One of the high privileges of the pastorate is listening to the stories of those who have made their way into my office. I know these people. I baptize their babies, and watch them grow up in the church. I sit across the table arguing with the church members at committee meetings that go long into the night, and I rush to the hospitals when someone gets sick. I sit beside them as chemotherapy slowly makes its way into their bodies, and I have lied more times than I can remember about how good a wig looks after their hair has fallen out. I’ve stood before the young couples who exchange vows on the most wonderful day of their lives, and I have also stood over their graves when one of them died way too soon. I know that the suffering of their lives is real.
So when they come to talk to me, we do not speak as strangers. Nor do I sit across from them as the professional therapist who will unlock the mysteries of their life with important insights from their family history. I am the pastor who loves them, and who in prayer places them back into the hands of God—where they have been all along.
Their stories are always different, but never as much as they want to believe. We talk about their relationships, health, work, and the deep, deep, hurts from the past. Sometimes these stories are so severe, I find myself reaching for the Kleenex before the person who is talking. I can never get used to how it is in our harsh world. But almost always, somewhere in the discussion we get to “the question.” It is phrased in different ways, with different levels of intensity, but they always want to know why this awful thing has happened. And behind that question is the even deeper question they are typically afraid to ask—Why did God let this happen?
I know this question is as old as Job, but it does seem to be coming up with more frequency in recent generations. Scripture seems to state that “why” is not nearly as good a question as “who.” Being reminded of who they were as God’s creatures, biblical men and women eventually lost interest in questions like why, and how. But we have recovered a preoccupation with figuring out why our fragile lives have not turned out just right. I suppose that is because we have again become confused about the questions of identity. We are not as clear about the identity of God, and we are certainly not clear about our identity as fragile creatures who were never intended to be whole.
Our Favorite Myth
God can and does transform aspects of our lives. God often heals our pain and binds our wounds. But, wholeness—absence of all pain and suffering—will not be ours. Suffering is a part of our lives. Yet, the rhetoric of personal wholeness abounds in our society. It floods the self-help book sections of our bookstores as a popularized distortion of the more profound insights of serious psychology. It sells well because we want to believe that it is true. We are dying to find that mythic place of complete perfection in this life where there is no hurt or pain. In fact, suffering has become something of an accusation that we have made mistakes, or worse yet, that we have been not been treated well. The next step is then to assert that we have a right, A RIGHT, to live without this suffering because it is preventing us from being whole.
In an effort to stay relevant to the felt needs of our society, the church has baptized this assumption about personal wholeness, and brought it into the mainstream of our teaching and preaching. It has become the basis of our successful church programs that promise a Christian recovery from the pain of life, and it is one of the unquestioned assumptions in our current debate about sexuality. As soon as someone begins to express a personal need or a painful experience, she or he is immediately granted more authority than all of the teachings of the church over the last two thousand years. Because, well, “How can it be right for someone to be in pain?” We ask that question because we assume we have a right to wholeness which we think means that you should not have to live without the thing that is missing. It is a small step then to assert that no one should have to live in an unhappy marriage, or maintain celibacy just because he or she is not married. We assume that if we have an orientation to a particular sexual activity we should be allowed to act on it, because celibacy will be very difficult, and how could God ask that?
Discussions of personal wholeness have invaded the messages we receive from sermons, retreats, songs and new hymns, and enough religious writing to successfully compete with the secular formulas for self-help. Where we do not find this message, however, is in the Bible.
From the beginning, the Bible has made it clear that we were never intended to have it all. The first two chapters of Genesis give us our only picture for life as God intended it to be lived before sin corrupted the world. That makes this brief passage incredibly important to anyone trying to discover what God had in mind for our lives.
Created Limitations
According to the narrative, after creating the world and human life, God placed Adam and Eve in a garden and told them to take care of it and to enjoy it. They were given the freedom to take whatever they wanted from it, except from the fruit of the tree that was “in the midst of the garden.” Something was missing from the middle of their little world, a daily reminder that they did not have it all. The absence of the fruit of that tree from their lives was a critical symbol of Adam and Eve’s status as creatures. Creatures do not have it all. The temptation of the serpent was to remind them of this very fact. The reach for the fruit of that tree, the reach for something more than they were created to have, has become an enduring illustration of our compulsive need to live as something more than creatures. We too believe the serpent that we can be like God, whole and complete, lacking in nothing.
The tragedy of this is that when we become so driven to take what is missing from our lives, we find that we have lost the garden that was really pretty good even without the fruit that was missing from our diets. At the time we were reaching for more, we were not thinking about the nine hundred and ninety-nine other wonderful trees that were all ours. When men and women destroy their families trying to find a new passion in life, they are not thinking about all the wonderful things that exist in that family. When people work themselves to exhaustion trying to become successful, they are not thinking about the daily blessings of health and relationships that are being tossed aside. When they demand to exercise their sexuality outside of the biblical norm of fidelity within marriage, they are not thinking about all of the other garden God has given them. Forgetting about that, they allow themselves to be defined by the tree that is missing—“What am I going to do about this thing I don’t have?”
One day, while my family was on vacation, we launched into a huge 3,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. As we sat at the kitchen table and slowly assembled it, we did the things that families do well—we told stories, we laughed, we teased each other, and we enjoyed the precious moment that we had. As evening approached, the puzzle picture started to form and I got much more interested in “getting this thing done.” Much to my horror, when we got to the end, there was one piece missing. At first, we all looked under the table and checked our laps and clothing. Still, no missing piece. Then I became obsessed with finding it. I looked everywhere—under the sofa, behind the refrigerator, even in the dog’s mouth. I tried to get the rest of the family to join me in this frantic search, but no, they were too busy still laughing and being the family. I did not care about that stuff any more. “What about this missing piece? How could anybody be having a good time when a piece was missing?”
There is not a one of us who has all the pieces to life’s puzzle. We can decide that the picture is still pretty good even without the missing piece. We can decide to enjoy the laughter and love we find along the way as we assemble life. Or we can forget about all of that, and make those around us miserable by insisting on finding the one thing we do not have. Essentially, it is a decision to be either a creature or a creator.
If we are convinced that the purpose of our lives is not to become gods, then it is easier to use these lives to glorify and enjoy the true God. The simple truth is that it is easier to do that as a people who confess our need for a savior, then as people who pretend to be our own saviors. We glorify God not by getting life just right, but by witnessing to the mercy of God who loves us and brings us into his broken body called the church.
Rehearsing Identity
Every Sunday we Presbyterians gather into a great a diversity of churches. Some of our congregations are very small and humble. Others are huge and ornate. But we all do one thing that is pretty critical to our identity. At some point in the worship service, we confess the truth. If we take the Prayer of Confession seriously, it is pretty frightening business. It is hard enough to tell ourselves the truth. Telling God the truth can be overwhelming. Week after week we remind ourselves that we have reached for things we were never intended to have, and we have not been thankful for nine hundred and ninety-nine blessings that abound in our garden. We have hurt others, we have hurt ourselves, and we have hurt our relationship with God. It is not just our sins that we confess, but our inclination to sin. After all these years we still spend our days trying to become something more than creatures who have things missing from the midst of our lives. But then we hear those words that still amaze me every time, “In Jesus Christ we are forgiven.” We get so excited we have to jump to our feet to sing the Gloria Patri.
I think that is already high drama, but it is never the end of the story. As we tell the truth, our hearts are made open to the even deeper truth of God’s Word as it comes to us from the Bible, the sermon and the sacraments. It is always a word of hope because it draws us to the amazing grace of God. Nothing is more amazing to me than the discovery that God has a purpose for our broken lives. In the words of Isaiah, “we are his witnesses.” We leave worship renewed in our vision to watch and to witness to the marvelous things that God is doing in our lives and in the world around us. We call that the mission of the church.
Now we are ready to talk about wholeness. Not our personal wholeness, but God’s whole purposes for salvation and redemption in the world. We throw our lives into this divine activity, and commit our lives to the work of Christ in the world. We do that not as people who have been given a perfect-suffering-free existence by the savior, but as a people who left those expectations behind, when we picked up our own crosses to follow him.
All of this makes Christians rather unique in the world. We are unique in our mission of following Christ, we are unique in telling the truth about our need for a savior, and we are certainly unique in abandoning the quest for personal wholeness. But that is not our most distinctive mark as Christians. I believe the followers of Christ are made unique in the world most of all by our gratitude. Christians have the audacity to be thankful, even when their lives are riddled with missing pieces, because we have discovered that our hope is not in finding the life we want but in being found by a savior who has come looking for those who lost their way chasing dreams. It is out of that gratitude that we then give our lives over to following Christ into every dark corner of the world in need of salvation.
The Use for Suffering
The Old Testament speaks with great beauty about the Shalom of God that provides an all inclusive peace and restoration of the earth and its created inhabitants. People of faith have learned to pray for this shalom and to work for approximations of it by doing justice, and loving mercy, and walking humbly with God. That is the wholeness to which we are committed, praying and working for God’s restoration of all our relationships. But according to our Scriptures, the operative dynamic behind shalom is that it comes as a grace from God. We work toward it only as a way of worshiping God who alone brings redemption and restoration to the earth, someday.
Actually, we are better witnesses to God’s shalom as a people who know we are dependent on God then as those who are on a quest to recreate life into our own image of goodness. About this the Bible is very clear—God created our lives without giving us all we wanted, and then called this created order “good.” What does this mean for those who have an orientation toward a sexuality activity that the Bible clearly proscribes? What does it mean for those who have an orientation to alcoholism, or other addictive behavior? Clearly what it does not mean is that we can act on impulses that further distort God’s image in our lives. We all spend life aware that we have to resist some particular fruit we seem disposed to take. For some that temptation seems so great. The fact remains that the order God has created and called good, has to be good enough for those humble enough to live in the hands of a Creator.
The Bible makes it painfully clear that every time we demand shalom on our terms, in our timing, we have to take control from God who is always too slow and mysterious to be trusted. In the process, of course, we distort shalom into something much less than peace for all the earth. When wholeness becomes a personal agenda, it always comes at the cost of God’s intended shalom for creation.
When we move from the old to the new covenant in the Bible, we find all creatures looking for the creation of a New City with the river of the water of life “flowing from the throne of God and from the Lamb” (Revelation 22:2). On either side of the river is the tree of life, and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. We are told there will be no more night because of the glorious light provided by the reign of the Lord God. That is the Christian vision of restoration and redemption. Like those who have gone before us, we too work for approximations of that vision, but all our work is only a witness to the real Savior Jesus Christ who breaks into our world with his reign.
Jesus did not heal and feed broken, hungry lives in order to make people whole. This is obvious because they all got sick and hungry again. The purpose of his miracles of compassion was to draw our attention to the Incarnation of God, who alone is whole and complete. In fact, it was when the crowds discovered that Jesus’ mission transcended their personal concerns that they abandoned him to his cross. There he died for the sins of the world, not the least of which was our obsession with getting the life of our dreams. As Jesus kept trying to tell us, it is not until we lose the life of our dreams that we will be able to receive the dreams he was dying to give us.
So let us be careful about assuming that it is a Christian mission to relieve all suffering. Certainly we are called to give the cup of cold water in Jesus’ name, to feed the hungry, to give shelter to the homeless, and to visit those in prison. Certainly we are called to work for justice and to show compassion and mercy. But we do all of that as a witness to the Savior. What we must avoid is the temptation to become the savior.
The Choice
So what do I tell my beloved parishioners when they unveil their suffering before their pastor? Of course, it depends on suffering they are enduring. I do not tell abused women to stay with the men who are beating them. I do not tell victims of racism, or sexism that they have to put up with that injustice. I do not tell people who are in lousy jobs, or churches, or even marriages that they can never leave. But what I dare not say is that suffering is always evil, and that they should never hurt. There are some things that break God’s heart, and to have a broken heart is sometimes the only reasonable response to the events of life. I do not reassure them that if they just make better choices, or if they are very careful, or if they just get healthy again, well, then everything will be fine for them. And I never tell them they have a right to get what they want in life. That would be the worst thing I could do.
For each of us there will always be something in the midst of the garden that is missing. That forces a choice upon us. Either it can drive us crazy with desire, or it can become the altar where it is easiest for us kneel before the Lord our Maker.
This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Jul/Aug 1996).
