Ever Feel Like This..? (Reflections on Lent 2, Year C 2022)

 

^“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” (Luke 13:34) 

Do you ever just feel hopeless? 

I’ll bet you do. Or at least, you have. You know what I mean. It’s that sad, almost nostalgic feeling that mixes love and longing with an utter sense of dread. You’d feel angry but you haven’t got the strength. You want to blame someone, but there’s no one to blame. It’s the emotionally raw moment when you look up at God and say, “So just what the freak am I supposed to do about this?” 

That heart-breaking dread is, for me, the thread which connects the Hebrew scripture passage (Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18) with the gospel passage (Luke 13:31-35) in the RCL for Lent 2, Year C. In both stories we see guys who look at their situation and recognize that it really sucks. 

Look at poor Abram. He’s done everything God’s asked him to do, but God hasn’t come through with his part of the deal. Abram wants a male heir so bad he can almost smell the Johnson and Johnson baby powder, but his missus, Saria, hasn’t popped one out. What really seems to bug Abram is not only won’t he have a biological child, but under the weird customs of his time, everything he’s got will go to his slave Eliezer. Like a lot of folks, it really bothers Abram to see a marginalized person getting a privilege (Of course, Abram doesn’t know that the entire nation he founds will one day become a marginalized slave population in Egypt!). Abram just wants a little tyke he can love and teach and to whom he can pass on his wealth and his culture. But it doesn’t look like that’s ever going to happen. 

In the gospel reading Jesus is also looking at a pretty crappy picture. He’s just doing his job—healing and casting out demons—and some lunatic despot wants to kill him for doing it (He kind of makes me think of Volodymyr Zelensky!). It has to be hard to care for others, to try to be righteous, and to be a conduit for good news when some power beyond your control comes along and messes everything up. But Jesus (like Zelensky) isn’t afraid. He’s determined to do what he came to do in spite of all the threats to his own safety. 

Jesus isn’t affected by the threat of Herod’s wrath. What seems to bother him most is the hard-heartedness of the people he’s come to rescue. There are those who are so into their own stubborn nature not even the Messiah can reach them. And that has to hurt. This is one time when I really feel for Jesus. He goes from the frying pan of Herod’s jurisdiction into the fire of Jerusalem. At least in Galilee he could do something positive. But what about when you feel for people and you can’t reach them? What about when you just know things are going to get a lot worse before they get better? 

This is what it means to be human. The beauty of our scriptures, I think, is that we can see in Jesus and Abram our own longing anxiety. In the Genesis story God mollifies Abram with a weird covenant ritual. They—quite literally—cut a deal. The torch and smoking pot, images of God’s brilliant glory, pass through the gooey entrails of the vivisected animals as a sign that God will be similarly destroyed if he doesn’t come through with his promise to provide Abram with an heir. Yet Abram still questions and doubts, and still has to wait until God is good and ready. For Jesus, there are no questions or doubts. He knows he’ll be rejected and crucified. There is in this story love, heartache and dread all rolled together. Have you ever felt that yourself? 

Here we are. Just as COVID cases are going down, gas prices—and the price of everything else—is going up. We watch in horror the war in Ukraine, feeling deeply for those living in that insanity, yet knowing any intervention on the part of the US or NATO could slingshot us all right into nuclear holocaust. We’re also watching as the Christian Church keeps getting elbowed further to the margins of our cultural life, our pews get emptier, and our kids and grandkids can’t be bothered with the spiritual inheritance we, like old Abram, want to give them. 

Where’s the good news here? We know even after Abram gets his son his family won’t live happily ever after. We know that Jesus will escape Herod just to be killed by Pilate. 

I think it might be good for us to admit to this confusing feeling of love and longing and dread. We should sit with it a while and not try to ignore or anesthetize it. If nothing else, it turns us back to our need for God. It turns us back to prayer. Perhaps it turns us out of ourselves and towards each other and the needs of the world. It certainly must turn us towards hope—hope that God will come through in the end. 

And this is not the end. 

God’s peace and blessings to you.