What is Jesus good for when everything hurts?
The bible text for this weeks sermon can be found at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=521025529
What good is Jesus when the world feels so far removed from all the promises and proclamations made in their name? I’m pretty tired of having this haunting question feel so relevant time and time again. It’s exhausting in every way. These are the days when violence, abuse, loss, and uncertainty surround. And it’s not just that they exist, but the way they seem relentless. There’s so much and such profound heartache and grief, anger and frustration, hopelessness...what can even be said? Our stomachs church with bile and acid and we feel sick, body and soul. What can we even do?
This past Friday morning, as I gathered with other clergy to help host a moment of prayer for our local elementary school community, as I stood up front watching those around me weeping and holding each other, speaking their stories through shaky yet bold powerful voices, as I hoped to offer some word of comfort while I imagined my own fourth grader being named among the slaughter…I turned and said to my friend and colleague, I hate our job sometimes. And yet…if there is any consolation in Christ, if Jesus is good for anything at all, if God has anything to offer at all…it is within these depths and what still lingers and emerges among them.
In these moments we are prone to fracture, to go our own way, or to hunker down so that we might protect our hearts from this hurt. We think of all the times we’ve walked similar roads before and we are apt to go numb, to give up, or get lost in the spiral of our own wounds and worry. We forget or are blinded to the goodness that still dwells in and through creation and community, that carries us when we’re not sure how to carry ourselves. I don’t blame us at all, but I also don’t want us to get stuck in that spiral forever.
So what shape does this Christ take in such settings? What does it look like? What can counteract and overcome and endure in the face of all this? Paul speaks of it as love, sharing, compassion, sympathy, and joy made whole in community. It sounds a bit lofty, but he’s actually speaking to the gritty stuff. He uses in the gut kind of language. The word translated as compassion in verse 1, is a word that literally means guts or bowels but figuratively suggests the most deep-seated place of human emotion. The best that God has to offer is deeply a part of the most raw and most human of experiences.
Yesterday I said final words of blessing at the funeral of a man not much older than myself. His brother shared part of the old Greek myth of Sisyphus relentlessly rolling a boulder uphill and sliding back down day after day. From this story he remarked that to be human is to know mortality and failure and yet strive anyway. I find this a reflection of the image of God in the depths of our humanity that we might know sadness and yet sing anyway.
It’s down here, in the humbling and sometimes humiliating realities of being fully human that God dwells and creates us as divine mirrors. After immense tragedy, there is inevitably plenty of blustering and posturing and self-righteousness vying for the top spot in our hearts. I get sucked into it as much as anyone else. If I rally enough protesters, if I post whip-smart articles and cursing memes, if I use scathing language that will surely shame others into change, the world will have no choice but to finally love each other. Those things feel much more satisfying in the moment. But the One who would have every authority to make some grandiose pontification, the One who was in the form of God, didn’t weaponize it or lord it over others. Instead, he trudges through the muck and the pain with the rest of us so that we might know what good Jesus is… not apart from, but in the midst of heartache and bullshit.
As I stood with people of faith across from this weekend’s NRA convention downtown, with our signs calling for peace, a reporter asked me, “What do you want the people inside (the convention) to know? To hear?” A million things ran through my mind, plenty of options filled with barbs and venom. But something in me also reflected on the reality that 14 acres of condemnation won’t get heard anyway. The best I could think of was to call us toward our shared humanity. I reflected how putting profits and power over people...is killing ALL OF US, physically and spiritually. How MOST of us actually long for and are willing to work for something better than this. That I believe we can find a way to hold differing parts of ourselves AND honestly examine what it has cost us. Ultimately, if any of us are to find life and goodness, it will be by moving closer to and not farther from the messiness and the sacredness of deep humanity.
When Paul tells the Philippians to “work out your own salvation,” it doesn’t mean go save yourselves and the whole world by your own strength. I think we all know how that would go…
But work it out like you might work out a puzzle, knowing what the full picture looks like and trying this way and to bring it to fullness before you. Work and live and have your being out of, rooted from, the promise of salvation that already lives within you. It’s a sort of cosmic invitation to “lean in.” Salvation, what we might otherwise call liberation and peace doesn’t get delivered from on high, by some magic apart from ourselves and our humanness, but within and through the full frailty of humanity.
The phrase “fear and trembling” isn’t about intimidation and shame-based theology.” It’s just an old timey phrase for humility. We are a part of what God is doing to redeem the world through our humility, our fragile selves, our wonder and curiosity and willingness to be amazed and surprised by goodness. You can use your hands, your heart, your gut, the fullness of who you are in your raw and humble humanity to reveal God even now. That’s how Jesus did it. Amen.
Where have you seen or embodied love, sharing, compassion, sympathy, and joy made whole in community? Keeping in mind that love doesn’t always look like smiles, sometimes it looks like tears. It doesn’t always make headlines, but it can also be a hand placed on shaking shoulders.
Where have you seen or embodied love, sharing, compassion, sympathy, and joy made whole in community?