I must admit I struggle with the gospel passage today and to be very, very, very honest, I always have. The gospel narrative seems to imply Jesus did not understand the purpose of the Passion until it was upon him and then he prayed to have it removed. In today's reading Jesus is telling his disciples it is a good thing that he goes away. Because in his place will come the Advocate. I don't know about you but that would have been a mighty hard story to sell to me and on most days it still is. He was asking his disciples to have faith.
"The desire for faith to shape my life promises too much risk, too much loss of control, too much pain, too much doubt about the materialistic world. We would prefer to continue to speak about faith, sometimes in hallowed terms, but actually to retire faith to a palm tree corner of our brain. " Vance Wilson
What endears me to the Bible narrative is that it is not linear. And my, oh, my do we love our stories to be linear. We believe that a good person is one who sins and suffers, realizes God's grace, reforms and then lives happily and rightly forever. But they or we don't. From Abraham Sarah to Moses to David to Bathsheba to Rachel to Mary and Martha to Peter to Paul, the bible heroes make massive mistakes all of their lives as if they do not learn ever one thing about the mercy of God. And that is alot like me. And that is why I believe we forever struggle with our faith, our work, our relationships, no matter how much we believe we understand.
Depending on what literature you read, it appears that most Americans think they work too hard. Most Americans do not feel they have enough leisure time. I would like to suggest that we work too hard but at the wrong things. We don't struggle or dive headfirst into our faith. We prefer to dive headfirst into our work. And I think we may have it upside down. Most metaphors are more gentle when they speak of the struggle for faith. But it I don't think the struggle is gentle. First you have to pray for courage. Courage combats fear. And fear keeps us from acting. You can't pray, meditate, study, and do all the other more gentle approaches to faith if you don't have the courage to act. Dostoevsky saw faith as something that matters above all else and that it is a gamble. I must gamble on faith because its presence or absence shapes my life. It is not irrelevant.
John Bunyan's Pilgrim sets off on the road to the new Jerusalem, God's truth comes to him not as he courageously keeps the straight and narrow way, but as he falls off the road. And only when he falls off the road. I don't know about you friends but that is not very comforting. And if I have learned or not learned one very important truth...it does work that way. God's truth only comes when you are broken, when you are bent to the ground, when you have given up, when you lost your way, when grief overwhelms you...
In life, linear thinking does not work when we impose it on reality. We must daily come face to face with the fact that any linear thinking we impose on reality must then come face-to-face with what we can't control, what we didn't anticipate, what we once thought was perfect and now think foolish. Some people call the unexpected "contingencies we must plan for. "
"That response, to me, only illustrates our refusal to abandon our way of seeing, our refusal to understand that no planning is sufficient unto the day. We must have faith in God's angels, God's anger, God's serendipitous sense of humor, and God's mercy. Surely it is God who saves us." Vance Wilson
And I don't know about you but that does not bring me alot of comfort and on days like yesterday, none at all. When she asked, "Are you crying?" I told her, "Yep, the dead baby pushed me over the edge this morning." What I don't think she knew and maybe she did was at that very moment I could have layed my head on that table and sobbed. And then I remembered. what Elie Wiesel said, "Whatever you say about God, you better be able to say over a pit of dead babies."
Faith is a struggle. It is not comforting in the way we expect. Peace does not come to rescue us from the storm, peace comes when we recognize we have adequate resources. Faith is the strength by which a shattered world will emerge into the light. And it is the shattering I struggle with. And why must it always be so.
And so I must have faith in this comforter that will come. Notice Jesus didn't say when, where or how...just that it will...and that it will come with struggle...
All is grace even the days we don't understand and want to cry,
Kathleen
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