Theology as the Art of Coping

25 Pentecost B    November 18, 2012  

1 Samuel 1:4-20 Psalm 16

Hebrews 10:11-14 (15-18) 19-25   Mark 13:1-8

Lectionary Link

   Have you ever heard of “Chicken Little Theology?”  You remember the famous Chicken Little in the famous tale.  She had an acorn fall on her head and in hysteria she made an incredible misinterpretation.  She did not actually see the acorn hit her so in alarm what did she scream?  “The sky is falling, the sky is falling, the sky hit me on the head.”   And she shared her alarm with Henny Penny and all of her other friends and ultimately the wily Foxy Loxy took advantage of her ignorance and he had her has very rare bird for his dinner.

  What might “alarmism” look like on the level of family, religious groups or society?  The Bible has within it alarmist theology.  We call it apocalyptic literature.  How do we interpret an alarming event that happens to us, to our family, to our parish, to our country, to our world?  Alarmist theology produced visualizations of the end of world; after all, if God’s people were suffering does that not signal an end of the world as we know it?

  Alarming events, interpretation and misinterpretation of the same are part of what we might call the efforts to cope with crisis and loss in life.  In many ways the Bible presents us with the efforts of people of faith to be involved in the continuous effort to cope with the events of life.  We celebrate blessing and success but what do we do in the time of crisis?  It is during a crisis when we need the psychological and spiritual wherewithal to “cope.”  And much more of biblical literature is about a theology of coping rather than a theology of success.   This gives some indications of the conditions that were faced by the people who generated the biblical literature.

  What did our country feel like when the twin towers came crashing down on 9/11?  We felt violated?  We felt baffled; why did this happen and why would anyone do this to us?  We felt angry.  We felt the need for revenge.  We felt like justice should be exacted upon those responsible even though those who perpetrated the act died in their act.  One of the planes targeted the Pentagon and another had targeted the White House.  How would we feel if the White House and Capitol Building were destroyed in an attack?  The symbolic importance of those building and feeling safe in our lives would be threatened.  How do we make sense of alarming events?

  Chicken Little’s first mistake was to misinterpret the cause of the event and so she ended up over-reacting to something that did not take place at all.  Events of alarm can bring out some unhealthy coping responses.  One response is denial.  Another response is self-blame; “It’s all my fault and I deserved this.”  Another response is to scapegoat and blame others.  “It’s all their fault.”  And when that is done on the social level entire groups of people can be blamed for misfortunes in society.  Another response is to propose conspiracy theories about why things happened.  Even factual incidents can inspire lots of “wacky” speculations.  Another response is the rationalization response and that can be part of denial as well.  If the levees had been better constructed we would not have had such a disaster.  Good thinking; but after the fact denial and blame.  But there is also the Calvinist deterministic response, “God is in control and God knew it was going to happen.”  There is some comfort in believing in a super-Cosmic Entity who is a puppeteer for all earthly happenings.  After all, at least somebody is in control.

  By now, I have probably offended all of our favorite methods of coping and for what purpose?  Today, we have read an account from the community which generated the Gospel of Mark.  This community belonged to the sect of Judaism who believed that Jesus was the Messiah.  They were opposed by other Jews who did not believe Jesus was the Messiah.  The community of the Gospel of Mark lived after the year 70 when the most important city and building for the Jews had been destroyed.  The Temple and the City of Jerusalem were leveled to the ground and so there were definitely issues of coping involved.  Many people lost their homes and had to flee the environment of Jerusalem.  Many people who believed Jerusalem to be the holiest site on earth had to contemplate the fact that God’s protective shield had not been in place.  Many people had to make sense and meaning of this event.   There were major shifts occurring within communities and we, as Christians today,  are the result of those shifts.  Today the Jewish community survived the destruction of the Temple and they have survived not believing that Jesus was the Messiah.  And Christianity is no longer a sect of Judaism; it is a separate religious faith community.

  This Gospel of Mark reveals the coping actions of the early Jesus Movement.  The community understood that the risen Christ as a living oracle in their community revealed that time means nothing is permanent and not even the holy Temple of Jerusalem.  What also did the oracle Christ reveal to them?  The oracle Christ used perhaps one of the most poignant metaphors of all, a metaphor of extremely unique pain but a sign of a most propitious event.  What is that metaphor?  Something I will never know anything about.  Birth pangs, labor pains.  Women who have delivered babies into this world have variously described birth pangs.  Birth pangs are painful but they mark the glory of a new beginning. The presence of the baby makes the pangs worthwhile, even while we might question the harsh reality of physiology that juxtaposes such pain and new life.   And the oracle of Jesus in the literature and liturgy of the community of Mark used the metaphor of birth pangs to describe the historic events of their time.

  Perhaps we might adopt birth pangs as a metaphor for life.  New moments are being born out of previous moments.  Painful transitions are always occurring and we continually have to let go of the old in order to embrace the new.  The birth of the community of Jesus Christ was a painful beginning and the community of the Gospel of Mark was trying to find meaning for the living out of their belief in Jesus as the Messiah.

  I believe that words of the Bible are consistent with the most common forms of coping in human experience.  We translate events of pain and pleasure into words; words are experienced in our physical existence but they also seem to have a parallel existence in the thought realm.  We use words to try to give meaning to all of the events in our lives.  The great philosopher Plato is known for his division of life into the realm of the ideal world and the actual world.  This platonic thinking is evident in the writer of the book of Hebrews.  This writer recreated a Temple and a priesthood of Jesus in the heavenly realm or the realm of the ideal.  So the earthly Temple and earthly Jesus had a parallel in the heavens and this realm in heaven was what completed the actual historical reality.  The early church understood and coped with their situation by their interpretation of life with a spiritual meaning.

  The question for us today involves how we use the Gospel of language to cope with the issues of faith in our life today, and they are many.  Our lives of faith involve rigorous efforts to interpret and assign meaning to events, not because we can discover any infallible meaning, but so that we can continue to live and act toward hopeful outcomes for ourselves and for our vision of what would make this world better.  What is infallible about the Bible is that people of biblical times grappled with the issues of faith and wrote their words of how they tried to find meaning.  Our words will be different than theirs based upon the fact that we have accumulated and are influenced by 2000 more years of world experience.

  As much as we think that we have progressed, we have progressed to know how small we are midst the vast quantity of what we know the universe to be.  We can be easily humbled by immensity.  We also know that we encounter freedom and that freedom renders for us a range of probabilities in our human experiences.  Important buildings can be destroyed, war and terrorism do happen in this world.  Disease occurs.  Hurricane occurs.  I think that mature coping in life does not involve scapegoating or pretending to know God’s will about why everything has happened.  Mature coping involves the faith of knowing that life is going to survive us, no matter what happens to us.  So what do we do?  We rejoice with each other in the joys and goodness of life.  We mourn with each other and support each other in the events of loss and crisis.

  And in the pain of our lives we hope that we can with the continuing oracle of Jesus Christ in the church, in faith, confess that life includes birth pangs, the terrible pain of delivering something new and joyful into our world.  Let us believe that the Gospel of Jesus and our lives of faith are a part of this birthing process and what we are giving birth to is the future after us.  Amen.