When Life Falls Apart, What then?

Sermon by James W. Crawford

February 23, 1997, The Second Sunday in Lent

From Job 14

Job finds himself yearning for hope and he finds hope failing him. He has  been through bone-crushing experience. He knows the worst. Robbed, invaded, violated in every way. In the course of his saga Job faces what every parent fears most: his children die before he does. And finally, he endures a physical assault on his own health: painful bleeding, skin ulcers crippling him, altering his appearance so when three friends arrive to commiserate they barely recognize him. For seven days they sit in silent vigil unable to speak, stunned by Job's ravaged condition. And Job himself: confounded, furious, driven to his bed by the mystery and pain of his situation, looks for hope, seeks some light, yearns for some way to understand the chaos, the irrationality, the physical, emotional and spiritual agony he goes through.

And remember? Job's prayer seeking some response from a God silent through this whole calamity, ends in despondency. As we read this morning, Job recognizes our mortality: all of us, he observes, born of woman, few of days, full of trouble, coming up like a flower, then withering; fleeing like a shadow that does not last. Even nature, he says, gets a better break from God than we human beings. Chop down a tree, and it will sprout again. Its roots grow old, its stump dies, yet a little water on the old roots, buried though they be, stimulates branches, buds, leaves. But for human beings, he complains, "No way!" Like mountains eroded in storms, boulders  disintegrated by rushing creeks, soils washed away by floods, so human life and its hope perishes and then disappears, dissolves, vanishes. Life goes blank. Nothing in the universe cares. In the bleakness of human existence we human beings--bereft--mourn alonefor ourselves.

Yet, Job without hope, throws his questions at this silent God. "Why," he asks, "if you love me do you put me through this miserable, undeserved catastrophe? Why, if you possess any power at all, do you not use it to alleviate this cruel distress?" In the course of his brooding, amid his fury, he arrives at the conclusion of a modern poet, "If God is God he is not good.  If God is good, he is not God."

Why? Why? Why?

I

Do you ever feel like that? Do you ever ask Job's question? Someone  leaving church last week commented to me at the front door, "You know we all feel like Job once in a while." Elie Wiesel refers to Job as "our contemporary." I believe that is true. No one can be in the Christian ministry and not sit in vigil with parishioners stunned by some absurd event.  No one can live in the twentieth century and not be familiar with, if not a direct participant in, or, indeed, a victim of events, afflictions, accidents, terrors shredding our hearts, emptying our spirits, exhausting our faith, draining our hope.

It happened to Larry Kramer, a sufferer from AIDS, a witness to its devastation to so many men and women in this country and across the world, a friend of those who, no different from members of our own congregation, became victims of this terrible conundrum of love and death. "I don't believe in God," Kramer said. "I find it incomprehensible that anyone could believe in God after what we've been through. I have learned in every possible way the horrible things man can visit upon his fellow man. I'm just overwhelmed by it all. . . " No hope there, as they say, "Muses from chaos and ash."

Or again, have you been following, in even a tangential fashion, these recent stories of Madeleine Albright's family identity or the collaboration of the Swiss Banks with the Nazis during World War II--stories bringing us face to face with what we call the "holocaust" but whose evil is so profound, so inexplicable, so beyond comprehension we dare hardly speak of it, especially those of us who, though not the victims, do share the religious faith of the executioners. As a consequence of the holocaust, former Dartmouth professor Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg testifies to his "Lifelong quarrel with God." Hertzberg recalls a Polish Rabbi who lost all of his family in the holocaust, never again mentioning them, or even saying "prayers in any visible ritual of their memory." Rabbi Hertzberg tells of his own encounter with this Polish rabbi, trying to pry from him recollections of his own family who served as the rabbi's disciples and friends. But he received no response, not even a gesture. Silence. A recollection beyond the reach of words.

And Hertzberg, himself rejecting all efforts to justify the ways of God to human beings--discovers every effort, while facing burning children and gassed millions, futile and obscene. Finally he concludes, "The disbeliever will insist that this silence proves God's irrelevance or God's nonexistence; the believer will hold on to the faith that the world adds up, but only in the mind of God." Then referring to Job, he remembers Job's restoration, Job's efforts to rebuild after catastrophe, and Hertzberg affirms that all one can do is "to live all the harder, all the more decently to carry on for every one of those unfinished lives." What can I do, he asks, "but quarrel with God,  and rebuild in the face, finally, of incomprehensible mystery."

And perhaps closer to home, each of us carries on our quarrel with God.  Who among us is not akin to Job our contemporary? Who among us is not first struck and perhaps confused when stricken by what seems to be unfair and unloving in our lives? I am still bewildered, frustrated, angered by the  untimely, undeserved and desperately sad deaths of my two younger sisters by ovarian cancer, one soon after the other, both leaving devoted husbands, the younger leaving three sons, my mother, her heart aching, hovering over and caring for them.

In this congregation this morning there are those who held--or who today hold--vigil as some cell run wild gnaws away and drains the life from a loved one long before their time. In this gathering there are those who know the spurning of their loyalty, the rejection of their love and whose knees buckled as they watched it walk out the front door. We worship this morning with those who see the investment they have made in their children vanish into a netherworld of addiction or disappear into who-knows-where.  We gather here at this moment with those in our congregation mute, engulfed by the pathos of a loved one taking his or her own life. Job is our contemporary.

Ann Weems is a wounded, modern poet. She lost her son 14 years ago in a terrible accident. She continues to weep, she says. And as a consequence she assembled a folio of poems she calls "Psalms of Lament." In one of them she begins by asking:

How long will you watch, O God,
as your people live huddled in death?
The whole world
is dressed in tears,
and I have joined
the procession of the bereaved
who walk daily in the death places.
We drown in the sea.
We bleed on the battlefield.
We lie stricken on sickbeds.
We are judged in the courtrooms.
We are victims of crime.
We are homeless and hungry.
Is this not enough?

We are tormented by mental illness.
We are abandoned by loved ones.
We wait in unemployment lines.
We grow up on the streets.
We live with disabilities.
We are injured in accidents.
We are plagued by family problems.
We fight drug and alcohol abuse.
Have you not heard enough, O God?
We sit in police stations.
We watch our loved ones endure pain.
We are falsely accused.
We encounter prejudice and hate.
We are humiliated and abused.
We contend with unbearable stress and anxiety.
We weep by the grave.

We are your people, O Creator God!
We are the work of your hands.
Is there no more grace
for your troubled ones?
Will we continue
our unholy procession
around the pit
of living death?

There is no sun, no moon, no star.
We cannot see our way.
Have pity on your world, O God,
Have pity on your weeping world!. . .

II

"Have pity on your weeping world, O God, Have pity on your weeping world!"

Friends, this plea from the poet speaks for all of us, I think. It speaks for me.  And I want to share with you for a moment my own faith, my own hope in this profound and troubling matter of our faith and its encounter with a bleeding and weeping world.

As a first clue, I invite you to look for a moment at the engraving included in your bulletin [herewith]. It is by the English artist, mystic, poet, visionary  William Blake, and is one of 2l engravings he produced in 1825 to illustrate the Book of Job. Look carefully at the face of God and the face of Job. In all 21 engravings Job and God look exactly alike. In Job's face, riddled with pain throughout the Blake series, one sees God's face in pain, suffering here on earth among us. In God's face, one sees Job's face, in pain, in loss,  suffering in heaven with us. Look at the eyes of the one who speaks to Job from the whirlwind; do you see kindness there, empathy, compassion? Do you see God's hand breaking through the cloud, connecting the anguish of earth with the anguish of heaven? Blake depicts a God who shares our suffering with us, a God reaching out to touch us in our agony. He  confirms a profound truth: love suffers in solidarity with the suffering of the loved one.

And how did William Blake come to understand the character of God in that way? Why that compassionate face in the whirlwind? It is because Blake, faithful as he was, knew the meaning of the great symbol gracing the heart of this room: the Cross of Christ. Friends, when we ask Job's question, "Why?"; when we are stumped with this shattering matter of a good God and an evil world; when we raise our fists in anger or bow our heads and our hearts in futility, bombarded by trouble or affliction, we need ask Job's  question first of all--now hear this--we need ask Job's question, "Why,"  first of all, right here at the foot of the Cross. If God is good, if God gives a damn, if God cares a whit for you and me and for this world, why did Jesus die? How could the best who ever lived die a criminal, rejected, hated, mocked, tortured, executed in the most painful, harrowing and savage fashion the civic officers could invent? If God is good; if God loves you and me, if God cares at all for human life, if God is God, why not a Divine intervention? How, in God's name, could the civil authorities, the religious clique, the person in the street conspire and succeed in nailing Jesus to that Cross? Where was God when Jesus died?

I am almost afraid that what I am about to say will sound too glib. For the full dimensions of the meaning of the Cross cannot be plumbed in any way. But what we see there, what we encounter there is a God who, first of all, as William Blake testifies, a God who knows what it is like to be you and me, a God who shares fully with us in this bloody and weeping world. Ours is a God no less vulnerable to suffering, grief, agony than you or I. For me that is a consolation. But even more so--and here lies the ground of our hope--the power of God lies not in some dramatic, divine intervention preventing calamity. No. We see the power of God, the love of God, exercised in transforming--transforming--this evil and terrible crucifixion into the very instrument dispelling forever the threat of Divine abandonment. The Cross hanging at the center of this sanctuary does not represent a cruel mechanism proclaiming evil's victory; not finally a sign of inhumanity, or human stupidity, nor proof that our world and our lives lie at the mercy of cruelty and chaos. It could mean that if we ever needed illustration of the impotence, the irrelevance, the absence of God, we could say, "So look at the Cross of Jesus: Exhibit # 1." But we don't. We don't!  What do we see here? What does this Cross proclaim? We see here  somehow--somehow--beyond our understanding, this instrument designed for cruelty transformed to the very vehicle of hope. We see here not love's failure, but love's triumph. We see here not evil's victory, but the last word belonging to goodness. I cannot explain it. I can only testify to it. I would in no way dare to take whatever crisis you may be going through or struggling with and say, "It does not matter, God's love and power make it all right." I would never say that because I do not believe it. But I will say, with trepidation, in fear and trembling, that whatever crisis you or I may be struggling with or through, whatever test of faith, whatever blight on our hope we may be battling or tempted to surrender to, that finally this Cross says God is in it with us; Love shares the pain of the loved one, and that ultimately--ultimately--love has the last word, even though we may not feel it, believe it, trust it now. Where was God when Jesus died? God was there all the time! That is why this Cross hangs at the center of this room. I pray you, trust its power and its love.

In a moment we are going to sing a wonderful hymn. Its first verse begins, "O Love that will not let me go." George Matheson wrote that; he wrote it after going blind. He wrote it, in a moment to which he testifies but does not describe, in a moment of severe and traumatic suffering. Each verse alludes to adversity; each verse trusts Hope like that radiated by the Cross:

O joy that seeks me through my pain
to you I cannot close my heart;
I trace the rainbow through the rain
and know the promise is not vain
that you will ne'er depart.

Love: that will not let us go.