Wednesday, September 28, 2022

"Through," Not "Out Of"--September 29, 2022


"Through," Not "Out Of"--September 29, 2022

"No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it." [1 Corinthians 10:13]

There's a lot in here, both of really powerful promises and really tempting ways to mis-read this verse.  And a lot of well-meaning Respectable Religious people have done an awful lot of damage by casually slinging around sloppy paraphrases of this verse like, "God won't ever give you any more than you can handle," and end up just breaking the spirits of people who are feeling overwhelmed and hear that line as a pious way of saying, "Suck it up and tough it out."  So, both because of the ways this verse can get misused, because there is still such deep and powerful hope to be heard in it, let's give it a closer look together.

First off, even though there's some pretty dense theology in here, at the center is a very simple point on which everything else is built:  God is faithful.  That by itself is a place worth spending some time in.  When we get to the big Questions about God and life, and we find ourselves asking, "What is God like?"  Paul would tell us that at the top of our list of answers is "faithful."  God is supremely faithful--the maker of durable promises.

That doesn't necessarily mean we will always (or even often) know how  God will turn out to keep the promises made to us.  Lots of folks in the first century were pretty sure that a Messiah was promised to them, but then again, nobody was expecting him to show up as a peasant baby who would grow up into a carpenter-rabbi and save the world by getting nailed to a cross.  In hindsight, the eyes of faith can see that God was being faithful to ancient promises, but wow, it sure came in a surprising way.  Theologian Douglas John Hall offers a good point about that.  He writes: “The disciple community believes that God reigns, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. But God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable about God: that God will be faithful.”

Faithful and predictable are not the same.  We step into this day assured of the first, but never the second.  We step into this day, perhaps with a Plan A of what will happen, and what we think we expect God to do in our day.  We pray petitions seeking to help us keep our routines in place--"Dear God, give me strength for this next task that is on my list," and "Lord, help me get through the day until I can rest and put my feet up tonight..."  And those are fine and appropriate prayers for us to offer.  But God reserves the right to be at work among us in ways we could have scheduled or rehearsed or planned for.  And yet the who of God--what God is like, and God's character--remains faithful, true, and constant. 

We are not promised, in other words, that we Christians can know what is coming our way in a day.  We get no secret knowledge or inside track.  We don't get to know the what, but we are assured of who it is that goes with us through whatever it is that comes our way.  God is faithful.  Always has been, always will be.  

So then, we need to get ourselves clear on what is, and is not, being promised to us.  On a first read, our minds mind latch onto "he will provide the way out" and assume that Paul is now committing God to helping us avoid trouble in this life.  We might well imagine that God has a secret shortcut to skip through the trials we face, and that Christians need only show their membership cards or perform the secret handshake, at which point God will pull back a curtain and show us a discrete back exit that will take us straight to sunny days.  Or maybe the more science-fiction-minded among us picture this as a promise to "beam us up," Star Trek style, out of trouble--whether we imagine the "beaming" is to heaven or to let us retreat away from the concerns of others in the world and to stay tucked away in our our insulated lives.

But none of those are the way the God of the Scriptures--the God of the wilderness wanderings and the God of the cross, too, mind you--operates in the world.  There is no back door shortcut hidden behind the curtain.  There is no magic prayer by which we can be "beamed out" of life so that we don't have to face... well, whatever it is we are afraid to face.  Rather, the pictures we get in Scripture are of a God who meets us in the face of trouble and stays with us--to bring us through it, rather than without facing it at all.  We tell the stories of the God who went with the wandering Israelites, even though it was a forty-year journey; the God who met Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the fire and preserved them in it, rather than snatching them out of the flames; the God whose way of salvation was not to beam saints out but to come into our world and our lives in the human flesh of Jesus, and to die here with us.  Easter, in other words, is only possible after coming through death; you cannot get to an empty tomb without a cross, and there is no shortcut given to Jesus to avoid that.

Our God, then, has made of a point of being faithful by being with us.  God is indeed faithful, as Paul insists.  But that faithfulness might not look like what we expect.  I might pray, "Dear God, please let me not have to have this difficult conversation with so-and-so..." or "Dear God, please just keep everyone I know healthy forever so that none of us ever has to deal with the pain of sickness or grief."  But God's way of being faithful might not be to spare us those troubles--but rather, it is much more like our God to go through them with us.  God doesn't keep us out of pain, but--according to Paul--makes it possible for us to endure

So as we start this day, we do not have to waste time or nourish false hopes and keep our eyes peeled for where there might be a back door hidden behind a curtain.  The way of our God--God's modus operandi, if you will--is not to give club members the secret shortcuts, but to be with us making it possible to endure.  That will change how we pray, today, too--so that we will perhaps no longer selfishly pray to be spared any inconveniences, but instead will ask for God to abide with those who are hurting today, and to give us the strength to be used for their sakes, too.  And it might even change the way we see the world this day--no longer as a place to be escaped, but as a creation God is so faithfully committed to redeeming that he sticks it out with us here, even for all its slings and arrows.

Today, let us get our prepositions correct:  we are not an "out-of" kind of people; because of Christ, we are "through" people.

O Living God, bring us through this day.  Give us what we need to live where you placed us, and give us the faith to trust that you will meet us here in our wilderness days, in the fire, and wherever else the day finds us.  And grant, Lord, that as others see us, no longer afraid to stay in the world with all its brokenness, they will come to know something of your abiding and faithful love that sticks it out with us.  This we ask in the name of Jesus, the one who came to be with us, and who went through death into resurrection for us.

No comments:

Post a Comment