Responses to Anguish

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I’m interrupting my explorations of the relationship between justice and equality to think about another issue that often forces itself upon us, especially when we let ourselves care about other people. Three words sometimes misused as synonyms can help us clarify the problem: explanation, rationalization, and answer.

An explanation tells us how something happens – the process by which it occurs. When the matter is not painful emotionally, an explanation seems rather straightforward if not always simple. Say, the water in the birdbath was frozen this morning. We don’t have to look far for an explanation, do we? The temperature must have dropped low enough last night to freeze the water even with the debris in it. When the situation is painful emotionally, even tragic, matter-of-fact explanations may be helpful medically and even personally (to some degree), but they do not satisfy our questions. A child has died because of a genetic glitch that set in motion a terrible series of events that physicians do not yet know how to interrupt successfully. So, now parents and friends know how it happened, but in our anguish we don’t ask, “How?” We ask, “Why?”

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Avoiding a Cheap and Dirty Trick

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This post is the last in a series of four written to serve as discussion starters for a group of university students doing an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

It is easy to find in the Bible exhortations to patience in times of suffering and to humility in the face of demands made by life and other people. Be long-suffering. Do not complain. Accept your limitations and the various affronts to your pride that come with living in this world as well as those which come from the world’s reactions to your conscious decisions to seek the will and way of God. Do not insist upon your own way, but do what is best for others. Be a servant.

It is one thing for me to give such advice, such encouragement to humble faith, to myself as needed. It is quite another matter for me to give it from a position of privilege and comfort to someone else being made to suffer. That’s the cheap and dirty trick we need to avoid.

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The Core Challenge to Faith

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To distinguish theology from ideology, I need to start where our faith is most insistent: our belief that God loves this world and its people. We believe the Creator loves the creation and has committed to its life and well-being. Moreover, God makes covenants and remains faithful to them even when the human partners in those covenants do not. So committed is God to these covenants that God no longer accepts a future (for God’s Self) without the covenant people. These are bold assertions, and the objections to them are many. The academic objections can take care of themselves as discussion continues. The existential protests against such a gospel come from human suffering and degradation that fly in the face of our assertions that God loves the world and wills its well-being and wholeness. This coming Sunday’s sermon on just this idea, not yet written, is called, “You Couldn’t Prove It by Me.”

These conflicts between our gospel and actual human experience we must not be dismissed or rationalized by making our belief ideological. To be faithful, we must stick with both the God who loves and the people whose lives belie that claim. To walk away from either is faithless, but strange as it may sound, the greater betrayal of God is to walk away from the world and its people.

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