Hope and an Exhausted Earth part 1

Today, I miss being overseas.
Today, I am restless.
Today, old questions resurface with a new urgency.

I have recently listened to N.T. Wrights lecture titled, “God, the Tsunami, 9/11 and the New Problem of Evil” and have just finished reading Walter Brueggemann’s book “Praying the Psalms.” I highly recommend both. The next several blog posts are some thoughts about what they said. I think a lot of these posts will focus on evil, the vengeance of God, and the overwhelming reality of humanities condition. Maybe it will add desperation to our prayers.

When choosing to enter more deeply into humanities vast anguish and lostness it may surprise us to find God already there. Sometimes witnessed in the miraculous, but many times He remains constant among us in small, often unlooked for glimpses of His presence. Recognizing Him is in itself committing an act of hope. (I love that idea)

We are puzzled and shocked by a never-ending stream of violence, anguish, absurdities and hurt emanating from our televisions, newspapers, websites and radios. Often the hardest surprises come from within our very families. Sickness, emotional abuse and a lack of care add to the chaos and poignancy of our daily pilgrimage. The Book of Common Prayer says that we pray together “for all sorts and conditions of men”, Brueggemann would say that this becomes possible by being “attentive to what is happening in our own lives”, by adding our voice to the “common elation, shared grief and communal rage that besets us all.”

Stopping long enough to consider, we realize that things are not as they should be, that each of us suffers from a curvature of the soul. Many of these daily evils simply pass us by, and on the whole we continue to live untouched lives. But then there are the cataclysmic events which shatter our small worlds and leave us breathless. We just don’t have categories for this kind of darkness, often because we fail to acknowledge the darkness of our own souls. This realization shocks us, so we often fail to properly process evil, preferring to ignore it, enter it, or simplistically categorize it into ill-fitting boxes. Understanding why evil is there in the first place, and how God has dealt with it and will deal with it, and how the cross of Jesus has anything to do with these matters, are deep mysteries that an in-depth look at evil brings to the surface.

There is so much to be learned of God in His compassion and grace as well as His grief and anger. The last chapter of “Praying the Psalms” discussed the vengeance of God. In relation to the topic of mankind’s sin Brueggemann writes,

“Instead of humankind suffering, God takes the suffering as His own. God resolves to turn the grief in on Himself rather than to rage against His creation. God bears the vengeance of God in order that His creation might have compassion.”

This is perfectly seen in the cross, the place where the evil of the world reached its bloody climax and the wrath of God was poured upon the Son, that we might know mercy. There is such hope in this! At the end of a run this afternoon all I could do was sit down on a park bench facing the mountains and pray “thank you.” It was enough.

More thoughts coming soon...Lord willing. :)