The Divine Comedy

The Divine Comedy--November 3, 2016

"Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty thunderpeals, crying out, 'Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns.  Let us exult and give him the glory...'" [Revelation 19:6-7a]

Is this a comedy or a tragedy?

The universe, I mean.  History, I mean.  All of it.  Are we living in a story that ends bleakly, or abruptly, or in agonizing lack of resolution, like a chord with a major seventh in it as the last beat of a march?  Or does the Story of which we are a part end with things somehow put right?

There was an underappreciated movie from a few years ago called Stranger Than Fiction, a quirky film with Will Ferrell playing a man who starts to hear a narrator in his life (and who wouldn’t be surprised to start hearing Emma Thomspon’s voice everywhere you went?) giving a voiceover exposition to everything he did and said.  And while he is questioning his own sanity over hearing such an omniscient voice describing his actions, it turns out the voice is an author—and Ferrell’s character is the protagonist of her latest novel!  So, he turns to a literature professor who tells him that the first thing he has to do is to find out whether he is living in a comedy or a tragedy.  He has to know whether there is a happy ending in store, if he is going to figure out how to live in between the present moment and the last chapter.

It might seem at first like an absurd premise for a movie… except that in a sense, the Christian claim is not all that different.  We don’t get a voice-over from a famous actress narrating our choice of breakfast cereals in the morning, perhaps.  But we do start each day having been told that the end of the Story is a good one, a true and sure and satisfying one.  We Christians have been promised that the Story of the universe is a comedy--and a divine one at that!--even for all the awful and tragic things that happen in our lives, and that have happened throughout history.  (Perhaps there is wisdom in the old comedians’ wisdom that comedy equals tragedy plus time.) 

And maybe at its most basic, to be a Christian is to be someone who trusts that, by God’s promise and with Christ as the down payment on history, indeed as the famous mystic once put it, one day “all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well.”

We lean on promises like these from Revelation, which say to us that the end of the Story is satisfying, and that, as theologian Douglas John Hall puts it, "all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, God reigns".  This is where our hope holds: for whatever is going on at this present moment, history is a comedy, without denying the tragic that comes along the way.  All WILL be made well, even if not yet.

And maybe that’s the other thing we need to be clear about—and, honestly, that we Christians GET to be clear about in a way that others may not be able to be.  The Christian hope, the hope of the Scriptures, is NOT that everything will go the way you want it to in life.  The individual chapters sometimes have rotten endings, both because of our own actions and because of the actions and choices of others far beyond our control.  Horrible things happen in this life, certainly. And the Christian faith is NOT a false optimism that EVERYTHING is guaranteed to work out right now by some invisible rule of fate.  There is a lot that happens in the in-between chapters of our lives that plays out as a result of our choices, or someone’s choices at any rate. 

And that means we bear a great deal of responsibility about how things go in our lives.  To say that the Story of the universe has a satisfying ending is NOT to say that I will always get the job I apply for, or that the girl will always say “yes” when you ask her out onto the dance floor. It does not mean that the candidate you vote for will win.  It does not mean that the candidate you vote for, even if victorious, will do a good job.  It does not mean that God is always on the "side" of those who use the most religious-sounding language.  It does not mean that I am entitled a career in the field I wish for, or that a career will just fall into my lap.  A lot of things in life require working for, and if they happen, they happen because you got yourself up off the couch and did them.  The Christian hope about the end of The Story does not mean the middle chapters are irrelevant--just that God promises us that all the loose ends and unfinished story-arcs will be gathered up by the last scene.

That also means that if we Christians are honest, we can say that we are not guaranteed that every relationship works the way we hope for.  Yes, sometimes people live decades estranged from a brother, a sister, a parent, a grown child, or a spouse.  We are not guaranteed that every relationship will be reconciled in this life—if it happens, it will happen because we have worked on mending the fences and restoring broken trust.  It means that we are not guaranteed that we will all get the 2.5 kids and the white picket fence life (and, whether that was ever the recipe for happiness or not anyway, is a matter of serious doubt, too, by the way).  It means that you and I are not owed or entitled to a string of bigger and bigger houses, or kids with steadily improving batting averages and report cards.  If you want your kid to get better at baseball, you have to spend the time playing catch. If you want a better shot at the job you want, you have to work hard and pour yourself into it. If you want the relationship to have a better chance of reconciliation, you have to be willing to do the hard work of lowering your defenses and daring both to forgive and to ask for forgiveness.  Much is possible by making those investments.  But those kinds of things are not “guaranteed” as a matter of Christian hope.  And any TV preachers who tell you otherwise are, not to put too fine a point on it, selling something—usually their own books. And Rule #1 of the gospel is "Beware of salesmen and sales pitches--real grace is always free."

Christian hope—real hope that the Story ends with hearts mended and a world restored—allows us to be honest about what is NOT our hope.  Knowing that the end of the story is the part that is assured, we can be truthful without spin about the things that are coming unglued right now.  And once we are honest about what is coming apart around us, or within us, we can then get to the point of asking what we will do about them.  We are not on our own in the midst of the brokenness of the present, either.  But we do need to be clear about what we have been PROMISED, and what has not been promised.  The end of the story is assured—history is a divine comedy.  The chapters along the way will contain heartache—but we can invite God to be present in the midst of them, too.

What if today, you and I started with an honest inventory of what things we CAN count on in this life, and what things are up to our decisions and choices and those of others? What could we have confidence in, and how would we face the work that is cut out for us then?

It's a comedy--the universe.  History. Everything.  There is a joyful promised ending.  It's a hilarious divine comedy.  Now, go face today.

Lord Jesus, assure us today of the end of our story, so that we can live through the middle today.