of such intolerable anguish that Abelard turned dizzy on his feet, and caught at the wall of the hut. 'It's a child's voice,' he said.

Thibault had gone outside. The cry came again. 'A rabbit,' said Thibault. He listened. 'It'll be a rabbit in a trap. Hugh told me he was putting them down.'

'O God,' Abelard muttered. 'Let it die quickly'.

But the cry came yet again. He plunged through a thicket of hornbeam. 'Watch out', said Thibault, thrusting past him. 'The trap might take the hand off you.'

The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stood over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and Abelard gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.

It was that last confiding thrust that broke Abelard's heart. He looked down at the little bedraggled body, his mouth shaking. 'Thibault,' he said, 'do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?

Thibault nodded.

'I know,' he said. 'Only I think God is in it too.'

Abelard looked up sharply.

'In it? Do you mean that it makes him suffer, the way it does us?'

Again Thibault nodded.

'Then why doesn't he stop it?'

'I don't know,' said Thibault. 'Unless it's like the prodigal son, I suppose the father could have kept him at home against his will. But what would have been the use? All this,' he stroked the limp body, 'is because of us. But all the time God suffers. More than we do.'

Abelard looked at him, perplexed. 'Thibault, do you mean Calvary?'

Thibault shook his head. 'That was only a piece of it - the piece we saw - in time. Like that.' He pointed to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle. 'That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree, but you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ's life was like; the bit of God we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.'

Abelard looked at him, the blunt nose and the wide mouth the honest troubled eyes. He could have knelt before him.

'Then Thibault,' he said slowly, 'you think that all this,' he looked down at the little quiet body in his arms, 'all the pain of the world, was Christ's cross?'

'God's cross,' said Thibault. 'And it goes on.'

So that is what the cross says. God suffers with us. Such is the love and such is the story of the one who hung there. In our deepest pain, greatest loneliness, worst bondage, or gravest evil, whether we know it or not, we are never far from our Maker and Redeemer, whose pain is greater than human pain, whose weakness is greater than human strength, and whose folly is greater than all the wisdom in the world.


Acostumbramos a recitar durante la Veneración de la Cruz: “Glorificamos la Santa Cruz.” No tiene nada de sentido si creemos que Dios es omnipotente o si creemos que Dios es omnisciente. San Pablo dice, “Los judíos piden milagros y los griegos buscan el saber, mientras nosotros proclamamos a un Mesías crucificado: para los judíos ¡que esándalo! y para los griegos ¡qué locura! Pero para los que Dios ha llamado, judíos o griegos, este Mesías es fuerza de Dios y sabiduría de Dios.”

Luego, ¿que significa la cruz? No es el instrumento por lo cual Dios obtiene satisfacción por nuestros pecados. Al contrario, es el lugar donde Dios viene para participar con nosostros en nuestros sufrimientos. Es el lugar donde Dios nos junta cuando estámos más debiles. En la cruz, Dios asume la parte de malhechor a pesar de que es inocente.

Una historia da cuenta bien. En su novello Abelard, Helen Waddell escribe que un día Pedro Abelard y su amigo Thiebault estaban circa del bosque cuano oyen una grita. Abelard pensaba que era un niño, pero discubrieron un conejo cautivado en una trampa. Abelard abre la trampa y cobra el conejo. El animal pequeño muere en sus manos. El corazón de Abelard está completamente roto, y temblando, pregunta a Thibault, “¿Pienses que hay un Dios en absoluto? Es justo que yo sufra por todos mis errores, pero este conejo pequeño, ¿qué hizo?

Thibault dice, “Creo que Dios está en esta situación.”

Abelard pregunta, “¿Qué? ¿Dices que Dios sufre también como nosotros? Luego, ¿porqué no pone un fin a esta situación?”

Thibault le dice, “No se. Pero yo creo que Dios sufre todo el tiempo, más que nosotros.”

“¿Estás pensando en Calvario?” pregunta Abelard. Thibault está de acuerdo. Le dice que Jesucristo es como una cepa que revela la interior de un arból cortado. La vida de Cristo nos muestra Dios, la parte que podemos ver. Luego, Dios es como Cristo, perdonandonos y salvandonos.

Mirando el conejo muerto en sus brazos, Abelard pregunta, “¿Todo la pena del mundo es la cruz de Cristo?¨

Thibault le dice, “La cruz de Dios. Y la cruz continua por siempre.”

Entonces, la cruz significa que Dios sufre con nosotros. En nuestro dolor más profundo, la mayor soledad, la peor esclavitud, o mal más grave, lo sepamos o no, nunca estamos lejos de nuestro Creador y Redentor, cuyo dolor es mayor que el dolor humano, cuya debilidad es mayor que la fuerza humana, y cuya la locura es mayor que toda la sabiduría en el mundo.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2010. For the quotation from Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard, see http://whathorizon.blogspot.com/2009/04/and-it-goes-on.html, accessed March 30, 2010.