Luke 18:1-8a
I am told by a member of the Hispanic congregation that she has a friend who has "bad air", inquiring further she says that he is obsessed with death, that dreams of dead people and has a very real sense of foreboding and he can hardly sleep or eat, his behaviour, as it to be expected is damaging other family members and relations. She wants me to pray, perhaps using blessed water, to help him to free himself form this "bad air". I was curious where this term came from and I discovered it come from "miasma" at one time considered the medium use by the bubonic plague to expand, through the air. It i also interesting that one of the outcomes of the Black Death was to shift medieval culture to a very morbid and hopeless outlook.
Another consequence of the Black Death was the cynicism toward organized religion for not keeping the promises of a cure or for lack of explanations. No amount of prayer and worship, procession and candles seem to have worked!. Some scholars think that this set the stage for the Reformation, the appearance of capitalism as the labor force became both scarce and expensive, modernity as such, with the introduction of the scientific method of reasoning, and the waning influence of Church. So in addition to that and after the Holocaust, it will not surprising than in a city of 800,000 like Amsterdam, on any given Sunday there will be less than 10,000 reformed Christians in attendance, counting that the royal family and the prime minister are devout members of the Reform Church.
When at one point or another we have felt abandoned by God? Sometimes I feel like my prayers do not “work”, that I am stuck which whatever you want to get rid of?. What do you say to a mother who lost her child to sickness or random violence? I have buried children, way too many, even if a just a few and have to hug parents, or bear the brunt of their anger, at God, at life and let me tell you it is not easy. September 11th, the Asian Tsunami, these macro events of a world in progress, shaking and shrugging in its foundations with amoral indifference, shakes that bring so much pain and suffering to millions. It is not easy. Talking about God’s presence in the midst of tragedy, is not easy. We rightly could clamor like the psalmist from where will my help come? Explain away anger and pain of families of slaughtered innocent Iraqis or amputees returning American soldiers is just not fair.
You can no explain away a personal or societal tragedy, suffering and pain. Sometimes I feel like Jacob wanting to engage God in physical combat, to ask him for a blessing that delays in its coming and that I desperately need. Such relationship seems to me at least more honest and honorable, rather than try to fool away ourselves from the enormity of the catastrophe or the injustice of the pain. Like Eli Wiesel, speaking about the Holocaust says in his novel A Beggar in Jerusalem talking to God:
I have never questioned Your justice, Your mercy, though their ways have often confounded me. I have submitted to everything, accepted everything, not with resignation but with love and gratitude. I have accepted punishments, absurdities, slaughters, I have even let pass under silence the death of one million children. In the shadow of the Holocaust's unbearable mystery, I have strangled the outcry, the anger, the desire to be finished with You and myself once and for all. I have chosen prayer, devotion. I have tried to transform into song the dagger You have so often plunged into my submissive heart. I did not strike my head against the wall, I did not tear my eyes out so as to see no more, nor my tongue so as to speak no more. I told myself: It is easy to die for You, easier than to live with You, for You, in this universe both blessed and cursed, in which malediction, like everything else, bears a link to You and also to myself...
The passage of the Gospel today has more to do with the loss of faith and hope that it does with prayer, if you read carefully verse one Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart and put it together with the rhetorical question of verse 8 when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, it puts the story within the context of unanswered prayers and faltering faith.
I preached the other day about Mother Teresa suffering of a “dark night of the soul” a term coined by John of the Cross to explain the emptiness of his soul and the absence of God at times in his life and spiritual journey. Mother Teresa interesting enough never failed in a life of prayer and got up everyday at 4:30 am in the morning. Like the insisting widow, her beloved has shown her his face once, once she had her mountain top and no more after that. She lived fifty years longing for God, like a dog wagging his tail by the his master’s table eyes fixated in a morsel of food, waiting and waiting, having no past nor future, but just completely focused in the today and now. She waited and died waiting for another “heavenly visitation” than never came to pass. And yet, every morning at 4:30 she got up and the first thing she did was to talk to God, to pray.
God’s scope of the world is radically different to ours. What we know of the world, in spite of our technological revolution and all, the world we see and hear of, is basically what someone has decided to tell us, the amount of information allotted to us, packaged in the way we can understand and consume. So what we always see is a construct made for us, information is a product sold to us, and I am afraid that the market is terribly deceitful. Yet God sees the world as it is, so his scope has to be radically different.
When I was a small kid, I always had the idea of God as an old man, sitting on great chair, not unlike my mother’s own favorite chair, directing the business of the world from somewhere in the remote skies. But if our free will and naturals laws are to be true, God can only respect them, since he is the Creator. As I grew older I started seeing God as a juggler timing the multiplicity of conflictive influences that shape the world every second and in the process bringing to fruition, not because of us but in spite of us sometimes, his sovereign will. As in movie Bruce Almighty you can no say yes to every prayer.
God ask of us, his people, to trust him and that is to have faith, and to continue talking to Him (which is prayer) even when in the process of trusting we take trough dark and dangerous alleys or when our heart is ripped out by pain and suffering and the only thing we want to do is to contend with him. He in this passage encourages to talk to Him, always, everyday, nonsensically.
God in Jesus his Messiah, as the prophet Isaiah tells us, is a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Isaiah 53:3
from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
The week after 9/11 I fell in what I discovered later it was depression, it lasted a good three months or more, passing by the Hospital door and seeing those photocopied notices of lost loved ones, from all over the world, form every religion and from none was excruciating. Giving here a cell number or a contact email there, staring at those pictures of people presumed by despair to be amnesiacs lost in some bureaucratic hospital jungle. I remember vividly, that the readings for the following week to 9/11 included Psalm 46 God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, He makes wars cease to the ends of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear, he burns the shields with fire
And I know that the wars have not ceased and the arrows have not being broken, at least not yet, but it does energizes me to join in his Holy Company, to open my heart in prayer to his will, to walk with my God, in spite of pain and injustice and perhaps because of it. I am reassured by the experience of Jacob turned into Israel, that my rocky relationship with the Creator of all reality is alright.
Churches and individuals have come up with creative ways to raise money. Potlucks, plant sales, walk-a-thons, concerts—the list goes on and on. But in the fall of 2005, 8-year-old Briton Nordemeyer of Brandon, South Dakota, thought of something new.
It all started when she lost her tooth. Briton had heard about the victims of hurricane Katrina, and wanted to help the little children who lost all of their possessions. So, she decided to donate the money the tooth fairy would bring for her missing tooth to the local chapter of the Red Cross.
Instead of waiting for the tooth fairy to arrive, however, Briton mailed her tooth to the Red Cross. She included a letter explaining her desire, and her confidence that the tooth fairy would render payment upon arrival.
When news about Briton's generosity reached the public, the Red Cross received a $500 donation from an anonymous donor who had heard the story. Be not afraid to believe, even when it seems that the entire world does not. Faith is not a popularity contest, be brave and take the risk, he has not given up on us, nor we.
from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.
