Stewards of the Mysteries

1 Cor. 4:1-5

May 25, 2008

I spent the better – or, more accurately – the “worser” part of last Wednesday beaten up by a bad headache. By Friday, when head and schedule had cleared up, I was ready to sit down and write out this sermon. Then, as I was sitting in Murky Coffee alternately writing and chatting with Bud, somebody stole his bike from the rack in front of the coffee shop. I was, I promise you, pretty ticked off, and, as I stewed I considered the texts in front of us this morning and the setting of the Memorial Day weekend, and I found myself like Dorothy in Oz – all in a muddle.

This is neither news nor a play for your sympathy. I’ve been muddled before. I’ve had things stolen before, and I’ve been a chronic headache sufferer for more than 30 years. All of these are just part of life and, over the years, a source of quite a bit of reflection.

For example, having inherited this tendency toward headaches from my father and having passed it along to at least one of our children, headaches have pushed me to consider genetics, history, guilt and that question asked of Jesus, “who sinned, this man or his father, to cause such suffering?”

Jesus’ answer, “neither sinned; this suffering is an occasion for the glory of God to be revealed,” is, frankly, of less comfort to me than that the glory of aspirin and caffeine may be revealed. Of course, God works in mysterious ways, and who is to say that aspirin and caffeine are not among the greater glories of creation?

Suffering, on whatever scale, often gives rise to questions about responsibility and causation. My own small suffering, like a pebble in a shoe, has led me to understand that much suffering is simply part of the human condition – common on some level to each and every one of us and not an occasion for ethical or moral consideration unless we are speaking of the suffering we inflict upon one another through slights and crimes both petty and pathological in scale.

But suffering does, properly, give rise to theological consideration. After all, if suffering is simply part of the human condition, is it proper then to say that the suffering of creation is the will of the Creator? If so, then it is really not too much of a stretch to find yourself wondering down strange paths like those of pastor Hagee and speculating about Hitler and history. If you wonder down such paths, then what kind of God are we talking about? Or, as The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy puts it, “who is this God person, anyway?”

If God is the One who wills shalom – wholeness, healing, peace, communion – for creation, then either God is lousy at the job of being God or we have not done such a good job of being stewards of the mysteries of God. In other words, either God is not worthy of the name nor of our worship, or we have neither understood God nor told God’s story in such a way that others will understand it either. Then strange stories of God and history take hold of popular imagination and stake their claims to power.

We find one reaction against such claims these days in the work of the so-called “new atheists.” They look at the great crimes committed in the name of God or for the sake of religions and declare, as does Richard Dawkins, that the biblical God is a monster, or argue, as does Samuel Harris, that God is evil, or say simply, as Christopher Hitchens does, that God is not that great after all. Variously basing their arguments on biology and evolutionary sciences and the history of faith-based crimes against humanity, the new atheists put God in the dock and condemn him.

I could, at this point, offer the expected preacherly move and defend God against both bold new atheists and bad old pastors. I could base the defense on scripture or the history of the church. I could build a case for God out the numerous passages of scripture that lift up the loving and creative attributes of God, or, in a slightly different tack, I could cite passages on the healing power of God. But while scripture may be a lively word, the living God is not confined to it, so simply looking at the sacred texts is inadequate. I could then go on to lift up the lives of the saints from Francis to Martin Luther King, or speak of the transcendent experiences of spiritual giants; but I don’t think God needs defense from the likes of me.

Mostly, when it comes to the arguments of the new atheists, I don’t think God needs defense from me because the god these writers take aim at has been dead for a very long time anyway. Indeed, the best 20^th-century theologians put this god to rest in the middle of the last century in the works of Paul Tillich, John A.T. Robinson, and Rudolph Bultmann – to name just three widely divergent lines of thought. Alas, too many Christian leaders have ignored their insights and cling stubbornly to the god currently in the cross hairs of the new atheists.

The god at the center of the diatribes of the new atheists is confined to holy books and holy wars; a capricious god at work outside of history and one whose death, thus, changes very little of history. Indeed, my own biggest criticism of the work of the new atheism comes down to this: “who cares?”

Or, as Georgetown theologian John Haught much more eruditely complained in The Christian Century,

“The blandness of the new soft-core atheism lies ironically in its willingness to compromise with the politically and culturally insipid kind of theism it claims to be ousting. Such a pale brand of atheism uncritically permits the same old values and meanings to hang around, only now they can become sanctified by an ethically and politically conservative Darwinian orthodoxy. If the new atheists' wishes are ever fulfilled, we need anticipate little in the way of cultural reform aside from turning the world's places of worship into museums, discos and coffee shops.” [1]

Still, I do not blame Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens and the like for taking on this long-dead god with a shotgun blast that hits every kind of faith from every imaginable faith tradition including those of us who do not see a contradiction between faith and science, who embrace religious pluralism, and who honor honest doubt while embracing a God of depth more than a god of height. No, I don’t blame the “new atheists”; I blame us – the mainline church, heirs to the Reformation. We have been lousy stewards, and we have let others – fundamentalists of various traditions, including the tradition of a-theism – tell the story of faith framed to fit their own social and political agendas.

Now we sit on the increasingly smaller sidelines as the religious loud and the often equally bombastic anti-religionists seek to define the field. We find ourselves marginalized by a kind of fundamentalist theism and equally fundamentalist atheism, squeezed out of the frame by conservative evangelical Christians, ultra-Orthodox Jews, fundamentalist Muslims, and cranky Western intellectuals.

As Douglas John Hall, one of the most thoughtful theologians of the past quarter century, puts it,

“Statistics will confirm that so-called true-believing forms of Protestantism have been particularly conspicuous in U.S.-American life, not least of all in the arena of politics” – and here we can think both of the Religious Right and of the related phenomena of megachurches – “but [statistics] will not tell us what sort of Christianity this allegedly successful Protestantism is, nor why it appeals to a frightened public, nor how it stands vis-à-vis Protestant origins and the evolution of Protestantism. Nor will such analyses convey to us very much about the causes of the diminishment of the formerly most “established” churches in the United States and Canada. For instance, they will not help us understand the factors that have brought about our loss of nerve, our failure to educate our laity beyond the most rudimentary clichés of the tradition (if that), our assumption that we could carry on business as usual long after the whole Constantinian framework of our culture-religion had collapsed, and so forth. Statistics will not show how predictable it ought to have been decades ago that the automatic churchgoing of yesteryear would disappear as soon as the social structures and public moods that held it in place had been altered, as they were (vastly), nor how, in consequence, an alert Protestantism ought to have been working long ago to articulate for itself the “reason for the hope that is in us” (1 Peter 3:15).

“In short, statistics will not demonstrate that the primary cause of the humiliation of classical Protestantism on this continent has been the failure of these old denominations to be “stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor. 4:1) as these mysteries have been testified to in the traditions of the Reformation and its faithful interpretation in the best scholarship of the past four or five centures.”[2]

Hall has argued for more than 25 years that the only Christian theological perspective adequate to the demands of our time, of our disestablished, post-Constantinian, global, religiously pluralistic, consumerist, post-Auschwitz, nuclear, postmodern age will focus on the cross of Jesus Christ.

Thus, on such a weekend as this one, as I struggle to understand that strange confluence of memory, suffering, and faith, let me suggest that we will draw close to the living God only as we focus on the passion and death of Jesus. In lifting up the suffering God we come to understand that God is in intimate solidarity with a suffering creation. God knows our suffering; indeed, God suffers with us. That has always been, to me, the final meaning of the cross. We worship a suffering God.

The god at the heart of the bland and insipid theism that passes for too much of Christianity these days skips quickly past suffering to triumph and leaves behind a broken humanity huddling fearfully in the face of a social compact fractured by petty thefts and high crimes, hiding behind gates of sprawling suburbs built to submerge differences and hide suffering under an architecture of sameness housing a bursting balm of consumer goods, and wandering rootless in a culture that denies its own history in a never-ending quest for a newness more glorious than anything Solomon knew.

Only a suffering God is adequate to the pain of such a people. A clock-maker god-above-history will not do and neither will a triumphal god-over-history. The good news of the gospel, however, is precisely this: and we are invited to enter a relationship with just such a God-in-history, God-with-us.

This is good news … as far as it goes.

Why that caveat? Because God-with-us, Emmanuel, only comes as good news if we have the courage to meet this God in history, to be present with God, and, ultimately, to be present with ourselves.

To be stewards of any kind – stewards of creation, financial stewards, stewards of mysteries – requires being present. Too often we are too fearful to be present.

Why? Because the present moment is all too often full of suffering and fearfulness. As we gather on a weekend dedicated to the memories of those who served our nation in times of war, we must be particularly mindful of fear and suffering. It does not matter what you think of war – the present one, or any other one – to appreciate and honor the suffering and sacrifice of those in the midst of war. And it does not matter what you think of war to grasp it horror and fearfulness.

Nor does it belittle that particular fear, suffering and sacrifice of warriors to acknowledge the fear, suffering and sacrifice of those who do not fight. To come full circle from where we began: fear, suffering, and sacrifice are universal human experiences.

Yet most of the time we do not wish to remember this. We do not remember our own fear, suffering and sacrifice.

Why? Perhaps it is simply too painful. Perhaps we simply wish to forget.

Perhaps we do not wish to make much of it out of fear that our own suffering somehow pales in comparison to that of others.

I was channel surfing one night last week and caught the famous scene from Jaws when Robert Shaw’s old sea captain is comparing scars with the young whippersnapper played by Richard Dreyfuss. They are rolling up their sleeves to see who has suffered the most, boasting about who bears the biggest scars, as if suffering is a competition.

But, like the scars they show off, they never go beneath the surface to touch the real wound that they are dancing around: the fear of their own death. Without touching it, attending to it, that primal fear will never be overcome nor the ancient patterns – social, historical or individual – the ancient patterns that reproduce such fear will never be transformed. As our own suffering testifies, there is much that needs to be transformed.

If the god dismissed by the new atheists fades from history’s stage, we will not have failed in our charge to be stewards of the mysteries of God. Quite to the contrary. For as John Haught noted, the death of that god changes little or nothing in the present arrangement of things.

All of us carry around ancient fears and wounds from old hurts, losses, abuses, guilts, shame. Unless those deep fears and wounds are touched, tended, they never heal. Thus, the scar never goes away; it remains there to be irritated from time to time, to dredge up ancient wounds and fearfulness, and to keep us from living fully present to the moment. If such wounds are merely memorialized but never healed, ancient traumas continue to hold power over us and, with a calculus almost exact as that of genetics, we will pass them along to our children and spread them through our communities in ways best described as demonic.

If, on the national day of memorial we truly recalled our own past, perhaps we would not be so likely to repeat it again and again and again. But we are far too full of fear for such encounters, and in our fear we turn too often to a triumphal god who knows no suffering.

Only a God who knows suffering is adequate to the healing of such deep wounds.

Only a people willing to acknowledge our own suffering, to recall it, to remember the places where we have been dismemebered, will ever be able to enter fully into relationship with such a God and to be stewards of divine mysteries.

None of this will add a day or even an hour to our lives. It will not rid me of headaches nor return Bud’s bike.

But it will draw us into deep relationship with the loving and creative power at the center of all that is, and allow us to live from the lofty heights of that love and creativity rather than within the narrow valleys of our own suffering. It will free us from the prison of our own pain and its deep darkness.

Only a God who knows suffering can promise us that,

In a time of favor I have answered you, on a day of salvation I have helped you; I have kept you and given you as a covenant to the people, to establish the land, to apportion the desolate heritages; saying to the prisoners, “Come out.” […] Sing for joy, O heavens, and exult, O earth; break forth, O mountains, into singing! For the LORD has comforted this people, and will have compassion on the suffering ones.

Amen.

---

[1] John F. Haught, “Amateur Atheists,” The Christian Century (February 26, 2008); http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=4497.

[2] Douglas John Hall, Bound and Free (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005) 107-8.