Hope lies in braving the chaos, and waiting calmly with trust in the God who loves us.

—Sue Monk Kidd

On Friday, after a rash of suicide bombings left Baghdad trembling and bereft, the cry of a baby sent rescuers searching for God. In the smoking, twisted wreckage of a bombed minibus, Iraqi soldiers found the baby, eight month old Sajjid Hassan, safe and alive in the protective embrace of his mother and grandmother, both dead. The rescuers and the doctor who treated him found in Sajjid’s survival, a badly needed sign that God was still with them, even in the midst of unspeakable chaos. Said Dr. Abdullah Younis, the hospital’s director, this baby had no strength, no family, but he was alive…this is a reminder that no matter how many the terrorists kill, there will still be life.[1] We all need such signs of hope; we need to believe that some god is at work for good in chaos, in the midst of these terrors of powers and principalities that are ripping apart our world, the creation and the creatures in whom God had hoped we would see his image made flesh. The novelist Sue Monk Kidd said it this way: hope lies in braving the chaos, and waiting calmly with trust in the God who loves us.

Braving the chaos is an old and honorable work, as evidenced by, among other things, the witness of today’s readings. In the book of Acts, when the apostle Paul went to Athens to preach what he had found, which was Christ, and him crucified, he said to the Greeks who inquired about his unusual faith, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. I looked around the city at the objects of your worship, and I found your altar to ‘an unknown god.’ Anyone who gets up in the morning and faces the news, lives through depression, pain, illness, or grief…or suffers like those do who are surviving day by day in Banda Aceh, Darfur, Sudan, or Baghdad, to name just a few, knows that we are all looking, everywhere we can think of, for a way to put a face to the unknown god who may somehow be at work in the midst of our inexplicable suffering. To put a face to One who might give meaning to the chaos, and hope for the living of these days. If nothing else moved Paul in the great and ancient pagan citadel of Athens, that common ground surely did: to know that the Athenians, no less than the Jews, waited with hope in the midst of chaos for a glimpse of a God who loves us. And so Paul bore witness with his words to what he had seen and heard by choosing to follow the path of the crucified Jesus of Nazareth to God: I am here to tell you that the God I have seen is not far from each one of us. It is that God’s desire that we should look in the world and at each other, who are each of us God’s children, for signs of the One whose will it is that we should know him, and love him. It is in the midst of chaos, in the breadth of the immense diversity of the human family and the human condition, that we are driven to seek the face of a god we can scarcely recognize, not so that it would be enough for us, but so that we would taste a possibility of God’s grace, and tasting it, want more, work for more, live for more.

There was a woman at the hospital in Baghdad, a woman no longer young and with twelve children of her own, who was visiting a sick relative, which, as many of us know, is an absorbing and important work. She had enough to do, waiting calmly and braving the chaos of her own family circumstance in war-torn Iraq, but then she heard about the little survivor being cared for in a room nearby. Without hesitation, she recognized the face of the unknown god in Sajjid’s black eyes and battered face, and declared that she would be his guardian, his comforter, his advocate—family to this lost boy until his own kin could find and claim him. In the midst of chaos, waiting calmly and attending to the ways of unknown gods in the known world, she saw someOne she knew, and acted with hope on behalf of this One who loves us….

In our other reading for this morning, the letter of First Peter was addressed to a gang of misfits and outcasts: a “community,” though I use the term loosely, of slaves, Gentiles, and resident aliens who were scattered and persecuted throughout Asia Minor because of the one thing they had in common: belief in Jesus, crucified and risen. I know who you are, the author wrote, and he did, aliens, foreigners, misfits. I know what you suffer, and I tell you: you are not alone. You belong to one another, and you belong to God. He reminded them: they were baptized, and baptism was the sign and seal of their belonging to one another and to God. He reminded them: their lives were patterned after Jesus’ own life, and their suffering and wandering was seen by God and known by God. That rag-tag band had little in common—but they could and did affirm that somehow, in the story of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, they had come home to God, and thus, out of many misfits, they were one people, and they belonged.

Last week I was called in my volunteer work for Presbyterian Disaster Assistance to the little town of Stockton, New Jersey, which had been inundated by the Delaware River for the second time this month. The local Presbyterian Church was described to me as a “funky” little congregation whose members were “from every walk of theology and life,” who were hard to describe because they didn’t really seem to fit together in any real way. The church has some 80 members, and a pastor with a PhD who had major surgery five months ago, and whose church-owned home had suffered, in addition to a flooded basement, two “puff-back” furnace fires since the winter season began, which forced Greg and his wife and daughter into a motel for several months. With this latest flood, a third of his ordained leadership and thirteen families of the congregation were out of their homes, some, forever. The Presbytery exec asked me and my colleagues to give Greg “the works”—down to “a mint on his pillow.” But he and his little congregation gave me the works, instead: for a full week after the flood, as people were picking through the rubble and mudding out what was salvageable of their possessions, Stockton Presbyterian Church opened their doors, scrounged money and food from wherever they could find it, and fed dozens in the community, every day. And when I gathered with them a week later, to help them begin a process of healing and recovery, they were far more interested in how to serve their neighbors, and be a part of the developing interfaith flood response and recovery work, than they were in addressing their own struggles through chaos. They may have looked like misfits, but I recognized them immediately as the brothers and sisters of Jesus, who did not leave them orphaned, but made them a family through the Holy Spirit.

The tradition of Jewish mysticism, known as the Kabbalah, describes the glory of God, known in the Hebrew scriptures as the Shekinah, as a woman, wandering the world in exile, weeping for the pain of humanity and for the loss of God. It also speaks, in its creation narratives, of how the grace of God flowed in cascades down to the world like light through ten earthen vessels, vessels which burst with the power of that which they contained, and scattered over the face of the earth. The souls of people, the Kabbalah teaches, are sparks of the light of God, trapped in clay, trying to free the light. So is the glory of God exiled, weeping, in the world: and we, knowing that we belong to God, are trying to find our way home. Though this creation account lacks the specificity, the down-and-dirty humanness of the Genesis stories, still, I like it. And the reason I like it is that it challenges me. For if there is within me an exiled spark of the Divine Presence: then no matter what I do with my daily hours, my highest calling and my heart’s true home, is to make it possible for God’s light to be freed from Chaos to hope. From the clay of my selfishness, my denseness, my fear and brokenness to the Light. My job at work is to free God’s light. My job in the midst of chaos, suffering, or grief, is to free God’s light. My job at home is to free God’s light. My job when I meet with friends or walk alone under the starry sky, is to know the light of God within me, and within those I meet and set it free. I will not leave you orphaned, said Jesus, I am coming to you. In that day you will know that I am in God, and you are in me, and I am in you. I am sending you an Advocate, the Spirit of Truth, to be with you forever. The word for Advocate is paraclete, and it means Advocate, Comforter, Companion….Jesus is describing the Holy Spirit to his about-to-be-abandoned disciples, but he is also telling them what they are about to become for each other, and the world into which they are being called.

We are all connected by God, Jesus believed, and bound to one another; we cannot escape. So the woman in Baghdad, Saadiya Nasr, convinced the police and the hospital officials to let her take Sajjid home for the night, or for forever, whichever was necessary. She and her daughters sat vigil through the night, passing the baby from comforter to comforter, dribbling water and formula through his lips, rocking him to sleep. She said: my conscience wouldn’t let me leave a baby like that. I would have cared for him as long as I lived.

I read a story once about a man who was walking down a road and passed a place where there had been a car accident. He caught a glimpse of something shining in the dirt and grass, and bent to pick it up. It was a piece of broken mirror, and without thinking he stuck it in his wallet. Later, he kept it, saying, you’d be surprised how useful a broken piece of mirror can be. It shines into the smallest of dark spaces. And so do we. We are all part of God: broken pieces of the Light, shattered and shaped by chaos, shining into dark places, if we are willing, if we remember that even broken pieces can be useful if they are not thrown away…for we are all part and parcel of the One who has made us and called us by the Spirit of Love, to find our way, together, home.

[1] Miami Herald, Sunday, May 1, 2005, pp. 1-2.

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.