Things We Cannot Fix--August 14, 2020

Things We Cannot Fix--August 14, 2020

After some days Paul said to Barnabas, “Come, let us return and visit the believers in every city where we proclaimed the word of the Lord and see how they are doing.” Barnabas wanted to take with them John called Mark. But Paul decided not to take with them one who had deserted them in Pamphylia and had not accompanied them in the work. The disagreement became so sharp that they parted company; Barnabas took Mark with him and sailed away to Cyprus. But Paul chose Silas and set out, the believers commending him to the grace of the Lord. He went through Syria and Cilicia, strengthening the churches. [Acts 15:36-41] 

Sometimes we just can't work things out on our own. If we needed a reminder of our need for God's grace, here we have one--sometimes, despite our best efforts and noblest intentions, we cannot get along with each other, we cannot reconcile, and we cannot fix relationships that are broken. That does not mean that such broken things cannot be fixed--only that we need someone beyond ourselves to fix them. That is, I suppose, the way of resurrection, too--Lazarus cannot raise himself from the dead, but that doesn't mean Jesus cannot call him back to life.  But here once again, Luke gives us a poignant, if also sorrowful, scene to remind us that even in the early church, sometimes people--even people of sincere faith--could not work things out on their own.   And yet, God continued to work through the broken pieces. God still does.

It does seem a little strange, given how we often treat Saint Paul as this heroic figure in the New Testament, and how often Barnabas is depicted as the early church's best cheerleader, to see them as so utterly, undeniably human here--getting into a squabble and having to part company. We would like to wish that being good faithful Christians will make our relationships indestructible, from marriages to friendships to church memberships. And maybe sometimes, our faith gives us a perspective that lets us forgive and reconcile beyond what we would be able to do on our own without the work of the Spirit in our lives. Okay, fair enough, but then we also have to deal with the straightforward truth of the Scriptures here in Acts 15, which says that having Jesus in your life will not guarantee that your closest friendships are fireproof or indestructible.  Sometimes they break--and they require a God who loves and uses broken things, rather than a magical belief that "true Christians" never get broken that way.  

They do.  We do.

No one doubts the genuineness of Paul's faith, and no one questions Barnabas' devotion to his mission, either--and yet they cannot come to terms about whether John Mark can come along on a follow-up journey. It is a sorrowful moment, because we will never find out in the rest of Acts whether Mark, Paul, and Barnabas eventually reconcile. The Book of Acts never gives us a future scene where Paul and Barnabas reconcile over a beer, or embrace with tears in their eyes.  We just don't know what ever happened between them. We get hints perhaps in Philemon and 2 Timothy that someone named Mark is a close confidant of Paul's, but we are left only to hope that eventually they patched things up. 

To me, this is an interesting thing to consider about this passage in Acts--it means that Luke  the narrator chose to leave things unresolved on this front. Luke may or may not have known what eventually happened between Paul and Barnabas and Mark, or he may not have, but he did have the control as author and editor to decide whether or not to even tell this unflattering story. He could have, if we he were more interested in just plain propaganda, skipped over the disagreement and announced that Paul had gone off with Silas--end of story. But instead, Luke is willing to live with irresolution, like a chord with a major seventh in it that is left hanging at the end of the piece and no return to a straightforward root. Luke is willing to leave things in his story without an ending, without tying up all the loose ends, and without a scene of Paul and Barnabas and Mark all getting together for a group hug. It's like the end of the parable we call the Prodigal Son, that hangs there with the older son outside the party and the father's invitation to come in and celebrate just hanging there--we just don't know what happened next.  That's not to say that Luke thought they would never mend their relationship--it's just that Luke is willing to leave that in the hands of the same God who sends them out into the world in different directions. 

Sometimes relationships get repaired, and we can see grace in that and give thanks to God when it happens, but that's not always how things go.  Sometimes, God's work is to take wounded people who go their separate ways and to bless each of them in different directions--to lead them, but to lead them separately.  Sometimes God resurrects a dead relationship, and sometimes God resurrects the individuals who were in it, but as separate people.  That's a harder, but ultimately more honest, reality about how God works in and through us.  In a way, it's a "big picture" version of what Luke says the church in Antioch did for Paul and Silas, too--they "commended them to the grace of God." That is essentially what Luke does in his storytelling--he puts Paul and Silas, and Barnabas and Mark, too, all in the hands of God, and lives with the tension of knowing he can't--and they can't--resolve things themselves. 

That is a difficult place for us to live--right in the thick of the tension of our tangle of relationships. Some we can manage pretty well, some fall apart when we even lightly touch them, and some seem to hold together apart from what we put into them. That is really the same with all of our work and effort, too, whether for the church or for our own daily vocations. There are things beyond our control, situations beyond our capacity to resolve, and troubles that we have no choice but to live through as well and as faithfully as we can. And in those moments--or perhaps to tell the truth, in all of our lives--what else can we do but let ourselves be "commended to the grace of God"? 

That doesn't mean we float through life as if nothing matters, singing "Que será será--whatever will be, will be." And it doesn't mean that we are absolved of responsibility for what we do in this day. But it does mean that there will come times when, after all of our hardest work and noblest intentions, we cannot fix things on our own. The Christian faith is not God's gift of a new set of rules for us to fix ourselves with--it is God's gift of love precisely in our brokenness, and the promise of God to mend us precisely when we cannot do it for ourselves. That is a reminder to us that Paul is not just a "peddler" of this Christian faith--he is a needy recipient of the grace he speaks about. As the old commercial used to say, Paul could say, too, "I'm not just the president of the club, I'm also a client." Paul, Mark, Barnabas, and Silas, all giants of the New Testament community, are people in need of God's reconciling presence--like we are. The whole lot of them lived in the tension of relationships they could not fix and troubles they could not outrun--and yet God used them, beautifully, blessedly, and meaningfully. 

Part of what that means for us is that God doesn't only work with people who look like they've got it all together.  God doesn't only work through people whose marriages are perfect, or who haven't ever angered their kids or disappointed their parents.  God doesn't only work through people who get along with everybody, or who always have a smile on their faces.  God works through us even when we have jagged edges in ourselves from the broken relationships we have been a part of.  And even though sometimes, life sends us new relationships that heal the old wounds, that doesn't always happen, and God doesn't wait for the jagged edges to be smoothed away before working in us and through us.  God uses wounded people.  God uses people who are estranged from others.  God uses people who don't get along with each other anymore.  They can still be beloved of God even if they struggle to love another, even as neighbors.  Paul and Barnabas couldn't keep going on the same mission, even for all they had been through.  And yet God loved and worked through both of them.

I wonder if today, God might have an easier time using us if we could be truthful and surrender up those places we are convinced we have to fix things on our own, and instead let ourselves live in the tension and let ourselves be "commended to the grace of God." Rather than imagining that Christianity has given us the do-it-yourself kit to make all of our relationships indestructible, perhaps we can be honest that we need God to meet us in our brokenness, in the shards, today. And we will see that as we sit in the shards, the shards sit in the palm of God's hands, too. 

Into your hands, O Lord, we commend... us all. We commend ourselves and our frustrated friendships, our enemies and estranged ones, who are hurting, too, and even the empty spaces in our hearts. We commend them all to you--trusting that you will be tender with them as we live in the tension of this day. We pray it in the name of Jesus, whose words from the cross were to commend himself into your hands, too.