Holding Three Oranges

Holding Three Oranges--October 4, 2016

"As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work'." [John 9:1-4]

This isn't going to be easy. But we have to go here.

This is a world in which awful things happen.  And if followers of Jesus are going to be honest, we are going to have to deal with that. We are going to have to figure out some way of thinking through how we can say we believe that God is real--that God is knowable, and personal, and that the Scriptures describe this God as both wholly good and almighty--and at the same time not to deny that awful things happen. Unless we are going to deny that awful things are truly awful--the death of children, the starvation of countless people in one part of the world while food gets thrown away in other parts of the world, the memory of the ovens and lynch mobs, the labeling of some as "the other" who were thus expendable, the cruelty of those who abuse or prey on others, the devastation of a hurricane or an earthquake or an violent mob, or any of a host of other tragedies--unless we pretend that those things don't matter, we have to find some way to speak about how those things happen in the world while we also say that we believe God is real, good, and all-powerful.

It's rather like trying to hold three oranges in a single hand all at once: you might be able to fit two of the three at once, but the third one always wants to drop onto the floor.  And so you end up with people throughout history who have tried to resolve this conundrum by saying, "Well, God is good and well-intentioned, but just doesn't really have the power to stop us from doing awful things to each other," or "...but God just set the world up to run on its own and doesn't muddle with it any longer." 

Or you have others whose conclusion goes, "God is real, and God is all-powerful, but this so-called God is just a capricious and cruel hand of fate that deals disasters out without regard for what gets destroyed." 

Or, also, there have been folks throughout history whose answer has been, "A God who is all powerful and all good is a nice idea, but a fiction.  You need to give up on that as a real idea and just treat it like a bit of wishful thinking."  Any one of those answers gets two out of three oranges, but lets one hit the ground.

We have had to start here because we are going to be looking this month at how grace heals the world.  And while that sounds wonderful--and indeed, it is wonderful--we need to start honestly.  And in all honesty, "healing" means that there is something "sick" in the first place, just like "resurrection" means that something was "dead" first.  And if we are talking about God doing the healing, whether of an individual man born blind in John's Gospel, or of your sick parent or child, or of the whole world, then the sickness itself begs the question, "Why did God let them get sick in the first place?"  Only if we are willing to face that question, and to just bear the fact that any way you ask it is painful, can we somehow also see the healing as grace, too.

People do get sick.  Is God not aware of their need or of the existence of germs prior to a diagnosis?  No--to hear the Scriptures tell it, God is indeed aware.  Couldn't God have just prevented every sickness before it even ever happened?  Couldn't God have stopped the earthquake, the hurricane, the maniacal tyrant using chemical weapons on his own people while Christians half a world away comfortably twiddled their thumbs and didn't want to think about where those people would find a safe home?  Couldn't God have stopped the iceberg before it hit the Titanic, or stopped the water crisis in Flint before anyone was affected?

This is the hard thing we have to face now.  The way the Scriptures describe God, they are unwilling to give up on the claim that God really is able to do any of those, and yet also that God really is supremely good, and at the same time, that God really is real and not just a figment of our imaginations.  The Scriptures insist on finding a way to hold all three oranges in one hand, so to speak, without letting any of them drop.  That means the Scriptures dare us to imagine that it can be true, even if paradoxically, that God is good, that God is strong, and that God is real.  But that comes at the price, so to speak, of also acknowledging that someone you love will get sick with Alzheimer's Disease, or with inoperable cancer, or with heart disease, and that God's way is not usually to prevent anything bad from ever happening, but to bring life through even the most deathly of valleys. 

And it means, too, that there is no promise that angels will stop us as a human race from devastating ourselves.  We came very close during the Cold War to self-annihilation, and it is possible, now that the day to day threat of nuclear war has abated and been replaced with different fears to trouble our hearts (like terrorism and endless war), to think that the lesson to be learned is that God will not let us do lasting damage to ourselves, because God is too nice.  But that is not the way the Scriptures view it: the Old and New Testaments say again and again that, yes, we can and do inflict damage that doesn't get undone, but which much be born and gotten through.  Israel did go into exile, even when they were sure that God would never let it happen.  The Second Temple did get destroyed, even when God's people were sure that the true God would never let the Romans get that close.  We really did wipe out the passenger pigeon and the dodo, and we really are capable (more than just capable--we are doing it) of causing great damage to the beautiful world in which we live.  Faith in God does not mean we have a get-out-of-jail free card for the consequences of our actions, whether individually or collectively.  No, there is no rule that says God must step in and prevent the sickness in the first place, even when the sickness is worldwide... even when the sickness touches all of us.  Rather, the hope of which the Bible speaks is of a God who heals--that means the sickness comes, and God brings us through and out the other side.  The Bible speaks of a God who raises the dead--that means that death comes, and God brings us through and out the other side of that, too.  But the sickness is real--whether for a person or a planet.

In the midst of all that, Jesus teaches us to look for God in the healing of suffering, in the relief of disease, in the restoration of what sickness or death have ravaged.  And Jesus does that knowing that it will raise the questions in our mind of how God can be good... and strong... and real... all three at once.  Jesus knows it appears impossible to keep all three of those off the ground.  But nevertheless he teaches us to see the presence of grace in the healing of what is wounded, even though he knows it will provoke the question from us of why someone was able to be wounded in the first place.

All this month we are going to explore what it means to say that grace heals the world. But if we do that, we need to have begun here, because we have to acknowledge that both healing and resurrection mean going through something painful and frightening, rather than avoiding ever having to face them in the first place.

We do need healing.  In all kinds of ways.  Today, let us keep our eyes open and our ears honest about our need and learning to see God in the midst of it all.

Lord Jesus, heal our sicknesses.  Be merciful to us.  We are messes.