Living the Word: Why Do Good Things Happen?

LENT IS A GIFT. It is a hard scrub brush for when we’re covered with grime that won’t come off in an ordinary bath.

Lent is popularly associated with “giving up” things. This giving up is easy to lampoon. When I gave up meat once, a friend said, “If you want to go on a diet, don’t pretend you’re doing it for Jesus.” Lent is a remarkably ineffective season for weight loss. Every Sunday is a celebration of the resurrection, so Sundays aren’t technically days of Lent. On Sundays you can indulge as much as you want. It’s not the best diet plan. But it does remind us that resurrection crowns every week and so every fast.

Lent is our minor participation in Jesus’ 40-day fast, which is itself a participation in Israel’s 40-year sojourn in the wilderness. It’s meant to be hard (a friend who loves to fast says he gives up fasting for Lent!). In Lent we say “no” to just a few of our desires. This is counter-cultural in a Western world bent on saying “yes!” to every consumerist desire, however bizarre. But these little “no’s” are really geared to help us say “yes” to Jesus more. It might hurt at first, especially if we’re not used to it, like every good habit. And in the gospel’s strange economy, saying no is the way to life.

[February 7]

A Face Alight 

Exodus 34:29-35; Psalm 99; 2 Corinthians 3:12- 4:2; Luke 9:28-43a

YOU'VE SEEN FACES shine before. Think of the radiant pregnant woman. Think of a speaker or an athlete or a dancer in a groove, performing like few can. Think of those few moments in life so magical you can’t stop smiling.

Moses’ face shines so brightly his fellow Jews ask him to cover it. He’s in the presence of a light so incandescent it has been known to kill people. Moses’ face is like the light of the moon—a reflection of a greater light on which we cannot look directly.

If Moses’ face shines, Jesus’ whole body shines. So does the mountaintop all around. Moses turns up to join in the shine, along with Elijah, and they discuss the “departure” or “exodus” (Luke 9:31) that Jesus will soon accomplish at Jerusalem.

This shine is what Epiphany—the season just concluding—is about. It is a season of light. The magi come and worship Jesus. He turns water to wine. Each text from January 6 to now is meant to throw light on who Jesus is and what he means to the world. Soon the texts will be hard—Lenten, penitential, including combat with the devil and demands to take up a cross. This text of shining faces and landscapes and promises gives us a glimpse at the glory on the other side of repentance.

This “glory” is a mixed legacy. The word for Moses’ shining face was notoriously translated “horns” in Latin Bibles. In the past, Christian images of Moses often show him with horns—which became a pretext for anti-Semitism when the church said Moses, his teaching, and his people, the Jews, were diabolical. Apparently the two-edgedness of the word is fitting in Hebrew. Moses’ grandeur is a mixed blessing. His face shines and/or has horns, just as Moses is both glorious and has flaws, like every leader, just as God’s presence both kills and gives life.

The presence of God is a dangerous thing. It can make you shine or make you dead; it fills the world with light and our eyes recoil.

[ February 14 ]

Temptation to Cheat

Deuteronomy 26:1-11; Psalm 91:1-2, 9-16; Romans 10:8b-13; Luke 4:1-13

IT IS CHARMING that St. Valentine’s Day and the first Sunday of Lent are simultaneous. Go ahead and nosh on the chocolate: Every Sunday is a little Easter, fit for feasting.

Not that Jesus will indulge with you today. He’s famished—having fasted 40 days. Don’t pass over this too quickly. Jesus is entirely human, and he’s as hungry as we would be if we were to fast so long.

The devil offers good things: bread, power, protection from death. He even uses scripture to promote his suggestions. He offers things that Jesus uses elsewhere: Jesus is the bread of life, and makes more bread when there is not enough. Jesus, contrary to the devil’s claim (Luke 4:6), is the unacknowledged Lord of everything. Jesus plans to conquer the grave not by avoiding it but rather by suffering it himself.

This might be a good Sunday to think of the ways we are tempted by food, power, and schemes to cheat death. While many in the world starve, in the Western and Northern hemispheres we die from the diseases of excess. We have more power than any people ever and less wisdom about how to use it. And our health-care industry is very good at cheating death—good enough that we trust it to do what only God can do: Save us.

Jesus’ response to unending food, power, and safety is, simply, “no.” We might say with him: No, I won’t acquire my livelihood illicitly. No, I won’t grab for power in order to dominate and subjugate others. No, I won’t try to use religion to avoid such basic human realities as aging and death. And I won’t say any of these “no’s” alone. I’ll do so in a church where we try, creatively, charmingly even, to be as faithful as we can.

[ February 21 ]

Belief and Disbelief

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17 - 4:1; Luke 13:31-35

GENESIS 15 is a key text for the entire Bible. God is preening, as God is wont to do. “Did I mention lately, Abram, that your people will be great?” Only this time Abram isn’t having it. He’s heard this preening speech before, and has seen no heir. “What will you give me?” he asks God, in the sort of request we Christians teach our children not to pray. Yet God honors the request, takes Abram outside and shows him the stars. Your descendants will be like that, says God. Today, we who are descendants of Abraham can see God’s faithfulness every time we look in the mirror.

Abram believes, “and the Lord reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6). As we can see from his letter to the Romans (4:3), Paul loves this verse! And yet, only two verses later in Genesis, Abram stops believing! “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” (15:8). The trip to the divine planetarium didn’t do it. Paul doesn’t mention Genesis 15:8. And Christians ever since have been perplexed by the verses that follow: the sacrificed animals, the birds of prey driven away, the sleep, the light, the promise.

God gives us ritual precisely when we cannot understand and forget how to trust. We might complain that we don’t understand. And God says, “Quiet! I’m making a promise here.”

A student of mine reacted against a demythologizing move I made against a scripture passage (one on angels, I think). He found it remarkable that modernity dismisses the miraculous, and then embraces en masse (to the tune of billions of dollars) elaborate mythologies such as Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, and Harry Potter. But when it comes to angels we sneer. Why do we believe the world has to be so believable?

Here’s the most unbelievable, mythological, and true thing of all: God becomes part of the world God made. Luke recounts Jesus sighing over Herod’s petty dictatorship, weeping over God’s favorite city, longing to gather us up like a mother hen. Sometimes God honors our childish requests. Sometimes God weeps at what we do.

And, one time, God became and becomes a child.

[ February 28 ]

A Bountiful Spread

Isaiah 55:1-9; Psalm 63:1-8; 1 Corinthians 10:1-13; Luke 13:1-9

WHY DO BAD THINGS happen to good people? It’s a beautiful pastoral question, at one point popularized by Rabbi Harold Kushner. The problem is, Jesus seems to have no pastoral sense.

In Luke’s recounting of Pilate mixing the blood of Galileans in sacrifice, the people are asking: Did the victims deserve it? No, says Jesus. But if you don’t repent, you will! Or when the tower at Siloam collapsed and killed 18—did they have it coming? No. But if you don’t change your ways, you’re a goner! Jesus breaks the fourth wall, pointing right at us, who thought we were safe in our living rooms. When someone asks why bad things happen to good people, try sticking a finger in their face and telling them they’re done for. It’s what Jesus would do.

Isaiah, on the other hand, has a much kinder, gentler word for us. Isaiah lays out an economics of the kingdom: Come, buy food and wine and milk ... for nothing. God spreads a table of rich bounty. Gentiles—foreigners—will join Israel there. God’s thoughts are higher than our thoughts, God’s ways beyond our ways. And God’s word is effective—it accomplishes that which it sets out to do. The question implied here is “why do good things happen to bad people,” or maybe better said, “to all people”?

Because of the generous provision of God.

The entire Bible might be seen as an effort to put our verbs about God into the present tense. Jesus does, with his warning about our “expert” religious questions that cost us nothing personally (see Luke 18:18-23). Isaiah promises a future where the poor are blessed and the foreigner is honored. In 1 Corinthians 10:4, Paul tells us that we were the ones in the wilderness, drinking from the rock who is Christ (imagining Jesus as a rock shambling leglessly in the desert is entirely too wonderful). We want to keep God-talk distant, hypothetical, cool. God keeps coming close, urgently, with passion. These texts leave us with a new, puzzling, and delightful question: Why do God things happen to all people?

Because God is always and unendingly good.

"Preaching the Word," Sojourners' online resource for sermon preparation and Bible study, is available at sojo.net/ptw.