MUMC Sermon-10/08/06

October 8, 2006

The Eighteenth Sunday After Pentecost

Faith Like a Child’s

Psalm 26; Job 1:1, 2:1-10; Mark 10:2-16

The Reverend Richard E. Allen, Jr.

Their story has haunted me for more than a week now, and for several days I didn’t even know their names. These nameless girls faced life’s complexity, sorrow, and violence in a one-room schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. The most recent of several victims killed at schools in the United States and Canada, they had done no harm. They innocently addressed their lessons, geography, social studies, math and literature, when the boredom and the whispers of their day were suddenly interrupted by a tormented intruder. On Thursday I learned the names of the four buried on that day: Naomi, Marian, Mary, and Lena. And Anna Mae was buried on Friday. Five others, wounded, remain in serious or critical condition. (New York Times, October 6, 2006) This much we knew from the start, without knowing their names: none of them deserved this. They were truly innocent.

Somehow, these children’s innocence made the violence all the worse, all the more difficult to understand. One was only seven, we all learned later. The oldest was just thirteen. The boys and some teachers dismissed, the girls were lined up at the front of the room and bound. Ultimately they were shot. The tale is nearly too horrible to recall, but it’s a story that begs for some faithful understanding.

Perhaps it’s trite, but it’s also true that God was with them that day. The students in the school and their teachers surely believed that God was with them. One of the surviving teachers noted to a neighbor that in the midst of her terror she was calmed, sensing the presence of an angel in the room with them and the intruder. And the families of the dead and dying little girls believe that God is present, even now. We believe, too. In such a world as ours, the culture we have shaped with our own violent hands, we hope and we believe that God is here, in our midst, sustaining us, if not always protecting us.

There’s something in us that understands that our culture is violent, but we want to think that there are places beyond the taint of evil – simple places, inhabited, perhaps, by dedicated, honest God-fearing people like the Amish. We want to think that there are places, our homes and our schools among them, that are beyond the threat of such a sense-defying, world-destroying tragedy. But events shatter such illusions of serenity. Our world has a share of serenity, but it has also a share of violence. All of us are touched by it. Everywhere.

It took me a while to come to my own honesty about this loss of imagined innocence. I have been touched by this story, I realized, because my own mother, a retired teacher herself, taught some years ago in a small school. Her school had not one, but two small rooms. She and another teacher shared one roof and twenty-some-odd students. Together they taught grades one through six. Some recess of my mind remembered my mom’s little room full of children when I heard the story from Pennsylvania. And, with a start, I realized that something like this week’s tragedy might have happened to her. Only then did I understand why I felt so personally involved in this story. I had come to understand a simple, awful truth: If it could happen in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania, among the Amish, such a thing might happen anywhere. It might have happened to my mom. Or to me. Or to one of my children. And it still could. But here’s the thing: I never once thought it might. Now I realize that life cannot be insulated from such violence. Never. To live in this world is to live at some risk.

Part of the story of this tragedy is that, being who we are, with the history we have, we are powerless to prevent every outbreak of senseless violence. I don’t say that we should not try. We will do our best: installing metal detectors and police guards at the doors of our schools has become commonplace. Appropriate enough. But some days we will lose the battle, and some days suffering will simply appear with an ugly grin, insinuated into even the most well gated communities or the most well ordered life.

Sickness as well as violence is part and parcel of the sin that stalks into life, even the healthiest. Neither exercise regimens nor nutritious menus will keep every illness at bay. The biopsy comes back positive, and suddenly the world collapses in on itself. Or you can be worrying over the balance in your child’s college account, the years racing toward the freshman year faster than the balance, and suddenly all is for naught with the onset of a mental illness. Or you wait for the daughter to return home from an evening with her friends, and instead an officer in a uniform rings the bell at the door.

Or, as happened on Long Island a few days ago, you graduate from the police academy, and naturally head out for a little celebration with your new friends, also rookies, and on the way home you lose control of the car: in the crash your friend dies and though you survive, the life you’ve just begun has now ended.

The lives of God’s faithful people are not protected from difficult circumstances. To live is to suffer. So it takes a bit of courage to hear the beginning of the story of Job. We wonder, with the theologian author of the book, whether God is capricious rather than merciful, allowing, as God does, this “Satan,” to put Job to the test of his faith. Surely, we think with Job, God is more fair, more just. We want to think more of God, as we want to hope more of the life God gives. Still, knowing life as we do, we know that Job will be tested. He will ultimately bow his head under his grief and his pain, and he will shake his fist up at God and ask the question we all ask: “Why?”

How could a human not ask such of God, at some time in our lives? How can we avoid wondering, “How can God let such a thing happen?” In lives of children, lives that are truly just beginning, truly innocent, how do such things happen? Is there no one there? Why do bad things happen, to truly good, innocent young people? Others may deserve such trials, but surely not they. Surely. Or is there something wrong with God, or with our understanding of God?

Job arrives at such questions himself, of course. But in today’s lesson, it is his wife who suggests that he give up. Listen again as the text describes her conversation with Job: “Then his wife said to [Job], ‘Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.’” (1:9)

But Job has seen enough of life to know that every life has its seasons. He answers his wife: “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (1:10) As most of us know, things will get worse for Job. Things will get much worse. His friends will blame him for life’s calamities, and Job will eventually curse his own birth. He will ask God for explanations which never come.

In his hope for God’s vindication in distress, Job is not alone. He speaks for us, and all who share faith in Christ as the Lord of life. We hope, we pray, and finally we trust that God is there, on our side. The psalmist who wrote Psalm 26, which we said together this morning, also looks to God for vindication. “I have trusted in the Lord without wavering,” he says. (26:1) Then, having made his case about his own faithfulness, he calls on God, to test him: “Prove me, O Lord, and try me; test my heart and mind. … I walk in faithfulness to you.” (26:2-3) And this psalmist hopes that God is watching, and he hopes that God will be faithful as well.

But it is more than hope, isn’t it? Finally the Psalmist finds that he trusts the Lord, no matter what. There is faith here, too. Don’t miss the jewel of faith, embedded in the granite of this otherwise heavy sense of life’s trials: “But as for me,” he says, “I walk in my integrity; redeem me, [Lord,] and be gracious to me. My foot stands on level ground; in the great congregation I will bless the Lord.” (26:11-12)

To bless the Lord in great congregation is to find the faith to continue. To bless the Lord is ultimately to trust the Lord, too, no matter what comes. This trust is the core of Job’s faith, of course. And it is the faith of the Psalmist, who, though he has seen trying times, still sees, knows, and trusts that the Lord is there in the trials.

The Psalm sings a trust in God not unlike the trust we invoked when we sang, as we shared that Psalm together, “Through it all, through it all, I’ve learned to trust in Jesus, I’ve learned to trust in God.” The people who first uttered those verses knew the trials of life, often at its worst. They had no hope but their hope in the Lord, but that, they knew, was enough. It was, and it is. The bedrock of our faith in a just and loving God supports every life, even when life turns through the valley of the shadow of death.

When all else fails, God is still God. When all others turn away, God’s love for us remains steadfast. When the bottom drops out of life, God is the ground on which we stand. Always. Always.

Our prayer, of course, is that our faith will not be tried, that life will continue in its easy course, that children will grow well and safely, and that lives will be carefree. Something in us knows that the shape of life is different, of course. Something in each of us knows that life will be both grand and difficult. Something in us knows that none of us escapes pain indefinitely.

When the shadows of life fall, Jesus suggests a childlike faith, a faith that trusts that God is there, and the angels, too. When the shadows fall, God is there, unmovable, a sure and present help in every distress. When the shadows fall, a practiced faith is important, with the community we’ve come to rely on as our own. The gathered church helps us say, together, with the Psalmist, “I have trusted in the Lord without wavering.” That trust is what matters in such times.

In the face of life, anything less is unworthy. Whether in a schoolroom or a family den, the shadows of life eventually fall on us all. Our hope for ourselves is that others may say of us, as one neighbor said of her Amish friends this past week, “These are people with unshakable faith.” (New York Times, Oct 6, 2006)

In such a time, nothing else matters. Nothing else at all.

Amen.