And yet,… when it seems like Jesus has forgotten you.

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A friend of mine, a pastor, posted on Facebook the other day that her four-year-old, at the end of what had been for him a very bad day, lamented, “Jesus forgot to help me today.”
Boy did this hit hard for me. I can only imagine how those words felt to her.
But “Jesus forgot to help me today” sounds remarkably biblical. Like something a psalmist would say.

Another friend of mine, pastor and theologian Samuel Wells published an article offering theologically and spiritually healthy ways one might respond to the pandemic. (See link below.)  My favorite sentence – because it is the most Sam-like expression of British understatement – is: “Best-laid plans are having a lean season.”

Indeed they are. I am on sabbatical this spring semester and I had wonderful sabbatical-related travel plans, including a trip to New Orleans that coincided perfectly with my daughter’s break between spring semester and internship, giving me several days to spend with her. Having had to lay aside such plans, it isn’t hard to feel that Jesus forgot to help me – to help all of us – this spring.

And yet,…

I also read a helpful reflection on Psalm 137 – which is a pretty horrible psalm actually. It is a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem, but it ends with the psalmist declaring, “Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock!” (vs 9). To call this a lament is perhaps a bit understated (maybe something today’s British and ancient Hebrews had in common). It is arguably the angriest of the imprecatory Psalms. It is one I have always found impossible to pray.

And yet,…

What I read today was a reflection on the second verse, “On the willows there we hung up our harps.”

Israel was lamenting their captivity and yet they had not destroyed their harps, they had not forgotten their harps. They hung up their harps. Why? In the hopes that they would one day play their harps again.

And yet,…

Our world has changed. Vacations have been cancelled, weddings postponed, loved ones buried. But what have we hung up? What is hanging, waiting in hope for days that aren’t overshadowed by the darkness of COVID-19? Family dinners? Celebrating the Eucharist with your church family? Sporting events? Entertainment?

We have perhaps hung up many good and holy things, things we love and long to return to, waiting for the “and yet” of God. Because our God is full of “and yets”.- Israel was taken into captivity, and yet God was with them and delivered them.

– Daniel was thrown into a lion’s den, and yet God was with him and delivered him.
– Jonah was swallowed by a giant fish, and yet God delivered him to Ninevah and delivered Ninevah through him.
– Esther was a woman with no power who could have been killed by the king, and yet God saved Israel through her.
– Jesus was hung on a cross to die, and yet he is our resurrected Lord, God the Son, who has delivered us from the power of sin, death, and the devil.

The entirety of the Christian faith is predicated upon “and yet.” Resurrection is not automatic; dead really is dead. And knowing that people are suffering and dying really is horrible. There is no way to make it ok.

And yet my faith tells me there are still, and will still be “and yets” moments.

– People are dying in ICUs, and yet healthcare workers are helping the dying facetime with their families and promising them they will not die alone.
– People are suffering economically – many are hungry, even homeless, and yet people are donating time and goods to homeless shelters, to food banks, to the Cherokee reservation (which has had to close its borders because of the disproportionate incidence of illness it has experienced), and to neighbors.

It may indeed feel like Jesus has forgotten to help us. And our very best plans may indeed have a very lean season.

And yet, we have hung up our harps, in the sure and certain hope that God has not and will not run out of and yets.

 

Link to Wells article: Practices of Resistance

 

We had hoped…

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“We had hoped…” These have long struck me as some of the saddest words in the Bible.  “Now on that same day” – that is on Easter – two folks are heading out of Jerusalem towards Emmaus and they are talking about  “all these things that had happened.”  While they are talking Jesus appears alongside them but is unrecognized by them.  They tell Jesus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel.”  (Luke 24:41)

I hear anguish and sadness and a deep disappointment.  And I hear the unspoken, “but we must have been wrong.”  They had placed all of their hopes and dreams for redemption, for salvation, for life itself, on Jesus having been the one.  And now he was dead.  Never mind that the reader of Luke knows that he is alive and in fact the one talking to them.  I want to sit with the two for a while, to feel what they must have felt.

On Easter a friend of mine posted on Facebook, “I’m not ready to proclaim ‘He is risen!’ I need to sit in Holy Saturday for a bit.”

That’s where I am on this fourth day of Easter.  Still sitting in Holy Saturday.  Still thinking “but we had hoped.”  We had hoped to be back in church for Easter.  We had hoped to be back in our classrooms.  We had hoped to be in Florida with my brother and sister-in-law.  We had hoped this would all go away.

Holy Saturday has historically been the day Jesus is understood to have “descended into hell” to save those who had died before Christ had come.  When my son was young, maybe five, he asked me – loudly – in the middle of the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, “Mommy, where is hell?”  I whispered back to him, “Hell is wherever God is not.”  He thought about that for a moment and then told me, and a good portion of the congregation, “Well, that doesn’t make sense.  If God is everywhere, why do we say that?!”

I’m not a strong believer in hell.  And, in truth, I’ve never been quite sure what to do with our proclamation that Jesus descended into hell.  My son’s question seemed right to me.  But if hell is wherever God is not – or wherever God appears not to be because all of the things we associate with God, all of our hopes, are a little bit blurry – Holy Saturday and Jesus descending into hell starts to make a little bit more sense to me.

We had hoped COVID-19 would go away.  But it spreads and gets bigger.  And now I know young adults who have had to postpone their weddings and students who are soon to be college graduates whose plans for next year have been cancelled.  I know people who have had and are recovering from COVID-19 and I know people who have lost loved ones to the virus.  I know pastors who are trying to comfort grieving families when they cannot all gather together and where physical distancing highlights our reliance on human touch for comfort.  I had hoped that would not be so.

I have faith that this, too, shall pass and that we will retrospectively be able to see that Christ was here with us all along.  I really do.  But, I also wonder if we do ourselves and those around us a disservice by jumping too quickly to that moment.  Sometimes we need to abide in the now-ness of Holy Saturday.  It is a place of lament, of naming our sadness and disappointment and shattered hopes for what we thought would be.  “We had hoped” is sad, a sort of accusation even.  But it is also honest.  And, I think it is faithful.

Who Will Roll Away the Stone for Us?

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It is an odd Holy Week.

Learning to record worship for YouTube so it can be placed on Facebook.  Learning that there are ways to store and share large video files, too big for my email to handle.  Trying to find ways to bridge the virtual gap that makes watching worship somehow or other feel less like worship.  And yet loving being able to watch friends and former students from across the US and even in other countries as they lead worship online in ways that are beautiful and grace-filled.

In many ways this pandemic has shrunk the world.  My world is circumscribed by a circle around my home of roughly a mile and a half, maybe two mile, radius.  I have walked pretty much every step within that circle, sometimes walking two or three hours a day.  And I am so, so grateful for such a beautiful little circle of the world in which I can walk.

But it is still small.

And the pandemic has shrunk the world in that we are so much more acutely aware than perhaps ever before of our interconnectedness.  What happens across the ocean directly effects us.  What we do directly effects those across the sea from us.  We are, indeed, one family of God.

And though the technology (for which I am grateful) further shrinks the world and allows me to talk with and even see my children and other family and friends, it can never replace their physical presence.  A touch.  A hug.  A kiss.  So while it makes the world smaller, it also reminds me of the vast distances between us.

So this pandemic makes me feel small.  It reminds me – appropriately enough, especially during this Lenten season – of my relative insignificance.  There is nothing I can do to fix this.  I cannot make it go away.  And this sense of smallness, of powerlessness sorta sucks.  ( A valid theological term, I assure you.)

Mark’s Gospel ends with the women (two Marys and Salome) going to Jesus’ tomb on Easter morning in order to anoint his body with spices.  I cannot fully appreciate the profoundness of their grief or of their fear.  But I do understand their very pragmatic question: Who will roll away the stone for us?  This is, of course, a literal question.  The stone was big.  Too big, too heavy for them to move it so that they could get to Jesus.  It was big enough to keep them from doing the thing they most wanted and needed to do.

“Who will roll away the stone for us?” feels like a metaphorical question as well, especially this Lent, this Holy Week.  I want to know who is going to roll away this stone for us?  And when?  It feels too big, too heavy, for us to continue to bear.  It is big enough to keep us from doing many of the things we most want and need to do.  It is heavy and scary.  And I want someone to roll it away!

In Mark’s Gospel, when the women arrive at the tomb there is someone who appears to be a young man in white clothing – someone often assumed to be an angel – who tells the women that Jesus has been raised, to go and tell the other disciples.  Now, Mark’s Gospel is a little tricky because it has multiple endings.  But, in what is most likely the original ending of Mark, the women then flee – afraid – and say nothing to a soul.

Though clearly they do tell, because here we are, in the midst of the strangest Holy Week of most of our lives, knowing that Jesus has risen (we aren’t really waiting for Easter), but also stuck in this space where the stone in front of the tomb feels very real, maybe more real than the promise of resurrection.

As we move into and through Holy Week this year, “who will roll away the stone for us?” will be my plea and my prayer.

COVID-19: The Shadow of Death

I’ve heard a number of people speak of this current time of social distancing, of stay-at-home orders, as a collective cultural pause that is good for families and individuals.  A time to slow down and re-evaluate the rush and hurry of our everyday lives.

And at some level I understand this.  The last week in February, just a week or so before COVID-19 appeared in NC, I had told Russell that I really wanted a few days where I didn’t have anywhere to go.  My spring was too busy (my fault), filled with too much travel (all of it good) but I had not maintained an adequate margin.  So, I was looking ahead to June, planning to be more intentional about creating margin in my personal and work life.

So, on the one hand it would be easy to see this spring (and maybe summer and beyond) as a pause, a margin that has been given to me, to us, by the universe.

But that image of a pause does not seem to me to be the most helpful.  Pause suggests we can simply hit “play” again when this passes.  This is, of course, predicated upon the assumption that it is going to just pass.  Pause suggests that when we hit play again, everything will continue moving forward as if not much happened, not much changed.  Like running to the bathroom or getting more popcorn while watching a DVD. Or, like the movie “Click” it suggests we have the universal remote control that will allow us to skip over the unpleasant and inconvenient parts of this story and get on with the life we want.

But our lives, our stories, will not simply continue.  I heard this morning that the current number of COVID-19-related deaths in the US is roughly 2,500 with a projection of 100,000 (or, at least, that is the number the President hopes we will not exceed).  I’m not a numbers person, but that’s a helluva number.  That means our “good” scenario means forty times the number of people who have already died, will die.  I resist the temptation to put this in numbers because each one of those numbers represents a real-life, flesh-and-blood, image-of-God-bearing human being whose value cannot be quantified and who is in relation with an untold number of other image-of-God-bearing human beings.

And in the meantime, increases in economic insecurity, job loss, depression and suicide rates, domestic violence and child abuse, impact an ever-greater circle of people.  Pause is a privilege many simply do not have.

I was talking with a friend about watching the state map and how as it is updated each day it gets darker and darker, with more counties reporting cases and more cases in each county.  We commented that this feels like waiting on a hurricane.  We are all watching the news, doing what we can to prepare, knowing we cannot stop the storm and wondering when Jim Cantore will show up in our neighborhood.

Last night I had an image of the dark shadow in Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time.  On a quest to save Meg and Charles Wallace’s father, Calvin, Meg, and Charles Wallace are taken to Uriel and shown the beauty of the world.  They are then turned around and the see a dark shadow that blotted out the stars.  The dark shadow, the reader learns, is evil; it is nothing – a no-thing, a non-tangible nothingness neither created nor sustained by God – that is threatening the world. That evil is not real (in a physical, tangible sense) does nothing to mitigate its effects.

However L’Engle’s book, like the Christian story, isn’t really a book about evil.  It is a book about hope.  And resurrection.  But resurrection does not – it cannot – deny the horrifying reality of death.

Watching COVID-19 spread throughout our world from the (relative) safety of my home feels to me like watching the shadow spread across the universe from the relative safety of Uriel.  In this week before Holy Week, Easter feels forever from here.

But – and this is a big but – (spoiler alert) it is the power of love that saves the children, their father, and the universe from the power of the shadow.  The power of love is stronger than the power of evil.  Love wins.

As this shadow that is COVID-19 passes, we will not be able to simply un-pause.  But we can – and I pray will – through the power of love (God’s love for us, and our love for one another) continue to find evidence of new life, of resurrection, even in the midst of death.

Love wins.

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Why Theology Matters – why I wrote a book about suffering

Several years ago a friend of mine was on the scene of a freak accident in which a young child was killed by a car backing out of a parking space. A (well-meaning?) pastor who happened to be in the parking lot at the time of the accident told the mother that he hoped one day she would find out what she had done that had caused this tragedy.

I am not a pastor or a therapist. I am not a counselor or a spiritual director.

I am a theologian and an ethicist and an academic. And I teach and work and worship and live with real people, many of whom have experienced very real suffering and trauma. And too many times in the aftermath – or even in the midst – of horrendous pain very real people have heard (and even said) things like that pastor. Often from, or even as, someone who claims to be speaking on behalf of God.

I am not a pastor or a therapist. And like most folks, I imagine, I often feel at a loss for what to say to someone who is suffering. But I do believe that sometimes – probably always – the best pastoral care is good theology. Only, even as I write that I hear Stanley Hauerwas saying that “Good is not a theological category.” So, it would be better to say that the best pastoral care is faithful theology – theology that is true to the story of God in Jesus.

And sometimes the truest thing we can say in the face of suffering is this: it sucks.

It sucks.

But that is not the only truthful thing we can say.