SunJun62010
I Kings 17:8-24
What a riveting and hopeful story is this tale of Elijah’s giving life to a dead boy. It’s a story with a happy ending, the kind of story we love to hear. At the same time, I find myself wondering how such a passage sounds to someone who has lost a child. Because this is not a story without its terrible questions. And chief among them is this: if God could bring life back to that stricken little boy, why could God not do the same to my precious child?
You who have lost a child have certainly wondered that. But it’s not just losing a child that brings up the question of whether God could have done something different and better. If you’ve been passed over for the promotion that that aggravating nuisance-of-a-colleague got, you’ve asked it. If you’ve been denied health insurance or had your home foreclosed or been betrayed by the love of your life, you’ve asked that question—at least implicitly, if not explicitly and loudly: “God, can’t you make things right for me too? Can’t you do your God thing and give me what I most want?”
One of the things I love is to read sermons. I’m fascinated by how other pastors approach biblical texts, how they speak publicly about the ineffable mysteries that lie at the heart of our lives, how they make sense of what sometimes just seems absurd. One of the oddities of being a parish pastor is that you don’t often have the opportunity to hear others try to make sense of God and the world. So reading sermons is a form of worship for me.
Last summer, I found myself gripped by a sermon preached by the Rev. John Claypool, a man who lost his ten-year-old daughter to leukemia. Claypool was wrapped up in just those questions. And he talks about three possible approaches to take when things go horribly wrong. Two of those approaches, he says, go nowhere. Only one is truly life-giving. I want to summarize those.
The first unhelpful approach is what he calls “the road of unquestioning resignation.” “You’ve just got to accept it as God’s will,” say some. We must not question. The way out is to submit, to surrender. And while there’s something to this—you can’t, after all, change the inevitable—at the same time, as Claypool says, you don’t just have to passively accept it. You can do what the psalmist does and complain loudly. You can do what Jesus does and say, “let this cup pass from me” (Matthew 26:39)—basically “don’t do this to me.” You can blast the unfairness of it all. It’s not remotely helpful, says Claypool, to be told simply to acquiesce to what is egregiously wrong, as though you have no feelings about it. What we have with God, above all, is a relationship. And if that relationship is to be healthy, we will react fully to our pain. It’s an act of faith to ask the questions and seek God’s answers and knock at that holy door.
A second unhelpful approach, says Claypool, is to imagine that there are clear and definite answers to our questions. There is no “road of total intellectual understanding,” in which all the questions are answered and the loose ends tidied up. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t ask the questions, because we should. It’s simply to say that these questions dwell in the land of mystery. There is no final, fully satisfying explanation for why awful things happen to us. And insisting on finding one will never let us heal.
There’s only one real way of dealing with the horrors that come to us, and that’s to approach it all with a measure of gratitude. That may seem a strange goal after a major trauma, but it’s the only way of becoming whole, says Claypool.
When Claypool was a child during World War II, his family lived on a meager budget, and they made do without a washing machine. In the middle of the war, one of their neighbors was drafted, and, when he left for war, he let the Claypools use his washing machine. Several years later, when the soldier returned home, he took his washing machine back, and little John, having forgotten that the machine didn’t belong to his family, remembers being resentful at losing it. So his mother gave him some perspective. “You must remember,” she said, “that machine never belonged to us in the first place. That we ever got to use it at all was a gift. So, instead of being mad at its being taken away, let’s use this occasion to be grateful that we had it at all.”
A good part of the Bible’s emphasis, says Claypool, is that “life is gift—pure, simple, sheer gift—and that we here on earth are to relate to it accordingly.” So in dealing with his daughter’s death, only gratitude gets him through it. “I do not mean to say that such a perspective makes things easy,” he says, “for it does not. But at least it makes things bearable when I remember that Laura Lue was a gift, pure and simple, something I neither earned nor deserved nor had a right to. And when I remember that the appropriate response to a gift, even when it is taken away, is gratitude, then I am better able to try and thank God that I was ever given her in the first place.” As he says finally, “The way of gratitude does not alleviate the pain, but it somehow puts some light around the darkness and builds strength to begin to move on” (A Chorus of Witnesses, “Life Is a Gift,” pp. 120-130).
Claypool nails it, doesn’t he. And I’ve been thinking about that perspective in all dimensions of our lives. Gratitude is a discipline of faith. It’s a kind of choice. Brother David Steindl-Rast says, “It is not happiness that makes us grateful, but it is gratefulness that makes us happy” (The Christian Century, June 1, 2010, p. 13). How might we find the gift even in what we detest?
Again and again, we tend, as the British say, to get our knickers in a twist over things we can’t control, many frustrating, some downright crushing. And with all of those, how would it be if we took a stance of gratitude? Think of simple things like how uptight we get about whether LeBron James will stay or go. Have you ever seen such a media circus—well, this week at least! There is rampant speculation about where he may land, and about what will become of Northeast Ohio if he signs elsewhere. Now I’m as eager as anyone to have him stay—he’s an incredible athletic marvel, and I will miss him if he leaves. But what if we were to take the perspective that we’ve been able to see him up close for seven wonderful years, he’s brought great joy to the region, and now the healthiest thing is for us to let go. If he lands here, great. And if he doesn’t, we move on and look to the next great grace in our lives. And I know what you’re mumbling to yourself: “That’s easy for him to say. He’s only lived here for five years. See what it’s like to wait for forty six years and counting for a world championship.” And you’re right. But when I think of the alternative, all I can think is: it’s better to be grateful than bitter, better to celebrate what we’ve had than to regret what we’ve lost.
The same is true in every facet of our lives. We lose the contract at work. What are we to do about it—get lost in a miasma of hand-wringing, or give thanks that we had it and look for the next one? We face the loss of some ability or a compromise in the fullness of our lives. Are we to drown in self-pity, or celebrate the special moments we’ve known? Remember: it’s not that grief or sadness or frustration is wrong. Expressing loss is a crucial facet of moving toward wholeness. It’s that, without some willingness to appreciate what we’ve had and still have, we will shrivel into a shadowy underworld of regret and bitterness.
I want to be like Armando Galarraga, the Tigers’ pitcher who lost his perfect game this week on a blown call by an umpire. Not only was the umpire, Jim Joyce, incredibly repentant about his mistake, but Galarraga himself was the picture of grace in the wake of that terrible call. He walked away from the play with an ironic smile on his face, and never said a word of criticism to the umpire—as if to say, “This is the way life is. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if you give in to life’s resentment, you wither away in a kind of poison.” That’s the way I want to be.
The story we read earlier is all about God’s gifts to us when we least expect them. Elijah and the widow have food and drink even when it appears to be gone. And the woman’s son is returned to life even when he has clearly died. Our gifts from God are not always so dramatic. Sometimes, as in this simple meal of bread and juice, they are the simplest of realizations: that we have had joy when we didn’t expect it, that we have had blessings that we didn’t, strictly speaking, deserve, that there is something about life that is magical and wonderful. And it is God who has done this. Thanks be to God.