4 Pentecost Cycle b Proper 7 June 21, 2015
Job
38:1-11 Psalm 9:9-20
2
Corinthians 6:1-13 Mark 4:35-41
God grant me the
serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to accept the things
I cannot change and the wisdom to know the difference.
This serenity
prayer is a confession and an admission that we are not all-knowing and so we
cannot understand why everything happens. And we cannot even
understand why lots of things happen to us.
In our time we
have actuarial science to assist our insurance companies to set their rates
based upon theories of probability. And so in our actuarial brilliance we
have an official way to blame God for the mistiming between human systems and
the systems of nature. If one looks up the phrase, "Act of
God," what does one find? "an instance of uncontrollable
natural forces in operation (often used in insurance claim)." And no you
can't blame really bad driving on an "act of God."
The biblical
writers were like us in that they were trying to make sense of things which
happen to them which eluded human ability to fully predict and fully
prepare. If we had known, then we could have decided not to be in the
wrong place at the wrong time. Biblical writers had their own actuarial
theologians who cannot be faulted for trying to inform their people to live in
ways of prevention. We are are told when we learn to drive, " to learn to drive defensively,
" to make room for those who will makes some errors. Theology and
wisdom theories are about living defensively.
The problem is
that such actuarial system can be regarded to be absolute systems and so if
something goes wrong, God forbid that one blames the system of belief for not
being comprehensive enough. If the system of belief is not comprehensive yet is protected by a cadre of
religious judges then the individual person must be deemed to be at fault if something evil
befalls a person. If it be called an act of God, then it must be a
punishing act of God for something done wrong because God would not punish
someone who was blameless.
What did the
disciples of Jesus find out about boating on the Sea of Galilee during the
night? Storms happen. In fact, storms happen even when Jesus is in
the boat.
What do we find
happens to us in the events of our daily commutes in life? Storms
happen. "Yes, but I thought that I had Jesus in my boat. I thought I
had Jesus with me as a sort of talisman to provide me perfect timing. Jesus
let the genetic timing for my heart attack and cancer be on schedule for the
age of 105 when I'm already dead; don't let such a storm come to me when I'm
actually here."
A major issue in
life is that storms happen. And how do we characterize such stormy
events, events which are at the very least inconvenient or dreadfully
inconvenient in the drastic disruption of our loves. And when the storms
occur, it is very easy for us to speculate about how our human freedom
contributed to the storms of life. And we can beat ourselves up about our
failure to be good stewards of our lives and it is one thing to be
self-critical, it is another thing when an outsider speculates about why bad
things happen to us.
These were the
conditions which are expressed in the biblical story of Job. The writer
of Job was faced with some easy answer, blessing theologians who proclaimed
iron clad answers about why bad things occurred. Here is the
formula: If you are good and you keep the law then God will bless you
with goodness. And so if you are successful in life, that is a sign of
God's favor and your goodness. Conversely, if you are bad, then bad
things will happen to you. And if bad things happen to you, that must
mean that in some way you have offended God with the deeds of your life.
The story of Job
was written to counter this simplistic, formulaic theology which unwittingly
was saying, "bad things can't happen to good people."
At the end of the
book of Job, Job finally gets to speak with God who used a whirlwind as the
site of this oracle. A whirlwind, a tornado, an "act of God" is the site of
oracle of God.
And what is
the symbolic meaning of this whirlwind? Why would God choose a whirlwind
to speak to Job?
The whirlwind is a
symbol of the creative freedom which exists in our world. If God is
pure creativity and pure freedom, then proportionate degrees of that freedom is
shared within the entire world. And this means that an entire range of
interactive events can occur within this panorama of agents who share a degree
of this creative freedom. It means that events of incredible harmony can
occur, harmonic convergences when we feel elated by the state of feeling
totally compatible in a given situation. But freedom also means that
states of cluster chaos can occur when human timing and nature's timing are
completely incompatible for human health, happiness and general
well-being. This is the whirlwind factor of living in a universe of
shared freedom.
What the Gospels
indicate to us is that God is not going to compromise with the significant
permissive freedom with which this world is made. God is going to inspire
hope and faith and wisdom as ways of learning to live with the range of events
present in our world.
If God were going
to perpetually and sporadically interfere with the conditions of freedom in
this world, then God would have simply made us all innocent robots of goodness
and sweetness and God would have made all of the pieces of the universe like a
well oiled machine whose parts were always in perfect timing so as not to
oppose or work against each other.
What the Gospel
message of Jesus Christ shows us is that God submits the divine self in the
person of Jesus to the very conditions of freedom in this world. God
submitted to the conditions of freedom in this world even to the condition of
allowing the divine Son to be killed on the Cross. Can bad things happen
to good people? The Cross of Jesus is the answer to that question.
And what do we
learn about the storms of our lives? We learn that we go through them
with Jesus in our boat and he is sleeping. And why is he sleeping?
Because he has made peace with the conditions of life and he himself knows that
he is not exempt from the worst thing happening to him. He knows the
worst thing can happen to him and yet he sleeps. In his faith he has made
peace with the conditions of freedom. And he rises to declare that every
specific storm in life must submit to time and have an ending. And he
declares the peace that comes when a storm ends. And he asks his
disciples and us to have faith informed by knowing the conditions of freedom
which prevail this world, not as fatalism but as living with the attitude of
making the best of whatever situation comes our way.
And why can God
and Jesus be so confident with the free conditions of this world? Because
the worst thing that a storm can throw us is death, and death has been
revealed as an event in time to be followed by resurrection afterlife.
After death, the world continues in the free afterlife of our departing.
And our lives continue in the afterlife of God's great freedom to let us just
keep on living in ways and manner which we don't fully know, but hope has given
us enough of a lure of our afterlife to inspire us to live faithfully in the free conditions of
this world.
So, friends, let
us continue to live defensively and in preventive ways using as much actuarial
wisdom as we can based upon sound probability theory. But let us not
presume to know causality in such a perfect way as to judge other people
wrongly. Let us be thankful for events of harmonic convergence when
seemingly Jupiter is aligned with Mars and peace is guiding the planet of our
lives, but let us also have faith when the storms come and when cluster chaos
forces us into the experiences of incompatibility, abhorrence and afflictions
which challenge our abilities to control events toward our momentary maximum well-being. Let
us have faith to know that God, the divine creator, has also submitted with
faith to the very conditions of freedom, because God knows that there is always
a new day after the events of cluster chaos. Let us live in the faith of
knowing that cluster chaos events do end and resurrection outcomes are on their
way. Amen.
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