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HEARING GOD IN THE SILENCES |
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Written by scott
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Monday, 02 July 2007 |
HEARING GOD IN THE SILENCES
1 Kings 19:9b-12; Psalm 42; Galatians 3:23-29
June 24, 2007
It was many years ago. Someone whom I thought of as a very close friend had made choices that hurt me deeply, catastrophically, painfully, turning my life upside down. I cried; I fumed; I complained to others. I felt betrayed, angry, self-righteous, and tremendously justified in my continuing fury. I wanted everyone to see it my way, to tell me I was the wronged party here, to agree that I had done everything I could . . . I wanted to have my fury and my self-righteousness as well. And yet it wasn’t enough. I needed more affirmation; more people on my side; more feed-back that I was absolutely justified in my continuing anger. And so, one day, feeling out of balance and unsettled, I prayed, “God, why did you let this happen? [Silence.] Why did she do this to me? [Silence.] What did I do to deserve this? [Silence.] What am I supposed to do now???” And then, I heard a small voice, definitely not my own, in my head, and a one-word answer: “Love.”
Well, it took me years to figure out what that could mean. I knew right away what it wasn’t—it wasn’t plan to do things together or be best buds or try to reconstruct a friendship, although I thought about or attempted all of those things. It wasn’t obsess or try to know all I could about what was going on or try to get my former friends to see that I was right—although I thought about those things. Over time, and not at all in any easy way, I came to my own peace, and in it I recognized what “Love” meant, as a word from
God. It was more like, “Find compassion, for my friend and for myself. Choose peace, for myself and for my feelings towards my friend. Stop hugging the grievances. Set down the pain. Learn to wish for the best, for myself, and for my former friend. Heal. Seek what is good, for my friends and for myself.”
It wasn’t easy, and I can’t say, to this day, that I accomplished the challenge set before me that day. But, I think it was a word from God, a word offered out of silence and stillness that came to me in my pain and pointed me toward a better way.
And the word of God came to Elijah, hunkered in his cave, and said, “Leave off your frightened crouching and stand”—and stand—not like some wounded animal hiding in a cage, ready to snarl at and attack anyone who might come by, not like someone who feels so hurt, so used, so victimized that any striking out is justified—and stand, like the strong, resilient, beloved person I have created you to be. “Leave off your frightened crouching and stand, because the Lord is passing by.” The Lord is here, passing by where you are, meeting you in this space of pain and confusion, calling upon you to remember, now, in your pain, that you are not a victim, not abandoned, not alone, that you are a child of God, beloved.
Isn’t that what we all want to know, most of all, when life has hurt us and we wonder why we deserved such pain? Isn’t that what we want to hear when we’ve been mistreated, even more than we want to hear, “Yeah, it was all her, it was all his fault! They really ripped you off. You’ve got a right to be mad!” Of course, if we have been injured, we have a right to be mad—but madness doesn’t heal our wounded souls or restore strength and balance to our lives. Even when we are thrashing around, wanting everyone to agree that we have a right to be mad, don’t we know, underneath, that we really want something much greater than that—we want to know that, even if we did mess up, even if we did goof or not see something coming, or try too hard or not try hard enough, even if all of these things are true at once, even if all of this is so, . . . still, somehow, we want to know that we are still beloved, that we still belong.
It comes down to this, does God love us because we have done it right, because we have it together, because we are such stellar human beings, or does God love us because it is the nature of God to love? When we’re feeling all full of ourselves, it’s kind of fun to pretend that we believe that God loves us because we are so very good. Why, we might say to ourselves, I keep all the commandments, and I give to the church, and I never speak ill of others, and I’m always a good person—of course God loves me. But you see the danger in that, don’t you? That life might go badly wrong for a while, and we might get out of balance, angry, spiteful, striking out at others, depressed, mean, vindictive, hard-hearted—but always, of course, because “they” deserve it—and then, and then what? Then, when we are out of balance and out of sorts, when everything else is already going wrong, does God stop loving us, too? Wouldn’t that be adding injury to insult—just when I am the most unlovable, God gives up on me too? Oh, that would be so hard, and we know so many people who think that is the way it is.
But, in our reading, Paul argues, “No!” That is the worst perversion of the faith, he shouts our through his letter, to imagine that we can make God love us, can claim our place in the gathering of God’s beloved, because of our righteous behavior. We can’t make God love us by what we do, or don’t do. We can’t make God stop loving us because of what we do, or don’t do. God love us and has claimed us, always, because that is the nature of God. Remember the greeting we have used sometimes: “God loves you, and there’s NOTHING you can do about it!”
Although I’m quite fond of today’s reading—claiming our unity without respect to being Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, I had no idea of what powerful stuff this is until I started digging into the bigger story, trying to understand the context of the book so that I might better understand the meaning of this passage. Right off the bat, what I learned was that this book was at the heart of Martin Luther’s rebellion against the Catholic church and therefore instrumental in making us all Protestants. This little book, only 6 chapters, has undergirded the fight to end apartheid in South Africa, has spoken to the question of the ordination of women, and is very relevant in our world and church today.
So what’s the story? Paul, reformed persecutor of Christians who became the great evangelist, taking Christianity to the Gentile world, had begun several churches in Galatia, an area in what is now Turkey. They’d gotten off to a good start, new congregations made up mostly of Gentiles, non-Jews, who had received the story of Christ as their own story. Paul had gone on his way, off to preach to new areas.
Meanwhile, in the rest of the new Christian Church, a controversy raged, one every bit as big, and of similar passions and depth as the current controversy in many churches about whether sexual orientation has anything to do with being a Christian. The question then was this—did a Gentile man who converted to Christianity need to be circumcised, coming under the Torah, Jewish law, or not? Christianity had started as a gathering within Judaism. Its first adherents were Christian Jews, keepers of the law. Could Gentiles become Christians without becoming Jews? Paul believed, yes, absolutely. But he’d gone on, and some new Missionaries had come to Galatia, men who were teaching that the gentiles needed to be circumcised to be real Christians. See, part of the problem was that Christians shared one table, the communion meal, and observant Jews never ate with Gentiles. So, the question was, would there be one table, with everyone circumcised, or two, one for Jews and one for Gentiles. The new Missionaries were arguing that the way to unity was through conformity—that all should become Jews, keepers of the Law, so that they could come to one table.
Well, Paul just roared his disapproval, calling the new teachings perversions of the Gospel—PERVERSIONS—and laying out his arguments in the strongest possible terms. Paul’s argument is at the heart of Christianity, and goes like this:
God is the initiator of all connection between God and God’s people. God first selected Abraham’s descendants as God’s chosen people long before Moses received the Law. What was important, then about the first covenant with Abraham was not the keeping of Law, but the way that Abraham lived in faith, putting all trust in God. Through Moses, God gave the Law to the God’s people to be a paidagogos, a slave who functioned like a nursemaid, taking children to and from school, seeing that they behaved and keeping them out of harm, but never a member of the family. Adults do not need a Nanny—to try to impose that kind of control imprisons and confines the human spirit. It is the same with the Law, Paul argued. Although the Law had served its purposes in the interval between Moses and Jesus, it now functioned to confine and imprison people. Through his faithful life and death, Jesus had burst Law’s hold, setting people free from its captivity, and redefined the nature of human community. In Christ, people became children of God, brothers and sisters to one another, living without distinctions that would separate them, that would cut them off from one another.
These distinctions—of race, economic status, gender, wealth, nationality, sexual orientation, education,--these distinctions so often lead to just the sort of dynamic that Paul was confronting in Galatia—a cultural imperialism that insists that you can’t be Christian unless you become socially like the ones who have power in the faith.
You know, I love Hawaiian shirts, their vibrant color and life—as well as their comfort. But when I wear them I am also aware of their role as a tool of cultural imperialism. You see, when Christian missionaries, many of them from cold and stony nineteenth century New England, went to the Hawaiian Islands, they found a people well adapted to a warm and generous climate, a people who wore little and lived easily. This would not do. If these people were to become Christian, the missionaries taught, they must dress like proper Christians. The missionaries manufactured simple work shirts and made wearing them a sign of conversion. The Hawaiians wore the shirts—but decorated them to express their own vitality, giving us Hawaiian shirts, still a symbol of an easier, more relaxed life. It’s a simple story perhaps, but still, an example of the tendency to insist that converts must become like us, socially. That dynamic played out in the U.S. when missionaries insisted that Native Americans, to be Christian, needed to learn to farm, wear “normal” clothing, and leave their native languages and heritage behind, a cultural imperialism that nearly destroyed a people. We see the same dynamic all the time—in the suggestion that to be Christian you must speak English, support capitalism, be heterosexual, act “white.’ Paul is saying “NO!” to all of this. To be Christian, he says, you must trust the faithfulness of Christ, of God, reaching out to love and receive you, there before you do anything to deserve that love, there because God and Christ are faithful and have acted to love you, not because you’ve done anything to make God love you. God loves you because it is God’s nature to love. Period. PERIOD! And—this love empowers us to resist anything that would separate us, not just individually, but corporately, from the love of God or neighbor.
And here is the tickle, the kicker: the same broad love that empowers us to resist all injustice, whether it is aimed at ourselves or others, also calls us, when we are at our most unbalanced, when we are cowering in the cave of our own despair, calls us to stand up and know that God is nearby and that we are called to live by the still, small voice that whispers in our hearts and souls, “Love.”
It isn’t easy, sometimes, but it is God’s word, for our lives. And we know, in our deepest heart of hearts, we know that it is true. Amen.
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