October 11: When God Can't Be Found

This week's lectionary texts: Job 23:1-9 and 16-17 or Amos 5:6-7 and 10-15, Psalm 22:1-15 or Psalm 90:12-17, Hebrews 4:12-16, and Mark 10:17-31.





I'd like to begin this week's post by introducing myself! My name is Caitlin, and I began writing the lectionary blog last week. I am a second-year M.Div. student at Harvard Divinity School, and I'm very excited to be doing field education this year at the Massachusetts Bible Society. I am a United Methodist, but not on the ordination track; at this point, I'm hoping to ultimately use my degree in the non-profit sector, working on issues of international relief and development. I look forward to journeying through the lectionary with all of you over the next few months!

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As Christians, we proclaim that God is love. We praise God for God's goodness and justice, God's righteousness and care. We thank God for our abundant blessings, and rejoice that we have been brought into relationship with the Divine.

Yet, at the same time, few of us would say that our relationship with God is 100% wonderful, 100% of the time. Sometimes, when confronted with personal afflictions or when considering the vast suffering in the world -- for example, the grave toll of the recent typhoon in the Philippines and the earthquake in Indonesia -- we find ourselves angry with God. "How could you do this?" we might ask, or, "How could you let this happen?" At other times, we may feel that God has become distant or is no longer answering our prayers. And sometimes we may even find ourselves afraid of God.

In this week's lectionary texts, we hear from people struggling with their relationships with God. Take Job, for example. Job's tragic tale is relatively famous: despite faithfully serving God, his children are killed and his wealth destroyed. He refuses to "charge God with wrongdoing" (Job 1:22) but is still broken-hearted and dismayed.

Part of Job's grief stems from the fact that God seems to have disappeared -- Job cannot even find God to ask him why such terrible things have happened:

"Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments. I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me [... But] if I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him." (Job 23:2-5, 8-9)

Not only is Job frustrated by his inability to find God, but he acknowledges another strong emotion: fear. "God has made my heart faint," he exclaims, "the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!" (Job 16-17)

For Job, recent events seem to be presenting God not as a loving protector, but as a distant, even wrathful deity: someone to be feared. And this theme is continued in Psalm 22, when David cries,

"My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest." (Psalm 22:1-2)

The Psalmist's words -- words spoken by Jesus on the cross in Matthew 27:46 -- are clearly the lament of someone who feels cut off from God. The language is darkly evocative, portraying a person who is "poured out like water," with a heart "like wax," lying in "the dust of death" (Psalm 22:14-15). God, for reasons that are unclear, seems to have left the Psalmist alone in a time of anguish.

I suspect that most of us have experienced seasons of life where we feel cut off from God, or indeed questioned God's very reality. But David's psalm, while reflecting the human experience of feeling that God has left us alone, also offers hope. He calls our attention to the great faithfulness God has shown in the past: "To you [our ancestors] cried, and were saved; in you they trusted, and were not put to shame" (Psalm 22:5). "Since my mother bore me you have been my God," David continues, reminding us that we have always been God's children, even when we cannot feel God's presence (Psalm 22:10).

Human existence is characterized by both great joy and great pain. At times -- perhaps when life is otherwise going well, or perhaps when we have just been thrown a curveball -- we may discover that God seems to have withdrawn. Such experiences can be painful and frightening. But as we see in Job and in Psalm 22, we need not be afraid to call out to God anyway, to express our fear or anger: God can take it.

In the lectionary text from Hebrews, we read, "Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need" (Hebrews 4:16). The author of Hebrews is saying that we needn't be afraid to approach God, to express our deepest worries and fears, or to ask for the mercy and grace that God has promised us. Indeed, I would contend that this week's texts show us that doing our best to keep our relationship with God alive -- whether by praising God, or lamenting to God, or questioning God -- will help sustain us even in those times in our lives when we feel that God is far away.

Photo credit here.

September 7—Discipline and the Disciple

"If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector. Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” –Matthew 13:15-20

When I was in college, several friends of mine went to a large and very popular church near campus. I remember hearing a story once about how their church had used this passage to handle an incidence of adultery within the congregation. The church leaders attempted to talk with the man in private, and when he refused to give up his affair, they brought him before the entire church one Sunday and publicly cast him out of the congregation. There’s no doubt that they took this passage seriously.

I remember feeling rather ambivalent about the whole thing at the time. Certainly I’ve never been okay with adultery, and kicking people out of the community for sin is found in scripture—in addition to this passage, there is the common refrain found in Deuteronomy, “ So you shall purge the evil from your midst” (Deut. 13:5, 17:7, 19:19, etc.), and Paul’s rhetoric on the contaminating effects of sin in 1 Corinthians 5. At the same time there seemed something rather harsh to me in simply throwing the man out of the church. Granted, I didn’t know this situation from the inside, and perhaps pastorally, such strong consequences were necessary for the person to acknowledge his own behavior. But I wondered how likely it was that this man would ever begin to address the broken relationship and hurt that his actions had caused if he were summarily cut off from his faith community. If the lines of dialogue were closed, how would the offender ever grow? How would the offended ever heal?

When I looked again at today’s lectionary passage in Matthew, a passage upon which many such protocols are based, I realized that Jesus’ rules for church discipline aren’t about punishment or rejection. Nor are they meant to preserve unity in the church at the cost of disagreement or diversity. Rather, they are all about relationships within the community. Notice how, in verse 15, the question is posed as “If another member of the church sins against you…” (italics mine). Now, those two little words set the tone for the entire passage. If they are not there, then the passage can be taken to address generic activities that contradict the church’s moral or ethical code. In some ancient sources, these words are indeed missing from the passage, suggesting such a general interpretation.

But if the two words are part of verse 15, as other ancient sources attest, then the entire passage becomes all about holding my Christian sibling accountable when her actions have broken our relationship. For in this the Apostle Paul is right—“a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough” (1 Cor. 5:6), and the bitterness and anger that results from an open wound between two people eventually poisons the whole community. So in this interpretation, Jesus’ plan sets up a way for the community to address broken relationships so that justice and reconciliation can take place. For when the community comes alongside one who has been wronged, confronts the breach, and calls for justice, it is not about enforcing uniformity of doctrine or belief. It is about being a disciple of Jesus—for just as Jesus came to heal humanity’s relationship with the Creator, members of his church are called to heal relationships with one another. And that healing cannot take place if we don’t address our brokenness with honesty and authenticity.

Yet what if someone refuses to acknowledge his wrong and try to mend fences? Is that the point at which we cast him out? In the past, when I’ve read the words, “let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector” (v. 17), I assumed that this was meant as a rejection of the offender. But as New Testament professor Mark Allan Powell points out in his commentary on Matthew, Jesus is saying quite the opposite—Gentiles and tax collectors were the outsiders of the Jewish community, to be sure, but they were also some of the people Jesus most persistently reached out to during his ministry. Treating someone as a Gentile and tax collector is not a call to cut off the wrong-doer, but a call to deeper and more persistent engagement with that person. For ultimately, the goal is unity—a reconciling unity, in which Christ himself is present among us (v. 20). And that requires not uniformity of opinion, but uniformity of loving, grace-filled care toward one another.

Our business as a church, then, is not about casting out and cutting off. But at the same time, it isn’t about discreetly overlooking the broken relationships within our community—from the petty fights and painful betrayals buzzing within local congregations to our failure as a Christian faith community to love and serve all humanity. Reconciliation cannot happen without justice, just as justice is empty without healing and reconciliation. And in Jesus’ discipline for the church, he gives us a practical, everyday starting point for practicing both.

Kelsey

PS-- The image above is of the Zaccheus story, one of the most famous stories of Jesus reaching out to a tax collector to bring him to discipleship.