Agony

 

Propers: The Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 23), A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

“Truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven.”

Now there’s a dangerous verse if taken out of context.

Too many people think that if we just believe in God then only good things will happen to good people and bad things will only happen to bad people. Too many people think that if you just pray hard enough, believe fervently enough, squeeze out enough faith from deep within your soul, then magic will happen. You’ll get that promotion. You’ll find that parking space. You’ll beat this disease.

“Name it and claim it!” Isn’t that what the prosperity preachers profess, those hucksters up on stage with their million-dollar McMansions and their Gulfstream jets? Or maybe it’s “the power of positive thinking,” for the more modest middle class.

We’re so deeply mired in American meritocracy that we truly seem to think that God is like some reality series CEO doling out bonuses to those employees who exhibit the most winning and sycophantic smiles, the bubbliest can-do attitudes. And the flipside of this, of course, is that if it doesn’t work—if your prayers aren’t answered, your wishes aren’t granted—if bad things happen to good people, happen to you—then it’s your fault. You didn’t pray hard enough. You didn’t believe earnestly enough. You didn’t have enough faith.

And this of course leads to shame, grief, bitterness, regret, and rage. We think that God has betrayed us. We think that our religion has sold to us a bill of goods. So many internet atheists, I find, prayed for a miracle, didn’t get it, and turned their wrath on the God who failed. They’re not enlightened rationalists. They’re jilted lovers.

It amazes me that people have been reading the Scriptures for thousands of years, listening to sermons for thousands of years, and still come away with the message that faith is transactional; that God is a genie granting wishes, a fairy godmother doling out spells. That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works. The Bible is full of terrible things happening to good people. It’s full of prayers that were not answered in the way that we wanted them to be.

Truly one need only look to Jesus. Here we have the world’s only perfect, sinless Man—God Himself in the flesh—and He wound up tortured and broken upon a Cross for all the world to see, murdered by the very humanity whom He had come to save. “Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me.” So prayed God in Gethsemane to God in eternity. And the answer, it seems, was no. The cup did not pass.

When I was a trauma chaplain back in Pennsylvania, I remember one evening when a young woman had lost her baby, her first and only child—the worst thing that could happen to any parent. She was in a living hell. And her pastor was there. And he told her, told this young couple, that their baby had died because they lacked faith; because they hadn’t prayed hard enough; because they didn’t believe strongly enough. And this he called religion.

Make no mistake: that night that pastor was an agent of hell. And he earned his pay.

What does prayer give us, if it isn’t magic, if we can’t conjure miracles on demand? Well, simply put, prayer gives to us God—or, more accurately, gives us to God. When a Christian prays, we never pray alone. In our Baptism, God the Father promises to hear us, as a loving parent listens to His children. In our Baptism, God the Son, our King and High Priest, promises to pray with us, pray for us, pray beside us, for it is indeed the Lord’s Prayer.

And in our Baptism, God the Holy Spirit, the very breath and life of God, enters into us, dwells within us, makes of our body His Temple, and thus intercedes for us forever with sighs too deep for words. And so God is the One who hears our prayer, God is the One praying our prayer, and God is even the prayer itself rising up from within, beyond all thoughts or words. In prayer we are drawn into the very life of the Trinity, the eternal outpouring of love between Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit that is God in God’s self.

And that changes everything.

To know God in this way, to have God in this way, is to have our sins constantly forgiven, our life constantly renewed. It is to know that God is not only Goodness and Truth and Beauty but Love itself, real love, true love, such as every love known here below is but a pale reflection. It is to know that God does not, indeed cannot, will evil; that God did not create sin, nor death, nor hell—for these things are negations, emptiness, with no substance of their own. The world as it is is not the world as it is meant to be. Bad things happen to good people not because God is careless or cruel but because it is a broken world, and we a broken people. And God will not let this stand.

Rather God reacts to all this tragedy, all this cruelty, not with fire and brimstone, but with a love that cannot die, a mercy that cannot fail, a life that outlives death itself. God does not sit aloft and aloof on His throne in heaven but plunges down here, down into the mud and the blood, to join us in our plight; to suffer with us unto death, yea, even death on a Cross; and to conquer the Abyss by filling it up to bursting with the white-hot grace of the God who loves us all the way to hell and back.

Christ is with us in all our pains, all our sufferings, all our doubts. He is with us in every godawful tragedy and unjust calamity. And He takes all our woundedness, our brokenness, our sinfulness, into Himself, into His heart, and there drowns it in the depthless ocean of His love. By His wounds we are healed. And He promises us that the Resurrection begun in Him at Calvary will spread throughout the cosmos, into every crack and crevice, until that day when the Son shall hand the Kingdom over to the Father, the old heavens and the old earth shall together become a new heaven-and-earth, and God at the last shall be All in All.

Then will He dry every tear, and heal every wound, and restore every loss, so that Creation’s final state shall be infinitely more glorious even than our first. And all the dead shall rise, and all the damned be saved, and every unthinkable wrong done throughout the length and breadth of history shall finally, impossibly, miraculously be set right. And it will be joy such as we cannot possibly imagine.

I will say three things about miracles. First, miracles and magic are opposites, not only in their sources but also in their aims. Magic seeks power for mortal human beings: a spell is but a prayer that our will be done. Miracles do just the opposite: they fill us with gratitude and wonder and fear precisely because they reveal that God is not what we imagine, nor are His ways our ways. Rather His will for us is infinitely more wondrous that our own could ever be.

Second, the miracles of Jesus, by and large, are the same blessings given by God to everyone, just sped up. We can all turn water into wine, given time. We can all, by God’s grace, heal wounds, feed the hungry, multiply bread, and restore relationships. Granted, the walking on water bit might be a little tricky. But the big one—the Resurrection, the remaking of the world—is promised to us all.

Third, every prayer is answered in the Resurrection. Every wound is healed, every blessing given, every loss restored, and every mother’s son raised up from the loamy earth of the grave. Then shall be reunion and joy and bliss everlasting. Then shall the ending of our story at last make sense and redeem all that went before.

I said earlier that Jesus’ own prayer—“let this cup pass from Me”—seems to have gone unanswered, that it failed. But this isn’t really true. The cup did indeed pass from Jesus, three days later. The Father saw His Son through the worst horrors that this world could throw at Him. And yes, He suffered. And yes, He died. But the Cross was never the end of His story. Why, it barely even slowed Him down.

God hears your prayers, beloved. In truth, they are His prayers too. Wherever we go, He has already gone before us. Whatever we do, He is already there to save us. Miracles happen, yes. But prayer is not a miracle machine. Prayer promises us one thing, and one thing only: the One True God, revealed to us, in Jesus Christ our Lord.

And when we have Him, we have everything—with infinitely more to come.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.