Suffering through Christmas

It's nice when someone asks how you're really doing.

It's nice when someone says they'll pray for you.
It's nice when someone thinks you're amazing because of all you've gone through.

But it puts divine medicine on a chapped soul when someone shares your suffering with you.  They enter into it as much as they can with listening, empathizing, asking, helping, comforting, even sometimes feeling the same things.

That's Christmas.

God doesn't just say, "Wow.  Life is hard for you guys."
or
"I'll send some angels to help sometimes."
or
"Good job facing the trials of life!"

No, He comes INTO it, WITH US.  Emmanuel, is this name that the ancient Jews were told the Messiah would be called.  It means "God with us."

That baby in Bethlehem becomes a man and showed us another time that He would be with us.  Here's a quote from Nadia Bolz-Weber's book Pastrix that captures it:

Every time I go looking for God amidst sorrow, I always find Jesus at the cross.  In death and resurrection.

This is our God.  Not a distant judge nor a sadist, but a God who weeps.  A God who suffers, not only for us, but with us.  Nowhere is the presence of God amidst suffering more salient than on the cross.  Therefore what can I do but confess that this is not a God who causes suffering.  This is a God who bears suffering.  I need to believe that God does not initiate suffering.  God transforms it.

Standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, and Mary Magdalene.  When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, "Woman, here is your son."  Then he said to the disciple, "Here is your mother."  After this, when Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said, "I am thirsty."

"I am thirsty," he says.  "I am not watching this from a distant heaven.  I too am thirsty."

Do I mean anything?

I'm reading two different books right now.  One is called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green, a fiction story about two teens with cancer who fall in love.  The other is Pastrix by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a former addict turned tattooed, f-bomb dropping Lutheran pastor. The differences between these two books is like oil and water.  In Fault, the main character Hazel has to carry around an oxygen tank because her lungs won't work otherwise.  She has terminal cancer.  A young cancer survivor named Gus comes to a support group meeting.  When asked his biggest fear, he responds, "Oblivion," meaning to cease to exist after death. 


Hazel tells him the following:
"There will come a time...when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything....Everything we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught....if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it."

Wow.  Makes you feel small and insignificant, doesn't it.  But then...I read a chapter in Pastrix called "Beer and Hymns."  Nadia tells the story of how her church meets in a bar to sing hymns to God each week.  However, one particular week stood out because a few days before that one guy shot and killed some 12 people in a movie theater during a midnight showing of Batman. 

Nadia considered cancelling the meeting, but instead, they did it anyway.  Here are some of her remembrances of that night.

"It took a few minutes for me to pinpoint the uniqueness of how these hymns were being sung [that night].  But then I knew.  It was defiance.

"Mary Magdalene was the very first to proclaim, in the midst of loss and sorrow, that death had been defeated.

"Of course, Mary Magdalene would have very little tolerance for the Christian platitudes and vapid optimism that seem to swirl around these kinds of tragic events.  Those platitudes are tempting, but they're nothing but luxuries for people who've never had demons (or at least have never admitted to them).  But equally, she would reject nihilism, or the idea that there is no real meaning in life or death--ideas present in so much of postmodernity.  Those ideas, too, are luxuries, but they are for those who have never been freed from demons.

"When we sang hymns to God at the bar, it sounded like a people who simply would not believe that violence wins, a people who know that the sound of the risen Christ speaking our names drowns out all other voices.  It drowns out the sound of the political posturing, the sound of cries for vengeance, the sound of our own fears and anxieties, and the deafening uncertainty--because all of it is no match for the shimmering sound of the resurrected Christ calling our name.

"This is the resurrected God to whom we sing.  A God who didn't say we would never be afraid but that we would never be alone.

"Singing in the midst of evil is what it means to be disciples.  Like Mary Magdalene, the reason we can stand and weep and listen for Jesus is because we, like Mary, are bearers of resurrection, we are made new.  On the third day, Jesus rose again, and we do not need to be afraid.  To sing to God amidst sorrow is to defiantly proclaim, like Mary Magdalene did to the apostles...that death is not the final word.  To defiantly say, once again, that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot, will not, shall not overcome it.  And so, evil be damned, because even as we go to the grave, still we make our song alleluia.  Alleluia.  Alleluia."

I'm not done with The Fault in Our Stars yet, but I'm hoping Hazel finds more hope than that sad "reality" that she gave to Gus.

I hate myself

I don't really hate myself, but there have been times when I have.  It still sometimes hits me, but I've learned how to fight that impulse.  I think we all can get pretty good at hating on ourselves.  In fact, in some Christian circles, hating on yourself is seen as a sign of spiritual maturity or something. 

So, I'm reading this book called Pastrix by an ELCA Lutheran pastor who also happens to drop f-bombs and has tons of tattoos named Nadia Bolz-Weber; oh, and she's a woman.  That alone would throw many for a loop.  There are a lot of things in the book that many would be uncomfortable with.  In fact, there are things I'm uncomfortable with in it too.  Still, I love this woman's heart for Jesus and people.  As I read I'm going to post some parts of the book that jump out at me.  Here's one where she talks about identity.

(BTW, she's going to be the speaker at an upcoming Ohio ELCA youth conference)


And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."  Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  The tempter came and said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread."

And the Word that had most recently came from the mouth of God was, "This is my beloved in whom I am well pleased."  Identity.  It's always God's first move.  Before we do anything wrong and before we do anything right, God has named and claimed us as God's own.  But almost immediately, other things try to tell us who we are and to whom we belong; capitalism, the weight-loss industrial complex, our parents, kids at school-they all have a go at telling us who we are.  But only God can do that.  Everything else is temptation.  Maybe demons are defined as anything other than God that tries to tell us who we are.  And maybe, just moments after Jesus' baptism, when the devil says to him, "If you are the Son of God..." he does so because he knows that Jesus is vulnerable to temptation precisely to the degree that he is insecure about his identity and mistrusts his relationship with God.

So if God's first move is to give us our identity, then the devil's first move is to throw that identity into question.  Identity is like the tip of a spool of thread, which when pulled, can unwind the whole thing...Our identity has nothing to do with how we are perceived by others.  But it's still tempting to believe.  I mean, if Jesus was vulnerable to temptation, the rest of us certainly are, whether it be temptation to self-loathing or self-aggrandizement, depression or pride, self-destruction or self-indulgence.  We are tempted to doubt our innate value precisely to the degree that we are insecure about our identity from, and our relationship to God.