Pastor Rob Recommends ... (January 28, 2022)

 

Brothers Karamazov

By Fyodor Dostoevsky (1879; 1984 by Bantam Classics)

 

It’s worth the time to make the journey through Dostoevsky’s classic. He shows the gospel and many of the questions the gospel births in the minds of women and men.

First Sunday of Lent - Forgiveness (Psalm 32)

            This Psalm begins, “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven.”  Doesn’t that assume that the transgressor feels guilt and shame because of his misdeeds?  If he didn’t, he would not need the forgiveness to feel happy.  Maybe the sin itself gives him a thrill, a guilty pleasure, if you will. 

            Have you had that experience with sin?  You know a particular word is offensive, an abhorrent word, but you giggle when you hear it or say it.  Gossip; does it really even count sin?  And systemic sins – sinful systems; who ever heard of such a thing?  Am guilty for benefitting in a sinful system?  Seriously, who feels guilt over sin whether it’s individual or systemic?  You know the phrase.  I’m only human.  Why even make a big deal about disobeying God? 

            But this singer, in Psalm 32:3, says, “While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long.”  Kept silence; he, or she, the singer, kept it inside.  Whatever the sin was, he buried it deep in his heart.   This Psalm is attributed to David and his most public of sins was to have an adulterous affair, try to cover it up, and then have the wronged husband, Uriah, murdered in a way that would protect him from guilt.  David committed both individual and systemic-power related sins in the Bathsheba episode.  You can read about it in 2 Samuel 11-12.  Psalm 32 is one of David’s confession songs. 

            However, the Psalms are portable.  What David sang, you or me or anyone could sing in reference to our own sins.  We could sing, if we feel guilty.   David had help feeling guilty.  He says in Psalm 32:4, “Day and night your hand, [O Lord], was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.”  The way God’s hand fell on heavy David was through the confrontation provoked by the prophet Nathan. 

            God’s heavy hand sets upon us until we have to face our sin, the damage it does, and the guilt it throws on us.  Two of history’s most acclaimed authors have captured this guilt sin has wrought.

            We’ve already mentioned that a parable from the prophet Nathan provoked King David’s guilt.  In 1843 Edgar Allen Poe published “the Tell Tale Heart.” In the poem, the narrator is driven by his own madness to the kill the old man.  He thinks the murder and brilliant cover-up has relieved his gnawing insanity, but it only drives it all the more. 

            A couple of police officers come to the door because a neighbor heard a midnight cry.  The narrator has successfully hidden the body and the police officers are about to leave the house when his screaming madness awakens with a vengeance. 

Why would they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men --but the noise steadily increased. Oh God! what could I do? I foamed --I raved --I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled. Was it possible they heard not? Almighty God! --no, no! They heard! --they suspected! --they knew! --they were making a mockery of my horror!-this I thought, and this I think. But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! and now --again! --hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!

"Villains!" I shrieked, "dissemble no more! I admit the deed! --tear up the planks! here, here! --It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

            Day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us in our sin.

           

            Twenty years or so Poe published his account of agonizing guilt in ‘The Telltale Heart,’ Fyodor Dostoevsky’s presents a similar theme in his novel Crime and Punishment where the gifted but starving writer and student Raskolnikov bludgeons the old woman Alena Ivanova.  She is stingy with her money and has no pity on this able, but poor young man.  The police suspect someone else in the crime, and that man commits suicide.  Raskolnikov is in the clear.  But, we are never in the clear. 

            Leaving Lieutenant Elia Petrovitch, Raskolnikov knows he is free, but when he steps from the police station, there she is waiting, his beloved Sonia.  She knows what he has done.

Her countenance expressed the utmost despair.  At the sight, Raskolnikov smiled, but such a smile!  A moment afterwards he had gone back to the police-office.  Elia Petrovitch was in the act of ransacking some papers.  “Ah!  There you are again!  Have you forgotten something?  But what is the matter with you?”  With pale lips and fixed gaze, Raskolnikov slowly advanced toward Elia Petrovitch.  [He] allowed himself to sink into a chair that was offered, but could not take his eyes off of Elia Petrovitch.  For a moment, both men looked at one another in silence.  “It was I – “said Raskolnikov.  “It was I who killed, with a hatchet, the old moneylender and her sister, Elizabeth, and robbery was my motive.”  Elia Petrovitch called for assistance.  People rushed in from various directions (p.421).

In the Psalm, David sings, day and Night, God’s hand is heavy upon us in our sin.  We are not murders like Raskolnikov or Poe’s narrator, or David for that matter, but sin rests just as heavy on us.  Our sense of guilt is enough to crush us and when it does not, God’s Holy Spirit convicts our soul.  When our conscience is dull and we seem content in spite of our words and deeds that hurt others, not bothered that we are agents of pain and deception, then God steps in and pricks the conscience and convicts the soul.  As long as we deny our need for forgiveness, we waste away, groaning all day.

However, there is hope – the best of hopes.  That’s the point of Psalm 32 and the simple message of this day.  There is a way out of this fog of sin, a fog so thick it is only cleared after God the son is murdered by us all when he’s nailed to the cross.  There’s a light that shows the path from crippling guilt and shame to unfettered freedom, a freedom that enables us to soar to the heavens. 

Again, the Psalm: “Happy are those whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.  Happy are those whose record the Lord has cleared of guilt, in whose spirit there is no deceit” (32:1-2).  David knew that happiness because he confessed, received forgiveness, and rose to stand as a new man.  He says as much in the Psalm.  “I acknowledged my sin to you … and you forgave” (32:5).  It is a basic, central Christian belief.  When we confess our sins by name, repent of those sins by turning away from them, and turn to Jesus, we are forgiven and we are made new.

In this Psalm, God is not an angry judge waiting to crush us in our guilt.  It is our guilt itself that crushes us.  In the Psalm, God’s heavy hand is meant to lead us to confession that we might be forgiven and rescued from the weight of our sins.  Verse 6 says, “Let all who are faithful offer prayer to you.”  And in the next verse, the singer sings to God, “You are a hiding place for me; you preserve me from trouble; you surround me with glad cries of deliverance” (32:7).

Confession is freeing.  We fear it because walking through our guilt is painful, but God walks with us.  And the church must walk with people so they don’t have to face their own shame alone.  We cannot be a judging community that compounds the pain and shame of the guilty by rejecting them.  We have to imitate our Lord by forgiving as God forgives. We have to be a community of grace, a community in which grace is extended to all.

In this way, and only in this way, does confession bring freedom.  And, O, what freedom it is!  Dostoevsky captures it well at the end of Crime and Punishment.  Sonia goes with Raskolnikov to Siberia.  She will wait for him to serve out his 7-year prison sentence.  She has been his conscience, by her purity forcing him to confess, and staying with him when he did.  She did not preach at him, but she lived her faith.  She gave him a New Testament, but never forced him to read it.

On the last page, he sits in his sell, holding the closed Bible, contemplating all that has happened: his crime, his confession, Sonia’s love for him.  He notes that as hard as things have been for her, “nothing could take her joy!”  And thinks to himself, “Her faith, her feelings, may not mine become like them” (p.434).  The books ends, “Now a new history begins: a story of the gradual renewing of a man, of his slow, progressive regeneration, and change from one world to another – an introduction to the previously unknown realities of life.”  Those are the realities of the happiness and freedom we have when we turn to God in Christ and receive forgiveness. 

A final note from the Psalm reiterates the necessity of grace from God to us and from us to one another.  Verse 10 says, “Many are the torments of the wicked.”  And we might expect the next stanza to say, “But great are the delights of the righteous.”  However, it does not say that.  It says, “Steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.” 

The contrast is not between the wicked and the obedient, the sinful and the righteous.  David, the singer of this Psalm, knows we all sin.  The contrast is between those who are miserable because they are stuck in sin and don’t see the way and just suffer the pain of it all, and those who, in the midst of the messes of their own making, turn to God and trusted God.  God can be trusted with our junk, with our messes.  “Steadfast love surrounds those who trust in the Lord.”

Enter that freedom today.  Fully confess your sin today and look to the cross and know that you are forgiven.  One of the ways God makes things right in the world is the gift of freedom.  God frees us from our own sins by forgiving and making us clean and new.  Confess today, and receive the new life God offers.

When we do that, then the final verse, Psalm 32:11 is ours.

“Be glad in the Lord and rejoice, O righteous, and shout for joy, all you upright in heart” (32:11). 

AMEN

A Creative Response to Suffering (Job 10:1-17)

            In the Bible I find several responses to adversity.  King David, whom we read about in 1^st & 2^nd Samuel and 1^st Chronicles and who is considered the greatest of Israel’s Kings and the “man after God’s own heart,” responded by fighting.  When things got tough, David got his slingshot, prayed, and went to war.

            Fighting was not always an option and even it when it was available, it was not always the right thing to do.  We also hear the lonely voice of the prophet speaking God’s judgment, sometimes against God’s own people Israel, sometimes against Israel’s enemies, and in the New Testament, God’s final judgment against Satan, evil, and sin.  Amos, Jeremiah, Daniel, and John of Patmos are some examples of people who responded to adversity with prophecy.

            A third Biblical response comes from the Apostle Paul.  He responded to everything that came up in life the same way: he shared the gospel. Whether Paul was whipped, kicked out of town, imprisoned, well-received as an honored guest, or respected, he responded by talking the salvation available to all through faith in Jesus Christ.  Suffering and adversity brought opportunity.

            There are other responses in the scriptures, but we narrow our focus to the book of Job.  Satan challenged God, saying that the most righteous man, Job, who was a true worshipper, would turn on God and curse God, if God allowed Job to be harmed.  God took the bait and allowed Satan to destroy all of Job’s property, kill all of Job’s children, and harm Job’s body. 

            Job’s three friends Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar come and sit with him and talk with him.  They insist that Job’s suffering is from God.  Job agrees.  They insist that Job must have sinned terribly to have such pain and loss.  His adversity is his own fault.  His suffering came by way of his mistakes and rebellion. 

The three friends in their speeches insist Job must submit to God.  Submission, they say, is the only acceptable response to pain.  Job must submit to God’s lordship, confess his sin, and repent.  Then, he will be made whole.

            Job will not submit.  He agrees that God brought this on him.  His friends accuse him of rebellion and he does indeed rebel.  But his rebellion is not a sinful rejection of God’s ways.  Rather, he rebels against a shallow theology that responds to real-world suffering by retreating to long-held theological presuppositions.  He rebels against his friends’ insistence that he confess.

            Job’s rebellion produces two responses.  First, he laments.  Lamentation is a form of prayer rarely used or even understood in churches today.  Jeremiah, the prophet, offered lament prayers. 

            Here’s an example of Jeremiah praying lamentation:

Bottom of Form

⁷O Lord, you have enticed me, and I was enticed; you have overpowered me, and you have prevailed. I have become a laughingstock all day long; everyone mocks me.

⁸For whenever I speak, I must cry out, I must shout, “Violence and destruction!” For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all day long (Jeremiah 20:7-8).

 

And then here is a sample of Job’s lament prayer.

10“I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.

²I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me.

³Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked (Job 10:1-3)?

 

 

Job expends a lot of energy in Lament prayer.  It is not though, his only response. The lament expresses injustice sorrow.  It is spoken by one defeated.  It is the ultimate in honesty before God.  We are so concerned with saying the “right thing” from a religious standpoint, we skip the honesty in lament prayer.  We fear it. 

The Old Testament invites us to enter this world of prayer.  More Psalms are laments than are praises.  Those Psalms along with Jeremiah and Job can be read by people today who suffer.  To read those words from the heart, “Does it seem good to you [O God] to oppress, to despise the work of your hands,” is to say what you feel.  This is not a condemnation of God.  It is the reality that you are hurting so badly, you have to vent.  You have to say it.  The Old Testament gives words for when we have to let it out. 

Job then goes further.  After the Lament, Job will bring protest right to God.  Jobs says to God,

¹²You have granted me life and steadfast love, and your care has preserved my spirit.

¹³Yet these things you hid in your heart; I know that this was your purpose.

¹⁴If I sin, you watch me, and do not acquit me of my iniquity.

¹⁵If I am wicked, woe to me! If I am righteous, I cannot lift up my head, for I am filled with disgrace and look upon my affliction.

¹⁶Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me.

 

            This movement from lament into protest leads Job to the language of a legal trial.  Job takes God to court.  His is a refreshing approach, taken by a man in a true relationship with God.  The friends have become people who choose the rules about God over a relationship with God.  They theologize and come up with rules and then stick to those rules no matter what.  Job will not.  He is so committed to the relational nature of God that he is willing to defy convention and challenge God.

            Just as God accepted the Satan’s challenge regarding Job, God accepts Job’s challenge regarding justice.  This matters because when we respond to adversity through lament, God will hear our lament prayers as God heard Job.  When we challenge God, God will accept our challenge.  God may humble us as God humbled Job.  But as hard as that humbling is, we remember that God humbles those whom he loves; those who treat him as one to be worshipped and loved in relationship rather than as a distant deity who can be reduced to a set of rules. 

            In commenting on Job’s protest to God, Old Testament professor Sam Ballentine quotes from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov.  The second brother, Ivan, is an intellectual and an atheist.  Ballentine feels that Ivan Karamazov speaks out the very protest against injustice heard from Job.  Ivan says, “I refuse to accept this world of God’s. …  Please understand, it is not God that I do not accept, but the world he has created.  I do not accept God’s world and I refuse to accept it” (Ballentine 172-3).

            There is a danger in lament and protest.  It leads to us sitting with Ivan the atheist.  The one suffering permanently abandons faith and gives up on God altogether.  Ivan’s words become ours.  “I do not accept God’s world.”

            In tension with this fallout and drift away from faith is a movement toward redemption of God’s world and a claiming of the world for the Kingdom inaugurated by Jesus.  This is a very optimistic worldview that believes in the presence and activity of the Holy Spirit.  Most of the writing in recent years done along these very positive thought lines comes from theologians, pastors, and spiritual directors who are not writing from the perspective of Job’s pain.  I don’t mean all these authors who have such a hopeful outlook have never suffered.  I don’t mean they all have easy lives.  But the hope that Christians can use their talents, skills, and experience to positively provoke transformation from within the world’s systems – education, politics, business – that hope is not coming from people who are currently suffering as Job suffered.

            It is coming from people who live in joy as their very lives are offered to God.  If you are a teacher, your offering is to be an outstanding, compassionate educator.  If you are a waitress – you are diligent in serving your customers, especially the rude ones.  Your equipment in representing Christ through excellence in your craft is patience, friendliness, and a servant’s heart.  If you are a carpenter – one of the ways you acknowledge the rule of God’s kingdom is to build things that are sturdy, that last, and are of high quality.  Doing what we do well and with absolute integrity is an offering to God.  In this we submit our lives to God’s lordship.

            Some of the leaders in this movement of announcing the kingdom and transforming culture are Andy Crouch, N.T. Right, Richard Foster, Gabe Lyons, and Rob Bell.  This hope-filled theology collides with Job’s perspective of suffering, lament, and protest.  How can the church today live out theologically optimism and at the same time respect and love people who are going through Job-type experiences?  We’ve got to hold onto that theological hope because that’s the stuff of Easter. We are resurrection people.  But even as we live in the Kingdom now, we also have to recognize that there is suffering in the world.  This is a fallen world and we have to respect that people have “Job-sized” problems. 

            This is where the church, ours and Christians in churches around the world, can be all that God is calling us and equipping us to be.  In doing what we do best – our experiences, skills, and training - God’s people band together to create a culture of compassion and care.

            Jesus did this.  A woman was caught in adultery.  The law was clear.  She was to be executed by stoning.  Jesus saw beyond the law.  He saw a woman who had no voice, who probably could not have resisted the man with whom she sinned, and who had no hope.  He did not deny the sin.  Instead he saw the big picture.  He invited all those who were sinless to begin the stoning.  No stone was thrown.  Instead of accusing, Jesus created a new paradigm – a community of forgiveness. 

            On another occasion he was faced with 5000 hungry people and only a few fish and loaves, not enough to even feed his twelve disciples.  Yet, he thanked God for the food and broke it and passed it out.  Miraculously all were filled, there were 12 baskets left over.  Conventional wisdom said, send them off.  Jesus did not send them off.  He asked the people to stay.  He had compassion for them.  He instituted a system of provision. In Acts, we see the earliest Christians continuing this practice, not by miracle, but by sharing.

            How can we creatively respond to Job and the pain in the world today?

            I think of my friend Caleb.  He visited about a dozen orphan care points in Africa.  At the time of his trip, he and his brother were running a Christian school and a Christian recording studio in OK.  They had experience taking students on mission trips to Latin America.  Caleb wondered if he could make a career of guiding church and student groups on these mission trips.  There is not much money in that!  But, he believed that God was calling him. God shouted to Caleb through a Job-type cry of pain, the pain of orphans.

            Orphans, especially in places like Guatemala, Rwanda, Russia, and Ethiopia, will end up on the street as addicts.  They will become sex slaves.  There is little hope that a child who grows up with no one to care for him or her in a society where the weak are already stepped on will have any type of positive, meaningful life.  Caleb heard this Joban cry and he knew the answer was provision for these kids from affluent Christ-followers in America.  He just had to do his part – get those affluent Christ-followers to the poor kids. 

            Three years and about a dozen trips later, Caleb is cooperating with God to help kids move from Job-type suffering into the kingdom of God. Start an organization that caters mission trips; that’s your full-time job – who knew that was possible?  Caleb certainly did not.  But, he was following God. 

What skills do you have to care for those who suffer?  If you’re in health care or education you can obviously donate your time to heal or tutor or teach.  If you’re someone who makes a lot of money, you can donate a lot of it, and you should as a part of your life as a disciple.  But what if you don’t have those types of front-line skills or access to financial resources?  What if all you have is time?  God will use it.  What if all you have is energy?  God will put you to work in a creative way, walking with Job.  Caleb did not have anything really except some experience on mission trips, a heart willing to listen to God, and a willingness to step outside the box. 

Some of us may be going through a Job-type of experience right now.  If you need to, turn to Job’s words of lament and protest.  That’s OK.  It is good to be that brutally honest with God.  God can handle it.  That response is better than pretending everything is OK and being theologically dishonest.

Many among us are doing well, not suffering.  We are called to respond to the suffering around us.  From the perspective of Easter, we enter the suffering applying our skills and experience and passion so that through us God creates a culture of care that respects Job and also announces that Jesus has come and there is life in His name.  We are culture makers in the way we reach out to Job.

AMEN