March 10, 2013 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m. | Fourth Sunday in Lent

A Method in the Madness

Joyce Shin
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 32
2 Corinthians 5:16–21

“So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!”

2 Corinthians 5:17 (NRSV)

The best work is done with the heart breaking,
or overflowing.
Mignon McLaughlin

There is a recently published book by Francis Spufford entitled Unapologetic: Why Despite Everything, Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense. Francis Spufford is not a theologian, not a pastor, not a religious expert of any kind. He is an award-winning writer, and he is a Christian, who in this book takes on the likes of defenders of atheism Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and does so both in his power of writing and his power of conviction.

His decision to write this book stems, in part, from care for his daughter. She has just turned six, and before she encounters a world of people cynical about religion or who feel the need to ridicule all things religious, which she surely will encounter, with this book he tries to nip in the bud any chance that cynicism will sink its claws into the Christian worldview that he thinks is worthy of passing onto her.

He lists all the things that his daughter will likely hear about Christians—Christians on the left, Christians on the right, and anywhere in between:

That we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities . . . that we don’t believe in dinosaurs . . . that we’re dogmatic . . . that we’re self-righteous . . . that we fetishize pain and suffering . . . that we advocate wishy-washy niceness . . . that we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die . . . that we’re judgmental . . . that we think everyone who disagrees with us is going to roast for all eternity . . . that we oppose gay rights, individual moral autonomy, a woman’s right to choose, stem cell research, the teaching of evolutionary biology . . . that we sanctify the idea of hierarchy . . . that we destroy tribal cultures; that we think the world is going to end; that we want to help the world to end; that we teach people to hate their own natural selves; that we want people to be afraid; that we want people to be ashamed; that we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, law to mercy, primary colors to shades [of grey] . . . that we’re villains in history, on the wrong side of every struggle for human liberty . . . that if we sometimes seem to have been on the right side, we weren’t really; or the struggle wasn’t about what it appeared to be about; or we didn’t really do the right thing for the reasons we said we did . . . that we’ve provided pious cover stories for racism, imperialism, wars of conquest, slavery, exploitation. (pp.1–3)

These are serious charges against Christians and Christianity, and when they have been true, to any extent, as they have been at times, I can see why cynicism creeps in. And so it is nothing less than remarkable and quite moving to me whenever cynicism is held at bay, whenever, instead, a sense of optimism, possibility, and hope is awakened.

German theologian Jürgen Moltmann, known for his serious academic scholarship, perhaps especially for his writings on a theology of hope, has written a book that is somewhat unconventional for a professor at a German university. It is unconventional because in it he shares a very personal story. There are some stories that, when you encounter them, illuminate your understanding of a person’s great body of work. While I had read many of Moltmann’s other books and had even gone to Germany the year after college to study with him, it wasn’t until I read this story, published late in his life, that so much of his writing and work made profound sense.

He writes:

I am not only a theologian who is concerned with the hopes and fears of humanity on the scholarly level. I am also a survivor of “Sodom and Gomorrah.” To say this is not poetic license in the religious sense. It is painful fact. Whenever I call up that catastrophe and descend into the dark pit of remembrance, I am overwhelmed again by fear and trembling. I am talking here about the destruction of my home city of Hamburg in the last week of July 1943. Night after night, about a thousand Royal Air Force bombers appeared over the city, and with explosive and incendiary bombs kindled a storm of fire which . . . from Hammerbrook to Wandsbek, burnt everything living. . . . In that fire 40,000 people died. . . . Together with others belonging to my school class, I was an air force auxiliary in an anti-aircraft battery in the inner city. The battery was stationed on the Outer Alster, easily visible for aircraft, and it was completely wiped out in a hailstorm of bombs. But for some incomprehensible reason, the bomb which blew to pieces the school friend who stood beside me at the firing platform left me unscathed. I found myself in the water, clinging to a plank of wood, and was saved. . . . In the end, those of us who had survived made our way through the wreckage of the streets, climbing over charred bodies. We were convinced that this was indeed “the end,” and that the war would be over in a few days. But this terrible end was followed by two other years of unending terror which destroyed the lives of millions. (Jürgen Moltmann, In the End—the Beginning, p. 33)

For Professor Moltmann, when the war finally ended, a three-year imprisonment began. The kindness that Scottish miners and English neighbors showed him and other prisoners of war added profoundly to the shame he felt not only for having survived when so many had died, but also for having played the perpetrator’s part. And yet, their kindness, he writes, “made it possible for us to live with the guilt of our own people, the catastrophes we had brought about and the long shadows of Auschwitz, without repressing them and without becoming callous” (p. 35).

He also recounts that during his imprisonment a well-meaning army chaplain gave him a Bible. Having been raised without any religion at home, he had never read the Bible, and now, after such catastrophe, he received the Bible with cynicism. Where was God? What good could God do now? Could God undo what was done? Could God bring about justice, repay good with good and wrong with wrong? Could God reinstate some method in the madness, some order in the chaos, some hope in the midst of all the devastation and death?

There in the Bible he encountered for the first time Jesus crucified, crying out “My God, why have you forsaken me?” And reading on, he found in the psalms a God who is judge, who is advocate, and who is also friend at court. He found a God who is on the side of the victims and who is on the side of the offenders, who is not only a deliverer from evil but also a forgiver of sins. And he recognized the complexity of it all: that justice is not as simple as repaying good with good and evil with evil, because not everything that is done can be undone. Sometimes no payment, no recompense, can make up for the harm that has happened.

What then? What can set things right?

None of us are immune to this moral complexity. By chance, most of us were not born into the generation of Germans who lived under Hitler’s rule. We can count ourselves lucky for that. But we know our own complicities with powers that perpetrate violence and harm on others. We are part of political structures, economic systems, and social institutions in which what is good on one side likely ministers to what is evil on the other. If we are honest with ourselves, we know that we too need a God who is not only judge over all, but also advocate and friend to the victim and to the offender. And because in catastrophic situations the method of repaying good with good and evil with evil simply cannot set things right, what is needed is something much more radical.

What is needed is a new creation.

In Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks about a new creation. In fact, often when Paul speaks about what God has done in Jesus Christ, he speaks about a new creation in which the old has passed away and the new has appeared. So radical and amazing is this act of God in setting all things right that he says, “Behold,” see, “everything has become new!” It is a ta-da moment, no less significant or amazing than what God created “in the beginning.”

There is, however, a big difference between the new creation made possible in Christ and the original creation in Genesis. Whereas “in the beginning” God created the world out of nothing, in Christ God re-creates the world out of what already exists. God does not create from a slate wiped clean; God does not undo what was done or override our mistakes. Rather, in Christ God comes down to us, dwells among us, is offended and betrayed by us, suffers and dies because of us. He takes upon himself our sin. And yet he is not weighed down by us and all our baggage. He advocates for us, prays for us, and forgives us. Christ re-creates us.

I read once a description of Mozart’s “Clarinet Concerto” that made the Adagio movement sound like what I imagine the new creation that Paul speaks about feels like. In case you don’t know the piece, as I didn’t recognize it by name, here’s the description:

It is a very patient piece of music. It goes round and round, in its way, essentially playing the same tune again and again, on the clarinet alone and then with the orchestra, clarinet and then orchestra, lifting up the same unhurried lilt of solitary sound and then backing it with a kind of messageless tenderness in deep waves, when the strings join in. It is not strained in any way (Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p. 15).

The description goes on:

It does not sound as if Mozart is doing something he can only just manage, and it does not sound as if the music is struggling to lift a weight it can only just manage. Yet at the same time, it is not music that denies anything. It offers a strong, absolutely calm rejoicing, but it does not pretend there is no sorrow. On the contrary, it sounds as if it comes from a world where sorrow is perfectly ordinary, but still there is more to be said. It said: everything you fear is true. And yet. And yet. Everything you have done wrong, you have really done wrong. And yet. And yet. . . . You are still deceiving yourself, said the music, if you don’t allow for the possibility of this. There is more going on here than what you deserve or don’t deserve. There is this, as well. And the tune is played again, with all the cares in the world. (Francis Spufford, Unapologetic, p. 16)

This is the season of Lent, when we remember that Jesus took upon himself all the cares in the world. The passion narrative of Lent and Easter is not just one among many stories in the Bible about Jesus. It is the story in light of which all the stories about Jesus’ life, his deeds and teachings, make sense. It is also the story that makes sense of all of our stories in which we have both suffered and have caused others to suffer. The story of Jesus being convicted and crucified convicts us. It shows us what we are capable of—the complicit roles we could have played in Jesus’ death: the chief priests who plot against Jesus, the disciples who fail to protect him, Pilate who lets the crowd decide Jesus’ fate, the criminal who is allowed to live when Jesus is sentenced to death, the law enforcers and guards who are just doing their jobs, the people in the crowd: the ignorant jeerers, the silent observers, the impotent family members.

Despite their different degrees of complicity, Jesus asks God to forgive them all. And in that request made on our behalf, we see the amazing power forgiveness has. As Professor Moltmann and other German prisoners of war came to know from the kindness shown to them by the Scottish and English people, forgiveness makes it possible for all of humanity to live with the tragic knowledge that there are times when we are both victims and perpetrators. Because Jesus asked God to forgive us, we can weep for him even though we can imagine ourselves capable of wronging him. And it’s precisely because this central story of our faith does not allow us to have illusions about sin, whether in ourselves or in anyone else, that we can avoid the disillusionment that leads to cynicism. Christianity is all about realism. It has no room for cynicism. The story of Christ’s passion speaks powerfully precisely because it is grounded in our real lives, in the real complexities of suffering and guilt, and in the real catastrophes of our personal and collective histories. God does not allow us to start from scratch. We have to live with what we have done. But in his mercy, he came to us in Jesus Christ, took upon our humanity, and through the amazing power of forgiveness, transforms us. We are not the same as we were before. In Christ, we are a new creation. Amen.