In Praise of Limits (Palm Sunday sermon, March 28, 2010)

Luke 19:28-44

In one of the early episodes of the television series M*A*S*H, the doctor called “Trapper” discovers he has a stomach ulcer -- no surprise given that he works in a combat zone. Although initially upset at the news, his outlook changes when his bunkmate Hawkeye reminds him that, according to Army regulations, that ulcer means Trapper is going home. The whole unit plans a big going away party for Trapper. Then, just moments before the party begins, Trapper learns that the Army has changed its regulations and he will have to stay in Korea and have his ulcer treated there while he continues to serve. Instead of calling off the party, Trapper goes anyway, letting the celebrations and festivities continue until finally he is called on to give a farewell speech. That’s when he tells everyone there he isn’t leaving after all. (1)

Like Trapper, trying to enjoy his going away party even though he knew that he wasn’t actually going away, it can be challenging for us to fully enter into the celebration of Palm Sunday. We know what those first cheering disciples didn’t know, even though Jesus had been trying to tell them. We know what the future holds for Jesus. We’ve been to this parade, year after year, we’ve sung the songs, we’ve waved the branches, we’ve shouted Hosanna! We’ve been here before and we know that the celebrations today don’t change anything -- within a matter of days, Jesus is still going to be betrayed, still going to have an unfair trial, still going to be crucified, still going to die. We know the limits of this story all too well, and we know that although this Holy Week begins today on a high note, it ends on the lowest, darkest note of all.

Today officially marks the end of the season of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week. And here at the end of Lent we find ourselves face to face not just with the limits of this season or the limits of this story but with our own limits. This Lent, we didn’t pray, read, study, or serve nearly as much as we’d hoped or intended. Days went by and we took barely a moment for God. As we enter into Holy Week we discover that, as a devotional I read this week put it, instead of Lent giving us a deeper understanding of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, actually, it reminded us that we really just don’t get it at all. (2)

Even that very first Palm Sunday, when there was so much shouting and celebrating as Jesus entered Jerusalem, even that day had its limits. You see, some historians believe that Jesus wasn’t the only authority figure riding into Jerusalem that day. Back then, it wasn’t known as Palm Sunday, of course. It was simply the first day of the week during which the Jews would celebrate Passover, the most holy week of the Jewish year. On that day, Jesus came riding down from the Mount of Olives in the East. But from the west came another procession, headed by Pontius Pilate, the Roman governor of the region that included Judea and its capital Jerusalem. The timing was no accident. With hundreds of thousands of Jews streaming into Jerusalem to celebrate Passover in the holy city, Pilate wanted to be there, not out of any sense of reverence for his subjects’ religious traditions, but so that in case trouble broke out, he and his soldiers would be there to stop it.

Pilate’s procession would have been an impressive display of imperial power: cavalry on horseback, foot soldiers, leather armor, shining helmets, menacing weapons, banners, sunlight glinting off of golden eagles mounted on poles. All over Jerusalem you could hear the synchronized marching, the clip clop of the horses, the beating of the drums. Those close enough to see would have worn expressions of awe or fear or resentment, for this procession was designed to remind the so-called chosen people of God that the empire of Rome was as more powerful as any god. Pilate wanted to be sure that the people knew that his power and the power of Rome were limitless. (3)

Compared to Pilate’s imperial procession, Jesus and his bunch of rag-tag followers looked pretty puny. In fact, if you’ve ever stayed to the bitter end of a parade, it was probably something like that. Thin crowds, streets covered with litter that even all those cloaks thrown down couldn’t hide, and then, the man of honor, a grown man who looked more than a little ridiculous riding on a small donkey. Compared to Pilate’s over the top procession, meant to clearly display the menacing power of Rome, the way Jesus comes into Jerusalem no longer seems so remarkable. It seems, if anything, to broadcast his limitations.

Most of us have heard the story of Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem so many times that we’re likely to hear things that might not have even been there in the text. This is particularly true in Luke’s version, which doesn’t include some of the details from Matthew and Mark. Listen again: “As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, ‘Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!’” (19:37-38)

Did you notice what isn’t in Luke’s account? There are no palm branches, for one thing. There is no reference to big crowds of unknown people who show up to welcome Jesus into Jerusalem. In Luke’s gospel, the only people cheering for Jesus are people who already know him intimately, his disciples. And the people cheering aren’t referring to Jesus as the Son of David, like they do in Matthew and Mark. Here in Luke the disciples refer to him simply as a king who comes in the name of the Lord.

Then there are the things that Luke includes that the other gospels do not. For one thing there is this strange comment from Jesus that if the disciples did not accompany his procession with shouts and cheers, the very rocks would cry out instead. And when Jesus comes around a bend and gets his first glimpse of Jerusalem, the holy city, instead of lighting up with joy, he begins to weep over the inevitable limitations of God’s people, who will not listen to him and accept the peace that he offers, but who will instead choose, in just a matter of years, to rise up in violence against their mighty occupier, the Roman empire. This choice, of course, is doomed to fail, as Jesus predicts.

No wonder the end of Lent brings us face to face with our limits; apparently, this entry into Jerusalem, at least as Luke describes it, brings Jesus face to face with limits, too; the limits of his disciples, who cheer for him now but will betray him in the garden of Gethsemane; the limits of Jerusalem, which should recognize him as God’s chosen Messiah but whose leaders instead will put him to death for fear that he poses too great a threat to Rome; even his own limits that come with being fully human, for Jesus knows that he has come to Jerusalem to die.

Like Trapper, aware that his going-away party was really only postponing the inevitable return to the reality of life in a war zone, today’s celebration evokes mixed emotions in us. But that’s exactly what it should do. This end of Lent and beginning of Holy Week, this strange parade that’s really a pretty pathetic procession of peasants, all these things bring us face to face with our limits so that we can learn again the limitless love of God.

We can enter fully into Palm Sunday, we can wave our palm branches high and sing praise to God with full voice precisely because we know how bad the week is going to get. We shout our praises of Jesus today because we know this week that ends with his death is just one part of a story in which we discover that God extends salvation to all humanity and even to the whole creation (which is why those rocks would cry out!) with a limitless, unconquerable love.

This is a week to reach our limits, to reach them and even to be thankful for them. Today that means joining the first disciples in proclaiming that Jesus has come in the name of the living God to bring the peace of heaven to earth. On Thursday that means gathering here to sit around the table with Jesus and remember that, like his disciples, we have betrayed him both intentionally and unintentionally and we desperately need and long for the limitless forgiveness he offers us in the Lord’s Supper. On Friday that means showing up to witness to Jesus’ limits as a human being and to remember that, because Jesus willingly accepted those limits, God truly understands and participates in human suffering and death. And when we find ourselves on Saturday truly exhausted by looking so deeply at all these limits, may we then rise up on Sunday morning and discover that our exhaustion and sorrow has once again been turned to joy and new life by a God whose mysterious, profound love for us and for all creation has no limits. Amen.

Endnotes:

1. Scott Hoezee recalls this episode in his commentary on the passage on the Center for Excellence in Preaching website. Read it here.

2. from an evotional sent March 25, 2010 by the Rev. Derek Starr Redwine, Westminster Presbyterian Church, Akron, Ohio.

3. Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, The Last Week. HarperOne, 2006.

Extravagance (sermon, March 21, 2010)

It wouldn’t be a stretch to call John’s gospel the gospel of extravagance. Jesus’ first miracle? Turning water to wine at a wedding. Not just any wine: fine wine. Not just a little bit, either: 180 gallons -- way more than was needed for all the guests at the wedding. How about when Jesus fed five thousand people? He not only ensured that every man, woman, and child was well-fed; there were twelve baskets of food left over!. Then there is the fishing miracle. After the disciples have fished all night with nothing to show for it, Jesus tells Simon Peter to cast his net on the other side of his boat. As soon as he does, more than a hundred and fifty fish literally start leaping into the net, threatening to break it.

But perhaps no miracle in John’s gospel is more extravagant than the one that precedes the passage we just read. A man named Lazarus, who apparently was a beloved friend of Jesus, falls ill and dies, even though Lazarus’ sisters send word to Jesus, begging him to come and heal their brother. Instead Jesus shows up four long days after Lazarus’ death, four days during which the stench from Lazarus’ corpse has already begun to permeate the air around his tomb. When he arrives, Jesus discovered a family and a community consumed with grief. And in his most remarkable, unbelievable, extravagant miracle yet, Jesus defies the laws of science and nature and brings Lazarus back to life. Theologians like to call what happened “revivication” to distinguish it from Jesus’ own resurrection, but whatever you call it, for Jesus to enable a man four days dead to walk out of his tomb and resume his life is an act of astounding extravagance.

So with that in mind, maybe the act of extravagance we heard about in today’s passage shouldn’t shock us. But this time something is different. This time Jesus is not the one performing an act of extravagance, he is on the receiving end.

Mary and Martha, whose grief at their brother’s untimely death has transformed to overwhelming gratitude toward the man who restored Lazarus to life, host Jesus for a meal. While he sits at the table with Lazarus, Mary takes a large flask of perfume and pours the whole thing over Jesus’ feet. The rich scent of the perfume permeates the air in the house, broadcasting to everyone there the utter extravagance of her act. In less than a minute she uses up perfume that cost a year’s worth of wages...and then she uses, not a towel, but her own hair to gently dry Jesus’ feet. Mary’s actions proclaim a depth of gratitude and love for Jesus that words alone simply cannot express.

Years ago, the great stage actress Dorothy Maguire was appearing on Broadway. Just before the curtain rose, the theater was filled with the sound of a woman shouting, “Start the show! Start the show! I want to see Dorothy Maguire!” Obviously, this woman was disturbed, but it didn’t take long before a couple of people in the shocked audience turned on her. “Get out of here!” someone shouted. And from another: “Throw her out and start the show!”
The theater manager approached the woman and tried to talk to her, but she pulled away. “All I want is to see Dorothy Maguire!” she shrieked. “Then I’ll leave.”
And then, suddenly, the curtains parted and Dorothy Maguire appeared. She walked across the stage, came down into the audience and walked over to the disturbed woman. She spoke to her quietly and hugged this woman who had recoiled when anyone else tried to touch her. The woman stood up from her seat, drew close to Miss Maguire, and walked with her toward the exit.
Before they left the theater, Dorothy Maguire paused, turned to the audience, and spoke. “I’d like to introduce to you another fellow human being.” (1)

Just as Dorothy Maguire’s actions toward the disturbed woman and her words to the audience made everyone in the theater uncomfortable, surely everyone who witnessed Mary’s extravagant act of gratitude toward Jesus also experienced discomfort. After all, this was no normal expression of gratitude and love from one human being to another. It was intimate, personal, over the top -- extravagant! Just as the smell of Lazarus’ death had proved to everyone how truly dead Lazarus was before Jesus worked a miracle, so the smell of the perfume in that house proved to everyone present that this was no ordinary act of thanksgiving.

Judas is so uncomfortable with Mary’s extravagance that he can’t help but speak up. “This perfume could have been sold for a lot of money and given to the poor!” And the fact is, in most contexts, Judas is right. We can even imagine those words coming out of Jesus’ mouth if he had seen someone wasting valuable resources when the needs of the poor were so obvious and urgent. But in this context, Judas is wrong. Mary has been on the receiving end of an act of extravagant love and generosity from Jesus -- the return to life of her beloved brother -- and in response, she expresses her love and gratitude toward Jesus in the most extravagant way she can.

A group of pastors recently gathered at a stewardship conference for a session on generosity. The speaker that day spoke about the importance of giving directly to God. It was right after lunch, the room was warm and the speaker wasn’t really saying anything new. But then he did something totally unexpected. He pulled a $100 bill from his wallet, put it in an ashtray, lit it on fire, and prayed: “Lord, I offer this gift to you, and you alone.”
Suddenly, everyone in the room was wide awake. The clergy exchanged shocked glances and fidgeted in their seats. One whispered that it was illegal to burn currency. Another commented that he’d gladly take any more bills the speaker wanted to part with. Gradually, the bill turned to ashes, and finally the speaker said, “Do you not understand? I’m offering this money to God, and that means it is going to cease to be useful for the rest of us.” (2)

Extravagance makes us uncomfortable. The perfume Mary poured all over Jesus’ feet was worth an average year’s wages. In Summit County, that would be the equivalent of $42,000. Now that’s a lot of money to burn, money that could do a lot of good. But if we think about it, every week when we worship, we offer to God resources that cease to be useful to us or to anyone else.
The choir practices an anthem for hours, only to sing it in worship for three minutes.
We pay money each week for flowers to brighten and beautify our sanctuary, and within days those same flowers will wilt and die.
People spend hours preparing food for a funeral reception or one of our church dinners and in thirty minutes, meals are consumed and then forgotten.

These acts may not seem extravagant by themselves, but when we add them all up, the reality is they represent a lot of resources that could be given to others who need them more than God. That was Judas’ objection to Mary’s gift, was it not? Couldn’t that equivalent of $42,000 have been spent on the poor?

In one sense, Judas was absolutely right, just as we could argue that there are surely ways we could use all our resources in service to the poor and needy. But in the context of that particular meal shared among Jesus, his disciples, Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Judas was dead wrong. There are times when we are called to give, even to give extravagantly, to God alone. We know that not just because of what Jesus says, but also because we have the benefit of knowing the whole story, and we can see that this dinner party is the hinge between two crucial events: Jesus bringing Lazarus back to life and Jesus giving up his life on a cross.

John’s gospel says that the miracle of Lazarus led many Jews to believe in Jesus. This in turn made the authorities even more determined to stop him by any means necessary, even death. Jesus dies in part because Lazarus lives.

Mary doesn’t know this yet, of course. But this story of Mary’s extravagant anointing of Jesus sets up God’s ultimate act of extravagant love toward all the world...an act symbolized by the empty cross, an act through which God promises, once and for all, that death will not have the last word, not just for Lazarus, not just for Jesus, but for us all. It is this extravagant act of salvation for all that inspires us to extravagant acts of worship -- offering our time, talent, and treasure to God in such a way that they cease to be useful to anyone else.

Yet it is also God’s sacrifice of his only son on a cross that calls us be extravagant, not just toward God, but also in service to others, remembering that on the cross God stretches out God’s arms to embrace the whole world. This is why, in the world’s eyes at least, we Christians are actually really bad stewards of our resources. Instead of making the best financial decisions, we spend what we could save, we give away what we could hoard, we live more simply so that we can imitate God by giving extravagantly both to God and to others.

In the story Babette’s Feast by Isak Denison, Babette, a gifted Parisian chef, is banished from her native Paris in a time of political turmoil. She washes ashore in a small Danish fishing village, where she discovers a fractured and divided religious community.
The once tight-knit band of believers has been bickering with one another, nursing grudges and exchanging petty insults, much to the dismay of the two spinster sisters who head up the community. The sisters hire Babette to be their cook, but they ask her to prepare only the blandest foods, which is what they are used to eating.
One day, Babette learns that she has won the lottery in Paris. She has a new lease on life, an opportunity to start anew. But first, she offers to cook a true feast for the community. The villagers are treated to rare delicacies, the best wine, and some of the most delicious gourmet fare in the world. It is truly an extravagant meal.
Although these religious folks have no idea the true value of Babette’s gift to them, during the meal, their community is restored. Past insults are forgiven, grudges are dropped, and when the evening is finished, they join hands and sing the Doxology under the stars, praising God for the extravagant gifts of creation and salvation.
It is only after the meal that the sisters discover the truly extravagant nature of Babette’s feast: she had spent ALL the money she won to prepare the meal, not just a portion of it as they had thought. In doing so, she gave up the opportunity to restore her life. She could not return to Paris and become a chef in one of the world’s best restaurants, in spite of her great talent. She had wasted everything on this small, fractious community. And her so-called “waste” brought new life to everyone who experienced her extravagant feast. (3)

When Mary received Jesus’ extravagant gift of returning her brother to life, she responded with an extravagant act of gratitude and love. When you receive God’s extravagant, costly gift...when you look at that cross and realize that it represents God’s extravagant love for you, a love that spills over the edges, that is given far too freely, too easily, that is available not just to you, but to everyone at any time...well, the only appropriate response to such a gift is extravagance...to love God and others with the same kind of reckless abandon with which God loves us. It might look like waste, it might make those who witness it uncomfortable, but according to God, it is only when we sacrifice extravagantly for the sake of love that we truly give -- and receive -- new life. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. from the sermon “Extravagant,” by the Rev. Mark Ramsey, preached at Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church, October 4, 2009. Used wth permission.
2. William G. Carter in his commentary on the passage in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Vol. 2, WJK Press, 2009, p. 142.
3. Scott Hoezee, Center for Excellence in Preaching website, read it here.

Looking at the Stars (sermon, February 28, 2010)

Genesis 15

Lent is supposed to be the season when we remember the suffering of Jesus, often by bringing some measure of suffering upon ourselves, whether by giving up something or taking something on. Although it was by no means intentional, in the first ten days of Lent I found myself thrown into the depth and breadth of human suffering, albeit vicariously. As is often the case for me, I experienced this vicarious suffering through books. It all started innocently enough...the first book was recommended to me by a friend. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago in a sermon. The book, called Here If You Need Me, is a memoir by the chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, Kate Braestrup. Braestrup’s husband, a Maine State Trooper, was killed in the line of duty one day. He had planned to go to seminary and become a police chaplain, and after his death, Braestrup decided to go to seminary herself and then became chaplain to the forest wardens who search for people who get lost in the woods or fall down a waterfall or ride a snowmobile onto ice thin. She ministers to those who are intimately involved in rescues and recoveries and to the families whose loved ones have turned up missing or dead. It’s a beautifully written book, filled with painful stories, only a few of which have the kind of happy endings we hope for: the lost child found, the swimmer recovered, the snowmobiler rescued.

Then I heard an interview with an author named Roger Rosenblatt. He too has recently published a memoir and after hearing him interviewed I immediately got a copy. The book is called Making Toast and in it Rosenblatt writes about the sudden death of his 38 year-old daughter Amy, a pediatrician and mother of three children, ages 6, 4, and 14 months. Amy dropped dead one day because of an extremely rare heart condition that no one knew she had. Immediately after she died, Rosenblatt and his wife moved into Amy’s home, and have lived there ever since, helping their son-in-law care for the children. Rosenblatt claims that the one skill he brings to this arrangement is the ability to make toast.

Then, sitting at my daughter’s preschool last week waiting to pick her up, another parent invited me to join a book group and handed me a copy of the next book up for discussion, Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana De Rosnay. That night, eager for a reprieve from the suffering in the other books on my bedside table, I started reading. Turns out Sarah’s Key is based on a true--and truly horrific--event: the roundup of Jewish families in Paris in the summer of 1942. Thousands of men and women and over four thousand children were taken from their homes in the middle of the night, held for six days in an old stadium with almost no food or water, then bussed out of the city into camps. Once there, the men were separated from the women and children and they all lived in squalid conditions for weeks. Then one day, the soldiers gathered up the women and children and separated the children from their mothers using brute physical force and icy cold buckets of water. While the children were essentially left to fend for themselves in the camps, their parents were taken by train to Auschwitz and immediately gassed. Days later, the children met the same end.

At this point, I felt like I’d entered a spiritual boxing ring and the hits just kept coming. How can there be this much suffering in the world? How can human beings treat one another so horribly or even just stand by while they watch their neighbors being dragged away? Why do awful things happen with no explanation at all, at least no satisfactory ones, like when a young mother dies of a rare heart condition? Why is the natural world so terribly indifferent to human beings? Come to think of it, why did two hundred and thirty thousand people die in an earthquake in Haiti, and hundreds of thousands more become injured, disabled, orphaned, and displaced? Frankly, I’m just not sure my faith is strong enough to withstand all these questions.

To top it all off, the words of today’s reading kept ringing in my ears: “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” Just at this moment when my faith felt under assault, here was this age-old story about Abraham, the father of our religion and two others as well, in large part because, in spite of the suffering in the world around him and in his own life, he had faith, he believed that God would fulfill God’s promises, no matter how improbable those promises seemed.

Today’s passage, and particularly verse 6, “And Abraham believed the Lord; and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness.” That particular verse has inspired many sons and daughters of Abraham, including the Apostle Paul, to hold up Abraham (and his wife Sarah, too) as the models of faith. My first reaction to this verse was that of a petulant child. Clearly I didn’t possess Abraham’s brand of blind faith and, frankly, I didn’t want to. There was just too much suffering in the world and I wanted some answers for it. I wanted to know exactly how God was going to fulfill God’s promises to those Jewish mothers and fathers and children, to Amy Rosenblatt Solomon’s daughter and two sons, to all those people in Maine who died in the woods or under the ice, to the people of Haiti. I didn’t want to hear promises, I wanted to see some results!

But then, remembering one of the fundamental rules of preaching--thou shalt know the context of the passage on which thou preaches--I turned back to Genesis chapter 12 and reviewed Abraham’s story from its beginning. And what I found was a profoundly human character whose faith was defined not by blind obedience, but by the courage to take risks and the willingness to make mistakes, receive forgiveness, and try again. You see, once Abraham answered God’s call to leave his hometown and journey with God to a strange land, his life didn’t suddenly exist in a vacuum where there was only God’s love and grace. It pretty much went on like everybody else’s. When there was a famine, Abraham and Sarah suffered right along with everybody else. And in spite of his faith in God, Abraham made some big mistakes in those moments when he doubted God’s promises would come true. Here’s one: when they went to Egypt to find relief from the famine, Abraham passed off his wife Sarah as his sister, allowing her to be taken into Pharaoh’s house, presumably to become one of the king’s lovers, which could really have messed up God’s promise that Sarah would conceive Abraham’s heir. Later, after years have passed since God promised a son and Sarah still isn’t pregnant, Abraham takes an alternative wife and has a son with her, a sure sign of his doubt that God’s promise would be fulfilled.

Abraham is a model of faith for us not because he blindly believed and obeyed God, but because he believed and obeyed God the best a human being can: in fits and starts, with mistakes and do-overs. Even today’s passage shows us this. First God repeats to Abraham the promises made back in chapter 12: “I am your shield, your reward shall be great.” Back in chapter 12, the reward was made explicit: Abraham and Sarah, though barren, would bear a child, a son, and Abraham would possess land that he could pass on through his son to his descendants. And yet, here in chapter 15, after years in which God’s original promise of a child and land has not yet been fulfilled, Abraham is skeptical, so much so that he has taken matters into his own hands. “You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir.”

That’s when God firmly repeats the promise: “No one but your very own [son] will be your heir...Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able...So shall your descendants be.” Then we hear that Abraham truly believed. He believed, although we aren’t told why. Maybe looking up at the stars reminded Abraham of God’s creative powers. After all, a God who could create the heavens and earth out of nothing could surely breathe life into a barren womb. But then God goes on to repeat the promise that Abraham will receive, in addition to a son, land to possess. And already, just a few minutes later, Abraham’s faith wanes again. “How am I to know that I shall possess this land?” Abraham asks God. What follows is a strange account of animal sacrifice and a deep and terrifying darkness and an awful dream--nightmare, really--about immigration and slavery and centuries of oppression for Abraham’s descendants.

Clearly we are dealing here with ancient rituals that we struggle to understand, but scholars generally agree that this portion of the reading has to do with sealing the covenant, the promise God is making to Abraham. God plunges Abraham into darkness, much as we are plunged--ready or not--into the dark season of Lent, and gives Abraham a glimpse of the future. In this future Abraham sees that it will be hundreds of years before God’s promise of land is fulfilled. Abraham sees that his descendants will know great suffering before they possess the land of promise, but he also sees that they will possess it, in God’s time. And in this strange ritual of animal parts and a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch God seals the deal, letting Abraham know that the promises God has made him will be fulfilled.

Abraham wakes up from that dream knowing two things: his longed-for descendants will suffer greatly and he will not live to see the fulfillment of God’s promise of land, only God’s promise of a son. And despite that great faith of Abraham, his life continues much as it did before, with no child anytime soon for Sarah and great manipulation by Abraham to try to force God’s promises to come true. This is faith, the faith of our ancestors that we emulate. We might want to think that Abraham’s faith was stronger or more consistent, but according to the Bible, it was not. Personally, I take great comfort in that. I hope you do too.

*****

After I took a few days away from those three heart-wrenching books that I somehow ended up reading all at the same time, right at the beginning of Lent, it occurred to me that the books presented two different ways to respond to life’s inevitable suffering. Two of the books affirm that there are times in life when the darkness is so thick there is no comfort, there is no light, not even the pinprick of a distant star. Now for some people, even people of great faith, there are times when this feels true, times when it seems the promises of God are null and void, and there is no hope for the future, no redemption. The third book looks at suffering differently. In spite of her terrible grief at the death of her husband and in spite of the tragedies she has seen as a forest service chaplain, Kate Braestrup is somehow able to trust that there more going on, in her life and in the world, than she can see. With language that is neither preachy nor certain she conveys that even in the darkest moments we can have faith in God who keeps God’s promises, if not today, then some day in the distant future.

“We are all in the gutter,” writes Oscar Wilde, “but some of us are looking at the stars.” When God shows Abraham the stars and promises that his descendants will be that numerous, Abraham has a choice. He can believe only in the reality around him, in human greed and nature’s indifference and a barren future, or he can look at the stars and believe in the promises of God who created the universe out of nothing, and who offers to Abraham--and to us--the gift of faith, a gift we can open time and time again by looking at the stars and trusting that someday, somehow, in God’s time, God’s promises will be fulfilled.

There is an obscure story about King David, another great and yet flawed ancestor of our faith. In this story, David takes a census. Although we aren’t told why this act is an affront to God, it is in fact a grave sin, and David must be punished. In a surprising twist, God gives David a choice of three punishments: three years of famine, three months of destruction at the hands of Israel’s enemies or three days of “the sword of the Lord.” God explains that this will entail a pestilence on the land and the angel of the Lord destroying all the territory of Israel. David chooses door number three, saying: “let me fall into the hand of the Lord, for his mercy is very great; but let me not fall into human hands.” (1 Chronicles 21:13)

Faced with the choice of destruction by nature, human beings, or God, David looks to the stars, trusting in the mercy and compassion of the Lord God, the one who creates out of nothing, who breathes life into creatures formed from the mud, who starts a dead heart beating again, who is gracious enough not to destroy us in our despair. Instead, God offers us the gift of a faulty but persistent faith that our that God will bring us home to the place where God’s promise is fulfilled, whether we reach that place in this life or the life to come. From the gutter of Lent, let us look to the stars. Amen.