THE DAY THE WORLD CRACKED

Job 38:1-11, 42:1-6; Matthew 27:45-54

How can you believe in God after Auschwitz? That is essentially the question Elie Wiesel asks in his 1986 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. When he said that Auschwitz changed everything about civilization and our belief in God. How can we believe in God after Auschwitz? What do you say to a mother who lost a son--a son who's walking down a street in Baghdad chewing gum and telling a dirty joke to his buddy--when in a flash of light and metal is vaporized by a car bomb? How can one speak Good News to such a person? How can God possibly make sense to such a person?

Of course I'm revisiting the territory that Brandon was reflecting on with us last Sunday, in the third part in this four part series on the Book of Job. This is, of course, the last installment of that series. Last Sunday we were dealing with Job's friends, and their so-called comfort of Job. And we were raising that question, "How can one be a friend, especially to someone who is in the midst of suffering?" And we were exploring that question, I think. How can we speak Good News to someone like the person I just mentioned? To the mother grieving her son in Iraq. And I guess this is how I would encapsulate the reflection that we were doing last Sunday with Brandon. How can you comfort somebody like that, who's suffering, and speak Good News to them? My answer would be, "You can't."

You cannot speak Good News to such a person, and if you do, I would bet it probably would not be heard. Or maybe a way to put it is--another way to put it is this: if there is a way to use speech to comfort such a person, it is speech without words. It is bodily speech. It is being present. I suppose that's something to remember when we have to confront someone who is suffering. I find sometimes, in the midst of that, we encounter somebody in our life who has undergone a tragedy, and there's a sort of "pariah effect" that can happen. Everyone is thinking about that person, "What can we do?" and often we are so worried that we'll say the wrong thing, that people don't say anything at all. And I think that perhaps it's important to remember as you go to the viewing of your wife's best friend, worried about what are you going to say to that person, it's important to remember: it's not what you say, it's that you are there. It's not the brilliant insights about God or meaning that will make any difference to that person. Any encouragement to personal piety or faith, "God will give you strength." It is that you made that mushroom beef stroganoff family recipe, and left the casserole on a doorstep. It's that you sent the card, or wrote the email, or prayed the prayer.

You know Job's friends, as Brandon pointed out, would have done well to learn that lesson. They were doing very well at the beginning of the Book of Job; they were models of compassion because they kept their mouths shut. It's only when they started giving Job their religious thoughts, their theology, that Job started to suffer. Because, you know, the suffering in Job--in some ways the real suffering--is Job's friends and their theology. Sort of proves the point at the end of Jean Paul Sartre's play No Exit. Perhaps you remember the great line at the end of that play? "Hell is other people." Because it's not just the ash heap that made Job suffer, it was his friends. And so, as I raise the question that I did this morning: How can we speak any kind of Good News? How can we speak of any kind of religion with somebody is suffering, like that mother? How can we speak Good News after Auschwitz? How do you make sense of God in light of that? I think, too, how can I speak about what I'm paid to speak about, preach Good News when I know many of you gathered in this place come here with heavy burdens, and are suffering? How can I glibly preach Good News in that context? Six million dead Jews--the most evil thing human beings could cook up. The wailing of a bereft mother. Such words tend to seem like pablum. Like saccharin. I think of the end of Life of Brian, if you've seen that movie, where Jesus is on the cross, singing, "Always look to the bright side of life."

How to speak Good News. In many ways I confess that I don't know how. I do not have the wisdom to crack open that mystery, because we are dealing with mystery here--the mystery of God and of human suffering. And so it is foolish to speak. But in that respect I suppose I am well-qualified. And so I speak because speech is all we have. And it's what I get paid to do. And it's something I do this morning with much fear and trembling. But it's what the Gospel requires us to do.

So maybe here's a start toward addressing that question. Not answering it--I told you at the first sermon that if I ever answer that question and give you "The Answer," you have permission to fire me. How do we speak Good News in light of suffering? Here's maybe a beginning--a very strange beginning. Bear with me--just consider this possibility. What if we began by considering this: that if there is such a thing as hope, its essence is distilled on the barren fields of Auschwitz. That it is there where we begin to understand the strange nature of this hope, this truth that God has revealed to us in this very strange Gospel, that we've come together today to proclaim and hear. And so maybe we could begin by saying that if that mother who lost a son in Iraq can find hope in some miraculous way, then maybe there's hope for this world, and there's hope for you, and there's hope for me. Maybe we can begin with the idea that the journey to discover the meaning of hope, if hope is to have any meaning, has us spelunking down into that place where there is no hope.

It's a very strange idea, I know, and I'm not quite sure what I think of it, either. But you know sometimes I think--I'll confess to you this kind of spirituality that I seem to have developed, this is sort of "true confessions." I do my prayer time in the morning, and take my meditation these days Tuesday and Thursday with a group of people, it's a wonderful experience, and we meditate and pray. But I find in the evening, I lay my head down on my pillow, and sort of involuntarily, almost, this prayer arises in me that says, "Thank you for this blessing of life! Thank you for this family, this place!" And, you know, I don't mean to tell you it's perfect--it ain't, in any stretch. But you know, this prayer comes up, and I say, "Thank you!" And I wonder to myself at the same time, what would I do if all of that were taken away from me? If this spouse and child, this place, this job, this house--would I still proclaim, what I proclaim in some ways what I so easily from this pulpit, this hope, this faith? Because that's Job in a nutshell, as you probably recognize. Because Job is me, stripped of all the things that say, "Comfort" or "Success" or "Health." Job really is any person who's ever suffered. Job is every Jew at Auschwitz. Job is that grieving woman who is mourning her son who died in Iraq. Job is you when you try to figure out how the universe works, when it doesn't work the way you want it to. Because for 35 chapters in this book, Job basically says to God--that is in the midst of suffering the torture of his friends' bad theology--Job basically says to God, "It can't be this way! The universe cannot be this way. You do not fit into my box, God." And as Brandon mentioned last week, Job comes perilously close to that line that you might call blasphemy in his address to God. He basically says, throughout these chapters, "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" He comes to that place that Elie Wiesel came to, at Auschwitz. But you know what happens, in the midst of that? The universe cracks open for Job. God answers Job. The world cracks open for a moment, and God speaks in chapter 38, out of the whirlwind. Now it's not in the quiet, meditative moment when he gets his act all together; in the chaos of Job's life, that's what the whirlwind is a metaphor for--chaos. In the chaos of Job's life, God speaks. And basically, this is what God says--we're going to have a little fun with this. God says, "Alright. Do you want to have my job? Because, if you do, you've got to make the sun rise every day. You've got to keep Leviathan in the ocean, and keep the forces of chaos at bay. You've got to keep the seasons going." For four chapters, basically, this is what God is saying to Job. "Do you want my job? Do you want to be God?" And at the end of that discourse, in chapter 42, Job responds. The universe has cracked open, and given Job a privilege that none of us might ever hope to have, a view of God and the universe as it really is. And it says in that--in Job's response--that he repents, in dust and ashes. And I think you need to say that the Hebrew here is much more subtle than the translation we have, because, basically what the Hebrew is saying is that Job in this encounter with God is saying, "I had no idea." He's expressing his awe and his wonderment for getting this view of a new universe. It's almost as if he's--you know, I know I use that illustration from Joe Versus the Volcano, where, you know, the Tom Hanks character is near death, and he's undergone all this suffering and he's on a raft in the middle of the ocean. He sees the moon rise and says, "I had no idea it was that way."

My friend Gil Bailey speaks of this moment, in chapter 38 when God speaks, as the moment when Job moves from the cause-and-effect universe into the providential cosmos. Because he now knows a universe in which God is no longer a God of levers and strings whom we have to please and propitiate. No longer is life dependent on us negotiating the causal levers and strings to get out of life what we want. And we discover that life is so much bigger than that. In some mysterious way, this journey has led Job into a universe in which the categories that we call "good" and "bad" are completely reinvented. A universe where the concepts of reward and punishment are replaced--what we Christians have spoken of when we say the word "providence." The idea that God and the universe is good does not depend on my comfort and success.

I was reading a magazine article about environmentalism a few years ago and I--somehow this stuck in my memory. I think the guy's name was David Brower--he's an environmentalist. And somebody was talking to him about the weather. You know, typical, everyday conversation there, and talking about if it's going to be good weather, or bad weather, and this guy, David Brower, said, "There's no good weather or bad weather. There's just weather." You know, that's a really funny way of describing what it's like to move from the cause-and-effect universe, in which we're constantly evaluating what's good and bad, into the providential universe. And the strange thing about this--and here's where I want to be very humble--is--consider this: whether somehow, it was necessary for Job to sit on that ash heap, in order to get this view of the universe. Somehow, from the point of view of that new universe in which Job finds himself living, he might look back. And in looking back, consider that that, in some strange sense, was even fortunate.

Now there's a song that a friend turned me onto a few years ago, by Leonard Cohen, and there's a lyric in the song that goes like this, "There's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in." To me, that's the paradox of the Gospel. It's like Job saying, "Here, I thought God was going to protect me from getting cracked open, and now I find that this huge crack in my life is the one through which I see the light of God, shining into my life."

There's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in. That's Good News, isn't it, if you're cracked? And I'll make another confession: I'm cracked. There are cracks all through my life. I'm sure people have come to this place with cracks in their life. And you might come expecting that God is that force in our lives that's going to patch us up, you know? And it comes as a huge surprise when we realize that it's through those cracks, somehow, that we see the light of Christ shining into us. Paul, basically in his letters, calls us "cracked pots." You know, we're fragile earthen vessels that contain the most precious stuff in the world: the grace of God. There's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in.

In one of our classes here at the church--I want to tell a quick story that I heard in one of the classes. One of the members told a story of when the universe basically cracked open for him. He had a car accident, and the car flipped over. And his wife was injured, and unconscious, and his daughter injured also. And it happened that an EMT crew had been in the area at an event, and happened by, and ministered to them. And a pastor prayed with him. And in the whirlwind of that moment, somehow, the way this person described it, there was a sense of peace and calm. A sense as if the universe had split open, and there was a strange view to God.

That's the strange truth of the Gospel, I think. What a weird way to reveal the truth. The notion that God went spelunking down to us, and experienced for us the most evil thing we could do: a cross. And you can superimpose whatever you wish onto that. Auschwitz is simply another word for what we mean when we say cross. I like Matthew's telling of the story of the crucifixion, because it goes along well with the metaphor that I'm suggesting here today. Matthew says, in his telling of the crucifixion story, that the world cracked open in that moment when Jesus died. The earth shook, and the rocks split, and the tombs were opened. It was the moment when the world cracked open so people could see God. What a strange thing.

There's a crack in everything, and that's how the light gets in. Amen.

March 25, 2007

Jeff Vamos

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