19 Pentecost Cycle b proper 22 October 4, 2015
Job 1:1; 2:1-10 Psalm 26
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12 Mark 10:2-16
Why is it that the news
usually consists of the presentation of bad news? Yes, there is news about success, the heroic
and victories in sports, but a greater percentage of the news is about bad
things that went wrong or about human failure or about war or about deeds
of inhumanity.
So why is bad news so popular? Bad news is so popular because we regard good news to be what is most normal about life. So when something departs from the normalcy of goodness, it stands out and calls attention to itself.
This is both good and bad. It is wonderful that goodness is so normal and taken for granted that we don't toot the horn of goodness. However, when badness get so much press, we can begin to think that badness is really normal and so we can begin to live our lives as though Murphy's Law is the guiding principle. "If something bad can happen, then it probably will. If someone can do a bad and horrible thing, then they probably will."
In very subtle ways we can elevate badness to normalcy and then begin to live our lives by over estimating the actuarial probabilities toward what is bad. Crime and criminals can become such a fear factor that we end up building prison after prison because we fear the preponderance of the criminal and criminality.
Humanity has always had anxiety about the bad things which can happen. Faith and religious perspective have been part of the human experience to help us deal with the fact that bad things can happen. To counter Murphy's Law, we would like to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, but in observation this does not always seem to be the case. In a period of theology for the people of Israel there was a certain school of religious thinkers who wanted Israel to have an ironclad system of protection from evil. They wanted to have an ironclad system which would explain why bad things happened to them. So they built a system of what they thought would be actuarial performance to guarantee providential outcomes or to explain why the bad things happened. There was a formula: If you love God and are faithful, God will bless you with health, prosperity and good favor. But if you disobey God, then bad and evil will befall you. The prophets of Israel had to have answers about why God would let the chosen nation become divided and why God would let the foreign powers of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Generals of Alexander the Great, and Roman armies over run Israel and enslave them and take them into exile. In their neat formula, God had allowed all of this because the people sinned and went after foreign gods. This system is still used by many American preachers. God is not blessing America because of her sins. There seems to be some comfort for many people to presume to know the specific connection between group behaviors and group disasters as though there was a one to one correspondence between bad behaviors and bad things happening.
In this system, on the personal level a person suffered badness because he or she had in some way disobeyed God.
The book of Job was written to dispel this simplistic actuarial theory of goodness and badness. Job was by all accounts a good and righteous man; but everything that could go wrong went wrong for him. He lost health, house and home, possession and family, and his friends had to uphold the party line, "Job you must have done something really wrong for all of this to happen to you." Evil and bad things can be so dominating that we can in our lives make them the primary motivation for all of our activity. We can in a subtle way begin to make sin, evil and badness the main principle of life itself. I can come to thing that bad things happen to me because I am bad.
What are some of the symptoms of letting what is bad define our lives? We become highly juridical or even legalistic. If evil and badness predominant then we need to elevate laws of punishment or permission to deal with the evil.
And this is precisely what had happened with the issue of divorce for some in the time of the writing of the Gospel of Mark. God is love, that is what normal theology is. Men and women are to be like God in learning to love and practice loving behaviors. Love among people is what is expressive of what is good and normal. It does happen that charity fails. It does happen that people hate and do not manifest loving behaviors. The failure of love is so profound that we fear that failure and because so much damage can be done when love fails we have to deal with the failure of love. And so we make laws to deal with the aftermath of the failure of love. Divorce laws derive from the fact that human love fails.
The words of Jesus are not so much words which should be used to deny or prohibit divorce, the words of Jesus should be used to reaffirm that God is love, God created men and women for love and the failure of men and women to love, does not nullify the original loving principle of life. In short, Jesus was saying human failure and divorce laws cannot replace the fact that God is love and that men and women are ceaselessly called to the vocation of love.
The words of Jesus decried that the religious lawyers were so hung up on the failure to love that they had dethroned the normalcy of the love of God and the call of men and women to love one another. And when we make divorce laws the norm; when we make the bad news the norm; when we make human failure the norm, we lose sight of the nature of God and the goal of human life.
And when the failure of love becomes regarded to be the norm, it starts a chain reaction. I am convinced that the discussion of divorce is juxtaposed with the bringing of a child into the discussion because when the failure of love and divorce is made more important than stating the principle of God's love, then children and the vulnerable get neglected. When the negative is treated as though it is the norm, then people lose the ability to bless each other with their lives.
So how can we correct this? Jesus used the witness of a child to show us how to make the correction. The youngest child, is a baby being born. Jesus said that we had to be born again. We had to become like a child in order to perceive the kingdom of God.
The life of faith requires that we become versatile in how we access the resources of our personalities. We cannot let the harsh things in life crush our human spirit to the point of elevating bad things to a place of normalcy. At the same time, we need to have adult realism to deal with the fact that love does fail but we need to do this in a way in which we don't allow God's love and our calling to love be dethroned from a place of prominence in our lives. Yes, it may be hard to maintain this naïve belief in love when the harshness of life is experienced in such pronounced ways. And this is why we have to practice the kinds of spiritual methods to access our child aspect of personality to continue to live in the wonder of God's love and goodness and our own delight in the same.
Some of the amazing experiences of life are to see is a child smile in pediatric ward of a hospital or a child playing or having fun in a refugee camp. There is capacity in a child to uphold original wonder even under dire circumstances; and each of us still has that capacity in ourselves as well. And we need to access this aspect within us in order to perceive the continuous and eternal nature of God's love and our continual calling to the normalcy of love and goodness.
Divorce happens; but God is still love and we are still called to love. The normalcy of love trumps the deprivation of love and the resulting divorce. Bad things happen but God and creation are still good and we are still called to good things.
Let the witness of Jesus and the witness of the child within us help us to keep the normalcy of God's love and our call to love ever before us today. Amen.
So why is bad news so popular? Bad news is so popular because we regard good news to be what is most normal about life. So when something departs from the normalcy of goodness, it stands out and calls attention to itself.
This is both good and bad. It is wonderful that goodness is so normal and taken for granted that we don't toot the horn of goodness. However, when badness get so much press, we can begin to think that badness is really normal and so we can begin to live our lives as though Murphy's Law is the guiding principle. "If something bad can happen, then it probably will. If someone can do a bad and horrible thing, then they probably will."
In very subtle ways we can elevate badness to normalcy and then begin to live our lives by over estimating the actuarial probabilities toward what is bad. Crime and criminals can become such a fear factor that we end up building prison after prison because we fear the preponderance of the criminal and criminality.
Humanity has always had anxiety about the bad things which can happen. Faith and religious perspective have been part of the human experience to help us deal with the fact that bad things can happen. To counter Murphy's Law, we would like to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people, but in observation this does not always seem to be the case. In a period of theology for the people of Israel there was a certain school of religious thinkers who wanted Israel to have an ironclad system of protection from evil. They wanted to have an ironclad system which would explain why bad things happened to them. So they built a system of what they thought would be actuarial performance to guarantee providential outcomes or to explain why the bad things happened. There was a formula: If you love God and are faithful, God will bless you with health, prosperity and good favor. But if you disobey God, then bad and evil will befall you. The prophets of Israel had to have answers about why God would let the chosen nation become divided and why God would let the foreign powers of Assyria, Babylon, Persia, the Generals of Alexander the Great, and Roman armies over run Israel and enslave them and take them into exile. In their neat formula, God had allowed all of this because the people sinned and went after foreign gods. This system is still used by many American preachers. God is not blessing America because of her sins. There seems to be some comfort for many people to presume to know the specific connection between group behaviors and group disasters as though there was a one to one correspondence between bad behaviors and bad things happening.
In this system, on the personal level a person suffered badness because he or she had in some way disobeyed God.
The book of Job was written to dispel this simplistic actuarial theory of goodness and badness. Job was by all accounts a good and righteous man; but everything that could go wrong went wrong for him. He lost health, house and home, possession and family, and his friends had to uphold the party line, "Job you must have done something really wrong for all of this to happen to you." Evil and bad things can be so dominating that we can in our lives make them the primary motivation for all of our activity. We can in a subtle way begin to make sin, evil and badness the main principle of life itself. I can come to thing that bad things happen to me because I am bad.
What are some of the symptoms of letting what is bad define our lives? We become highly juridical or even legalistic. If evil and badness predominant then we need to elevate laws of punishment or permission to deal with the evil.
And this is precisely what had happened with the issue of divorce for some in the time of the writing of the Gospel of Mark. God is love, that is what normal theology is. Men and women are to be like God in learning to love and practice loving behaviors. Love among people is what is expressive of what is good and normal. It does happen that charity fails. It does happen that people hate and do not manifest loving behaviors. The failure of love is so profound that we fear that failure and because so much damage can be done when love fails we have to deal with the failure of love. And so we make laws to deal with the aftermath of the failure of love. Divorce laws derive from the fact that human love fails.
The words of Jesus are not so much words which should be used to deny or prohibit divorce, the words of Jesus should be used to reaffirm that God is love, God created men and women for love and the failure of men and women to love, does not nullify the original loving principle of life. In short, Jesus was saying human failure and divorce laws cannot replace the fact that God is love and that men and women are ceaselessly called to the vocation of love.
The words of Jesus decried that the religious lawyers were so hung up on the failure to love that they had dethroned the normalcy of the love of God and the call of men and women to love one another. And when we make divorce laws the norm; when we make the bad news the norm; when we make human failure the norm, we lose sight of the nature of God and the goal of human life.
And when the failure of love becomes regarded to be the norm, it starts a chain reaction. I am convinced that the discussion of divorce is juxtaposed with the bringing of a child into the discussion because when the failure of love and divorce is made more important than stating the principle of God's love, then children and the vulnerable get neglected. When the negative is treated as though it is the norm, then people lose the ability to bless each other with their lives.
So how can we correct this? Jesus used the witness of a child to show us how to make the correction. The youngest child, is a baby being born. Jesus said that we had to be born again. We had to become like a child in order to perceive the kingdom of God.
The life of faith requires that we become versatile in how we access the resources of our personalities. We cannot let the harsh things in life crush our human spirit to the point of elevating bad things to a place of normalcy. At the same time, we need to have adult realism to deal with the fact that love does fail but we need to do this in a way in which we don't allow God's love and our calling to love be dethroned from a place of prominence in our lives. Yes, it may be hard to maintain this naïve belief in love when the harshness of life is experienced in such pronounced ways. And this is why we have to practice the kinds of spiritual methods to access our child aspect of personality to continue to live in the wonder of God's love and goodness and our own delight in the same.
Some of the amazing experiences of life are to see is a child smile in pediatric ward of a hospital or a child playing or having fun in a refugee camp. There is capacity in a child to uphold original wonder even under dire circumstances; and each of us still has that capacity in ourselves as well. And we need to access this aspect within us in order to perceive the continuous and eternal nature of God's love and our continual calling to the normalcy of love and goodness.
Divorce happens; but God is still love and we are still called to love. The normalcy of love trumps the deprivation of love and the resulting divorce. Bad things happen but God and creation are still good and we are still called to good things.
Let the witness of Jesus and the witness of the child within us help us to keep the normalcy of God's love and our call to love ever before us today. Amen.
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