“Revelations: When Bad Things Happen…
...And Keep Happening…Again and Again”
A Sermon by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
November 13, 2005
Following the elections last week, conservative Christian televangelist Pat Robertson actually told citizens of a Pennsylvania town that they had rejected God by voting their school board out of office for supporting "intelligent design." He warned them on Thursday not to be surprised if disaster struck. ''I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected Him from your city.''
While I have no qualms dismissing the wit and wisdom of Pat Robertson as having come from a self-promoting, demented bully hiding behind a clerical mantle, there is much (too much I fear) of his theology that lingers in the underpinnings of the American character. Clearly Pat Robertson and others of that mold are holdovers from the religious school of Calvinism that was based in the Book of Revelations: damn near every one is damned from before the beginning of time and hardly anyone is heavenly bound.
The latter group – the saved – knows that they are saved because, of course, God told them they are. Hard to argue with a direct communication from the Supreme Commander! Not only do they know they are saved, but they know the depths of depravity reached by the rest of us. If only we'd get it right (I put myself in the camp of the damned here, because no one has informed me otherwise) but if we’d get it right, it would sure make things a lot easier for those who are saved to keep their noses to the brimstone. And by the way, they have no compunction about engaging in activities that might hasten Armageddon, the destruction of the world. At the very worst, they see themselves – and I include here our president and his cadre of power rangers – as instruments in the fulfillment of God’s plan.
What biblical scholars tend to recognize – which more often goes unrecognized by ideologues looking for theological justification for their otherwise unconscionable privilege – is that the Book of Revelations was written, ironically, in response to the oppression exerted by the Roman Empire over its subjects. It was a very political tome, written in mythological language, and was intended to give heart to those who were oppressed by the Romans. The evil empire would come to an end, it predicted, and in the end evil would perish while goodness would rein. In the two millennia since then, in the Western world, much effort has been made by many to claim turf on the goodness side of that good and evil continuum.
The truth is that the idea of End Time has stood as a reminder that we are not here forever, but for now, and that forever hangs in the balance of now. The corruption of that truth is whoever would serve their own purposes by these verses in the Book of Revelations – the John Calvins, the Pat Robertsons, and the George W. Bushs – would have us believe that they have their authority on good authority straight from God, and that their very patriarchal perception of the universe is the only natural and divine one.
This theological perspective is not particularly healthy for, nor is it particularly helpful to most of us. We religious liberals would do well to present, as best we can, a more hopeful theology to the world. We have one, you know. It's about the unity of all things. It's about faith in the ultimate potential for goodness, the inherent worth and dignity of all of humanity.
One day this world will indeed come to an end. We are left with the inescapable inevitability that one day each of us will die. And we are left with the very challenging reality that along the way bad things happen. Sometimes they happen in isolated occurrences and sometimes they happen in what seems like unrelenting sieges. If the ideas of damnation of the many and the salvation of just a few do not provide us with hope, what can?
When the movie, "Titanic," came out a few years ago, I was amazed, though I shouldn't have been, that it was such a phenomenal blockbuster. How, I wondered, could a movie whose outcome was clearly known to all beforehand, have such incredible appeal? The answer of course could be found in the intrigue of how the fate of the ship unraveled within the ever present dynamics of classist oppression that were such a constant sub-theme, and in the sheer beauty of the movie. Much more I suspect, the movie was a hit because it was a transforming story of love, love that was shared by two people for one another, and love for life itself.
I suspect the answer to my question where do we find hope in our disaster filled world and our sometimes tragic lives, both of which we know will one day come to an end, the answer is similar: by finding love for one another and finding love for life itself. So let's take a look at this subject in two parts: as it pertains to the world; as it pertains to our own lives.
Tsunamis, hurricanes, flooding, mudslides and earthquakes... Sounds a lot like end times or at least like a very bad run of events. In order to try to grasp the magnitude of each of these events I try to remember how I felt on September 11th and on the days immediately following. Then I try to multiply the intensity of that feeling by the size of whatever the current disaster is. I know that it doesn't work all that well, but it gives me some sense of what people who are in the midst of those catastrophes are dealing with and it puts me in relationship with them.
All of the lives that have been lost and all of the devastation in those areas are quite directly connected to other lives, the lives of the survivors. People, places and things that have given meaning to those survivors lives in the past have instantly been lost. The grief must be close to unbearable, even if it has to be postponed in order to assure immediate survival, as it has in so many cases.
What are we to do here as a result of all that loss out there? How are we to feel as disaster follows disaster? If we fear Armageddon and sense an increasing doom in the world around us, how are we to respond in a way that promotes love of one another and love of life itself?
What can we do about the loss? We can do what we have been doing. As a congregation and as individuals we have reached out in generous and meaningful ways in order to support the survivors. In this way we stand with them in solidarity and in witness; we honor their humanity and give integrity to our own.
How are we to feel as disaster follows disaster? I'll tell you how I feel. I feel grief for the losses and pained for those who are living through them. And more, I feel scared. I'm afraid that we have so distanced, so separated, our lives from the earth, which has given us life, that we might be well on our way to extinguishing the brilliant light of this majestic blue/green planet.
How are we to respond in a meaningful way that promotes love of one another and love of life? I have many friends and I know that there are many among us here who feel that the world is just too enormous to take on with our little lives. I've heard so many people say, "All I can do is live the life that's in front of me, trying to create a positive influence on the world immediately around me and hopefully that will have a rippling effect that causes the world to be a more positive and loving place."
I don't think we can afford to delude ourselves with that line of thinking any longer. I find that to be a very Calvinistic response. We in this country and in this community have far too much privilege to get away with that. Such a fantasy allows for us to feel very positive in a world filled with our own gas-guzzling SUVs and sweatshop sweat suits and sneakers. It allows us to feel comfortable eating food that has stripped away the topsoil, poisoned the waterways and polluted the atmosphere on its way to our tables. It allows us to feel comfortable, much like John Calvin did, with the idea that we deserve to have more than others because our birthright and our hard work have allowed us to count ourselves among the saved, however unjustifiable that salvation may be.
When we say there is nothing we can do about the larger world, we are in denial of the many ways in which we participate in abusing the world. Some of us say that we're not interested in living political lives but that we want to focus instead on living spiritual lives of integrity. The truth is that if we are to live with integrity, there is no separation between the political and the spiritual beings that we are.
Every breath we take, every bite we eat, every sip we imbibe, every single thing we touch that has been produced is the result of political processes. There are laws that protect the air or that make it vulnerable. And the same is true for our food, our water, our medicines and all the rest. Even the stratum where we end up in the socio-economic spectrum is the result of political processes. Politics is not something we can choose to participate in or not. Like it or not, we are a part of the process, whether actively or passively.
Our world will indeed one day come to an end. Will that be the result of whether or not, as a people, we have been active or passive? Can we live with our honest answer to that question? If we are lovers of life, I have to believe that we must engage in life and not be satisfied by merely allowing it to act upon us. If we are to experience hope for our ailing world, it can come about by our vigilant witness, our compassion and our dedication to it. However long our world may last, the quality of life while we are here will be a result of the efforts we have made to assure peace, love, beauty and justice for all its people, for the generations to come and for the planet itself.
And yet, even though the time for thinking that our private lives are paramount in the larger scheme of things may have passed, we still have these personal lives that can and might be lived to spiritual fulfillment. How can that happen, when for many of us bad things seem to keep happening, over and over again? Within just this past year I've been closely associated with four very dear people who have felt compelled to throw in the towel by ending it all. Two of them were successful in their attempts at ending their lives, leaving behind them awake of grief and sorrow. The other two have left the door open, have given life another chance.
Why for some of us is the question, "What can I do in order to cope?" When for others the question is, "How can I possibly survive?” There are degrees of severity in despair and, while they are hardly insignificant in our ability to find our way, there are still common elements to the despair itself. Serious illness, mental illness, the loss or impending loss of loved ones, divorce, the loss of or failure to acquire a job… fill in the blank, these are all hardships that most of us bear to some extent most of the time. Sometimes they stack up though, and seem overwhelming. And there is no easy answer, certainly no answer within a 20-minute sermon.
I have to tell you though, the more I am aware of the struggle, the more I recognize that there are at least two very powerful responses that we can give to adversity. The first is reaching out to others and allowing them to make a difference in our difficult journeys. I remember my own darkest days after my divorce nearly 30 years ago. Had it not been for the love and support of those nearest to me, I don’t think I’d have made it through that time. And I remember the words to an Eric Anderson song that I sang to myself over and over, “Jesus, I’m falling, please see where I am. Help me to get around the next bend. And if you can’t save me, then please send a friend, someone who’s been there and come back again.”
And that leads to the other most powerful response, prayer. I'm not talking about praying to any supreme commander to let this cup pass from our lips. We’re not talking about praying that our problems will simply go away or undergo some kind of miraculous fix.
We’re talking about praying the prayers of our heart: that we might be sustained by life, even when it is most tenuous; about praying that we might have enough faith to get us around the next bend; about praying that we might even have enough hope to even feel that getting around the next bend is a worthwhile goal. We're talking about praying that even in the midst of pain and suffering we might have the grace to experience the beauty of life. We're talking about praying that even as we face death itself we might be alive to the possibilities of wonder and awe and gratitude, gratitude so strong that it might be a part of our very last breath. May our prayer be that even in that last breath our gratitude might be so strong as to allow us to reach out in love to another human being and to be embraced in a rapturous love for life. Even if our experience falls short of our prayers, we will have done more to have lived our lives more fully and thus in greater service to the mystery that has allowed us to be here in the first place.
Armageddon will one day come and we are not likely to determine its schedule, but we are able to respond to a broken world, as many times as it is broken, with loving companionship and a determination for justice. Our own death too will one day occur and neither is that likely to be on some time schedule that we have consciously set. And still, we are free to write the story, to fill it with meaning and to underscore it with love, love for others and love for life.
So let this too be our prayer, that we might live fully; that we might live for and with each other right up to the moment when we move beyond this life; that our hearts might be filled with faith and hope in the possibilities of goodness that always await our participation; that love might be the guiding light above us and the sustaining ground beneath our feet.
I am moved by a poem, "The Sycamore," by poet, author and theologian Wendell Barry, whose thoughts I leave you with here. I invite you to think of the sycamore tree both as a metaphor for our world and for ourselves.
The Sycamore (for Harry Caudill)
Taken from Collected Poems by Wendell Berry
In the place that is my own place, whose earth
I am shaped in and must bear, there is an old tree growing,
a great sycamore that is a wondrous healer of itself.
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward.
Over all its scars has come the seamless white
of the bark. It bears the gnarls of its history
healed over. It has risen to a strange perfection
in the warp and bending of its long growth.
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
It has become the intention and radiance of its dark fate.
It is a fact, sublime, mystical and unassailable.
In all the country there is no other like it.
I recognize in it a principle, an indwelling
the same as itself, and greater, that I would be ruled by.
I see that it stands in its place and feeds upon it,
and is fed upon, and is native, and [is] maker
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