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Making
things happen - with integrity. A weekly CyberMemo designed to keep you on task. Monday January 21, 2002 Volume IV Number 3 |
FOCUS - Seasons
I remember the Sunday I preached a sermon on the Old Testament story. I was twenty-something at the time. Young. Not a whole lot of credibility with those weather-worn veteran saints. I’d read a bunch of commentaries and dictionaries in preparation. But in spite of all my homework, I was still troubled by the story and unsure about how to approach it from the pulpit. The story was troubling to me and I knew it would be troubling to my people. Maybe if, as the preacher for the morning, I hadn’t been troubled, neither would they have been.
But I was. And I’m guessing they were, too.
It’s the familiar story from the first book of the Bible where Abraham, after a terribly long wait, finally got his son. They were hiking out in some wilderness area as fathers and sons do. A short time before, God made a pretty heavy demand on Abraham. He gave Abraham a test. It was a loyalty test. He told this elderly father to take his young boy and sacrifice him as evidence of his willingness to obey God.
In those days when I was a young pastor, the God of the Bible got a bad rap anyway from a lot of folks. Many dismissed the Holy Scripture as an ancient relic concocted by unsophisticated religious types who, without many intellectual, historical, analytical, scientific, linguistic, philosophic tools to sort things through, tried to make some sense out of a world that could be foreboding and hostile and dangerous. Those ancient writers hatched some primitive notions about a supreme being, a higher power, who controlled things more or less. They recorded the oral traditions of prehistoric peoples, ultimately elevating the archaic works to the status of holy books, even calling the old writings Revelation. Modern thinkers recognized it straight away, and according to them, stories like this one betrayed an unacceptable view of God. In one of the oldest stories in the Bible, God appears ego-centric and barbaric and capricious and cruel.
On the surface at least, this passage didn’t seem to help. I wanted God to get a better hearing than he got in the mainstream of American culture. I figured he could use a little help. I thought I might give it a contemporary spin; make it a little more palatable to my contemporary audience.
So I wrestled with the story, looking for some redeeming quality. Some sermon point that would at the same time be true to the text and relate to real life.
I knew that some believed this to be a prophetic picture of the pain experience by God the Father when His own Son was sacrificed for the sins of many. And indeed, it is a powerful picture. But even so, the notion that God would ask a father, particularly this father, who waited so long for God’s own promise to be fulfilled, to make such a sacrifice was, well, in a word, troubling.
And it is troubling still.
* * * * * * *
I always had difficulty with the notion that God in his “sovereignty” arbitrarily visits hardship and tragedy on unsuspecting folks for the simple purpose of teaching some sort of cosmic lesson. When a couple of teenagers were killed in a tragic fluke of a car accident in our town, if you listen to some, you’d conclude that God engineered the whole thing and someday we’ll understand it. Some suggested that God was behind the 9-11 tragedy because America needed a kick in the pants.
The problem of pain and suffering and heart breaking tragedy presents us believers with something of a dilemma. It stems, I think, from our need to attach after-the-fact blame for just about everything that happens. It has never been more true than in this society we’ve come to call “litigious.”
If the doctors lose a patient, we want to know why. We look for some evidence of malpractice, some failure to diagnose and properly treat, some application of misguided procedures because, we think, if we can attach blame, we might somehow right the scale of injustice. If we end up with some kind of disability and we can somehow prove up that it was caused by some flaw in the workplace or the employer’s lack of attentiveness, then we can make a claim that will fill in the gap of a missing paycheck. If an airliner goes down, we spend millions to reconstruct the wreckage because someone needs to pay and we need to know who. So we go through this enormously painstaking process to put an impossible puzzle together so we can know what happened and why. The clues and answers may allow us to make some changes that will result in prevention of a repeat tragedy, but primarily we want to know who to blame. The pilot? The manufacturer? The air traffic controllers? The maintenance crew? The government? Who’s gunna pay?
When something goes wrong, we want to know.
When it comes to God’s role we bring a similar kind of analysis to the conversation.
We start with the assumption that this is a loving, caring God. And then we also note for that God to be God he must be all-powerful. There’s nothing beyond his reach. He can pretty well do what he wants, except, I suppose, do something that contradicts his character. He cannot be what he is not. And so we look around, and see stuff that ought not to be, and we wonder - why God doesn’t do something about it? He certainly could. It would be consistent with his character. It is within the realm of his sovereignty. What’s the hold up?
Open your eyes. Look around. There’s plenty that needs to be fixed.
So in the aftermath of a personal tragedy, we put together the pieces like a broken up Boeing and examine every piece of it because we want to know. How did this happen? Why did it happen? Who’s to blame? God is a prime suspect.
Was it neglect? Did someone miss something? An oversight? A distraction? Who’s minding the store?
Where was God when we needed him?
So which is it? Is God good? Or Sovereign? It’s gotta be one or the other. Can’t be both, we say.
* * * * * * *
The call from Kristyn came at about three thirty in the afternoon. “Pray for me, Mom and Dad, I’ve got a fever.”
That meant that infection set in and took hold. We didn’t know then how serious it would be. Carolyn and I were blissfully unaware of what would happen next.
The fever sounded the alarm. A team of specialists quickly gathered around our daughter and son-in-law after a full week of intensive hospital care in the Prenatal High Risk Unit. Just a week before, in the middle of the night, Kris lost her amniotic fluid in a premature rupture of that delicate membrane triggering a process that now proved irreversible. During the day, her body showed sharp and clear signs that the pregnancy was coming to an end way early. She was just twenty three weeks along.
Her doctor rallied. The risks were measured. The specialists consulted. The options debated and considered.
Within a couple of hours, on a dark chilly night in Pasadena, Kristyn crossed through a hard and dark passage. Ben, too. In a matter a short time, they transitioned from listening to the regular heart beat of their little boy through the monitor to holding his lifeless body wrapped in a tiny clean blanket in their arms as Kris and her strong husband Ben looked him over and held little their little boy close in a spirit of amazement and wonder and heart-numbing grief. Kristyn told me via telephone as she looked down on his face, "Dad, he is the most beautiful baby I have ever seen."
Carolyn and I arrived in the room just shortly after they returned their little boy to the hospital staff.
We wept together.
The pain - indescribable.
* * * * * * *
Earlier in the week, I sat with Kristyn in her room and she told me something of her struggle. She spent and entire day reading through her Bible.
Something in her memory triggered an interest in the old story of Abraham and his son. She opened her leather-bound book and found the reference somewhere in the Book of Genesis. As she lay on that hospital bed, she was facing questions that no parent wants to face. She was asking whether it would be that she would keep her son. She didn’t know. She wanted to know. And in a profound way, she connected with this father who faced the same dilemma. Her heart ached with his.
She saw something in this ancient story that I had missed. She taught it to me that day in her hospital room from her bed. When I was her age, my assignment was to make sense of this story from a big hardwood pulpit to a congregation lined up in pews on a sunny Sunday morning. Our daughter had her finger on that same text. But she wrestled with the story as a young mother who had just been told that she was in the highest possible category of risk of losing her little baby.
She told me what she was learning. She said, “Dad, here’s what God is teaching me. I understand now that this baby doesn’t belong to me. He is God’s. I can’t control what happens next. I've been thinking it's all up to me. I’ve got to let go.”
And in the listening, beside her bed, I wept with her as together we affirmed something every parent knows. Our children are a gift. We have a season as stewards. We are guardians. We give care. But at any moment, without warning, they may be gone. The ultimate destiny of our children is beyond our control. It’s a painful truth. But it is the truth.
And somehow, from the book, in the story of Abraham, my little girl found some measure of comfort in knowing that there are painful limitations to our human capacities.
And then she looked me in the eyes and told me, “I have a name for our little boy, Dad. Ben agrees. His name is Isaac.”
“That’s a beautiful name, honey.” It made me smile. “Our first grandson’s name is Isaac. So shall it be.”
* * * * * * *
Those of us who dismiss this powerful book simply because it’s old and it presents us with riddles that are difficult to unravel are really missing out.
If there is a tape floating around somewhere of that sermon preached from an obscure little church back in the seventies, it would probably bring more comic relief than spiritual insight. But that was then. Now, I’m feeling a bit more like one of those weather-worn veterans and I'm coming round to the place where I understand - this Book is quick and powerful, and sharper than a two edged sword. It cuts to the heart of the matter, and brings healing and hope and a peace that passes all understanding to all of us who will read and ponder and contemplate and comprehend.
I don’t believe that God arbitrarily visits tragedy on the innocents. We live in an imperfect world, full of violence and storms and disease and and infection and calamity and enmity and strife. Airplanes fall from the sky and mountains explode and winds blow and food runs short and water gets contaminated and good people suffer. And God’s heart breaks.
Think about what happened to his son.
And in the grieving, we learn something good.
Isaac, precious little Isaac, my grandson, has touched my life. For good.
He is a gift. A forever gift. Isaac Nathan. Isaac, the gift.
* * * * * * *
It’s Monday morning. You are a leader.
They say that life comes in seasons. There is a time to laugh. A time to cry. A time to dance. A time for war. A time for peace. A time to embrace. A time to search. A time to mend. A time to plant. A time to mourn.
In our house, it’s time to grieve. A time to mourn. Our Isaac is gone. For now.
Maybe you have an Isaac, too. Maybe our story reminds you of yours - when hopes and dreams vanished in a terrible and swift unwelcome moment when the earth stood still. Time stopped. The loss is still real. To this very day.
We’re learning that tears bring healing. That holding brings wholeness. And that remembering strengthens bonds.
Leadership means that you set the pace. You make the room. You get the conversations rolling. You set the stage. You create the space for healing to flow. You share in the tears. You listen attentively. You affirm the process.
God takes care of the rest.
He knows.
He’s been there.
© Copyright Kenneth E. Kemp 2002
LeaderFOCUS is brought to you by Good Stewardship Associates
Special Thanks for Design by my good friend David Belcher, owner of Rhino Media Group and creator of WisdomGram
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