Good Friday 2013

Isaiah 53

Who has believed what we have heard?
   And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?
For he grew up before him like a young plant,
   and like a root out of dry ground;
he had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
   nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by others;
   a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
   he was despised, and we held him of no account.

Surely he has borne our infirmities
   and carried our diseases;
yet we accounted him stricken,
   struck down by God, and afflicted.
But he was wounded for our transgressions,
   crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the punishment that made us whole,
   and by his bruises we are healed.
All we like sheep have gone astray;
   we have all turned to our own way,
and the Lord has laid on him
   the iniquity of us all.

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
   yet he did not open his mouth;
like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
   and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
   so he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
   Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
   stricken for the transgression of my people.
They made his grave with the wicked
   and his tomb with the rich,
although he had done no violence,
   and there was no deceit in his mouth.

Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush him with pain.
When you make his life an offering for sin,
   he shall see his offspring, and shall prolong his days;
through him the will of the Lord shall prosper.
   Out of his anguish he shall see light;
he shall find satisfaction through his knowledge.
   The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous,
   and he shall bear their iniquities.
Therefore I will allot him a portion with the great,
   and he shall divide the spoil with the strong;
because he poured out himself to death,
   and was numbered with the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
   and made intercession for the transgressors. 


(The idea for this post and the picture came from Richard Beck's "Experimental Theology" blog on 3-29-13)

I almost had a cow last night...

Well, not me, exactly, but my Jersey, Sassy who is just past nine months pregnant.  And it wouldn't have been a full grown cow, of course, but a very little one.  Conventional wisdom from my vet says a Jersey's gestation runs 9 months plus 10 days (give or take a week--don't you love how precise farming is).  That would put her due date anytime between yesterday and sometime next week.

So when I checked her last night and saw the signs--a swelling udder, softening tail bones and a far off look in her eyes, I began to get hopeful.  I moved the pesky donkeys to a different paddock, fluffed up some extra bedding where Sassy would sleep and went to bed.  At 3:30 (that's A.M.) I got up to check on her because I am a careful (read: soft-hearted) farmer and I wanted to make sure everything was proceeding well.  Sassy was laying down, chewing her cud, with her back legs sticking out straight.  Her breathing was coming in short, measured grunts and every few minutes she would stretch, arch her tail bone a little further, give a big push and her back end would swell and extend a few inches--everything you expect to see when a soon to be cow-mom is working to expel 30 0r 40 pounds of calf through an impossibly small opening.

These things can take time, I know, and I'm not really worried about Sassy's birthing or mothering abilities.  So after watching for a few minutes I returned to bed and woke up my wife to tell her nothing had happened.

I went back out to the barn at 6 this morning, fully expecting to find a baby cow and hoping for a baby girl.  But Sassy seemed to have thought better of the whole idea.  She was just standing around waiting to get her neck scratched and her feed bunk filled.

She didn't fool me for a minute, however.  I know what's coming; I'll just have to be patient.  Patient-- and hopeful that she doesn't get the lame brained idea of having her calf out in a snow bank at the far end of the pasture in the rain this weekend.

Patience and Hope.  The farmer's job description.

The Not So Simple Supper

Our Simple Supper discussion of chapter 3 in Sara Miles' book, Jesus Freak, circled around one of the thorniest questions in all of religion--thorny not just for Christianity but for religions of every stripe.  The question, which commonly goes under the title "The Problem of Evil" is usually stated this way: If God is all knowing, all good and all powerful, why is there suffering and evil in the world?  If God is all we think God is, why do things have to be the way they are?  Why do good and innocent people have to suffer?

Alas, though some of the greatest minds and spirits in the history of religion have applied themselves to this question, none of them have come up with an acceptable answer.  Even one of the best attempts at an answer--"This is a mystery we can't understand but must accept", is really a non-answer that begs the question.  And the second-best answer--"People were created with free will and we chose evil, so it's not God's fault" helps very little in our attempt to understand why things are the way they are.

Our conversation Wednesday evening about the problem of evil grew out of a larger conversation we have been having about prayer--what it is and how it "works".  When we, or someone we love, falls ill we pray for recovery and cure.  Illness or disability, especially in a child, is a bad, unwelcome event.  It represents something gone terribly wrong in the world.  So we who try to be people of faith pray and ask the good, wise and powerful God to remedy the situation; to bring health where there is sickness.

But very often the outcome is not what we hope and pray for.  Very often the evil continues until the life affected ends.  And we are left, it seems, with only two possible conclusions: either something is wrong with prayer, or something is wrong with God.  Neither of those conclusions is comfortable; neither is acceptable.  But we are hard pressed to find any other alternative.

I would be the last one to offer a resolution to this dilemma.  Even attempting to do so is far above my pay grade.   Why?  I don't know!  Perhaps we might wonder, sometime, what we mean when we say God is all knowing, all good and all powerful and why we ascribe those traits to the Creator in the first place.  Or we might sometime wonder why we think the Divine nature should somehow fit within our meager human understanding of what it means to be "God".  But those conversations, while interesting, would bring no comfort in the face of the suffering that too often afflicts those we love.

There is something we can do, however, that for me at least suggests a reason for hope and offers some comfort.  We can pay close attention to the story we have been given--the story that is meant to give us some sense of what God is up to in our world.  And I'm thinking here of a particular detail in that story--one that tells us not why God lets bad things happen to good people (if that in fact is what God does) but where God is when the bad stuff rains down on us.  The "why" question, I think, is never answered in Scripture.  The "where" question, on the other hand, is often and resoundingly addressed all through the writings in the Bible--from Genesis to Revelation.

From "...even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you are with me..." in the 23rd Psalm to St. John's assertion that "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" ("moved into the neighborhood" in Eugene Peterson's translation) to the promise in the Revelation:

"the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes.
Death will be no more;
mourning and crying and pain will be no more,
for the first things have passed away."

and in many, many more passages and promises in the Bible the conclusion is always the same.  No matter the darkness, no matter the pain, no matter the senselessness of the evil around us, God is with us; we are not alone.

We want to know why.  We can ask why.  But the reality of our lives, for now at least, is that we are not going to know why; and we aren't going to know why we can't know why.

But the "Jesus Freak" in me is ready and willing to answer the "where" question whenever and wherever it comes up.  "God has said, 'Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you'" (Hebrews 13.5)  and Jesus himself said, "I am with you, even to the end of the age" (Matthew 28.20).  

This is the promise.  It is true; we can trust it.  God is with us; we are not alone.  Thanks be to God.