What I Learned During the Great 2020 Quarantine

 

Thing two: stuff happens (yes, even in the Kingdom)

“God’s people should be the happiest people on earth. Maybe you came from a family like my dad’s, where they didn’t have much. Perhaps you hail from a long line of divorce, failure, depression or mediocrity. You need to say, “Enough is enough. I’m going to start believing God for bigger and better things.” Get up each day expecting God’s favor. Friend, no matter what you’ve been through, no matter whose fault it was, no matter how impossible your situation may look, the good news is that God wants to turn it around and restore what has been stolen from you. Start expecting things to change in your favor. It’s your faith that activates the power of God. Remember, if you obey God and are willing to trust Him, you will have the best this life has to offer — and more. You can start living your best life now.”

 These are the words of Joel Osteen, author and Pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston, Texas. They are typical of what is commonly known as the “Prosperity Gospel,” an uplifting and inspiring message that promises God’s rewards for those who believe and trust. Not merely the reward of an eternal life in paradise, but a fulfilled, prosperous and trouble-free life here and now. Material rewards for material acts of faith – church attendance, clean living and homage to other appointed marks of holy living. Happiness and serenity for those who choose the right side. Lakewood church has a membership counted in the tens of thousands, and a televised media following in the millions. And who would not want such a glorious, fortunate life?

If only it worked like that.

Years of ministry have shown me again and again that the opposite is true. The deeply faithful people I have encountered in my journeys have struggled with poverty and disease, strife and grief in the course of their lives, sometimes of their own making, sometimes not. There have been some who have enjoyed the fruits of their labors, there have been many who have been favored with the joys of family and friendship and community. Yet they have also had dark days and difficult times. Suffering is not the purpose of discipleship, not a requirement of faith, nor should it be. But faithfulness is not an inoculation against the vagaries of life and the hardship it brings.

What is constantly amazing is not the bad things that happen to God’s people, but how the light of their faith shines through even in dark times. And while I have never even toyed with the notion that following Jesus might bring me either wealth or health, I have coveted such grace that I might bear the same witness when my days are trying.

And now we come into the year of our Lord 2020. The perfect intersection of the long history of human brokenness and uncommon events, seemingly designed to ask the most of us, and for which we have proven ourselves least able to meet. This moment is laying bare the undeniable truth – we have not yet learned to live in both our brokenness and in the grace of our God. We expect the world to be what it is not, and so we are unprepared and unable to live within it when it simply is what it is. We are not walking where God expects us to walk, we are not living where God expects us to live.

When the disciples pestered Jesus to foretell his upcoming victory, they did so expecting promises of glory and joy, an end to the oppression and suffering they experienced on a daily basis. They spoke from generations of belief that the world, their story, was going somewhere, becoming something, and they longed for liberation from their troubles with every ounce of their faith. Jesus did not give them the answer they wanted: 

“Do you see these great buildings? Not one stone will be left here upon another; all will be thrown down … When you hear of wars and rumors of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place … nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places; there will be famines. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs … they will hand you over to councils; and you will be beaten in synagogues … Brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all because of my name …Woe to those who are pregnant and to those who are nursing infants in those days! Pray that it may not be in winter. For in those days there will be suffering, such as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now.” (Mark 13:2, 7-9, 12-13, 17-19).

 It is not a rosy picture, not an image consistent with our hoped-for escape from our drab, limited and often painful existence. Things like pandemics and social upheaval are painful in every way, even if they don’t touch us directly. They impair our carefully constructed expectation of how life should be, they are a veil over the hope we cling to so desperately. We suffer every day in the world we are seeking to escape, and that’s why it never changes. We cannot be instruments of Grace and Light in the world if we refuse to live in the world.

                Following Jesus means going where he went, being where he was. Discipleship is not all changing water into wine or joyful parades into Jerusalem. Discipleship is touching the untouchable, feeding the hungry, sitting with tax collectors and sinners. Discipleship is crossing boundaries, standing against power, freeing captives. And discipleship is enduring betrayal and denial, suffering and death. These are the places where we are needed, where we are led, where Jesus’ work is done.

This is where we must go so we can be who we were saved to be.

But we refuse to be who we were saved to be. We desire the same perfection in ourselves (and each other) as we do in the world around us. We fill our days with self-improvement programs and sanctimonious religious quests, all which end in disappointment because even if they are born in a true desire to be good people who do good things, they are driven by a need to be who we cannot be. We are re-enacting an age-old Christian heresy.

Luther’s life work spoke to that error. While the story of Luther pledging his life in service to the church during a lightning storm may be apocryphal, it was typical of his time. Surrounded by poverty, hardship and death, the church provided much needed protection from the adversities of this world and the key to paradise in the next one. Becoming a priest, monk or nun was an escape – not merely from the hardships of life, but from the personal brokenness that haunted the life of the faithful.

Not everyone followed that path. But the church had plenty of answers. For the laity there were practices and rituals that ensured God’s protective grace against the dangers and evil powers that ran through world. There were holy days to observe (lots of special holy days), special prayers to say, rituals that marked not merely the passage of time but provided safe escort through the perils and trials of life. And there was the mass itself, the supreme mystery of faith in which bread and wine became the very body and blood of Christ with all of its powers over sickness and death. It was not unheard of for a parishioner to sneak the host home to feed a sick animal. Spoken in Latin, the words “this is my body” (hoc es corpus meium) become the expression “hocus pocus.”

Of course it was the practice of Indulgences in particular that caught Luther’s attention and ignited his reformation. An indulgence was a special gift of grace, granted by the Pope himself, to speed the passage of a soul through the terrors of purgatory, a time of punishment and suffering for those who lacked the necessary credit to enter heaven directly. As if life itself wasn’t bad enough. Luther’s complaint went much deeper than the financial corruption driving the practice of indulgences. It was the lie they told, that the purpose of life was the achievement of spiritual perfection in whatever way it could be gained. Luther had come to realize through his own spiritual tribulations (which he called his anfechtung) that such a thing was a false hope, a barrier to true faith and the peace of Christ.

For Luther, the reformation began in the discovery in the Epistle to the Romans that Paul spoke of righteous as a property of God rather than a human achievement, given freely in faith as a free gift of God. But he might as well have taken the words directly from Jesus’ mouth. Mistrusted for his constant disgraceful association with tax collectors and other known sinners, Jesus rebuked his critics with these words: “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick do. Go and learn what this means, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners.” (Matthew 9:12–13 NRSV). The harder we try to define ourselves and our works as righteous, good and worthy, the farther we are removed from the saving grace of God in Jesus.

Luther had a great way of describing the reality that we detest. Simul Iustis et Peccator. Simultaneously saved and sinful. Not loved because we are perfect or in spite of our imperfection but showered with grace and mercy because of it. Loved by God as the whole being we are, and called to discipleship with all of our gifts and our flaws. Rather than live in a prison of denial, Luther imagined living fully in the freedom of grace. Rather than tilt at the windmills of sanctity, we could be free to do the best we can as often as we can, and when we come short, to try again. Not religion, faith.

Faith teaches us this hard truth about our world: stuff happens. Sometimes we are that stuff. God is not deterred by that. The Bible is a never-ending string of stories of mostly well-meaning people with serious character flaws who work against God’s plan as often as they follow it. But somehow, miraculously, the Kingdom of God moves irresistibly forward, not merely in spite of humanity, but surely through it. It is the imperfections of the creation that make it the perfect instrument of grace.

Grace is in the stuff that happens.

There is both a material and a spiritual dimension to reality, and grace lives and flourishes where they cross. We flee the harsh realities of the world we inhabit, we despise the shortcomings of the person we see in the mirror every morning. But we are called to abide in the fullness of both, to fulfill our calling to discipleship as we follow Jesus into all of the places we would rather not go. We are not waiting for perfection – either in the world or in ourselves or in some later transition to glory. We are looking for the Kingdom of God as it lives and breathes, close at hand.