2^nd Samuel 6:12-23   

1^st Samuel 24:1-12                Mark 10:46 -52

 

I: — He was a poet, a musician, a lover, a military genius.   He was also a shrewd administrator and a formidable dispenser of justice. He was generous, kind, merciful, a loyal friend. Above all he was a man of God.

DAVID was his name. Men envied him. Women swooned over him. Enemies dreaded him. All of these responses befitted him, for there were gifts in him worth envying, a virility that could make any woman gasp, and a determination that only fools trifled with.

David had a faith in God that could move mountains.   He also possessed immense human affection.  And he had feet of clay. He sinned as ardently as he worshipped, and as a result of his sin his life fell apart; domestic disaster overtook him, and his son even sought to kill him.

A hero in Israel , David was adulated at a civic reception, one day, and an aristocratic princess, Michal, daughter of King Saul, fell for him.  Later she despised him. Of course she despised him. She came from the royal family, while he came from rural people devoid of social sophistication and cocktail party smoothness.  Later still — in fact last of all — he died a broken man, everything around him in ruins.

Nevertheless David’s people remembered the glory that had been his, and because his, theirs as well.  So it was one thousand years later that shepherds were told they would find the saviour of the world in the city of David . So it was that a blind beggar cried repeatedly to Jesus, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Not only can his people, Israel , not forget David to this day. I can never forget him either.

II: — Who was David? He was a red-haired shepherd boy, born in Bethlehem , the youngest of eight brothers. When only an adolescent he found favour in the eyes of King Saul.   As David gained fame, however, Saul became jealous; soon his jealousy curdled to hatred. Saul was plainly manic-depressive, paranoid as well.  Paranoid? Certainly.         “All of you have conspired against me”, Saul thundered one day, “All of you.” Saul was deranged. In his derangement he tried to spear David.  David fled from the royal court and hid himself in a cave, twenty kilometres from Bethlehem . An outlaw now, he was joined by four hundred other men who had had to flee the psychotic king and who were as desperate as David himself.   “Everyone who was in distress …   in debt … or bitter of soul” is how the bible describes the band that gathered around David.

The four hundred men had wives and children with them.  They had to eat. Money and food were gathered from the sheepfarmers whom David’s men protected against the Philistines. In addition, the men plundered any raider foolhardy enough to take them on.

Then Saul died. David was no longer an outlaw. Much happened overnight. His fame increased dramatically. He was royal ruler, military general, civil service administrator, chief justice — all at the same time. He seemed invincible. Nonetheless, his life unravelled. Amnon, David’s son, raped and then discarded Tamar, a half-sister.         Whereupon Absalom, another son, killed his brother Amnon for the foul deed. After this Absalom came to think himself quite important, a vigilante hero (at least in his own eyes). Following much scheming and manipulating Absalom proclaimed himself king to the cheers of his own crowd of sycophants.

David had to flee for his life, flee from his own son.  In what I regard as the saddest picture in all of scripture, David fled across the river Jordan and staggered up the Mount of Olives , weeping, a broken-hearted, broken-down king.  Meanwhile, on the other side of the Jordan , David’s friends pursued Absalom.  Absalom tried to escape only to hang himself accidentally.  Distraught, David lamented his murderous son’s death in a lament we shall never forget: “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom. Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom my son, my son.” And there David died.

III: — David moves me as often as I think of him.

(i) He moves me, in the first place, on account of his immense affection and his intense loyalty. He moves me inasmuch as today we live, by contrast, in an era of cavalier human encounters and superficial relationships and dessicated affection.   Whole-soulled affection poured upon people dear to us whom we love as our own soul and to whom we shall remain loyal though the earth shake? Not likely.  No generation has used the expression “meaningful relationship” as frequently as our generation, and no generation has meant so little by it.

I watch people change relationships (so-called) the way I change socks. I have people come to me who complain that they lack friends.  I recall the quiet word of my long-dead dad, “If you want to have friends, you have to be a friend.” When I probe the friendless person’s understanding of friendship, invariably I find that the friendless person has no appreciation that the claim of a friendship is as strong as the friendship itself.  Put the other way, a friendship is only as strong as the sacrifice we are willing to make for it, the humiliation we are willing to undergo for it, the sheer inconvenience of it.

Inconvenience? Sure.  The Saturday morning we begin to paint the garage our friend phones us, upset. He wants us to go over to his home immediately, so upset is he.  But we’ve waited five months to paint the garage; it’s rained every Saturday since the weather was warm enough to paint, and we have to leave town tomorrow night on a business trip.   Then do we drop everything (this means having to clean the brush with paint on it even though we’ve only dipped it in the paint-can and haven’t yet painted so much as one stroke) and call on him? Or do we “explain” why we can’t see him, however upset he is, because we simply must paint today? If the latter, we are refusing the claim of the friendship and forfeiting a friend — if ever friend we were.

My friends have embarrassed me in public; and I know I’ve done as much to them. My friends have unloaded their emotional burden on me precisely when I’ve been so emotionally burdened myself I didn’t feel I could withstand it; but I know too I’ve done as much to them.   My friends have pestered me and pestered me again; but no more than I’ve pestered them. A friendship is only as strong as our friend’s claim on us.  The “selfist” people of our narcissistic age assume that a friendship consists of someone else gratifying them endlessly; selfist narcissists never understand that having a friend means we’re willing to be drained, and in fact are drained more than once.

Those who can’t forge so much as a friendship are never going to establish a long-term, stable union.  No wonder they dabble in human superficiality and flit from one shallow encounter to another.

And then I think of young David and his friendship with Jonathan.  “David loved Jonathan as his own soul”, we are told.  And Jonathan felt the same way about David.  Ardent affection; unshakable loyalty; inexhaustible self-giving.  Risking disgrace and expulsion at the hands of his father, King Saul, Jonathan saved David’s life by tipping off David when Saul was in a murderous mood. When Jonathan died prematurely David cried, “I am distressed for you, my brother, Jonathan…your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women.”

David’s magnanimity he poured out not only on his best friend but even on his worst enemy, Saul. During his outlaw days David was resting in the far end of a cave when Saul came in to relieve himself. Saul removed his coat and laid it aside.   While Saul was preoccupied with his toilet details David cut off part of the hem. As Saul left the cave David called after him, “Why do you listen to people who say I’m bent on harming you? See what I have here; your coat-tail. I could have sliced you up as readily.” With tear-choked voice Saul called back, “Is that you, David? You are more righteous than I; for you have repaid me good, whereas I have repaid you evil.”

In our era of frippery and frivolity David’s fathomless affection and undeflectable faithfulness loom huge.         To be such a friend, to have such a friend means that we are bound to at least one other person in a bond marked by tenderness and toughness, sensitivity and frankness, comfort and honesty, gentleness and truthfulness. Such a friendship perdures, even thrives, in those times when our friend is moody, interferes with long-made plans, even irks us because he seems to be trading on the friendship. What is such a friendship worth when we are fragile and must be handled delicately, when we are wrong and must be corrected, when we are offensive and must be confronted, when we are insensitive and must be rebuked, when we are bleeding and must be bound up?

I have such friends. I know how David and Jonathan felt about each other.  My heart beats with David’s.

(ii) David moves me, in the second place — sobers me, in fact, even startles me — every time I recall his treachery.         He frightens me as often as I recall his self-delusion as he stumbled into his shame.

Can the man whose huge-hearted magnanimity spared Saul be the same man whose reptilian lust slew Uriah, a loyal supporter who wanted only to help David? “Ur-i-ah” is a compressed Hebrew word meaning “The Lord is my light”.  And the light that Uriah was David extinguished for the shabbiest reason imaginable: he wanted Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba.  What shocks me most about this incident isn’t that David behaved badly on this occasion (although his behaviour was reprehensible) but rather the self-delusion, the rationalization, the unconscious but nonetheless self-willed blindness that left him unable to see what anyone else could see in an instant.  I am dismayed when I contemplate the incremental insensitivity to sin that inured him against the God whose voice he heard undeniably on other occasions and relished hearing.

David frightens me. Like him, I believe in original sin. Like him, I believe that there’s an innermost, down-deepest warp – utterly perverse warp – to my heart and my mind and my will.  I can’t pretend that where David was vulnerable I’m impervious. I’m aware that David’s erudition concerning theology didn’t inoculate him against that disaster which ruined his earthly future and tore his family apart.

For this reason I have no difficulty understanding the Supreme Court judge who is found taking bribes, or the supermarket cashier with the sweetest smile who is caught pilfering money from the till, or the sincerest Sunday School teacher whom the newspaper describes as incestuous, or the physician whose fatigue and isolation are met by a caring patient and whose disgrace becomes notorious thereafter.  I have no difficulty understanding this.  What scares me is that it can happen nevertheless to anyone whose understanding of it all is adequate. Plainly, more than understanding is needed.

David was brought to his senses when the prophet Nathan confronted him, confronted him by means of a parable that exposed David as sleazy. Who holds the mirror up to you? To me? My wife does, my friends do, my colleagues do, even my enemies do.  (I have thanked God for my enemies a thousand times over, since my enemies have often told me the truth about myself — albeit from the worst of motives — when others have left me self-deluded from the best of motives.)

 

Now please don’t think that this part of the sermon has spiralled down into gloom and doom, unrelieved negativity. You see, the glory of David’s story is this.  So great is God’s mercy, so marvellous his patience, so inscrutable his providence (to quote John Calvin), so persistent is God’s purpose, that not even David’s sin disqualifies him from being used of God most wonderfully. Not even David’s treachery, his blindness, his betrayal; none of it disqualifies him as a servant of God.  Glorious as David’s pardon is, more glorious still is that incomprehensible surge of God’s grace whereby God’s work moves ahead even through the most clay-footed.

And therefore I find myself encouraged for myself and encouraged for you and encouraged for the church of Christ throughout the world. Without thinking for one minute that I can trade on God’s pardon and patience and persistence, I yet know that our sin disqualifies none of us as useful servants of God. God’s work will triumph; triumph in spite of us, to be sure, yet triumph through us nonetheless.

(iii) Lastly, David moves me with his sheer, simple delight in God.  On the one hand David trembled — as he should have — before the awesome lordliness of God; on the other hand, David loved God and delighted in God with the childlikeness of the youngster for whom freshness and  simplicity and exuberance and merriment are natural.

When the Ark of the Covenant (the ark signified God’s presence) was wrested from the Philistines who had dishonoured it and was brought back to Jerusalem , David “danced before the Lord with all his might” (says the text).         David never did anything by halves.  Then of course he danced with unselfconscious abandon.  (As a matter of fact his kilt flew up and he inadvertently exposed himself.) The day the Ark of the Covenant was returned to Jerusalem may well have been the most important day in David’s life.  What else, then, but ecstasy and exuberance and enthusiasm?

But not so with Michal, the wife who had blue blood in her veins and vinegar everywhere else. Not so with Michal, who was ashamed of her husband’s boisterous boyishness. She regarded David as an exhibitionistic oaf whom she had had the misfortune to marry. She saw her husband behaving in conformity with the breeding he had inherited; namely, a socially inferior lout who would never know how to behave like a king.  After all, David’s celebratory cavorting had caused the servant girls to snicker at the spectacle of the king (no less) behaving like a football fan feeling no pain in the victory parade following a Superbowl win. Michal despised him for it. Of course she did. Those who are deaf always despise those who dance, don’t they? “It was before the Lord I was dancing”, David insisted, dumbfounded, thinking somehow that if he told his sourpuss-wife often enough she’d get the point.         Michal would never get the point: those who are deaf despise those who dance. “It was before the Lord.” Before the Lord? Michal had never known David’s God; she knew nothing of the heights and depths of David’s immersion in God.         Her heart was as frigid as David’s was inflamed.

When I was only a child I came upon a line that I didn’t comprehend fully, yet understood enough at the time so that the line has never left me. The line came from an old Scottish clergyman of the last century: “You show me someone who has never purchased a gift he can’t afford for someone he loves and I’ll show you someone who isn’t fit for the kingdom of God .” But I understand it now. David had always understood.

David was the poet and the musician of Israel . He knew that poetry and music are the heart’s outpouring of an immersion in God so deep that prose is insipid compared to that poetry which itself is finally inadequate. If David’s outpouring strikes us as exaggerated — or worse, much ado about nothing — then we can only wait for and wait on the God who moved David to exclaim, “Thou dost show me the path of life; in thy presence there is fullness of joy, in thy right hand are pleasures for evermore.” We shall have to wait for and wait on him who came among us one thousand years after David and said, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you and your joy may be full.” We shall have to wait for and wait on him until we cry with Paul, “He loved me and gave himself — for me.”

David knew. And because he did, I find him to be a reflection of what goes on in my own heart, even if my experience of God is slender compared to his and my articulation of it feeble.

IV: — David was Israel ’s greatest king: colourful, gifted, passionate, an outrageous sinner and yet the tenderest child of God.

Someone greater than David came among us, came one millennium later. To this one a blind beggar called out, “Son of David, have mercy on me”.  And in his mercy Jesus Christ our Lord freed Bartimaeus to see and believe and follow.

Then may you and I ever cry out, “Son of David, have mercy on me.” For in crying out to the Son of David who is also the Son of God we shall find ourselves seeing, believing, hearing our Lord, and together with all who hear, dancing too, as we joyfully await that day when the old king and you and I alike fall on our faces in adoration of him who was born in a stable in the city of David, and who is our blessed Saviour for ever and ever.

                                                                                                 Victor Shepherd      

July 2009

 

2^nd Samuel 12:16-23                 Mark 5:1-43

 

[1]           I’ve always found conducting the funerals of children extraordinarily difficult. I manage to get through the service, albeit shakily, and then I stagger home and fall on my wife.

What is worse than the death of a child?  For years I said that the greatest burden I’ve seen in people is the burden of childlessness. People will do anything to have a child. Yet if they can’t have a child, can’t adopt a child, I’ve noticed that husband and wife don’t thereafter divorce. But when a child dies the parents divorce 70% of the time.         In other words, the death of a child strains marriages beyond the breaking point more often than not.  Then perhaps there is something worse than childlessness; namely, the death of a child. When David’s child died (the child he had had with Bathsheba), his servants were afraid to tell him lest the heartbroken king kill himself.

 

[2]         Everyone is upset at the death of a child.  Everyone feels the death of a child to be especially tragic.   We feel that the child has been cheated.  We don’t feel this way about the elderly.  When Maureen and I lived in rural New Brunswick we called one evening on Mr. and Mrs. Henry Palmer.  Henry Palmer was dying. He was 98 years old.         As he lay dying in the bedroom Mrs. Palmer sat in her rocking chair, that winter evening, close to the fire in the wood stove, rocking pensively, saying little. Maureen, assuming Mrs. Palmer to be upset, began to commiserate with her.         Mrs. Palmer listened to Maureen for a while and then interjected, without interrupting her rocking, “Henry’s had a good life.”   By our standards he’d had a difficult life: he’d had to spend a month at backbreaking labour every year just to cut enough firewood for the winter, among other things.   Still, by Mrs. Palmer’s standards, Henry had had a good life.  Where children are concerned, however, our standards or anybody else’s standards mean nothing: we feel the child has scarcely had any life.

 

[3]         Lingering illness in a child; untimely death in a child; these are manifestations of evil. Evil is evil, and must never thought to be anything else.   We must never pretend that evil is “good in disguise.”   “Good in disguise” is still good; evil can never be good.   We must never say that evil is good on the way, or at least the potential for good. Of itself evil is never the potential for anything except more evil.

My aunt’s grandson (my cousin’s son) died at age seven.  The little boy was born a normal child and developed normally until age two when he was diagnosed with a neurological disease.   His condition deteriorated thereafter.         His facial appearance changed — became grotesque, in fact; his mobility decreased; and his intellectual capacity decreased.  When I spoke with my aunt at the funeral parlour I said to her, “There’s no explanation for this.”   (I didn’t mean there was no neurological explanation; of course there was a neurological explanation.)   I meant, rather, “Given what you and I know of God, there’s no explanation for this.”  My aunt told me later it was the most comforting thing anyone had said to her at the funeral parlour, for virtually everyone who spoke with her put forth an “explanation”; such as, “Maybe God wanted to teach the parents something.” What were the parents supposed to be taught by watching their son suffer and stiffen and stupefy for five years? “Maybe God was sparing the little boy something worse later in his life.”   It would be difficult to imagine anything worse.  These aren’t explanations; these are insults.   As long as God is love, unimpeded love, there isn’t going to be an explanation for this.

We must always be careful and think 25 times before we conclude we’ve found the meaning (or even a meaning) to such a development. Think of the one and one-half million children who perished during the holocaust. Their parents (four and one-half million of them) were first gassed to death, whereupon their remains were burnt.  The children, on the other hand, were never gassed; they were thrown live into the incinerators. If anyone claims to be aware of the meaning of this event I shall say, among other things, “Meaning for whom? for the barbequed children? for their parents? for their survivors? for their executioners? for the shallow pseudo-philosophers who think their question is worth the breath they spend to utter it?” What meaning could there ever be to such an event?

We can bring the same question to bear on any one child who is dying at this moment in the Hospital for Sick Children.

 

[4]         In light of what I’ve just said I have to tell you how unhappy I’ve been with Harold Kushner’s bestselling book, When Bad Things Happen To Good People.  I’m disappointed in the book for several reasons.  In the first place there’s virtually no discussion of God’s love in Kushner’s discussion of God.  In view of the fact that God is love, that God’s nature is to love, the book is woefully deficient right here. In the second place, because God’s love isn’t discussed, the rest of the book is skewed. Kushner writes, “Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us.   [I’ve no problem with this.]   They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. [No problem here either.] We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them.” I object to this statement. We redeem them by imposing meaning on them? Any meaning that is imposed can only be arbitrary. An arbitrary meaning, something imposed, is just another form of “make-believe”, and no less “make-believe” for being adult “make-believe.”  My cousin and his wife whose seven-year old son died of neurological disease; what meaning were they supposed to impose on the event? And why impose that meaning rather than another?  And how would the imposition of such arbitrary meaning redeem the tragedy?

Harold Kushner’s book is yet another attempt at theodicy.  Theodicy is the justification of God’s ways with humankind, the justification of God’s ways in the face of human suffering.  All attempts at theodicy lefthandedly put God on trial, so to speak, and then develop arguments that acquit God, allowing us to believe in him after all, allowing us to believe that he really is kind and good despite so much that appears to contradict this.  All theodicies assume that we know what should happen in the world; as long as there continues to happen what shouldn’t, God (we think) is on trial; we have to develop arguments and marshall evidence that will acquit him if we are to go on believing in him.

 

[5]         All of which brings me to my next point; namely, our assumption that the questions we think to be obvious and obviously correct are the right questions.  The question, for instance, “If God is all-good, he must want to rectify the dreadful state of affairs so often found in people’s lives; if God is all-powerful, he must be able to rectify such a state of affairs. Since such a state seems not to be rectified, then either God isn’t all-good or he isn’t all-powerful, is he?” Next we set about trying to remove the suspicion that surrounds either God’s goodness or his might. We think our question to be the right question, even the only question.  But in fact the question we’ve just posed didn’t loom large until the 18th century, specifically the 18th century Enlightenment.   The question we’ve just posed was raised by Enlightenment thinkers who weren’t even Christians.  Eighteenth century Enlightenment atheists raised the question, and Christians took it over in that they thought it to be a profound question. But this question didn’t loom large in the Middle Ages where physical suffering, at least, was worse than it is today. This question wasn’t pre-eminent in the ancient world; neither was it front-and-centre in the biblical era.   The pre-eminent question in the biblical era wasn’t “Why?”, because those people already knew why: the entire creation is molested by the evil one. The pre-eminent question in the biblical era was “How long?   How long before God terminates this state of affairs?         What’s taking him so long?”

Think for a minute of the biblical era; think of John the Baptist. John and Jesus were cousins. Not only were they related by blood, they were related by vocation.   John began his public ministry ahead of Jesus.  John’s ministry ended abruptly when a wicked woman, angry at his denunciation of her sexual irregularities, had him slain.  What did Jesus do when he learned of John’s death and the circumstances of John’s death? Did Jesus say, “We need a theodicy. We need a justification of the ways of God.  We need an explanation of how John’s terrible death could occur in a world ruled by a God whose love is mighty.  And if no explanation is forthcoming, then perhaps we can’t believe in God.” — did Jesus say this?   Jesus said no such thing. When John’s head was severed Jesus didn’t cry to heaven, “You expect me to trust you as my Father; but how can I believe you’re my Father, for what Father allows his child to be beheaded?   In view of what happened to cousin John, I can’t be expected to think that I’m dear to you.” Jesus said no such thing. When he was informed of the grisly death of John, Jesus said, “It’s time I got to work.” Whereupon he began his public ministry, and began it knowing that what had befallen John would befall him too, and did it all with his trust in his Father unimpaired.

My point is this: that question which we suppose to be a perennial question, “How can we continue to believe in a mighty, loving God when terrible things keep happening in our world?” — wasn’t the most pressing question in the biblical era or the ancient church or the mediaeval church. It was shouted only in the 18th century Enlightenment, and was shouted by atheists. Having heard the atheists’ question, the church took it over thinking it to be the soul of profundity.

Susannah Wesley, mother of John and Charles, had 19 children. Ten of them survived. As the other nine died (eight of them in infancy), Susannah’s heart broke.   Never think that she didn’t care; never think that her heart wasn’t as torn as anyone’s heart would be torn today.  Read her diary the day after a domestic helper accidentally smothered Susannah’s three-week old baby.  Infant death was as grievous to parents then as it is now.  What was different, however, is this: even as Susannah pleaded with God for her babes while they died in her arms she never concluded that God wasn’t to be trusted or loved or obeyed or simply clung to; she never concluded that as a result of her heartbreak God could only be denounced and abandoned.

Until the 18th century Enlightenment there was no expectation of living in a world other than a world riddled with accident, misfortune, sickness, disease, unrelievable suffering, untimely death.  There was no expectation of anything else.  It was recognized that the world, in its fallen state, is shot through with unfairness, injustice, inevitable inequities, unforeseeable tragedies. When John the Baptist was executed Jesus didn’t say, “If honouring God’s will entails that then I need a different Father.”   Instead Jesus said, “I’ve got work to do and I’d better get started.” Susannah Wesley didn’t say, “If I bear children only to have half of them succumb to pneumonia and diphtheria, I should stop having them.”  Instead she had twice as many.   If today our expectation is so very different on account of the Enlightenment, then what did the Enlightenment cause us to expect?

 

[6]         The Enlightenment brought us to expect that humankind can control, control entirely, the world and everything about it.   The Enlightenment brought us to expect that we are or can be in control of every last aspect of our existence.   Specifically, the Enlightenment brought us to expect that the practice of medicine would smooth out our lives.   And with the new expectation of physicians there arose as well a new agenda for physicians. Whereas physicians had always been expected to care for patients, now physicians were expected to cure patients. Until the Enlightenment physicians were expected to care: they were to alleviate pain wherever they could, they were expected to ease the patient in every way possible, and above all they were expected to ease the patient through death, which death everyone knew to be unavoidable in any case. But cure? No one expected physicians to cure, at least to cure very much.   Nowadays physicians are expected to cure everything.  I’m convinced that people unconsciously expect physicians to cure them of their mortality. When physicians can’t cure people of their vulnerability to death, blame for such failure is unconsciously transferred from medicine to God.

A minute ago I said that we creatures of modernity assume (arrogantly) that the questions we ask are the questions that people have asked in every era; our questions are perennial questions, and our answers are the only answers.  It’s not so. If people today are asked how they’d prefer to die, they nearly always say, “Quickly. I want to die quickly. I’d like to slip away quietly in my sleep.” During the Middle Ages, however, no one wanted to die quickly; people dreaded sudden death. Why?   Sudden death gave them insufficient time to make adequate spiritual preparation for death. What we regard as human expectations as old as humankind are actually very recent. What’s more, these recent expectations weren’t fostered as we reflected on the nature and purpose and way of God; they were fostered by atheists who, at the time of the Enlightenment, came to think that there was nothing humankind couldn’t control.

 

[7]         Let’s come back to the situation of the young person afflicted with a lingering illness and about to die all too young.  Why are we so very upset at this?   I think we’re upset in that we feel the young person to have been cheated. The 85-year old who dies has had a life, a complete life (or at least what we regard as complete.) The eight-year old, we feel, hasn’t; she’s been cheated.   The elderly person’s life can be told by means of a story; the young person, on the other hand, has virtually no story to be told.   I am 63 years old, and if I die tonight others will gather up my life in a story and tell the story.  Hearers will identify me, the real “me”, with my story.  But let’s be honest: they will regard “me” and my story as identical in that my story is fit to be told; my story is positive; my story is rich (supposedly.) No one would hesitate to tell my story.   But if my story were one that couldn’t be told; if my story were bleak or disgraceful or incomprehensible, others would like to think that the real “me” was somehow better, somehow grander, than my shabby story.

It isn’t only the eight-year old child with leukaemia whose story seems to be sad and sorry and miserable.         There are many, many adults whose stories are longer, to be sure, but no better. One Sunday, several years ago, a man wearing a clerical collar sat in the gallery of my church in Mississauga , accompanied by a lawyer-friend of mine.         The man with the collar was an Anglican clergyman.  He was also a plastic surgeon with a practice in one of the wealthiest areas of Toronto . He was at worship, that Sunday, as he awaited trial. He and his estranged wife had had an altercation, in the course of which his wife was struck, the result of which was that her skull was fractured. Several weeks after the service the attended in Mississauga the fellow was convicted and sent to jail.  Upon his release from jail the College of Physicians and Surgeons restored his licence, thus permitting him to do plastic surgery again. The Anglican Church, however, didn’t reinstate him as a clergyman.   A year later the man committed suicide.  What’s his story? Is it a grand story? Is it a story anyone would envy? Or is it a story better left untold?

Maureen and I were asleep on a Friday evening when the phone rang at midnight . The caller was a man I’ve looked out for for 20 years.  He’s paranoid schizophrenic.  I’ve followed him around to restaurants, hospitals, jails, and numerous shabby “digs.” Last autumn he was in Vancouver and got into a “discussion” (as he tells his story) with a motel clerk.  The clerk phoned the police, and Eric spent the next three months in a provincial hospital. A week or two before Christmas I took him to Swiss Chalet for lunch.  We had been seated for only a few seconds when he leapt out of his seat and shouted, “It’s bugged.  It’s bugged. There’s a tape-recorder under my seat.” I took the shaken waitress aside, told her my friend was deranged, promised her I’d see that no harm befell her, and asked her to find us seats in an area that was free of tape-recorders.   A few months after this incident Eric phoned me again.  In the afternoon he’d gone to a barber shop, only to have the barber “butcher” his hair. And why had the barber “butchered” his hair? Because the barber too is part of the conspiracy that is putting foreign substances in Eric’s drinking water and causing his urine to stink.  Eric had come home; his sister had burnt the supper-meal toast; Eric had decompensated and smashed the toaster.  His sister had fled the house; the police had been called; Eric had refused to open the door to them – and was now in a great deal more trouble. Eric was phoning me at midnight. He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t violent: he was frightened, terribly frightened. He feared he was going to be sent back to a provincial hospital.  Eric is 65 years old. He was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic when he was a 20-year old university student. Eric has suffered atrociously since then. He hasn’t had one torment-free day in 45years.         What’s Eric’s story? Do you want to hear all the details? Would anyone want his story (all of it) told at his funeral?         Tell me: are Eric and Eric’s story identical?

The truth is, none of us is identical with our story.  Our story isn’t big enough, comprehensive enough, grand enough.  None of us has a story (whether tellable or untellable) that does justice to who we are truly in ourselves because of who we are truly before God. Our story is small and feeble and miserable and frustrated.  Often our story, so far from reflecting who we truly are, contradicts who we truly are. Our story has to be taken up into a much bigger story.

Then what’s the bigger story, grander story, for Eric?   It’s the story of a man who once lived in a cemetery. (Mark 5:1-20) He was violent, anti-social, and an inveterate “streaker.”   One day Jesus came upon him and asked, “What’s your name?”  “My name?”, the fellow replied, “I’ve got lots of names.   I’m your local nut-case; so why not call me ‘Peanut, Pistachio and Pecan’, ‘P-cubed’ for short.”   Some time later the townspeople saw the same man seated, clothed and in his right mind. By God’s grace that gospel-story has been appointed to be Eric’s story, Eric’s true story.  That story is the final story into which Eric’s story is taken up and in which Eric’s story is transfigured.

And the eight-year old who has just died of leukaemia?   Her story too is bigger, grander than most people know.         A distraught man cried to Jesus, “My daughter is sick unto death. Won’t you come with me?” Our Lord is delayed by a needy woman who is distressed herself.   While he’s delayed, the daughter dies.  Now all the relatives are beside themselves.  Jesus declares, “The little girl isn’t dead; she’s asleep.” The relatives scorn him. Plainly she’s dead; anyone can see she’s dead.   But you see, in the presence of Jesus Christ (only in the presence of him who is himself resurrection and life, only in his presence but assuredly in his presence) death is but sleep.  The girl is awakened shortly — as the eight-year old has been appointed to be awakened. This is the story into which the leukaemia patient’s story is taken up and in which it is transfigured.

 

[8]         If you ask me why such things as leukaemia and mental illness happen I shall not attempt an answer.   When tragedy befell John the Baptist Jesus didn’t say, “I can’t figure out why these things happen; therefore I can’t trust my Father.” Jesus knew that in a fallen world such things happen and will continue to happen until God’s patience, finally exhausted, ends the era of the fall and with it forecloses the day of grace. Jesus didn’t explain John’s wretched death; Jesus responded to the news of his cousin’s death by launching his public ministry.

Let me conclude by recalling Aaron, my cousin’s little boy who was diagnosed with a neurological disease at age two and who declined hideously for the next five years. Our Lord offers no explanation. (What help would an explanation provide?)   Our Lord, rather, whose risen life is grander even than his life from Bethlehem to Golgotha ; his risen life is that larger, grander story in which Aaron’s story is transfigured.  Furthermore, our Lord is the occasion of a response: the response of Aaron’s friends and relatives and neighbours and congregation.  The response we make to all such developments is an expression of our caring. (Not an expression of our curing; ultimately I can’t cure you, you can’t cure me, and medical practice can’t cure any of us, ultimately.)   Such a response will be caring enough until that day when we see our Lord face-to-face, the sight of whose face will transfigure our face, for the sight of his face will be enough to wipe away every tear from every eye.

 

                                                                                                        Victor Shepherd                                                                                                                                                                            

 May 2007

2^nd Samuel 23:13-17               James 4:1-10               John 2:13-22

 

I: —  For years I have arrived at church on Remembrance Day Sunday with my heart in my mouth. For years I have wondered what this service says to people of recent German ancestry. Have we implied, however unintentionally, that German people are the ogres of the world? that they are people of impenetrable hardness and incorrigible cruelty? To be sure, we at Tyndale University College & Seminary; we know better; we are orthodox, or at least orthodox enough to say we agree with the prophet Jeremiah that the heart of everyone — without exception — “is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt, beyond understanding.” (Jer. 17:9) But even as we say we agree with the prophet do we quietly qualify the statement so as to suggest that the hearts of one nation, one people in particular are extraordinarily deceitful, uniquely corrupt and thoroughly un-understandable?

 

The century just concluded, the twentieth century, has found Germany our enemy and France our ally in two major wars.  But it hasn’t always been like this.  The century before last found the situation reversed: France was the enemy and Germany the ally. Following the Battle of Waterloo, where the Duke of Wellington defeated the French forces, Wellington remarked, “Never have I come so close to losing.”   Wellington would have lost for sure had British troops not been supported by German forces. In other words, labels like “enemy” and “ally” change in a twinkling.

Think of the United States . We Canadians have been allies of the U.S.A. for decades, as have the British. But the British and the Americans haven’t always been allies; there were slaughters in 1776 and 1812. The Citadel, that massive stone fortress in Quebec City , was constructed in the late 1800s to protect you and me from the Americans. As soon as the American civil war ended Canadians were nervous lest the victorious Union army, led by General Ulysses S. Grant, decide it might as well turn north and make a clean sweep. From 1900 on the British and American navies vied with each other for superiority just in case the two countries went to war.  In the year 1900 there was a celebration for Queen Victoria , and 2,500 British warships were on display for it in British waters.   (Not included, of course, were British warships patrolling the high seas. And all of this in a country the size of a postage stamp.)         The U.S.A. was determined to develop a navy that could conquer the Royal Navy.  And in fact the U.S.A. had on file in Washington as late as 1932 plans for war against Great Britain .

Speaking of the Americans, when Rene Levesque became premier of Quebec in 1976 he began talking about claiming sovereignty over the St. Lawrence Seaway; he talked about reducing exports of hydroelectric power to the United States ; he talked about cozying up to Castro in Cuba . The Americans didn’t say anything about this; they did something. They immediately stationed one entire division (10,000 men) of light infantry opposite Kingston in upstate New York , so that these 10,000 soldiers could move quickly to Ottawa and Montreal in case Quebec refused to respect American interests.  At the same time the CIA, America ’s intelligence force, quietly slipped hundreds of French-speaking operatives into the province of Quebec . America wasn’t our ally in the 19^th century; it was in the 20^th century; I hope it will remain our ally in the 21^st.

The expression “concentration camp” has been especially ugly in the past one hundred years. Who invented the concentration camp? The British developed concentration camps in their war against the Dutch in South Africa . The Dutch suffered more fatalities in the camps, we should note (principally through disease), than they suffered through enemy fire.

Jeremiah is correct. The corruption of the human heart is universal.

Nonetheless, while all hearts are corrupt, there do occur in history extraordinary concentrations of evil that are to be resisted at any cost. We cannot use our common sinnership as an excuse for not resisting the appearance of a particular concentration of evil. Naziism was such a concentration.

 

II: — It goes without saying that to approve armed resistance to an evil like Naziism is to approve violence. Those people who say they are opposed to violence in principle, opposed to violence of any kind, for any reason, must therefore approve non-resistance (at least non-armed resistance) to Naziism. Those people are therefore pacifists.

The tradition of Christian pacifism is long and noble.   Many pacifists have suffered terribly for their conviction.      There is much about them that appeals to me.  I too want to be a pacifist.  I am a pacifist by conviction (almost) – i.e., until I see once again a photograph or film footage of little children, four to twelve years old, tightly huddled on a railway station platform in eastern Europe or Holland or France. Their parents are frantic. The children are waiting for a freight train — waterless, toiletless, near-airless — that will take them to an extermination site.  In a few days these children will not be gassed and their remains incinerated (the fate of their parents); in a few days these children will be burnt alive. At this point my pacifism evaporates.

Please don’t think that because I can’t approve of pacifism in principle I therefore approve of violence in principle.  I don’t approve of wanton violence, gratuitous violence, violence for the sake of violence. To approve of violence in principle is to approve the sort of Nazi depredation we rightly deem reprehensible.

At the same time, we should be honest and admit that violence is another word for coercive power, and everyone exercises coercive power in some form every day. If everyone exercises coercive power, then everyone is violent.

When I speak of coercive power I mean that we impose our will on someone else who is unwilling. To impose our will on the unwilling is to coerce them; to coerce them is to violate them.

When the police officer arrests the criminal suspect at gunpoint the police officer is imposing her will on someone who is unwilling. She is coercing the suspect. The police officer with a revolver in her hand exercises the same coercive power as the bank robber with a revolver in his hand.  The bank robber is coercing the bank teller; the police officer is coercing the suspect. But both are coercing. Both are imposing their will upon the unwilling.

When the judge sends the convicted person to prison he is imposing society’s will upon the unwilling.         Violence has been done. Imprisonment remains a horrible form of violence, however necessary.

On this Remembrance Day we are glad to recall Canada ’s fine reputation for international peacekeeping.  Too few people notice, however, that all peacekeeping forces are armed. In other words, peace is maintained only through threatened violence.

When the parent says to her child, “No, you aren’t going to the overnight party. I don’t want to hear any more about it.  One more word from you and you won’t go anywhere this weekend”; when the parent says this she is coercing the child.  It’s impossible to pretend anything else.

When the dangerously deranged person is sedated and whisked off to the provincial hospital he isn’t asked if he’d like to go.         He is strong-armed off to the hospital.  The school principal about to suspend the pupil for striking a teacher doesn’t first ask the pupil and her parents if they agree with the suspension. What if the pupil and her parents are unwilling with respect to the suspension?   Too bad. Their will is going to be violated (as it should be).

Someone like Gandhi is often held up as a model of non-violence.  I don’t think for a minute that Gandhi believed in non-violence in principle. Gandhi used non-violence as a technique whenever he thought it would be effective; he disregarded non-violence whenever he thought it wouldn’t.  If Gandhi had frontally opposed British military forces in India , he and his followers would have been decimated.  Therefore he didn’t oppose British military force with whatever military force he could muster. Instead he deployed non-violence as a technique (always assuming, of course, the British tradition of justice, and always assuming that British military might — i.e., violence — would protect him and his followers in their protest against the British.) Gandhi used non-violence against the British in order to establish (with the help of the British) the oppressive power (violence) of the Indian state.

 

We can’t pretend that our Lord was less than violent the day he cleaned out the big church in Jerusalem . John tells us that Jesus made a whip out of leather cords. How long did it take him to gather up the cords?   How long did it then take him to braid the whip?   Plainly, our Lord’s violence was premeditated.  He didn’t lose his temper in a flash; he didn’t lose his temper at all. He planned what he was going to do; his violence was premeditated, deliberate.

This story is rooted firmly in the gospel tradition.  Every written gospel mentions it.  John puts it at the beginning of Christ’s public ministry, thereby having it set the tone for his public ministry.  Matthew, Mark and Luke put it at the end of his public ministry (just prior to the cross), thereby making it the climax of his public ministry.

In any case every gospel-writer understands the incident to be crucial. Jesus was not a devotee of non-violence. This shouldn’t surprise us. There is no one who is utterly non-violent.  Even the pacifist punishes her misbehaving child; and punishment of any kind is coercion, the imposition of someone’s will upon the unwilling, and therefore a form of violence.

 

III: — Then wisdom is needed, much wisdom, if we are to forego the illusion that all violence is avoidable and forego as well the wickedness that any violence is acceptable.

Think of our Lord once again.  He doesn’t hesitate to act violently when he is exposed to injustice and exploitation. He arrives at the temple (which he loves) only to find devout worshippers being “fleeced”. They are defenceless people. The animal they have brought to the service (or purchased locally for the service) must be blemish-free. The temple authorities, in league with the sellers, pronounce the animals unsuitable. The authorities tell the worshippers the only blemish-free animals are those that the sellers inside the temple are selling.  It so happens that these animals cost fifteen times the market price.

The worshippers were financially poor – and were swindled unconscionably. They were devout — and their devotion was exploited shamelessly.  When Jesus saw defenceless people being duped and exploited; when he saw poor people rendered poorer still, he became violent on their behalf.

Yet when Jesus is victimized himself, he doesn’t become violent on his own behalf.   Concerning himself he exercises not violence but self-renunciation. When his victimizers are nailing him to the wood he will only intercede for them, “Father, forgive them; they don’t even know what they are doing.”

Self-renunciation is sacrifice.  To renounce oneself is to give oneself up, to sacrifice oneself.   To renounce oneself is to absorb violence, and in absorbing it, to learn that there is a cross at the heart of life.  Christians believe that the crosses everywhere in life are to be picked up and shouldered willingly, gladly, even cheerfully.

Several years ago a well-known leader in the British Methodist Church , Rev. Scott Lidgett, objected to the attention and adulation accorded a very popular preacher and able psychologist, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead.   On one occasion when his heart was twisted pretzel-like Scott Lidgett said publicly of Weatherhead, “We are not interested in stars that scintillate but do not illumine.”  It was a vicious remark. What did Weatherhead do? He absorbed it. When I say he absorbed it I don’t mean that he gritted his teeth and fought down the urge to retaliate. I mean he never let the remark impair his relationship with Lidgett; he never let the remark curdle his spirit. The remark was simply absorbed and therein neutralized.   But we should never underestimate the sacrifice involved in such renunciation.

A year or two ago my mother was reading the newspaper obituary column when she came upon the name of one of her former office-colleagues. My mother told me (again) about her late colleague.  The woman and her husband had had a child born with spina bifida.  The child had to be turned every hour throughout the night.  The woman and her husband took turns getting up in the night, hour-on, hour-off, to turn their son.  They did this for thirty years.         Having had her sleep interrupted several times during the night, every night, the woman would come to work in the morning and cheerfully set about the day’s tasks, never once complaining about her lot or suggesting that she and her husband were hard done-by.  What kind of self-renunciation is involved here?   There is a cross at the heart of life.

A man in one of my former congregations was at worship every Sunday, diligent in his responsibilities on the official board, and enthusiastic at the weekly bible study my wife and I held in the manse.   He and his wife had married in their mid-twenties.   Shortly after they married, his wife began behaving oddly, and soon was diagnosed schizophrenic. After that she had good days, bad days, and terrible days.  On her worst days she abused her husband in every way.  When this fellow was having an especially difficult time he would visit me and talk with me. At the end of every conversation he would tell me he was feeling better and could go on caring for his wife (in every sense of “care for”).   “I made a promise on our wedding day”, he told me often; “I made a promise to her and I’m going to keep it.”   It costs nothing to make a promise, but it costs everything to keep a promise. Some promises kept entail enormous sacrifice, nothing less than a cross.

Our Lord made a promise too.   (The bible calls it a covenant.)  Our Lord made a promise to all humankind.         His promise kept meant self-renunciation for him, self-renunciation so extreme as to end in a dereliction at the hands of his Father, a forsakenness, an abandonment, whose horror is incomprehensible to you and me.

The truth is, self-renunciation worthy of the name, anywhere in life, is never less than a cross. We should never pretend anything else.

 

IV: — Today is Remembrance Day. It is not a day in which we gloat over the superiority of some nations while despising the inferiority of others.  Neither is it a day when we boast of violence in principle.

But it is a day when we understand soberly that violence and non-violence are not the simple alternatives that we may have been taught. Violence is the exercise of coercion, and coercion is a household commodity: everybody exercises some form of coercion every day, even must exercise some form of it. The question we must ponder today is, “What kind of coercion (violence) are we to exercise? When?   Where? Why?   How?”

On Remembrance Day we remember the sacrifices made on our behalf in a violence, perpetrated and suffered, that is simply indescribable.  We also recall the example of our Lord in the violence he chose to exercise and the violence he chose to absorb.  We who are his people must come to the same understanding and make the same self-renunciation. For there is a cross at the heart of life, and therefore a cross everywhere in life. And such a cross God has promised to honour in such a manner that it will redound to his praise even as it eases the distress of us his creatures.

 

                                                                                                Victor Shepherd       

Remembrance Day 2008                     
Tyndale University College & Seminary