Without An Escape Hatch--July 16, 2024

Without An Escape Hatch--July 16, 2024

"We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see--we are alive; as punished, and yet not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing everything." [2 Corinthians 6:8b-10]

I'm going to warn you now: following Jesus is going to mess with your head (if you didn't know that already).  Belonging to the people of Jesus has a way of taking your old assumptions about how the world works--what we usually call "conventional wisdom"--and turns it upside down.  Any one of us might think themselves crazy to wrap their brains around that new Christ-shaped perspective, except that we share it together, and we remind ourselves that we haven't lost our minds.  But still, it can be hard as a follower of Jesus to see our old ways of understanding the world getting turned inside out, and our former assumptions about how God works evaporate like morning fog.  In the end, though, Jesus helps us to see clearly--even if it means our old familiar illusions are finally gone.

One of the particular ways that following Jesus messes with our old thinking is the way we read God's presence in the world.  Respectable Religion teaches us a simplistic plotline: when good things happen to you, it must mean God favors you, and when bad things happen to you, it must mean that God is punishing you. "The man who is saved from the oncoming truck must be endorsed by heaven, but the woman who went into cardiac arrest across town and couldn't be resuscitated must not have been important enough for God to help."  Or, "The people in Country A whose stock markets are at all-time highs must be divinely blessed, but the people in Country B who are starving through war and famine must be under divine judgment."  It's an alluring and easy way to make sense of the world--the only problem is that it's not at all the way Jesus teaches us to see the world.

After all, we confess that the One who really is "chosen by God"--Jesus himself--was strung up by an angry mob of religious leaders who handed him over to the empire for execution on a Roman death stake.  Nobody stops the flogging from happening. Nobody prevents the crucifixion of the Messiah.  Nobody swoops in at the last minute to save Jesus from having to die.  He dies.  The resurrection doesn't erase that death; it only tells us that he was God's chosen even though he was utterly scorned and despised all the way to death without an escape hatch.  

For that matter, Jesus himself is constantly undoing our bad theology that assumes good fortune translates to divine approval and that bad fortune is a sign of God's rejection. Jesus himself rules out any claim that being safe and comfortable is proof of God's favor or that suffering is evidence of divine disfavor. The Crucified One himself refutes that sloppy thinking. He tells his disciples that the man born blind isn't being punished, even though that's what they assumed (John 9).  He tells his disciples that if they are faithful, they'll be persecuted, and that if all speak well of them, they should be more worried (Luke 6).  He announces that the really "blessed" are the hungry, the poor, the grieving, and the ones denied justice, while he calls out "woe" over the well-fed and well-heeled with their saccharin smiles.  And he insists repeatedly that if you want to be first, you'll need to put yourself in last place, and that if you lose your life you'll find it.  All of that just completely pulls down the old thinking of Respectable Religion down to the ground.

And then, if that weren't enough, the first generation of Christians found the same in their own lives.  The apostle Paul--someone clearly chosen by Jesus himself for his work--found that in his own life and ministry, he was regularly regarded as a loser, a failure, a recipient of God's punishment, and a glutton for suffering. But Paul doesn't see those as evidence that God is mad at him; he sees them as signs he is walking the path of Jesus.  By the time Paul writes to the Corinthians in these verses above, he has learned that sunshine and safety are not signs of God's approval, and that suffering and sorrow are not proof of God's disapproval.  He has learned that the old theology of Respectable Religion was all a sham. Sometimes the true prophets get run out of town or have stones thrown at them (this happens a lot actually). And sometimes the worst villains get away smiling and smirking. The cross of Jesus makes all of our oversimplification of God into a cosmic vending machine of prizes and punishments unravel.  And instead we see that God can bless and care for us in our sufferings... that God's love for us may not always translate to the world's definition of success... and that sometimes crooks lick their lips in triumph while sometimes the righteous are written off as failures.  Paul didn't just hear stories or teachings of Jesus to learn that--he saw it in his own life as well.  "We are treated as impostors, and yet are true.. as punished, and yet not killed... as poor, yet making many rich."  Paul had learned that the old assumptions of a moral universe of karmic clockwork, doling out divine protection for the "chosen" and heaven-sent suffering for the "rejected," were all bunk.  God's ways can't be reduced to a formula like that, especially not when the Anointed and Chosen One, Jesus, goes all the way to a cross rather than getting whisked away from the custody of the centurions or the crowd shouting, "Crucify him!"  Paul can no longer bear bad theology like that--because of Jesus.

And honestly, it's still hard for us to let go of the old reductionistic thinking.  Some part of us wants to be able to identify who is God's favored because they got rescued by the lifeguard (and therefore must have special purpose) and who must be unimportant in God's eyes because they drowned.  But Jesus and Paul both remind us that's not how God works, and if anything, God is especially present with the broken, with the hurting, and with the ones who have lost it all.  It takes a lifetime to learn to see things rightly again, after all the haze of bad theology burns off with the sunrise.  

But we do it together.  Paul keeps saying "we" about these experiences of finding God in the midst of suffering and defeat--he knows he's not alone as he finds Jesus there in the places of loss and hardship.  And because we face those struggles together, we can keep reminding each other of the unexpected, unconventional wisdom of a God whose victory comes through the magnificent defeat of a cross, and who brings life through death rather than a saved-in-the-nick-of-time close call.  

That's what allows us to offer comfort to one another when we are sitting in an ICU waiting room, wondering if we just didn't pray hard enough that our loved one ended up there ("That's not how this works!" we can remind each other).  That's what allows us to pick our feet up and start again when it seems like the cheaters and the crooks have won the day again ("It doesn't mean that they're blessed and we're cursed!" we can say).  That's what allows us still to recognize God's presence with us even when the chemo isn't working, even when the loved one falls off the wagon and hits the bottle again, even when the company says your job is being "relocated" without out in it.  Because we know that God's love isn't the same as getting the lucky break or avoiding the deer in the highway, we can trust that God's presence for good in our lives will be enough--even if it feels like we're losing. 

I don't know when you'll need that reminder, or where it will show up in your life's journey, but you will.  And on the day you do, know: we face it together, and God, we trust, will be there, too--even if it takes our eyes and hearts a bit to recognize God's presence there.

Lord Jesus, help us to see you and your presence in all things and all circumstances, and to face whatever challenges are ahead today together.