April 1, 2001
Fifth Sunday of Lent
Year C
Title: Expecting Round Two
Theme: We know we must face the spiritual and emotional times in the
desert—but why must we experience these desert times. The truth is
that we aren’t really given an explanation, but we are given a truth about
our times in the desert.
As most of you well know, we’ve been on a journey during this season of
Lent. This journey has been all about going with Christ into the desert,
and staying there, at least for these forty days so that we could pay
attention to the desert and to the God we meet in that desert, in the
desert times of our lives. Its been a rough Lent, to be honest, a
challenging Lent, for me as your pastor, partially because of the
challenge of preaching 5 times from the same 13 verses—I kept thinking,
especially here at the tail end of these verses—what more is there to be
said?!?! And I know, I know, that you may just be a little bit tired of this
passage…I know that I am looking forward to Palm Sunday next week
and Easter Sunday the following week.
But there is something else about this passage that needs to be
attended to, I think, there is always, always more that we can glean from
Scripture if we keep paying attention to it. And what I want to reap for us
this Sunday is not so much about what this text says about the desert
times of our lives—I want to simply ask the question that isn’t asked at all
in this text. Sometimes what the Scripture don’t say is as important as
what Scriptures does say, a principle that feminist Biblical scholars have
been using for years now. I think one of things we know from paying
attention to this text is that we are going to go through moments and
times like Lent, that there will be, no doubt, desert moments, desert
times, in our lives, where the things crumble, things come apart, and we
find ourselves, like Christ in the desert, famished and bruised, seemingly
alone and tempted by forces that want us to turn our gaze away from
God. These moments happen and the church pays attention to that
reality, honors it, really, during Lent, during this forty days each year.
But I want to ask a question that the Scripture we’ve struggled with
during Lent doesn’t ask, and which Wayne Muller from our contemporary
reading tonight, says we shouldn’t probably ask, a question that goes
like this: we know that the desert times happen, the dry times will come,
but WHY must they happen? Why must Jesus go to the desert for forty
days? Why must he go deep into the wilderness, compelled by the
Spirit, driven, the Scripture say, why must he experience this awful and
terrible time, this dry and parched and painful time in the desert? And
for us, why must WE experience these dry and challenging and
disheartening times in our lives, where things fall apart, where chaos and
disorder and pain seem to rule our lives? We know these moments, don’
t we? We’ve all experienced these times and these moments.
There is a story that may capture this question for us…and some of our
frustration with our experiences in the wilderness. There was a man who
fell off a cliff and was hanging precariously from a tree branch. And this
man cried out to God, saying, "God, please help me!" And God
answered, "Have faith and I will protect you. Let go of the branch." The
man, stunned, cried out, "Is there anyone else up there?" I think that
story actually captures our frustration and our challenge during the
desert times, the Lenten moments of our lives, where we know the truth
that God will protect us, at least enough to get us out of the desert, but
we have a hard time letting go of the branch, of refusing the temptations
that meet us in the desert, and so we stay frozen, stuck on the branch,
never having the courage to actually move out of our desert times. But
like the Scripture in Luke that we’ve been exploring for weeks now, in this
story there is no explanation about why God didn’t just make sure that
the man hadn't fallen off the cliff in the first place. Certainly it is in God’s
power to make sure that he didn’t make that potentially fatal misstep, or
that God could cure our mother’s cancer, or cure our own cancer, or that
God could have prevented us from being laid off, or that God could have
prevented the Holocaust from happening, the murder of 10 million Jews,
gypsies, Catholics, Protestants, and gay men and lesbians. This is, after
all, the God who has scattered the stars into the universe like pebbles
from her hand during the act of creation, who has brought life from the
darkness of death when all that was needed was a word from his divine
lips. This is a God who can make the desert times in our lives disappear
by simply transforming the dry, hungry desert into a paradise, just like
God did in the Garden of Eden. The Christian and Jewish traditions
have always affirmed the truth of this powerful and creative God.
I know that some people have tried to explain why God sometimes seems
to stayon the sidelines while we wander through our heartbreaking
deserts, deserts that would simply disappear if God so willed it. People
sometimes say that we wouldn’t know life if we didn’t know death, that we
wouldn’t happiness if we didn’t know sadness. And there is some truth
there—people who have been starving in a desert, who have had their
stomachs scream out for food, they know what it means, in the end, to sit
at a full, rich banquet table in life. Deserts do teach us about the
moments of feasting in our lives, if we pay attention to the deserts and
the banquets in our lives—I do think is true, to some degree. But I must
admit that I personally am not convinced that God couldn’t have been
just a little bit more creative with the mission of teaching us the pleasures
of banquets without having to send us into deserts. It doesn’t ring true
for me that God has to stand by while a child dies from leukemia to make
a point to her parents that life is precious and that they should pay
attention to every moment of their lives here on earth. Surely there is
another way of making this point without taking a child from her parents
to make that point, albeit a very important and good truth. It doesn’t
make sense to me to say that God had to let 8 million Jews die at
Auschwitz and Bergenbelsen to make a point to the Jewish people. As
many Jewish scholars have pointed out, a God who would do such a
thing simply to make a point is not a God worth worshipping—to use the
murder of women, men, and children as divine examples is a God whose
brutality must be spoken against. This is a God who created the
universe—surely God can find some other way of making a point than
sending us into the desert, don’t you think? This is a God who created
the rules, the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega, and so I
think God could have found a different way of teaching us some of those
divine truths without the deserts, without the holocausts and the
tragedies that sometimes haunt our lives.
Others have argued that it is Satan who solely wrecks havoc on this
world, that it is evil run amuck, that has caused so many of the deserts in
our lives. In the Christian tradition, Satan is an adversary of God and
especially Jesus, as we’ve been witness to during the last few weeks. In
the Jewish tradition, Satan is actually in God’s presence, in God’s eternal
court, as you see in the beginning parts of the book of Job; he holds a
much more ambiguous position in the Jewish tradition, to be honest, than
he does in the Christian tradition, because in the Jewish tradition God is
completely supreme, meaning that even Satan must answer to God. And
the Christian tradition is like that too, in the fact that we believe that God
alone is supreme, that there is no battle of equals between God and
Satan, simply because God and Satan are not equals—the book of
Revelation makes clear that God is the one who writes the beginning and
the ending of the story of the universe, and that it is God who writes the
rules for all divine contests. Certainly Satan, evil, does wreck havoc in
this world, but it is not as if God couldn’t stop Satan with a blink of an
eye—this is not a contest between equals; rather it is a contest between
the Creator and his creation, Satan. In the end, it is God who decides to
allow Satan to tempt us in the desert times in our lives, who allows Satan,
evil, to permeate whole nations and drive them to go into mass killing
sprees, as happened during Germany during the early 1940’s. In the
end, both Jews and Christians ultimately believe that this world is God’s
world and that God is all powerful and is the one who makes the only
decisions that really matter.
Others believe that we bring havoc on ourselves, that to blame God for
the Holocaust is to blame the wrong person. And I think they are right, to
some degree. After all, it is humans who pushed those people into
ovens at Auschwitz, not God. And so often, it is our choices that send us
back the negative consequences of those choices—we make choices all
the time in our lives that lead to cancers, poor health, and personal
disasters. We as humans need to take responsibility for those things, I
think. Still, still, the other side of that is that there are people who are
seemingly simply victims of blind chance, to be honest—Jews and gays
in Germany in the 1940’s, a child who inherited a gene that gave him
leukemia, or a woman dealing with a breast cancer that has no pattern,
no explanation, no cause and effect. There are things in this world that
simply do not meet this cause and effect pattern. How do you and I try to
say to these people—you did this, and this is what happened? I know
that I can’t do it—or I won’t do it. And Jesus, over and over again,
refuses to fall into this cause and effect explanation of suffering and
desert times—for example, he refused to say that a wall that had fallen
on some people in Jerusalem was a result of those people’s sin. And
another time, a time we heard Wayne Muller speak of in contemporary
reading, we see Jesus refusing to say that a man was born blind
because of sin. We, as well, shouldn’t get too caught up in trying to
explain our desert times this way, I think, in this cause and effect
explanation of human suffering.
So, why do we have to experience these moments, these moments that
even Jesus experienced, where we find ourselves clamoring and begging
for answers,just like Job did thousands of years ago—trying to wrench
meaning out of the meaningless moments in our lives. What I want to
offer you is not an explanation—I honestly don’t know why we have to
have the desert moments in our lives, why we continually have to
experience moments in the desert. Instead, I offer a truth, and not an
explanation. You see, I think there is a difference between a truth and an
explanation—truth usually contains some paradox and some amount of
mystery, but an explanation, at least in theory, should not dabble in
paradox and mystery. The truth is this, I think—and it is something that
we heard Jesus point to during the second temptation in the text that we’
ve journeyed with during Lent—the truth is this: God is God and I am not
God. It sounds so simple, almost comical, but it is so fundamental to
what it means to be human—to realize who we are in relation to our
Creator. I can rant and rave about the injustices of being in the desert, I
can call God on the carpet for not doing anything during the Holocaust, I
can question God’s goodness and struggle with God in the desert, I can
hold God responsible for God’s own sacred and beautiful creation, but in
the end, God is my Creator—and I am God’s creation. In the end, you
and I must accept the truth our relationship to God—that we really are in
the hands of God, hands that sometimes feel rough and painful at times.
It is a truth that we must carry with us into the desert—it is not a
explanation of why we must experience the horror of the deserts in our
lives. When Job ranted and raved about the injustice of having a good
man like him lose everything for no reason, when he rightfully calls for
God to be the God of justice that he believes God to be, the only
explanation the heavens reveal to Job is this—Job, you are not me, you
are my creation, and I will not answer to you. And to be honest, like Job,
I’m not sure I’m satisfied with the divine explanation that God gives Job,
but, of course, God wasn’t giving Job an explanation—God was giving
Job the truth, which doesn’t necessarily satisfy us, being so full of
paradox and mystery. It does, however, set us free, free to be the
children of our creator, and to know that profound and mysterious truth,
the truth that we are not God but we are God’s own creation, in its fullest
sense. Maybe we can sit with the truth rather demanding an
explanation—I don’t know if we have any other option, really. I am not
God, you are not God—we are the handiwork of a God who loves us, but
who sometimes leads us, for a time at least, into the desert times of our
lives. Maybe, instead of an explanation for the deserts, we must settle
for the truth about our relationship with God. We will experience more
Lents—more times in the deserts, both in the church calendar, but in our
lives as well…we will experience round two and three and four, until we
pass to our other life. I don’t know whether or not we will necessarily get
the explanations of why we had to go through what we had to go through
in this world, though, if we are smart, we will learn a lot about ourselves
and God if we pay attention to the experience of being in the desert.
Maybe we will get that explanation in the next life, I don’t know, but, of
course, an explanation is not owed us, really, as much as we may feel it
is owed us at times. I do know this, however: the truth will get us through
the desert times, it will set us free from the questions that cannot be
answered, at least not here, in this world. Jesus, with his hunger
gnawing away at him, deep in his desert, tells the truth to the devil; --You
are not God and I will not worship you. I will remain in relationship with
the God who has driven me into this desert, and whom I know will not
abandon me to this place and to this moment.
Today is April Fools Day, as well as being the last Sunday of Lent. I
think its actually fairly appropriate, to be honest. In the ancient court of
kings, it was the Joker, the mad fool, the one who played with paradox
and mystery so as to help the king be aware of his own foolishness and
the folly of all human arrogance, even the arrogance of the king. Jokes
don’t explain anything; they more often than not point out a truth amidst
the play on words and the laughter. Jokes don’t explain much—but they
often help us to see the truth, and of course, the truth is not an
explanation—the truth is simply the truth, simply the way it is. One of my
professors from college you used to say, in reference to those moments
that are horribly unexplainable—he would say “that’s just the way things
are.” Its no answer, its no explanation, it certainly wasn’t when he said
that to me during my freshman year in college, but it’s the truth, I think, it’
s the truth. And I think God would rather us have the truth than an
explanation we simply aren’t going to getin this world, because God loves
us and we are God’s beautiful and wondrous creation and we deserve
the truth. Amen and amen.
