The Absence of God
By Charles Rush
March 28, 1999
Matthew 27:27-50; 54
veral years ago a friend of mine was out very late at night. A
recent graduate of the Wharton Business School, he had been working
80-hour weeks on mergers for Donaldson, Lufkin and Genrette. The
schedule had been a grind for months and he had been caught up in the
frenzy of it all, burning the candle at both ends and burning out
though he didn't know it at the time.
One night a college friend calls him. The two of them hook up at
10 p.m., they catch up on their lives, way leads to way, it is suddenly
2:30 in the morning when the both of them realize that they have to
go. Tired, with a few beers under the belt, they are saying a few
farewells right near a subway stop when shots ring out and they both
hit the ground. A shop owner comes running out of the front of his
bodega with two teenagers behind him who force him to his knees, guns
drawn to his head. These two kids are hyped up and wild. The street
is practically empty and one of them is waving his pistol around
ordering everyone to freeze. The owner of the bodega is crying and
begging all at once. He is so scared he forgets to speak in English
and is rambling in his native tongue. The two teens are shouting
orders at the few people caught in this drama to remain still and obey
their commands.
The shop owner finally breaks a few words into English and keeps
repeating that he has 5 children. One of the teenagers begins a rant
to the whole world as he has captured their attention for the moment.
It was full of a lot of bombast about how
he was in control
and people were going to do what
he told them to do,
about how he had been nothing to them 5 minutes ago but now
he was something, about how he just might do anything just
because he could. Like all the Cambodians in
The Killing Fields,
my friend said there was nothing more frightening than the arbitrary
power of an angry seventeen-year-old with a gun.
Several years later, I was involved with a four-year-old kid that
was in transition. This young man had been removed from his home where
there had been some kind of abuse, violence, or drug abuse. He had
been in a couple of different foster care homes but the families gave
him back to the system because he acted out. The social worker just
needed us to keep him for one night in transition. She brought him
over shrieking. She wasn't able to control this kid, so I went
out to the car and carried him into the house, my neighbors wondering,
I'm sure just what in the world is going on. Now there is not
much you can do with a screaming kid except just hold them and wait and
I was just holding this kid for a while to calm him down. I'm
holding him and every once in a while, when he talks at all, he just
says ‘don't touch me or I'll bite you.'
Of course, all parents have held shrieking children. Some of us have
earned a degree in screaming kids. Many of us have had that wonderful
experience of carrying a kid screaming bloody murder out of a nice
restaurant in the Mall, people glancing at you like you might have
beaten this kid or something. Isn't that great?
And you learn to distinguish different types of screaming, do you
not? There is one kind of screaming that is just the plain old tantrum
and you know that if you engage the tantrum, the screaming will just
get louder and longer. There is the scream of physical pain that is
more piercing and alarming, and you also know that it is going to pass
with some tender loving care and good holding. There is the scream
that comes from being too tired, full of cold medicine and just sick.
It has a whiny quality to it, sometimes a hysteria, and you know that
these kids are not truly in control of what they are doing which makes
it easier to endure even if it is not going away.
I may be wrong but with this kid I thought I heard a new version of
screaming. I thought I heard a screed of the soul. It had a depth to
it, seemed to come out of the center of his being. It was afraid. It
was lonely. It was a cry that was mad as hell and wanted to be loved
at the same time. It was the cry of a young child without his Mom. It
was an awful and inconsolable longing. And for just a moment, I
wondered to myself if I wasn't looking at that seventeen
year-old-teenager with a gun when he was a kid?
Eloi, Eloi, lama sabacthani.
‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?' There is no
question but that the God forsaken moments in our lives shake us to the
heart of our being and some of us never recover from them entirely.
Those times when the forces of nature and the forces of history seemed
to have aligned themselves in a foreboding intersection that has us as
the target in the cross hairs. I was reading about a Navy captain this
week that was piloting one of the very first long-range submarines
after the war. It was a brand new submarine with the best technology
on it. Everything was going along just as planned when a fire broke
out on the fifth day that the crew couldn't put out. Then came
another explosion and another. Toxic fumes were filling the sub and
the fire was uncontrollable. The men leapt to the deck of the sub.
Unfortunately, they were in the Arctic Ocean north of Norway.
Unfortunately, there were 16-foot waves crashing over the top of the
sub. Unfortunately, it happened in the middle of the night when most
everyone was sleeping. None of the men were in protective gear. Most
were in their underwear, lashed to the bow of the sub, being violently
thrown to and fro. There was no solution in sight. It was fire below
and freezing air above and there came a moment of somber resolve when
the Captain of the submarine was trying to find some solace in the fact
that people generally conk out in the freezing waters before they
drown. That is a God forsaken moment. He didn't plan it,
didn't deserve it. The only options were bad, worse, and tragic.
Nature is bad enough, but injustice, caprice, and arbitrariness
can literally
drive you insane. I was in Moscow in 1991 and I met quite a few people
who had spent time in the Gulag, enduring the torture for which
Communism became infamous. I met many people who had suffered much for
their religion or because they stood for human rights and they were
truly admirable. But one fellow struck me in particular, precisely
because he could not suffer for a cause.
Serge told me a story that he was arrested in the middle of the
night, torn from the warmth of his bed and brought to an interrogation
room where he was questioned and tortured for hours about things he
knew absolutely nothing about. The more he denied knowledge, the worse
the torture became. Finally, he confessed to something/anything just
to be left alone. That began an oddessy for him through the system of
the Gulag that would last for ten years. He was arrested, as he would
later learn, on a case of mistaken identity, charged for conspiracy and
espionage he knew nothing about.
For the first weeks of his imprisonment, he kept thinking that this
would all end soon, that someone in his family or his neighbors would
come explain everything and it would be over. They never came. They
were too afraid that they might also get arrested for something they
didn't do. He went from one camp to a progressively more harsh
camp, ending up in Siberia.
I asked him what the hardest thing about the whole experience was. He
looked at me in a pensive blank stare and said ‘I was going
insane progressively Each day I had to wake up and find a reason to
live. That was the hard part.'
The story of the trial and death of Jesus is filled with
frustration, arbitrariness. It appears that the forces of destiny are
arrayed with evil and injustice. There is no question that this story
is more threatening still for very religious folk. There is a strong
tradition in our natural theology and in our biblical tradition that
assumes that because God is God, God is in control of the universe; and
if God is in control of the universe, God is going to protect us from
arbitrary evil because otherwise God wouldn't be good. It is more
threatening still because surely God would protect Jesus. I mean, God
may not protect us because we are fairly compromised people. But Jesus
is the very best of our breed.
It is just common sense to have a pretty strong tradition of the
Sovereign protection of God. The psalms repeatedly lift up God as
worthy of praise because God brings us the routine of the seasons.
Furthermore, God is looking out for us. One of my favorite psalms is
Psalm 121 ‘I lift mine eyes to the hills/ from whence cometh my
strength/ my strength cometh from the Lord who hath made heaven and
earth He will not left your foot stumble/behold he who keeps Israel
shall neither slumber nor sleep/ The Lord is your guardian/ He is your
defense at your right hand/ The sun will not strike you by day/nor the
moon by night.'The Lord will guard you against all evil/The Lord
will protect your coming out and your going in from this day forward
and forevermore.
I think that is pretty clear. This is the Sovereign God who stands
over against us, the ultimate power of the universe. Clearly,
enforcing justice in the world is in the job description of the
Almighty. We need reassurance that God is not only there but that God
is actively enforcing justice, protecting us from the vicissitudes of
history and the arbitrariness of evil men.
Even Jesus portrayed God in much this fashion. Jesus taught us not
to worry about what we shall wear or how we shall eat. One time in the
gospel of Matthew, he is reported to have said ‘Put away anxious
thoughts about food and drink to keep you alive, and clothes to cover
your body. ‘Surely life is more than food, the body more than
clothes. Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow and reap and
store in the barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. You are worth
more than the birds! Is there one among you who by anxious thought can
add a foot to their height? Consider the lilies of the field, how they
grow; they do not work, they do not spin; and yet, even Solomon in all
his splendor was not arrayed as one of these (Mt. 6:25-28). The
justification for this non-anxious approach is that God will take care
of us.
Mark Trotter says he was preaching once on how God looks out for us
and takes care of us. By the time he finished his sermon he was all
fuzzy, with a warm, basking glow. He is standing at the back of the
church when someone came up to him and said ‘what about
Auschwitz?' He went on to say that this person came to his office
the next day and reported to him ‘I'm not coming to church
anymore because I don't believe in God and I don't believe in
God because God did not answer my prayers'. She then enumerated a
number of very sober, legitimate things that she had prayed for, things
you and I would regularly pray for as well- health, well being,
protection for her children. She didn't really want an answer to
her declaration, not that we Ministers have an answer for some of these
questions either, she just wanted to file a complaint officially with
the Cleric ‘God doesn't answer prayer.'
Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani.
You may recall that Elie Wiesel's response to the radical evil of
the Holocaust was something quite like this woman's. He tells the
oft-quoted story of the time that two men and a boy were hanged for
some routine trespass. The two men died instantly and the young boy
slowly strangled because his weight wasn't enough to break his
neck. In the midst of the agony of watching this someone cried out
‘Where is God?' Another man answered, pointing to the boy,
‘there is God'. Wiesel uses that story to point to the
impotence of God in our world. And if God is impotent, then God is
pretty much irrelevant in his view. And that is one possible answer.
But I would also point to the witness of Etty Hillesum in the book
An Interrupted Life.
She was in the same concentration camp, filled with the same
frustration and hardship. It never exactly occurred to her to blame
God for her condition. She appears to have had a visceral- a
pre-reflective- understanding that God would not want to put anyone
through something so horrible. Quite different from Wiesel, she
remarks that she had an increasing sense of the presence of God as a
help in her time of trouble. Indeed, as things became more difficult
and dangerous that sense of divine accompaniment and encouragement
became more pronounced. ‘It was as if she didn't need to
understand, because she knew God understood her'. She had a sense
of divine support in the midst of tragedy.
And that is what the symbol of the Cross has meant to Christians
for centuries. It means that God is with us, that God understands our
suffering and our frustration, the alienation that we are going
through. The tragedy that Jesus experiences is not diminished one
wit. He is not relieved of the horrible violence of it. But
Christians came to see this whole episode as God taking that suffering
up into the bosom of God.
You see, it is at precisely this point that the authentic man Jesus
becomes something of a living icon, radiating the presence of God in
empathetic identification. It is exactly here in his forsakeness that
the communion of the divine transcendent is manifest. It is in this
boundary situation, this mixture of courage and despair, that Jesus
does not so much know
as he appears to have been known
by God. This is what Christians gleaned from this story looking back
on the whole unfolding drama at a later time. As Paul Tillich once
said ‘
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when god has
disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.'
God is present with us but not in such a way that the antinomies
and contradictions of history are resolved prematurely. It is not
given to us to have the cup of tragedy and frustration pass from us in
this life. We are not granted any special exemption because of our
spiritual discipline or moral virtue. Indeed, if the life of Jesus is
a reliable guide, we should be warned that following in this way is
likely to animate the arbitrary evil that exists all around us.
But in some sense, all of our life is taken up into the heart and
mind of God, all of our injustice and tragedy,
even our God forsaken moments.
There is an incompleteness to our lives, however good and beautiful,
however ugly and sad. Their completion will finally come from beyond
ourselves. They will come from God. There is an irresolution to
history that will come from beyond time. It will come from eternity.
That is the promise of the Cross.
Reinhold Niebuhr once said ‘
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime; therefore, we must be
saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense
in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by
faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
therefore we are saved by love.'
Brothers and sisters, we are at that time of year in the Christian
calendar, we are at that place in our confession of the faith, when we
are forced to remember that our faith in the world must come from some
place beyond it. Our confidence in the triumph of goodness is not
warranted by the facts alone. We must confess with St. Paul ‘for
now we see in a mirror dimly, but then we will see face to face. For
now, I know in part; but then we will understand fully,
even as we have been understood.
So faith, hope, and love abide, these three.' They are not borne
out by the world, but ultimately, they will make sense of it.
Amen.
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