April 9, 2015 — Obscenity and Glory

Easter’s come and gone. The day, anyway. For Christians who follow the liturgical year, the season lives on, in the forty days between Easter Day and Pentecost.

Today I ran across this quotation from a collection of sermons by Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat (HarperCollins, 1985). Buechner is a preacher’s preacher. Although he doesn’t step into a pulpit that often, his influence as a writer is widespread, and much-appreciated by those who craft sermons week in and week out.

Here’s the excerpt:

“Anxiety and fear are what we know best in this fantastic century of ours. Wars and rumors of wars. From civilization itself to what seemed the most unalterable values of the past, everything is threatened or already in ruins. We have heard so much tragic news that when the news is good we cannot hear it. But the proclamation of Easter Day is that all is well. And as a Christian, I say this not with the easy optimism of one who has never known a time when all was not well but as one who has faced the Cross in all its obscenity as well as in all its glory, who has known one way or another what it is like to live separated from God. In the end, his will, not ours, is done. Love is the victor. Death is not the end. The end is life. His life and our lives through him, in him. Existence has greater depths of beauty, mystery, and benediction than the wildest visionary has ever dared to dream. Christ our Lord has risen.”

What I like about this expression of Easter faith is its realism. There no illusions, here, that life is never hard. There’s no attempt to sell the idea that God offers the baptized a “Get out of suffering free” card. There are plenty of purveyors of spiritual snake oil out there who carry around whole stacks of such cards, and hand them out as a come-on. (It works. They always seem to be surrounded by hopeful hordes waving dollar bills.)

Buechner’s got too much integrity for that. For him, the cross is not an item of sparkly gold jewelry, but an “obscenity” that — paradoxically — leads to glory.

For people with cancer, or anyone else who’s on a hard road, there’s hope in that vision. Hope doesn’t come from finding a way around life’s struggles and heartaches. It comes from resolutely forging on through them — knowing that, on the other side, someone’s waiting for us. Someone who’s been through it, too.

March 23, 2015 — God is Bigger

J. Todd Billings is a Reformed Church in America minister who’s on the faculty of Western Theological Seminary in Holland, Michigan. Like me, he’s dealing with an “incurable but treatable” blood cancer diagnosis: in his case, multiple myeloma. He’s written about his cancer experience in a new book, Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ (Baker,  2015).

I intend to get the book and read it, but in the few teaser excerpts provided by the publisher, I’ve heard echoes of my own experiences of years past.

I was particularly impressed by an anecdote he tells in the opening pages, of receiving a card from a 15-year-old girl from his congregation with Down Syndrome. By way of encouragement, she wrote: “Get well soon! Jesus loves you! God is bigger than cancer!”

Billings identifies some pretty good theology in the girl’s words:

“While I had received many cards in the previous days, this one was different. ‘God is bigger than cancer!’ Yes. She did not say, ‘God will cure you of this cancer,’ or ‘God will suffer with you.’ God is bigger than cancer. The fog is thick, but God is bigger. My cancer story was already developing its own sense of drama. The sky was closing in, enveloping my whole world so that nothing else could creep in. But God’s story, the drama of God’s action in the world, was bigger. The girl in my church wasn’t denying the fog or the loss but testifying to a God who was greater, the God made known in Jesus Christ, who shows us that “the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it (John 1:5)….”

Billings also finds comfort in the famous first Question and Answer of the Heidelberg Catechism:

“‘What is your only comfort in life and in death? That I am not my own, but that I belong — in body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.’ Like the note from the fifteen-year-old girl in my church, it breaks through the fog of ‘terminal’ and ‘incurable’ and ‘cancer’ by pointing us to the bedrock of what matters: that I belong, in life and in death, to Jesus Christ. My life is not my own….”

I like this concept of the bigness of God, when it comes to living with cancer. The first tendency of many of us, as we learn of a cancer diagnosis, is to allow the cancer to grow in our minds until it crowds out everything else, even our faith. This amounts to making the cancer into an idol, an object of false worship. The god to whom that idol bears witness is a malevolent deity, indeed. But that doesn’t stop us — in horrified fascination — from ascribing to the cancer god all sorts of power over us.

A healthy understanding of the bigness of the one, true God is the way to overcome that false worship. As the teenager with the mighty heart bears witness, cancer’s big, but God is bigger.

Billings goes on to say:

“This place of not knowing is one that sometimes feels like a thick fog for me right now. I could have five years, ten years, or decades. Who knows? Not me. We belong to God — the Alpha and the Omega, who holds time In his hands — but we are not God. We are mortal, and we don’t know when we will die. There is a fog for all of us, whether we realize it or not, that as creatures we do not live in the world as individuals who own it but as temporary stewards of God’s good gifts.”

How easy it is to reduce God to the sum-total of our needs and desires! “Where are you, O God?” is so often our demand, when we learn that our expectations of a long and healthy life are threatened by a cancer diagnosis.

Yet, if God is indeed bigger than our dreams and desires — bigger, even, than our very lives — then isn’t it just a trifle audacious for us to shake our fists at the heavens, demanding an answer to that question?

It’s only human to voice such angry laments, from time to time. I don’t think God is particularly offended by that sort of thing. Because God is bigger. Yes, indeed.

(Quotations from J. Todd Billings,  Rejoicing in Lament: Wrestling with Incurable Cancer and Life in Christ [Baker, 2015], selections from pp. 1-7.)

April 6, 2012 - Godforsaken

Today’s Good Friday, and it fell to me to give the sermon at our local Community Good Friday service, sponsored by churches of the Point Pleasant/Bay Head area.

I’ve preached many a Good Friday sermon in my time, but today I was struck by the words of Jesus from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Jesus is of course quoting Psalm 22:1, one of the gutsiest laments in the Hebrew scriptures.

Many Christians find it hard to stomach this awful scene depicting the Son of God in abject despair.  Some of them deal with their discomfort by staying away from Good Friday services altogether (or, at least, from worship services like ours that strive to regard the hard reality of the crucifixion without blinking). If relentlessly practicing positive thinking is your thing, and if – like some of my Baptist friends – you just can’t hold back from cheerily uttering that Pollyanna proclamation, “It’s Friday, but Sunday’s coming!”, you’re probably numbered among this group.

Other than boycotting Good Friday, the other way to manage such cognitive dissonance is to imagine Jesus wasn’t really so Godforsaken as all that.  Following the lead of the Gospel-writer John – who, unlike Matthew, Mark and Luke, is more inclined to portray Jesus as omniscient, and eerily aloof from even his own sufferings – they seek to to rationalize away his sense of abandonment.

That view of Jesus is actually heretical, as the church has traditionally viewed it.  The traditional doctrine of the Incarnation declares that, during the 33 years of his earthly life, Jesus was truly God and truly human. In a reversal of the state of affairs that’s prevailed through much of history, Christians in our highly-churched American culture are more likely to struggle to accept Jesus’ humanity than his divinity.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, as he wrestled with the decision he had made, he could only turn to God in prayer – just like any of us.  He could only ask God to “take this cup away from me.”  He didn’t say, “What do you think, God, hasn’t this show gone on long enough – isn’t it time, now, for me to overturn this cup?”

Throughout his earthly life, Jesus suffered and struggled, feared and doubted, bled and died – much like any of us.  The scriptures teach that he was unlike us in one respect – that he did not sin, and therefore went to the cross blameless – but in every other way he was human.  And that is why he was impelled to cry out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Do you think he didn’t really mean that?  Do you think it was just a line in a play, spoken for our benefit?  Do you think he knew all along that it would come out OK in the end, that this death – that was even then wrapping its cold, bony fingers around his neck and starting to squeeze – was not really death, as we know it from the experience of others (and will one day know it ourselves)?

No.  When Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I take him at face value.  I believe he means what he’s saying.   I believe he truly feels Godforsaken.

That’s a colorful word, “Godforsaken.”  It hardly even sounds like an English word at all.  It’s more like one of those intricate, compound German words: schadenfreude or weltanschauung, or even the lowly pepper-cookie, the pfeffernusse.  The German language has that capability of combining shorter words together in a long string.  I’m glad that, in this instance, the English allows us to do so, because no other word captures the sense of abandonment and desolation, the fear and anxiety, the doubt and despair, that’s caught up in that word, “Godforsaken.”

Sometimes we speak of “a Godforsaken place.”  That expression is reserved for the driest of deserts, the most isolated of islands, the most barren of landscapes.  The geography of the human heart it describes is equally desolate.  That’s what Jesus was feeling, there on the cross.  The pain he felt in his body was only the half of it.  The sense of abandonment that tore at his heart was just as agonizing, maybe even more so.

Those of us who have had to cope with that unwanted guest, Cancer, gate-crashing our lives perhaps know something of what this means.  There may have been times when the word “Godforsaken” accurately described the way we felt.

Christian essayist G.K. Chesterton captures the sheer absurdity of God’s son crying out “Why have you forsaken me?” as he observes:

“When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God.” [Orthodoxy (Moody, 2009), p. 20.]

We don’t like to think – no, not even imagine – that “God was forsaken of God.”  God’s supposed to stay in heaven, and all is supposed to remain right with the world.  The crucifixion was the one time in the history of the universe when that did not happen, when the fundamental balance of creation was thrown off, when chaos seemed briefly to reign, when the interrelationship of the three persons of the Trinity was severed, when darkness descended in mid-afternoon and the very earth beneath our feet rocked and reeled.

Speaking personally, I still don’t understand why it happened.  Yes, there are many competing theological theories of the Atonement, of why and how Jesus had to suffer and die so sins might be forgiven.  None of them, at the end of the day, answers every question.  I also don’t understand how it happened.  My mind is just too small to take in the mystery of the Incarnation, the complexity of the inner workings of the Trinity, the marvel of divine Grace.

Although I don’t understand why or how the crucifixion happened, I can say I’m awfully glad it did happen.  I’m glad because, when I look on from afar, from the perspective of twenty centuries, at the spectacle of “God forsaken of God,” as Chesterton says, I know that because of what Christ has done, I will never be Godforsaken in quite the same way.  Through every trial and tribulation, through every pain or struggle divine Providence may in the future place in my path, whether my lymphoma creeps back into my life again or whether it doesn’t, I’ll always be able to look to the cross of Jesus and know that I am not alone, that there is one in the heavenly places praying for me who knows what it means to be human.

To me, that’s what’s so good about “Good Friday.”  I would never be so bold as to ask one such as Jesus to go to the cross for me – I do not deserve it – but the good news is that he has done so, anyway, of his own accord.  For that, I am grateful beyond words.

March 12, 2012 – Job’s Comforters

One of the worries people often have when a friend is diagnosed with cancer, or experiences some other misfortune, centers around the question, “What do I say?”

Lots of energy is burned up fruitlessly trying to answer this question.  Even if an answer emerges, it can very easily turn out to be the wrong one.  Stories abound about unintentionally hurtful things well-meaning friends and family members have said to the newly diagnosed.

Yet, that’s no reason to stay away.  Friends need friends more than ever in times of trouble.

Here’s a little poem, “Comforters,” that gets to the heart of this matter.  It was written by a cancer survivor.  I can’t copy it here, because it’s under copyright, but you can easily read it by clicking on this link.

This calls to mind the ancient story of Job, the faithful man of God who’s suddenly afflicted by a perfect storm of suffering, including bad health.  Job receives a delegation of visitors, friends of his who are trying to comfort  him.  Each one presents an answer to the “Why?” question Job’s been asking himself ever since his troubles began.  Yet, each would-be helper fails miserably.

The first friend, Eliphaz the Temanite, comments philosophically on the inscrutable ways of God.  How hard it can be – he explains to his poverty-stricken friend, who has just lost his entire family and whose once-healthy body is covered with painful boils – for us to account for many of the things that happen, both good and bad!  There is no one who is without fault, so therefore it makes sense that no one is spared some measure of suffering in this life.  Besides, it could be that God – who’s noted for extending punishment for one person’s wrongdoings to the generations that follow – is simply collecting on some old debt.  The important thing is to keep returning to God, trusting in the Lord to bring healing and restoration in time:

“For misery does not come from the earth, nor does trouble sprout from the ground; but human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward.   As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause.  He does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number.... How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. For he wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal.”

[Job 3:6-9, 17-18]

The second visitor, Bildad the Shuhite, tells Job he’s just sure his afflictions must be his own fault, that he’s sinned against the Almighty in some way.  If he’s diligent about repentance, though, God just may have mercy and take away Job’s afflictions:

“Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right? If your children sinned against him, he delivered them into the power of their transgression. If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place.”

[Job 8:3-6]

The third caller is Zophar the Naamathit.  He chides his friend Job for being so certain he’s blameless and undeserving of his terrible fate:

“Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven – what can you do? Deeper than Sheol – what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. If he passes through, and imprisons, and assembles for judgment, who can hinder him?”

[Job 11:7-10]

Yet, Zophar’s counsel is not without kindness.  He, too, urges Job to consider his burden of suffering as God’s correction, and repent:

“If you direct your heart rightly, you will stretch out your hands toward him. If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure, and will not fear. You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away. And your life will be brighter than the noonday; its darkness will be like the morning. And you will have confidence, because there is hope; you will be protected and take your rest in safety. You will lie down, and no one will make you afraid; many will entreat your favor. But the eyes of the wicked will fail; all way of escape will be lost to them, and their hope is to breathe their last.” 

[13-20]

Commenting on the story of Job in his classic book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner writes:

“Under the impact of his multiple tragedies, Job was trying desperately to hold on to his self-respect, his sense of himself as a good person. The last thing in the world he needed was to be told that what he was doing was wrong. Whether the criticisms were about the way he was grieving or about what he had done to deserve such a fate, their effect was that of rubbing salt into an open wound.


Job needed sympathy more than he needed advice, even good and correct advice. There would be a time and place for that later. He needed compassion, the sense that others felt this pain with him, more than he needed learned theological explanations about God's ways. He needed psychical comforting, people sharing their strength with him, holding him rather than scolding him.


He needed friends who would permit him to be angry, to cry and to scream, much more than he needed friends who would urge him to be an example of patience and piety to others. He needed people to say, ‘Yes, what happened to you is terrible and makes no sense,’ not people who would say, ‘Cheer up, Job, it's not all that bad.’ And that was where he friends let him down.”

[Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People

(Random House, 2001), pp. 120-121.]

Let us strive not to let one another down as well, when friends come upon hard times.  Just be there.  Listen.  Share the pain.  Offer to fill the water-glass or run some small errand.

You’re not there to fix it.  You’re just there.  And that’s what friends are for.

January 28, 2010 - When Positive Thinking Isn't Enough

One of the hardest things to do, in ministry, is to stand by people who are going through hard times: not trying to change the situation, but just being with them, accepting things as they are.

An invaluable lesson I learned, years ago, in my clinical counseling training in seminary, is that sometimes you can’t fix it. Sure, there are some counseling situations in which an easy answer – be it a scriptural citation or a word of practical advice – can make a world of difference. But, not every situation is like that. Sometimes the only thing you can do is to be there – accompanying people through their difficulties, sometimes even to the edge of the grave.

It’s one of the reasons (among many) why I have such admiration for my wife, Claire - a minister who works as bereavement coordinator for a hospice program. Accompanying people in just this sort of way is what she does all the time. When she was a hospice chaplain, she worked directly with dying patients. Now, she specializes in accompanying family members through their days of mourning.

Claire’s grown used to a certain awed response she gets from people she meets for the first time. They often say something like, “More power to you! I could never do a job like that,” or, “That must be so hard! How do you keep doing it, year after year?”

Frequently, she gets another sort of response: “I think hospice programs are wonderful. The hospice team was such a help to us when my mother was dying!” A person who says something like that has come to appreciate the value of standing by those who are suffering. It’s like the famous first line from Reinhold Niebuhr’s famous Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

In my sermon this past Sunday, I spoke about a certain tendency toward magical thinking that can be a detriment in situations of serious difficulty, medical or otherwise. I was inspired by reading an insightful book, Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, by Barbara Ehrenreich.

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Ehrenreich has gotten a lot of press because of the forthright way in which she takes on the 200-pound gorilla of the self-help world: positive thinking. Her point is that our culture so unquestioningly considers positive thinking to be a good thing, that in situations – like the final stages of hospice care – in which it’s no longer appropriate, people just don’t know what to do. They feel abandoned, adrift, without the familiar life preserver of positive thinking.

Many of us think that, in a tough situation, we’ve got only two choices: think positively, or give up altogether. My point in Sunday’s sermon is that, while positive thinking is often a good thing, there are some situations in which it crosses the line into magical thinking – which is not. Some things that happen to us in life are simply bad things, and there’s no getting around it. It’s one thing to cultivate a positive outlook generally, but it’s quite another to believe we have an obligation to think positive thoughts all the time – and that, if we don’t, we’re somehow putting ourselves at risk.

Sadly, some cancer patients get precisely that message from those around them. Some feel guilty, beating themselves up because they can’t keep the sunny side up all the time. If their disease progresses, they feel irrationally responsible for failing to stoke the positive-thinking furnace.

A new illustrated article on Beliefnet.com, “In Praise of Thinking Realistically: When Positive Thinking Isn’t Working,” by Lori Hope, speaks to this same theme.

The positive-thinking movement is very often an ally of Christianity, but there’s a point at which the two part ways. Bottom-line, the Christian prescription for spiritual health is not positive thinking, but rather, repentance and the forgiveness of sins. As the Gospel-writer Mark sums up the essence of Jesus’ message:

“Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’” [Mark 1:14-15]

If we’re constantly trying to push everything but positive thoughts out of our minds, we’ll never be able to recognize sin in our lives, because we’re so afraid of the negative thoughts that go with it. Without a recognition of sin, there can be no confession. Without confession, there can be no forgiveness. And, without forgiveness, there can be no experience of grace.

I ended my sermon on Sunday by telling a familiar story from the classic Broadway show, The Music Man. It’s about the con man, “Professor” Harold Hill, who travels around selling band instruments to schools, promising he’ll stick around to teach the children how to play – but he never does. He always hops the first train out of town as soon as the money’s in his pocket. In the Midwestern town of River City, though, he falls in love with Marian the librarian, so he’s got to think of something. Harold’s problem is, he knows nothing about music. He’s not a professor of anything, except shady deals.

What he does is tell the children they can learn to play their new band instruments using what he calls “The Think Method.” All they have to do is think of the melody he tells them to play, recalling it over and over in their minds. When they pick up their instruments, he promises, they’ll be able to play it perfectly.

Well, the day of the first band concert comes, and Harold’s ready for his slippery scheme to fall apart. The children pick up their instruments and start to play. The sound that emerges is one of the most awful things you’ve ever heard – everything you’d expect from a teaching strategy so ill-conceived as “The Think Method.”

Wonder of wonders, a miracle occurs. The parents of River City are so pleased to see their children tooting away on the band instruments, they completely ignore the fact that there’s no discernible melody. Professor Hill’s reputation is saved, and he settles down in River City to marry his beloved Marian.

Positive thinking won’t teach us how to play the trombone, any more than it will guarantee we’ll beat cancer. The lesson of The Music Man, though, goes beyond the concrete task of producing the right musical notes at the proper tempo. It’s a lesson about grace and love and unconditional acceptance of children by their parents. Professor Hill’s brand of magical thinking was a complete dud, but the magic of love proved far stronger.

There is no greater magic in the world than this. It’s the love of God, that Christians believe is experienced uniquely in Jesus Christ. We believe that love was demonstrated for us on the cross of Calvary, and is given to us as an unconditional gift. It comes to us in good times and in bad, in sunshine and in storm.

“Thanks be to God for this indescribable gift!”
– 2 Corinthians 9:15

May 9, 2009 - A Most Useless Place?

Dr. Wendy Harpham sent me a link to the blog of Rabbi David Wolpe, who also has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Several years before that, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Here, he writes about receiving his last Rituxan infusion, ending a two-year follow-up regime after chemotherapy for NHL:

“Recently I had the final infusion. But I was not at all sure that pulling away the safety net was a cause for celebration. My doctor poked his head into the curtained chamber to assure me that he expected a long remission. Kind of him, but what could he say?

Remission is cancer's suspended animation. The renegade cells are poised to return but no one knows when. It could be a month or a decade; for my type of lymphoma (one of the more than thirty varieties of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) there is no cure. So I am stuck in what Dr. Seuss – in a book I used to read to my daughter – calls “a most useless place. The Waiting place....’”

A most useless place. That phrase does sum up how it feels, sometimes. Unlike David, I’m out of remission – have been for a couple of years – but there are days when I, too, feel like I’m in suspended animation.

David’s experience is similar to mine, too, in that he is a member of the clergy, serving a congregation:

“I had the strange, surreal experience of hearing my congregants' shock that this could happen to the family of the Rabbi – as though professional piety was a shield against disease. As though God played favorites.

Right before my brain surgery I appeared in front of the congregation and asked them for their patience and their prayers. Three year later I was standing before them, bald. I witnessed the realization in their eyes that there are no guarantees, no protected people. No one is safe.”

No, no one is safe. Yet, that observation ought to be surprising only to those who believe God is some cosmic puppeteer, manipulating the lives and loves and illnesses of us poor, benighted souls who dwell below. Is cancer a thunderbolt, cast down in righteous anger from Olympian heights? I’ve never seen it that way – although I’ve met plenty of people, both inside and outside my church, who fear it may be.

Granted, there are strains within the biblical tradition that portray God that way. God punishes the ten spies who brought back an unfavorable report of the promised land by killing them with plague (Numbers 14:37). God gives the adulterous David and Bathsheba’s infant love-child a fatal illness (2 Samuel 12:15-17). Even worse, God famously afflicts Job with boils, not because he’s an unjust man but simply because God wants to win a debate with the devil.

Yet, before everything is said and done in the Hebrew scriptures, the Lord is portrayed as “merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8). That’s the majority witness. When it comes to the New Testament, of course, God not only sympathizes with human suffering, but personally undergoes it, becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ.

Yet, the ancient images of a capriciously angry God, that dread smiter of sinners, are maddeningly persistent. “What did I do to deserve this?" is the anguished cry we pastors hear again and again, whether spoken or unspoken, standing at the foot of many a hospital bed.

No one is safe. We’re all going to die. Some of us sooner than others. If we’re spared from some fatal catastrophe on the highways, we’re all going to hear some doctor admit to us, someday, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more medical science can do for you.” Is this God’s judgment?

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden suggests it is. Death is, that story suggests, God’s judgment on the entire human race. That may be so, but, unless we toss out all the biblical witnesses to God as patient and merciful, it’s hard to make a case for God micro-managing the entries in our individual medical files. We belong to a race for whom that dark, old lullaby is all too true:

“Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
for you know your mama is born to die...”

The divine decree of death is meted out to the human race en masse, not on a case-by-case basis.

The fact of death is perhaps the deepest mystery we children of Adam and Eve seek to plumb – as Rabbi David has himself come to realize:

“For now I am just waiting. I am trying to find my own way through this because, inevitably, I will be asked how I did it. Rabbis are supposed to be figures of authority and calm. It was hard enough to reassure my congregation that a fickle universe does not mean that God is absent. That belief does not indemnify me against adversity. That my faith through all this is unshaken. How does one live, Rabbi, is the question my congregants ask, of not so directly. Tell me, Rabbi – it is your job to know.

My answer, I now realize, is: Live as if you are fine, knowing that you are not. Death is the overriding truth of life but it need not be its constant companion. My safety net is gone. I feel, as all people in remission do, that each time I fly my hand may slip from the trapeze. But to live earthbound is to give the cancer more than it deserves.”

The place David and I find ourselves in may feel, at times, like “a most useless place.” On deeper examination – and, viewed through the eye of faith – it turns out to be anything but.

April 26, 2009 - Libation

Responding to my April 20th entry, a reader named Christine writes:

“My cancer has progressed to the point where I am on my last leg of this journey. I was wondering if you could direct me to what the Bible says about facing death. In essence, what are your thoughts on dealing with grief and sorrow? My journey has been four years and as I approach the end, surprisingly I find that my emotional and spiritual struggle have not diminished but intensified.”

Wow. I had to think about that one for several days, before attempting an answer. It’s not that I’ve never had to supply this sort of counsel before; it’s just that Christine poses her question so bluntly. Most people whom I visit in their final days raise the question obliquely, if at all. Whether they ask the question directly or not, I typically respond by sharing some of the great scripture passages that witness to God’s reliable presence.

For example, there’s Psalm 139, in which the psalmist imagines himself journeying to the very edges of the known world, only to find God still there beside him:

“If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,
even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast.” (Psalm 139:9-10)

For those who struggle with fatigue, cancer-related or otherwise, there’s always Isaiah 40:28-31, that promises:

“Those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and not faint.” (Isaiah 40:31)

Those of a philosophical bent may find some comfort in the timeless contemplations of “the Teacher” who wrote the book of Ecclesiastes. In these verses – immortalized for my generation by Pete Seeger’s folk anthem, “Turn, Turn, Turn” – he recalls how, in life, there is a time for everything, even a time to die:

“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance...” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4)

THE BYRDS - Turn ! Turn ! Turn !
by danadi33

Certain psalms, like Psalm 69, pull no punches when it comes to voicing the honest cry of human anguish. Perhaps, Christine, you’ve felt like this in recent days:

“Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck.
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold; I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.
I am weary with my crying; my throat is parched. My eyes grow dim with waiting for my God.” (Psalm 69:1-3)

So, what does it mean to speak of God saving us, in a time of serious illness – perhaps even illness unto death? Some may be tempted to blithely drop a pollyanna catch-phrase, like “Expect a miracle!” Yet, this is unrealistic, maybe even deceptive. We all know miraculous reversals like this – the sort that cause doctors to scratch their heads and say, “I don’t know what happened, there’s no medical explanation for the way that tumor just disappeared” – are rare indeed. Besides, even in those fortunate cases where a terminal illness reverses itself, the patient is still going to die of something, eventually. No, that sort of miracle merely buys a little time, that’s all.

No, the only ultimate consolation comes from promises such as Jesus’ words in John 11:25-26:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Seeking to describe the life to come, Paul resorts to a variety of metaphors. In 2 Corinthians 4:16-5:1, he likens this present life of ours to a tent – a temporary dwelling, slated to be replaced by something more permanent:

“So we do not lose heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.”

In 1 Corinthians 15, Paul uses a different, organic metaphor, that of a seed planted in the ground – one I’ve cited just upstream, in my April 14th entry.

At the end of the day, though, all these are just metaphors. Such poetry, lofty as it may be, captures the emotion, but inevitably falls short on details – for, who can chart with certainty lands no human has visited, save on a one-way journey? (Jesus, of course, being the notable exception, and he wasn’t talking – not on that subject, anyway.)

In the course of my pastoral ministry, I’ve spoken with more than a few people who’ve had near-death experiences. There are more of these people around than you may think. Most are pretty quiet about it. They’re hesitant to speak of such experiences, for fear of being misunderstood – but, if you give them a chance, they’ll speak in hushed tones, eyes brimming with tears, of bright visions no words can capture. I feel incredibly privileged to have heard a few of these firsthand testimonies.

We can’t make too much of these subjective experiences, though. They’re elusive, dreamlike – merely the shadow of a suggestion of what the next life may be like. Still, I take some comfort, personally, in observing that, whatever these soul-travelers experienced, there was no terror in it: only a sense of comfort and welcome and peace.

Reflecting on his own impending death, the pseudonymous author of 2 Timothy speaks of his hopes and fears using the common coin of his own culture. He portrays his life as a “libation” – a sacred offering of wine, to be poured out onto the ground, as the Greeks and Roman were wont to do:

“As for me, I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. From now on there is reserved for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, will give to me on that day, and not only to me but also to all who have longed for his appearing.” (2 Timothy 4:6-8)

Back in my chemo days – when I was feeling sick as a dog and far from certain Dr. Lerner’s promises of a likely remission would ever come to pass – I wondered if my own life was turning out to be just such a libation.

It’s a powerful image, even though we have to work a bit to translate it into 21st Century terms. Then, as now, it defies reason to upend a perfectly good cup of wine and pour its contents out upon the ground: but sometimes that primitive calculus is the only response that makes sense in face of the absurdity we call “death.”

Surely, we protest, there’s got to be a better way. Surely, God – if the Bible’s descriptions of divine power are true – has the ability to arrange things in some other way for us.

The hard fact is, God chooses not to exercise that ability. Sooner or later, our life-force is bound to run out in rivulets, like that libation-offering, poured upon some unimaginably ancient block of stone.

A libation. That’s what we’ll be, one day.

Poured out. An offering to a God who (we can only hope) is, as the scriptures teach, “gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 145:8).

If that is so, we will one day be able to affirm, with Paul, that:

“...in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:38-39)

That’s the sort of thing I’d be inclined to say to you, Christine, by way of summarizing the Christian witness about life and death.

On a more personal note, I’d also like to encourage you to try to step back and get some perspective on the faith-struggles you’re going through right now. A certain amount of angst is to be expected. Strong emotion is understandably part of the experience. Cancer stinks. So does an early death. There’s no way to sugar-coat such hard realities.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you’re feeling angry, as well. Just read through some of those biblical psalms of lament, and you’ll quickly realize you’re not alone in this.

Doubt can be part of the psychic landscape, as well. (Remember, even Jesus went through his own crisis of faith in the Garden of Gethsemane.) You may worry, at times, that you’re losing touch with all the beliefs you once held dear, but that’s simply what dying is like. It’s profoundly disturbing and disorienting (Hollywood cliches about falling gently back on the pillow notwithstanding).

There’s nothing more disturbing nor disorienting in all of life. If - as the Christian faith teaches - death is actually rebirth into a new way of living, then wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect a bit of birth trauma? Just try to keep your eyes upon Jesus, the one whom the letter to the Hebrews calls “the pioneer and perfecter of our faith” (Hebrews 12:2).

May God be with you.

May 26, 2008 - Random?

Another thoughtful response from Christine, over in the comments section. She writes:

“Following from your proposition, by allowing ‘creation’s freedom,’ God has inadvertently (or not) introduced randomness of events/tragedies into the human realm. If this is so, then where I am today (with cancer) might possibly be the result of a random event. So essentially it boils down to the luck of the draw. And as such, there can be no purpose to life or life's struggles.”

I wonder if “random” was the best word to use, in my last post. In suggesting that God the creator allows certain things to happen randomly – like the genetic mutations that lead to the evolution of animal species – I didn’t mean to suggest creation is purposeless. Quite the contrary: God has imbued the world with such a powerful purpose – evolution – that a great many things we see around us are in service to that higher goal.

Take the human tailbone, for instance. Most anatomists agree it’s the useless, vestigial remnant of something that was far more useful to our distant ancestors. Lots of people’s tailbones give them trouble, causing back pain. Perhaps it’s a small comfort to some of those people (or at least, to those who contemplate such weighty philosophical matters) that the bone that causes them such pain at one time had a purpose – a purpose that was one of many factors leading to the appearance of the human race on earth. Because God’s temporal frame of reference spans eons rather than human lifetimes, this means generations of human beings will have to suffer with vestigial tailbones, until – through the slow work of genetic mutations that fuel natural selection – this annoying anatomical feature finally disappears completely.

It’s possible (although probably not terribly comforting) to say to a back-pain sufferer, “God is doing something about that pesky tailbone, but it’s going to take a few hundred thousand years before the job is done.”

Maybe the cell mutations that lead to cancer have a similar purpose. Maybe, without those millions upon millions of mutations – a very few of which are incidentally responsible for cancer – other, more positive mutations could never occur. Such mutations appear, from our perspective, to be random. But, from God’s perspective?

How can we possibly say? We don’t have the God’s-eye view. All we can do is trust, in faith, that God is working the divine purpose out.

The prophet Isaiah seems to think the God’s eye view is worth thinking about:

“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and makes the rulers of the earth as nothing. Scarcely are they planted, scarcely sown, scarcely has their stem taken root in the earth, when he blows upon them, and they wither, and the tempest carries them off like stubble. To whom then will you compare me, or who is my equal? says the Holy One. Lift up your eyes on high and see: Who created these? He who brings out their host and numbers them, calling them all by name; because he is great in strength, mighty in power, not one is missing.” (Isaiah 40:22-26)

The classic Western image of the creator God is that of a divine watchmaker, creating an intricate machine by fussing over every flywheel and gear. It’s the sort of metaphor that worked well in Enlightenment times, but in this present era it’s more than a little dated. With what we know about the unimaginable complexity of evolution, it seems to make more sense to view God as the creator who cooks up the primordial soup out of which life springs, then steps back to watch it all unfold.

I don't see this as a Deist understanding of God (the cosmic watchmaker who winds the blame thing up, then slinks off, letting it tick away). Rather, the God of evolution is still involved with the created order, although without manipulating it like a puppetmaster. That’s because freedom itself is too important a principle to compromise. It’s the very fuel on which the universe runs.

I prefer to speak of freedom, rather than randomness, with respect to God’s creation. I believe there is a purpose to it all – although it’s a purpose we can understand only in the most fragmentary of ways.

We await the full revealing. In the meantime, we live by faith.

May 21, 2008 - And It Was... Good?

Last Sunday, I had occasion to read Genesis 1:1-2:4a in our worship service. Joanne, our seminary assistant, was preaching, and had chosen that passage from out of the Revised Common Lectionary selections for the day.

Not often do I have the opportunity to read that famous passage – the first of Genesis’ two creation stories – aloud, in its entirety. “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:31) I was struck by the sheer majesty of those ancient words.

Funny that today I should see those very same words pop up in a comment posted on my blog. A reader named Christine referred to Genesis as she commented on the May 18th entry, “The Imperfect Is Our Paradise.” Here’s what she has to say:

“Dear Carl, can you really see God in the immense suffering as a result of the China earthquake or the Myanmar cyclone or in any other tragedies? I truly would like to but how does one begin? Does the answer lie in finding a purpose in the imperfection? I thought the Bible says that when God created the world, he saw that all was good. Perhaps I am missing the point.”

Ordinarily, I respond to comments in the Comments section, but Christine’s remarks set me to thinking. The more I think about it, the more I realize that her objection, and my response, belong not just among the comments, but here in prime time.

The theological issue Christine raises is a big one – perhaps the biggest. I’m speaking, of course, about the question theologians call theodicy: the problem of evil.

Christine puts it bluntly: “Can YOU really see God in the immense suffering as a result of the China earthquake or the Myanmar cyclone...?” It’s kind of like Jesus’ question to Peter at Caesarea Philippi: “But who do YOU say that I am?” (Christine has a way of putting a preacher on the spot. Which is OK with me. It goes with the territory.)

Well, Christine, let me attempt an answer. Please understand, before I begin, that any answer I attempt can hardly break new ground. This question has both preoccupied and baffled the sharpest theological minds down through the centuries.

Archibald MacLeish put it colorfully, in J.B., his play in verse based on the book of Job. There, the poet has the devil taunt the long-suffering Job, saying,

“If God is God, he is not good,
if God is good, he is not God,
take the even, take the odd.”

The writer of Genesis punctuates his narrrative of creation with the repeated mantra, “And it was good.” But was it? That’s really what Christine is asking. She wants to know if it was good through and through, if there were any seeds of evil in that idealized, primordial realm. In other words, was creation perfect? And, if so, what happened to it? How could the loving, omnipotent, “and it was good” God tolerate a world with earthquakes and cyclones in it, let alone Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma?

I’ve spent a fair amount of time wondering about that question myself, over the last several years. As I’ve pondered it, I’ve come to the conviction that creation need not be perfect to be good – at least, not as we commonly understand the word, “perfect.”

Anyone who takes a hard, unblinking look at creation quickly realizes it’s far from perfect. I’m no creationist; I firmly believe God used – and still uses – random processes like Darwin’s natural selection to fashion the universe. Think of the wild profusion of seeds that never make it to fertile soil. Think of the billions of animals gobbled up by larger, fiercer beasts. Think of humans who are blessed with free will, but who turn around and misuse that gift to create everything from Mein Kampf to child pornography to “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.” Yes, indeed, creation is a messy business. Sometimes it seems the creator God operates more like Jackson Pollock than Andrew Wyeth: sending shiny strings of paint swirling through the air, spattering as much color upon the floor and walls as ends up on the canvas. Yet, somehow God loves the wild imperfection of it all. And it was good.

It’s an imperfect world, no doubt about it. One strain of thinking within Christianity posits that creation began with perfection, but then something called the Fall intervened, as a saltshaker lid comes unscrewed over a bowl of soup. It blames human sin for the mess. I don’t buy that. There in the Garden, Adam and Eve have free will. The serpent may croon to them seductively, but at the end of the day they choose the forbidden fruit on their own. Adam and Eve have that capacity for choosing wrongly within them, all along – and isn’t it true that God created them, including their capacity to choose evil?

There’s another meaning to the word “perfect,” and this one I can affirm with respect to the creation story. “Perfect” doesn’t only mean “without flaw.” It can also mean “finished.” Like the grammarians’ “perfect tense,” this sort of perfection means just what Genesis 1 asserts: that God created, then God rested. When God rested n the seventh day, the work of creation was finished: flaws and all. And it was good.

When the author of Genesis says it was good, I think he’s using that word the way parents use it of their children: “He’s a good boy, she’s a good girl.” In saying such a thing, parents never mean their offspring are free from errors or flaws. They mean, “They are who they are. What they are is mine, and I love them.”

Yet, this world God created – good as it was, and still is – is far from static. It’s a living, growing thing. God may have perfected it eons ago, speaking a word of love into chaos, but the divine work of creation continues to unfold, through spouting volcanoes, shuddering earthquakes and swirling cyclones. Evolution continues, in its glorious profusion of species – some destined to become ancestors of species yet unborn, others bound only for the scrap heap of extinction. It’s all God’s, and it’s all good.

Could God intervene to prevent a shoddily-constructed Chinese school building from collapsing on the unsuspecting heads of its students? Could God send a cyclone spinning out into the open ocean, rather than letting it careen into a heavily-populated river delta, dotted with fragile bamboo huts?

In theory, God could. But, in practice, God typically won’t. That’s because God values one aspect of creation as especially good, so good it needs to be left alone: creation’s freedom. Were God to begin censoring creation’s every impulse to randomness, then it would cease to be the starkly beautiful place it is. It would become, instead, a wasteland of dreary predictability. The Pollock canvas would be transformed into a Stalinist propaganda poster. The lumpy, fresh-off-the vine tomato would become the perfectly-spherical but tasteless hothouse variety.

Did God create cancer? Maybe not directly, but God did bestow upon creation the gift of freedom. God stepped back and said, “I’m finished. Let it be.” Then there began a wild profusion of changes and mutations, continuing through the eons, even unto our own day. As in all living cells, the DNA in certain cells of the human body eventually mutates, changing the intricate pattern of chemical switches. One of these chemical switches controls the cells’ programmed instructions to die on schedule, making room for new cells. In their wild freedom, the newly-immortal cancer cells grow in size and number, squeezing out their healthier neighbors. Repeat this process millions of times, and the complex creature of which those cells are an essential part falls ill, even dies prematurely. Such a turn of events causes God to weep. Yet, through the tears, God keeps loving creation – enough to refrain from laying hands on it, robbing it of its precious freedom. God continues to call it good.

Ultimately, it’s love that’s at the center of creation. Out of love God fashioned the whole thing in the first place. Out of love God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness.” Out of love, God allows the human prodigal to run free, even if that one is squandering the family fortune. The child’s got to fall before it can walk.

“Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end. For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.” (1 Corinthians 13:8-10)

The poet Isaiah promises that, one day, God will roll up the whole cosmic burrito, leveling earth’s mountains and raising up the valleys to make a grand processional highway of celebration. Then, there shall be no more weeping, nor crying, nor pain. They shall not hurt or destroy on all God’s holy mountain.

I’m coming to believe Philip Simmons – the ALS survivor whom I quoted, in the blog entry to which Christine took exception – is right. Because of his experience of suffering, he of all people is worthy to be our guide in such matters. The world is imperfect, as we normally define the term. Yet, the world is good, all the same. That good, but imperfect, world can even be our paradise.

It’s the only world we’ve got. Until the day. Until the day...

April 18, 2008 - Cancer and Sin

“Cancer” and “sin” are two words that truly don’t belong together – yet, how easy it is to pair them up anyway!

There’s a part of us that wants to assign blame for cancer. What’s the first question many of us ask, when we hear of someone diagnosed with lung cancer? “Did she smoke?” As if that makes a difference. Somehow, a non-smoker with lung cancer belongs to a different order, in our minds, than a smoker struggling with the same disease. Aren’t both worthy of our compassionate concern, as they sit side by side in the oncologist’s waiting room?

It’s more comforting, somehow, to hear of a smoker who gets lung cancer, than a non-smoker who does. It feeds our craving to see the universe as a fundamentally fair place.



Relatively few cancers have a clear lifestyle- or behavior-related cause. Sure, there are all sorts of theories out there about environmental causes of various cancers, but only a few (smoking for lung cancer, asbestos exposure for mesothelioma, sun exposure for melanoma, sexual promiscuity for some cervical cancers) are established beyond doubt. To say “So-and-so got cancer because _____” is appealing, for it allows us to scratch another cancer off the lengthy list of those that simply are – scourges that descend upon a human life without warning and without apparent cause.

Those cancers – like the non-Hodgkin lymphoma I have – are truly scary. They seem so random.

Some people, having exhausted the possible environmental or lifestyle causes, move on to theology. They want to view cancer as God’s punishment for sin.

I’ve been reading Dancing in Limbo: Making Sense of Life After Cancer, by Glenna Halvorson-Boyd and Lisa K. Hunter (Jossey-Bass, 1995). I’m not exactly living a life after cancer, myself, but there are some aspects of my extended, asymptomatic watch-and-wait existence that are similar to life after cancer. I’m struggling, these days, with survivorship issues, which is why I picked up this book. Anyway, here’s a perceptive passage from it, about how common it is to view cancer as God’s punishment:

“Although the notion that cancer is a punishment for our sins may remain unconscious or unspoken, it appears to be present in a surprising number of cancer patients and their family members. A recent study of Canadian children with cancer and their parents by David Bearison and his colleagues revealed that half of the adults blamed themselves for their child's cancer. (Only 20 percent of the children practiced self-blame.) What the parents blamed themselves for directly was a sin. They actually believed that their use of illicit drugs or their adultery had caused the child's cancer. The parents' reasoning defied medical science but reflected their belief that sin will be punished.

For many of us, the idea of cancer as a direct punishment for our sins is too antiscientific to believe. However, if we examine the causal theories we create, we may find sin lurking just below the surface of our reasoning. For example, women who are sexually active at an early age and have many sexual partners are, in fact, at higher risk for cervical cancer. Disentangling the “sin” (of “promiscuity”) from the science (of statistical risk) in cervical cancer is difficult at best. Even if the form of cancer that we have does not appear directly linked to behavior that we feel guilty or ashamed about, we may, like the Canadian parents, nevertheless imagine it to be a retribution for our sins.” (Dancing in Limbo, p. 43.)

Why do so many of us practice such faulty logic, wanting to assign blame where none is deserved? It’s because there’s something that scares us even more than sin and retribution: the thought that, as Jesus teaches, God “sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous” (Matthew 5:45). Which is a scarier universe to live in: one ruled by a petty, vindictive God who’s quick to smite sinners for their transgressions, or one in which God allows two-year-olds to die of brain tumors for no apparent reason?

Halvorson-Boyd and Hunter boil it down to a twisted little syllogism: “Our primitive sense of justice is ruled by a cruel logic: if we want to believe that we will get what we deserve, then we must deserve what we get” (p. 44).

And so, many of us cancer survivors wallow in self-blame. I’ve had a few moments in the past few years when I’ve wondered what I might have done to so anger God, but – I’m happy to say – that hasn’t been a major theme for me. After nearly 25 years in ministry, I’ve heard the “Why me?” question so often, from saints and sinners alike, that I really don’t believe illness is God’s punishment. In those awful months just before and after my diagnosis, I did feel considerable anger over my plight, but I wasn’t much inclined to direct my anger at God. I was more inclined to say, “Life is unfair” than “God is unfair.”

Bottom line? None of us deserves to have cancer.

March 23, 2008 - Encrypted with Christ

For my Easter sermon this morning, I decide to go with a slightly unconventional choice. Rather than basing it on the Gospel lesson (as most worshipers expect), I decide to speak on the Epistle – which, today, is Colossians 3:1-4.

The line that’s grabbed my attention is v. 3: “...for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” It’s an odd statement: for, if the greeting is, “you have died,” then who could the listener possibly be? If it’s a true statement, then what ears could hear it?

Maybe only those who reside in the cemetery. In that place, truer words were never spoken. Yet, like the philosopher’s famous tree that falls in the forest where no one’s around to hear, if we went and proclaimed that message among the gravestones, would we really having a conversation?

The “Aha!” moment, for me, in writing this sermon, was the realization that the Greek word for “hidden” is krypto. It’s a word we know from “cryptology,” “cryptogram,” “cryptic.” That means we could translate the scripture text very literally indeed, so it would read, “your life is encrypted with Christ in God.”

That got me thinking about the Rosetta Stone, probably the most famous code-breaking device of all time. That slab of black, granite-like stone – with three parallel inscriptions, in Egyptian hieroglyphics, another ancient Egyptian tongue called Demotic and classical Greek – became the cryptographic key for unraveling the secrets of hieroglyphics. Up to that point, no one in the world remembered how to read hieroglyphics. The translator, Jean-François Champollion, fulfilled the herculean task of using the stone to break the code. Once he had done so, all other translations of hieroglyphics became child’s play (relatively speaking).

There’s much that is mysterious about human life – and, human death as well. What happens after we die? No one can say for sure – apart from certain, highly poetic passages of scripture that have provided much of the imagery we tend to associate with heaven (clouds, choristers, pearly gates and the like). While a few Christians take such passages literally, most understand them metaphorically. The true heaven is likely to be a bigger reality than earthbound human minds can comprehend.

The theologian Douglas John Hall once admitted that he’s mystified by the resurrection, as well. “I don’t claim to understand it,” he wrote in one of his books, “but I do stand under it.” (You don’t need to understand it; just stand under it – I like that.)

It seems to me, I tell the Easter crowd, that we can look on the resurrection of Jesus Christ as the cryptographic key that enables us to plumb such mysteries (at least, up to a point). The resurrection is our Rosetta Stone. We can’t fully understand the concept, but we can utilize it as a sort of interpretative lens, through which we can view all of life, as well as death.

There is much that is dark and mysterious about cancer, as well. Why do some get the disease, and not others? Why do some have a harder time with it, and others manage to muddle through with apparent ease? How ought we to cope with debilitating side effects, not to mention the sheer emotional weight of carrying such a health burden, over time?

The answers to such questions, it seems to me, are hinted at in Jesus’ resurrection. It’s a story that’s been filtered through centuries of retelling. The only way to grasp it is to accept the biblical witness, in faith.

There are multiple biblical witnesses, of course – and some of them disagree with one another. Does it detract from the authority of the Bible to have four separate Easter stories – some of them contradicting the others?

Not if the resurrection is real.

If the resurrection were not real – if someone had made the story up – you'd expect there would be just one account, perfectly structured and beautifully narrated. What we have instead are these four versions: each one flawed, each one compelling in its own way. Each one tells us something worth knowing, but each one also leaves us feeling hungry for more.

Growing into a serviceable understanding of the resurrection is the journey of a lifetime. For those of us with cancer, who may be faced with the reality of a shorter lifespan, there’s no time like the present for claiming this ancient proclamation for our own.

The Lord is risen – risen indeed!

March 15, 2008 - The Bucket List

Yesterday, Claire and I went to see the film, The Bucket List, at our local second-run movie theater. We don't get out to many movies in theaters, and this is one we'd meant to see on its first time around, but missed. We're glad the Beach Cinema in Bradley Beach gave us a second chance.

In case you haven't seen it or read about it, the film is about billionaire executive Edward Cole (Jack Nicholson) and blue-collar mechanic Carter Chambers (Morgan Freeman). These two men are sharing a hospital room on a cancer ward when they both learn they have fewer than six months to live. They decide to stop behaving as though they are already dead. Bankrolled by Edward's substantial fortune, they check out of the hospital and live their lives to the fullest in the short time they have left. Living life to the fullest, for Edward, involves field trips like skydiving, visiting the Pyramids and getting a tattoo – macho activities that set the ol' adrenaline a-pumping. Carter's ideas are more modest and more values-driven – "witness something truly majestic," "help a complete stranger" – although he enthusiastically joins in on the race-car driving and touring the world on a private jet. All these are detailed on a scrap of paper from a yellow legal pad they call the "bucket list": the things they want to do before they kick the bucket, which they then scratch off the list, one by one.

It's a buddy movie for the cancer set. In any other circumstances, these two men would have been unlikely to become friends, due to differences in background, wealth, temperament and religious beliefs. Yet, they do become friends. The thing they have in common is cancer, and an awareness that their days are numbered.

The film's plot has been savaged by some critics for being contrived, but the fans evidently loved it. It was the number-one film in theaters for a time. Surely, a large part of its appeal is the chemistry between these two accomplished actors, but I think it also has to do with the way the film fearlessly takes on big, philosophical questions like the meaning of life, death and religious faith. The Bucket List doesn't supply a lot of answers, but the journey is a fine ride.

I was especially impressed by the role religious faith plays in the film. Edward, the over-the-hill hedonist, is a frank and rather prickly agnostic, declaring that the sum total of his belief is "We live, we die and the wheels on the bus go round and round." Carter gently declares his faith in God, although he admits it's not based on empirical evidence. That's what faith is all about, he tells his new friend. To him, faith is clearly not a truth distilled from empirical analysis. It's not something you deduce. It's something you do.

Does Edward get the message? The film hints that he does, leading him to a sort of personal redemption, through repairing some long-sundered family relationships (I won't say more than that, so as not to be a plot-spoiler).

I've never been as sick as the two men in the film, but the scenes of them learning of their cancer diagnosis did strike a chord. News like that sure does pick you up, turn you around and put you back down in a different place.

Everyone should see this film. It's a gem.