Scripture: Isaiah 60:1-6 and John 14

On Thursday morning, I felt compelled to put away my Christmas things early, turning my attention away from a fading vision of the Child in the manger and reluctantly toward the new year that was surging in on a tide of wreckage and death, of grief and the deepening pain of unanswerable questions about the way God is being in the world. I have turned off the news in favor of a last attempt at Christmas carols, and begin my work. The tree goes first. Next, one by one, I gently fold the pieces of my nativity scenes into tissue paper, organize them by country and type, and carefully replace them in their neatly labeled boxes.

One, I notice is from India.

The next, one I bought at the SERRV shop just two weeks ago, from Indonesia. The last is from Sri Lanka. It is a puzzle, whose colorful pieces and joyful tidings of good news to all people fit neatly, perfectly in place in a way, I think, they will never fit again. I look at the crèches one last time and wonder if those who crafted them are still alive, or among those who have been swept away by the Christmas tsunami. I imagine the shepherds, the animals, the Marys and the Josephs, and even the baby Jesus, mud spattered and broken, tossed in a pile, a holy jumble of lost souls for whom there will be no room in the inn for a long, long time….

Because of an unusual convergence of personal and global disasters in these past, last, darker-than-usual days of Advent and Christmas, I have been asked more frequently than I’m used to—and more pointedly than I feel comfortable with—just who in the hell I think this God is who would permit such things to happen: without warning, without vengeance, without a reason why? I have been asked, by people in pain who deserve to know, what is god up to, anyway, and what good is God if he can’t prevent such catastrophes or protect his children? And I don’t guess that I have a particularly satisfying answer — not for myself—nor, I imagine, for those of you who have been asking. These terrible things are happening, and God is either willing it or allowing it — if, indeed we subscribe to a view of God as all-powerful, all knowing. And if we do not, then, we are left with a God — or something less than god? — who cannot stop catastrophe or evil, who is powerless to prevent creation’s — our — suffering.

Friday afternoon, a friend said to me — sometimes you seem comfortable, maybe even glib about this “powerless God.” Is it really that easy? And I have to say—no, it’s not. It’s not easy to have no answer to the suffering of people I love, or for the groaning of creation and the world’s children. It is heart-wrenching to look at the deaths of 200,000 people, to pray about it, and to have no reasons, no miracles, no excuses. It’s painful to hear the anger and the bewilderment and to have nothing much to offer but silence, compassion, and companionship…and more painful still to be a spokesperson for a God who seems to be offering only somewhat more of the same. We want God to keep bad things from happening to good people. And we want a God who stops good things from happening to bad people. And we are stuck with a God who does little of either, a God who, our most sacred story tells us, didn’t even stop evil people from killing his own son. And choosing to continue to worship this God is not the easiest of choices.

But when we choose to live a life in relationship to the Divine Source, when we choose to follow the Christ who urged us to know the truth, so that it can set us free, we don’t get the God we invented, who would be perfect, powerful, rewarding good and punishing evil, blessing and protecting us no matter what comes. We don’t get an Omnipotent Fantasy with a Big Plan, but, perhaps, if we are brave, we may have a relationship. With a God who is true, and who is being revealed in the world, and in our lives, sometimes beautifully, but more often through what Isaiah called the thick darkness. A relationship in which holy moments — of seeing, or knowing, or being with God—break upon us like a flash of light in darkness. You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set us free. Free from the plastic perfection of the god of our childhood fantasies, and free for a life of partnership with the Source of Life who is through us, bringing creation to birth. The Word becomes flesh, and dwells among us. And is us. We worship a God who has made us free, and whose freedom to be GOD — is consequently limited by how we are choosing to be human, and made in God’s image.

It is clear that such freedom comes at a price — a price that we, and, I believe, even God is paying. Part of the price is, we have to continually think and re-think our ideas about the sovereignty of God, the power of God. Rather than being like the child who finds comfort and protection in the arms of a powerful and loving father, we have to endure the sadness of coming of age: of learning to love a Parent who is neither perfect nor omnipotent, and whose love, however unconditional, cannot shield us from disaster or grief. If we are going to be as we were created to be, God’s free children, we need to put our big-girl pants on and take our place as adults, co-creators. Sure, the world isn’t being run the way we would have run it. But we’re not running it. And we don’t really know what “running it” entails, if we were to be honest. All we can do is choose to accept our part in it, or not. Choose to be brave enough to give up our script and wait in the darkness while we learn the truth and how to be free, or stubbornly stick to our old script, and give up our shot at the living God.

And as Jesus also said, you know the way to the place where I am going.

What is the way? When do we see you, God? When do we get to learn who you are? You already know what you’re supposed to do to get there: Love God, and love your neighbor. We can be a part of the nativity, of the birthing process, groaning with God, bringing something to life even though we can scarcely bear the pain or look at the blood or imagine how such a process could ever bring forth the miracle of a living child; or we can leave the room, and let life belong to others. The preacher and writer Barbara Brown Taylor tells a story about a cartoon someone gave her one time: a caricature of a street corner preacher, a sign hung round his neck that said: the world is not coming to an end; therefore you must suffer along and learn to cope.

I was thinking about learning to cope, and how we do it, as I was presiding over the marriage of Tracey Barrow and her new husband Stanley Schoenblatt this past Monday. Stanley had asked for “a sermon,” and so I was telling them that marriage isn’t easy…and even coming to a longed-for marriage with the dearest of friends does not protect a person or couple from suffering or disappointment. Relationships that matter—with a spouse, with a friend, with God—take a great deal of hard work and only unfold into fullness of joy when the partners in them embrace the fullness of truth as they learn it from the love of friends, from the experience of suffering and brokenness, from working against injustice, from walking alongside those who are trying to survive and thrive in this life, from ordinary, repetitive choices of living in faith and in fidelity with God and with each other and with the world. And I remember thinking how lovely it would be if our vows and our prayers and our support would shield those we love from hurt and disappointment — but it isn’t so.

And so we do the best we can: we live in community, and we bring the not inconsiderable power of our love for each other and for God and for the work of healing and good in this world to bear, together with all the hope we have, to help God guide a good creation through the dark channels and the bitter pangs of birth into a life worth living. And we cover each other over with the canopy of that power, as members of this community did last Monday when they raised a prayer shawl over Tracey and Stanley as we blessed them into their new life together.

This is the tallis, the prayer shawl that I used that day. It was bought for me by my parents when they visited Israel, after I had visited Israel myself and witnessed a part of a bar mitzvah ceremony that was held atop a dry stone mesa overlooking the Dead Sea. Prayer shawls are given by parents to bar and bat mitzvahs as a sign that the children are ready to become adults in their faith. This ceremony took place in the red dirt fragments of the yeshiva that was the school for the Masada community, which in 70 ACE committed suicide en masse, waiting for God’s supernatural intervention while the Romans overran their mountain fortress. I thought it a depressing place to celebrate the beginning of an adult life of faith, that sad and windswept ruin where faith died unanswered almost two thousand years ago. But the rabbi said: here, where a community died, and with it, the hopes of a dying nation, you take up the heritage of an old and profound faith. We do not know what life will bring you. We do not know what tomorrow holds. We do know that here, now, you are covered over by the sheltering canopy of family and friends, you have been given a faith and a story. Know who you are, and what you believe. Be ready, for our future is in your hands.

At the beginning of this new year, the future of the world looks hard. And, it is in our hands, and we are in each other’s, loving God and neighbor, and bringing the world to birth, together with the truth that is setting us free. Let us observe moments of silence for those who have been lost, and for what we all have lost, and for the work of beginning again to find shelter, a way home.

And then let us pray, in the words of an old collect from the prayer book: Eternal God, who commits to us the swift and solemn trust of life; since we do not know what a day may bring forth, but only that the hour for serving you is always present, may we wake to the instant claims of your holy will, not waiting for tomorrow, but yielding today. Amen.