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Every year on the third Sunday in October we celebrate the Children's
Sabbath. Like every sabbath, it is a time to stop, a time to take stock and to remember both the joy our
children are to us and the profound responsibility we assume as parents.
And every year at this time I am reminding of two things. I am reminded of how terrified I was
when, at age 26, Judy told me I was going to be a father. For 26 years I had been a student, and nothing
I had learned in school so far had prepared me to be a parent. The very thought of it was daunting to
me. But sure enough, Aaron soon arrive, right on schedule. And he was a delight, and my pleasure became
even greater as, month by month, Aaron grew into his own person with his own personality.
The second thing the Children's Sabbath reminds me of is the time Judy and Aaron and I were
visiting Judy's parents when Aaron was about two years old. While we were there, I shared with Judy's
father my delight at being a father. I told him how much I had come to love my son, and how wonderful a
child Aaron was, and what a joy it was to play with him and to read to him and just to enjoy his company.
And Judy's father said to me, "Wait 'til he gets old enough to tell you to go to hell."
More education. More terror! My father-in-law was reminding me that children grow up. And if
they are healthy, they become their own persons with minds of their own which don't always agree with the
minds of their fathers.
At the end of the wonderful book and equally wonderful movie, "A River Runs Through It," Pastor
Maclean, by then an old man, grows feeble as he grieves over the death of his younger and rebellious son,
Paul.
Pastor Maclean had never fully understood Paul. Paul's brother Norman, who is narrating the
story, remembers that even as a child "Paul was tough by thinking he was tougher than any establishment."
When he was only seven years old, Paul had bested his father in a test of wills over whether Paul was to
eat his bowl of oats. "My mother and I watched horrified, morning after morning," Norman recalls, "while
the Scottish minister [raged, trying] to make his small child eat oatmeal."
Maybe you remember the scene -- if not from the movie, then maybe from around your own kitchen
table -- maybe you remember the time when the child simply sat at the table refusing to eat the food he
despised. "People have been eating the Lord's oats for centuries," Pastor Maclean fumed, "and it's not
the place of a seven-year-old to challenge the tradition." Nonetheless, there Paul sat, well into the
night, lower lip stuck out and arms folded defiantly across his chest. "My father was horrified," Paul's
brother explains -- "at first because a child of his own bowels would not eat God's oats, and, as the
days went by, because his wee child proved tougher than he was. [And] the hotter my father got, the
colder the porridge, until finally my father burned out."
And as he grew older, Paul resisted with equal grit the disciplined Presbyterian faith his father
had practiced all his life and had tried to teach Paul. In two things only was Paul like his father: he
loved boldly and he fished boldly. For Paul did not resist the fly fishing which his father taught him
as well. To that particular discipline, Paul submitted himself with pleasure. So the two of them --
disciplined, traditional father and defiant, rebellious son -- anchored their companionship and love
for each other in the joy and discipline of fishing the rivers of Montana together.
It was to be a short love affair, however, because as a young man Paul lived dangerously. He
fished the waters of dangerous rivers. He kept company with Indian women, not a seemly thing to do in
Montana in the 1920s. He drank heavily, he gambled heavily, he was not a stranger to a fight, and he was
often arrested and spent many a night in jail sleeping it all off. So it was no real surprise to the
family when the police called one morning when Paul was only 33 years old to tell them that Paul had been
beaten to death with the butt of a revolver that night, and that his body had been found in an alley.
And the story ends with Pastor Maclean weighing the spiritual balance of his dead son's life, and
that of his own as well. It is one of the ironies of life, he muses, that it is those we are closest to
that we are least able to help or understand, for often they either resist the help we want to offer or
do not need it. "And so," he adds, "it is those we live with and should know who elude us. But we can
still love them. And we can love completely, without complete understanding. That I have always known
and preached."
It is one of the ironies of life that in religion, as in life, we often crave complete
understanding, even certainty. As if certainty were the engine of life. Surely the disciplined faith of
a Presbyterian pastor, we insist, will map out the safe and secure road his own son will take! Surely
the clarity of the creeds will light a certain path for all Christians!
But neither life nor God ever offer it -- certainty, that is. What God offers is not
certainty, but assurance. The assurance of faith, the assurance of hope, and the assurance of love. And
the greatest of these is the assurance of love.
At one time the disciples, those who lived so close to Jesus for three years on earth, thought
they had it, this certainty we crave. "Can you be baptized with the baptism with which I am to be
baptized?" Jesus asked them. And they replied, "Oh, yes! Yes, we can!"
But they couldn't, of course, for they did not understand Jesus. Did not know him as he was, but
only as they wanted him to be. Despite their closeness to Jesus, they did not understand that Jesus was
asking them if they could be bathed in the death he was about to undergo.
Despite their closeness to Jesus, they did not understand Jesus the way the Church later came to
understand Jesus: Jesus as "one despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and familiar with
suffering," Jesus as one "from whom men hide their faces," Jesus as one "who took up our infirmities and
carried our sorrows," Jesus the one to be "pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities,
by whose wounds we would be healed." The disciples understood none of this later understanding of the
Church.
Nor, despite their closeness to Jesus, did they understand, as the Evangelists and the author of
the Letter to the Hebrews later understood, that Jesus was the divine Word of God himself in human form
who, because he suffered as we do and was tempted as we are, yet did not sin, has become for us the high
priest of God through whom we might boldly approach the throne of God itself. The disciples understood
none of that.
And if the disciples, those who stood so close beside Jesus on the road to Jerusalem, did not
understand him, how then are we to understand him?
To understand. The word comes from Old English, literally, to stand under, in order to see
clearly, so that one might appreciate the full significance or meaning of something.
Jesus and his disciples were traveling the road of life together on their way to Jerusalem when
James and John made a request. "Allow one of us to sit at your right hand and the other at your left
hand in your glory," they asked. And Jesus asked if they were certain about what they wanted. "Are you
able to be baptized with the baptism with which I am to be baptized?" And with all the certainty they
thought they had, they said, "O yes! We are able!"
But they did not yet understand, as John was later to understand, that the "glory" of Jesus was
his Cross and his suffering and that the baptism of Jesus was his death. James and John did not yet
understand about Jesus' glory, because they had not yet stood under the Cross at Calvary and watched the
agony of Jesus. Until they stood under Jesus' Cross, they could not understand Jesus, or the glory of
Jesus. And neither can we.
Why is life the way it is?
"Why?" asked Job. "Why, Lord, since I have always been righteous and faithful, why has my life
fallen apart?" And God answers from the chaos, not with certainties, but with questions. "Who is this
who darkens my counsel with words without understanding? Where were you, Job, when I laid the
foundations of the earth? What are the footings of the earth like? How long are they? Who shut up the
sea behind doors and fixed the limits for it? Who gave orders to the morning and showed the dawn its
place? What is the way to the place where light lives? Tell me, Job, if you understand."
But Job was silent, of course, because he did not understand. But he was assured, then, that God
was. And that God was God, and he was not. And Job found that he could love God completely, without
complete understanding. He found that he could live by faith and hope and love and the assurance of God,
not by certainty and answers.
Why is life the way it is? Why do sons and daughters not walk the way of their mothers and
fathers? Why does one generation of the Church tell the generation before them, if not to go to hell,
then at least that they intend the Church in their day to have a different face? Why do bad things
happen to good people like Job? Why is life not fair or easy? Why do people suffer?
A child named Margarita raises these same questions in Robert Coles' book, The Spiritual Life of
Children. When Coles interviews her for the book, little Margarita looks up at the large 'Christ of the
Andes' statue, whose arms are outstretched over Rio de Janeiro, and says, "When I look at Jesus up there,
I wonder what He's thinking. He can see all of us, and he must have an opinion. I try to talk with Him.
He is all that I have. Mama still works as a maid in Copacabana, even though she coughs and she bleeds
and they say she is dying.
"A lot of time I ask Jesus why He does things like this. He must see what we see, the slum where
we live. Mother used to tell us we'll go to heaven because we're poor. I used to believe her. She just
says that. It's a way of shutting us all up when we're hungry! Now, when I hear her say it, I look up
at Him and I ask Him, 'What do You say, Jesus? Do you believe her?'
"I shouldn't blame Jesus. I do, though, sometimes. He's right there, and I'm either upset with
Him or I'm praying for Him to tell me why the world is like it is."
But Margarita does not understand yet, as we do not understand yet, that Jesus isn't up on the
top of the hill, a stonefaced statue indifferent to the misery below. She doesn't understand yet, as we
do not understand yet, that Jesus is down here with us, down there in her shanty with her, suffering with
her, down here with us, dying on a Cross, with one thief sharing his glory on his right hand and another
on his left.
Why is life the way it is? Why didn't James and John understand Jesus? Why did Jesus die? Why
was Jesus bathed in the death he was immersed in, which James and John were certain they could share but
didn't understand that they wouldn't?
As everyone knows, Jesus died because of "bad" people. Jesus died because of those who were
wrong about Jesus.
Jesus died because of the Jewish authorities. Jesus died because his brother Jews held him in
contempt because he questioned their traditions and authority, and because he said that church should be
different from the way they had always been church. Jesus died because the religious authorities were
afraid that the people would abandon their way and follow Jesus. So Jesus died because the Jewish
authorities feared him.
Yes, but Jesus also died because of the Romans. Because the Jews lived under a foreign
authority, Roman authority. So if the Jewish authorities were to get Jesus out of their hair, they would
have to get the Romans to do it for them. And even though the Roman governor, Pilate, knew that under
the law Jesus was innocent, he had him crucified anyway, because it was a way of keeping peace with the
Jewish authorities. So Jesus died because the Romans killed him.
Yes, but Jesus also died because his friends, because of those who thought they knew him and said
they loved him, but who did not stand up for him. Because Judas betrayed him and showed the authorities
where to find him so he could be arrested in the first place. And because Peter, when asked, denied he
had ever even laid eyes on Jesus. And because James and John, and all his other friends who had said
that they were certain they were able, all ran away when the time came. So Jesus died because, in the
end, no one stood with him, not even those who said they loved him.
Yes, Jesus died for all these reasons. And that's why life is the way it is.
But there is another reason Jesus died, which is also the reason life is the way it is, a reason
that can be understood, not by intellect or creed, but only by standing under the "why" of it all. Jesus
died, finally, as John later understood, because he chose to. Jesus died, finally, as John later
understood when he stood under the "why" of it all at Calvary, because of love.
Jesus was blessed with assurance. Not with certainty, but with assurance. The assurance of
Jesus, which he received from his Father, was that from the beginning of time the great hope of his
Father had been to share his love with his creation. Jesus understood that the great hope of God from
the beginning had been to pour out his grace and love upon all people. All his life Jesus stood under
the assurance of that love. And it is with this assurance that Jesus shares the life and the suffering
and the temptations, and the questions and uncertainties, of James and John and Peter and Margarita, and
of Tom and Job and Sarah and Oskar. Jesus came to be with us in the actual life we have, in our life of
suffering and questions and uncertainties, so that we might live and die with that same assurance. All
this John came to understand, but only later, only when finally he stood under the assurance and love
that Jesus was, on the Cross.
Do you understand this? Do we understand it, those of us in Jesus' Church? Do I understand it?
I don't know. Sometimes I think I do. Sometimes I'm not so sure.
But I believe this, and the Church believes this -- that love now has a place. I believe that
I can stand in that place, under the Cross, and that you can stand in that place, under the Cross. And
there, standing under the Cross, as it was for the disciples, so it is for us -- that all of us can
stand under the love that Jesus was, and is. The question is: will we stand there together?
It is those we live with and should know and understand who elude us. That's the way life is.
But we can still love them. And, because of the Cross, we can love completely, even without complete
understanding.
That's why Jesus died. And that's the greatest assurance of life.
In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. |