So much is out of our control
February 25, 2024 - Luke 13: 31-35 (NRSV)
Kate Bowler was 35 and living the life of her dreams. She had married her high school sweetheart. After years of infertility, she had finally gotten pregnant and was raising a one year old. She had just been hired at the first job she applied for in academia.
But she had terrible pains in her stomach that no one could explain until a physician’s assistant called her at work to share she had stage 4 cancer and that she needed to come to the hospital right away. She remembers helplessly telling the physician’s assistant on the phone, “But I have a son.”
So much is out of our control. Wars rage. Children go hungry. The planet is in peril. And even now new parents are not spared from devastating diagnoses. How are we to live with that reality?
Terrible things happened in Jesus’ time, too. Terrible things, in fact, happened to Jesus. By some people he was loved and revered. By some people he was feared and reviled. In the end, he was torturously executed.
Then and now bad things happen to good people. How can any of us stand it?
One strategy it seems is to wager that “everything happens for a reason.” Maybe that gives some of us a sense of comfort and control to believe that every hardship brings a grand lesson or a great chance for improvement or an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy. But if I’m honest, I just don’t think that’s true.
I think it’s much more likely that this Creation is full of billions of self-interested entities bumping up against each other. Volcanoes and viruses and vultures are not necessarily out to get each other or to teach us a lesson. But their well-being can and does often conflict with our well-being without much rhyme or reason that we humans can comprehend at least on the plane of morality.
Neither do I think that has to mean there is no God or that God doesn’t love us. I think it does mean that God is not orchestrating all the events of our lives to either reward us for good behavior or punish us for bad. I think it means that life can be difficult no matter how good we think we are. Rationalizing how we deserve or don’t deserve such difficulty is so much less than helpful.
Jesus wasn’t really into that. He wasn’t into sweeping aside difficulties with pleasantries. He didn’t pretend that bad things hadn’t happened, weren’t happening, or weren’t going to happen in the future. No, he talked about his own imminent death a lot. He discussed his own beloved culture’s propensity to murder their prophets. Rather than cast them out, he blessed and cared for those who experienced hardship in life. He never promised we would be able to control everything if we just tried hard enough.
As Kate Bowler was walking into the hospital on the day she received her diagnosis, even amidst her grief she was struck by the irony that just weeks before she had published a book on the prosperity gospel titled “Blessed.” Bowler believes the prosperity gospel to be today’s great civil religion. “Rather than worshiping the founding of America itself,” she explains, “the prosperity gospel worships Americans. It deifies and ritualizes their hungers, their hard work, and their moral fiber. Americans believe in a gospel of optimism and they are their own proof.”
Despite telling herself she was nothing like the evangelical Christians she had interviewed across the country, she realized on that fateful first day approaching the hospital that she was already asking herself what she had done wrong. How had she not been enough? What had she messed up to receive this diagnosis? She realized then that “if you live within the influence of dominant American culture, it is extremely difficult to avoid falling into the trap of believing that virtue and success go hand and hand. The more I stared down my diagnosis,” she shares in her Ted Talk, “the more I recognized I had my own quiet version of the belief that good things happen to good people.”
Now, the upside of the gospel of success is that it does allow us to achieve, to dream big, and to forge ahead. It serves us well until we find ourselves in the middle of something we can’t manage our way out of.
Bowler writes, “everything that I thought would save me – my hard work, my success, my personality, my sense of humor – would not save me. My life,” she realized “is built with paper walls and so is everyone else’s.”
So, she wrote an Op Ed that got published in the New York Times asking: “How do you live without quite so many reasons for the bad things that happen?”
Thousands of readers wrote back to convince her that there is a reason for what happened to her. Some even confronted her husband while she was still in the hospital to declare to him “everything happens for a reason.” But they stammered awkwardly when he replied, “I’d love to hear it. I’d love to hear the reason my wife is dying.”
It’s human to look for patterns, to learn, to want our world to be a safe, just, wonderful place. But there is no concrete correlation between how hard we try and the length or ease of our lives.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to make the world a better place. I’m not saying there aren’t people who are committing horrific violence and abuse.
I’m just saying if it were up to me, there wouldn’t be book bans, or devastating health struggles, or a climate crisis, or war upon war, or non-binary children fearing for their lives at a normal day of school. And I will do what I can to work for a more just and hopeful world. But I know so much is out of my control.
As much as I find that to be disturbing and even at times rage inducing, I have decided I will do my best not to let the fear of that lack of control win the day.
I am still in love with the teaching of the late preacher Frederick Buechner who once declared in a sermon: “Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”
The Pharisees tried to tell Jesus to be afraid. They warned him that Herod was out to kill him. He answered back, Go tell that fox about the work I’m doing. Tell him I have more to do before I meet the end he has in mind.
Then he declared to the symbol of his whole world, oh my beloved city, you have problems. But oh, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”
Sometimes when hardship comes our way, we can feel far from God. That is a real experience many have. But sometimes, we get to experience the peace that passes understanding and the shelter Jesus speaks of longing to provide us – to gather us in as a mother hen gathers her brood under her wings.
Kate Bowler wrote that in those early days of her treatment that’s what she felt. In the depths of her despair she did not feel alone. She felt deeply loved. It wasn’t the medical healing she was looking for. But it was a kind of healing all the same. That love overwhelmed her and held her up for a time. Its intensity came and went. But even when the strength of that feeling of eternal love sheltering her “receded like the tides, it left an imprint” for her to draw on, too.
“I am learning to live without reasons and assurances,” Bowler declares. “Life will break your heart and it will take everything you have. But I am learning to believe in a different kind of “prosperity gospel:” “I believe that in the darkness, even there, there will be beauty and there will be love. And every now and then it will feel like more than enough.”
May it be so. Amen.
