Divine Providence Is Often Like Sausage Making

2 Pentecost, A p 7, June 22, 2014 

Genesis 21:8-21 Ps. 86:1-10, 16-17

Rom. 6:1b-11    Matt. 10:24-39

 Lectionary Link

    History is about how and what we remember what has happened.   History involves selection of what is to be remembered.  Selection of what is to be remembered is determined by the stand out value of any particular event or happening.  History is highly editorialized because events stand out because of their value in comparison with  ordinary mundane events.  You might remember the day of your graduation but not distinctly remember brushing your teeth on that day.  Some things stand out and some things don't.   In the community of faith, the twenty-twenty hindsight of history's highest designation of the editorial selection of an event is often called "divine providence."  Divine providence is such a confident "after the fact faith" that one believes a past event to be evidence of God's intervention.

  And so we ask what is it that makes ordinary history turn out to be divine providence?  In the events surrounding the crucifixion a person witnessing this event would be hard-pressed to call the dying of someone upon the cross an obvious event of God's providential intervention.  Such would be absurd.  But St. Paul years after the crucifixion,  writes about this crucifixion event being a remembered narrative providing the power of personal spiritual transformation.  Our old selves are crucified with Christ and so this terrible event becomes post-facto designated as God's providence, God's wonderful intervention and a source of continuous transformation.

  Providence that is known in advance is called prediction or clairvoyance or prophetic utterance.  And wouldn't every gambler playing the horses love to know providence in advance?  People who confess wonderful providence like to enhance that wonder by suggesting that there was prophecy or foreknowledge for such things.  It is like the recovery technique of the teenager who accidentally slips and falls in front of a large crowd and instead of being embarrassed by the laughter, he says, "I meant that to happen." Responding to an accident by claiming to be in control.

  The Bible is written from the point of view that these things "were meant to happen."  This is effort of people of faith to try to survive, cope with and find meaning for things that happened to them.  Word is spirit and word is life and word is creating.  We use word to re-shape the things in life that often are experienced immediately as chaos because they do not submit to the way in which we would control things.

  In hindsight we can find creation that arise out of chaos and we can find redemption which happened after severe hurt and loss.  And without trivializing the poignant pain of the events themselves we use the creative words of faith and the survival excellence of subsequent events to remake history into providence.

  One could say that the task of our lives of faith is to remake ordinary history into divine providence through the creative words of faith when we did not give up but kept going and we did not always know why we kept going.

  Our Scripture readings give us examples,  messy examples of finding the divine providence even in the earlier events of human weakness, pettiness and the crisis of major family and community disagreement which result in painful conflict and recriminations.

  The fact of history is that the Jews and the Arabs are two dominant branches of the sons of Shem, otherwise known as Semites.  The Jews and the Arabs became great peoples of tribes who came to have the mutual respect of great rivalry.  What was the providence of these two great nations?  These two people came to know the success that the ancient people believed to be God's blessing.  But what was the source stories of the blessing of these two people?  The writers of Genesis cite incidents of sheer human doubt, fickleness and petty rivalry.  Sarah, the wife of Abraham laughed when God's angelic messengers told Abraham that the elderly couple would have a son.  And so her first son was named accordingly, Isaac, which means laughter.  But before Isaac was conceived Sarah began to doubt whether she would conceive.  And in the good old family values of the Old Testament, Sarah ordered Abraham to try to conceive with their slave woman Hagar.  So, Ishmael was born before Isaac was born.  Later when Sarah conceived and bore Isaac, the boys grew up together as half-brothers until Sarah became petty in her jealousy.  She was worried that Ishmael might share in some of the affection and prosperity that came with being raised with Isaac in the presence of their father Abraham.  So she demanded that Abraham send Hagar and Ishmael away into the desert.  And it was there that Hagar and Ishmael received the promise of God's blessings.  So the human pettiness is made to seem as though it was God's providential acts. Past acts that seemed doomed and motivated by human folly and pettiness are re-shaped and re-designated as providence, by a trumping subsequent blessing.

  The Gospel writings derived during a period of transitions between families and community caught in the aftermath of the success of the Jesus Movement.   The Jesus Movement grew as a prominent interpretation of the Judaic tradition.  A chief part of the success of the Jesus Movement is that many Jewish followers of Jesus allowed their Jewish customs to be dispensed with so that the success of the message of Jesus could be fostered and promoted for the non-Jewish believers.  This promotion of a Christo-centric Judaism to non-Jews and allowing them to forgo circumcision and many ritual practices caused great division within Judaism and particularly within families.

  If Jesus within his own time was a significant challenge to the existing religious authorities in Palestine, the challenge of the Jesus Movement to Judaism became more pronounced as Gentiles began to fill the gatherings of the Christian communities.

  The phrases of the Gospel of Matthew that we've read today are evidence of the incredible community and family pain of this major paradigm shift in the religious communities because of Jesus of Nazareth and the aftermath of his life on earth.

  Many people have been in families where people are passionately divided by having a common God and a common religion.  Christian, Jew, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Mormon, Jehovah Witness.....the division among people who claim be devoted to the same Christ has been known.  How can Jesus as the prince of peace bring peace to an individual soul even while that soul comes to anger and strife with members of his or her own family?  People change faith persepctive; that new faith perspective which is meaningful is suddenly designated as a sectarian cult and people are shunned, excommunicated and persecuted as the outcome of the new faith experience.

  How many people today embrace the notion of atheism because of the extreme conflict and hateful behaviors of people who claim to have faith in a loving God?

  Let us not believe so naively that the Gospel communities resolved issues of faithful living in such a final way.  What we find in the Gospel communities are people who are seeking to find the narrative and oracle of Jesus as inspiration for words of wisdom which try to give context for the conflict which was evident in their communities.  If people can believe that creative advance does not always occur with peaceful transition, then they can decide to keep following the path of creative advance.  We know that the American experience came about with great conflict and there were many who would have wanted to return to the security of being but a colony of Great Britain.  We have come to regard the conflict as providential for the incredible experiment in government that we know America to be.

  We can look back at the Gospel communities as communities which survived some very conflicting times of their birth and separation which were providential in forming this Christo-centric Judaism which traveled around the world.  The Gospel words are words of trying to make sense of the chaos of conflict that was occurring as this new universal Christo-centric Judaism was being formed.   Let us be thankful that they endured lots of discomfort and conflict to survive to be links in a great and wonderful movement.

  Let us pray that we can have the faith to come to providence for our religious history both on the personal level and on the parish and community level.  Conflict is a fact of life.  But let justice and love be the final judgment about the divine providence of conflict:  Are more people invited to know God's love and justice because of the conflict?  If this is so, we can embrace the conflict as the divine providence of God's Spirit helping us to make creative advance in love and justice.  And this, loving and just outcomes are the good and providential news of conflict for us today.  Amen.

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