A man undone: Lent 2020

I must die.  Lent is the season that reminds me that I must die.  Die to myself.   Die to my desires, die to my hopes, die to my dreams.  Dietrich Bonhoeffer says that that “Christ bids us to come and die.” So I know th
at must die.  

            As we begin Lent, I know that this must be a season in which I reflect on my sins and to confront my own self.  But it must be more than this. I must completely undo myself…to remake myself.

            Lent is about putting to death all the things that are in opposition to God. Lent is about self-reflection and re-centering yourself around God’s will for your life.  But…where does this leave me?

            I must die.

            I must undo that which I have become.  I must…unbecome.

            Lent tells me that I must sacrifice all…that I must be willing…no…must be able…to endure the complete reduction of who I am.

            Where to begin? How do you start to…undo yourself?  How do you start to…die?

            The first thing that must go is my idea of career.  I no longer think of myself as a chaplain.  Rather, I think of myself as a person who works as a chaplain.  This might seems as a slight difference, but it is actually very significant.  I do not associate myself as one who is worthy to have the title, “Chaplain,” or “Chaps…” There are also those that hold that title with whom I do not wish to associate.  Is that pride on my part? But I feel that I must not think of myself as a chaplain… ‘chaplain’ as an ontological part of my being.

            Rather, I must think of myself as a man in relationship to his God.  But even so, what does that mean?

            The prophet Micah told the people of Israel to “love justice, do mercy, and to walk humbly with their God.” The season of Lent is an opportunity to learn to walk humbly with their God.

            I will confess that at 44 years old, I do not have a grasp on this.  I want to tell God what His plan is for me.  I want to direct the course of my life and most of all to expand my kingdom and my comfort. What if God’s plan is not what I want? Imagine if God is calling you to a life of obscurity…could we do it? What if God was asking us to give up our hopes and dreams…without the assurance that there is something better.  Could we do that?

            The central image of the period of Lent is Christ on the cross.  Paul writes about this and tells us that Jesus, “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil 2:6-8). If Christ was willing to do this, what does that call me…us…to?

            This Lent for me is about reflecting on Christ on the cross and trying to instill humility within myself.  Prayer, reading, fasting are all part of this.  Engaging with the Stations of the Cross on a weekly basis is also a large part of my Lenten observance.   But I feel that I have to do more than this.  Periods of silence, reflection and introspection must become the norm.  Most of all, I must begin to tackle my own pride.  I must let Christ teach me to learn how to die to myself. I must put away my vain ambitions.  I must learn to be a better man…a better husband, a better father…only then can I begin to…come alive.  

Where is God?

“Where is merciful God, where is He?”

This question was asked by a man in a concentration camp as he watched two men and a young boy being hung for stealing food. It is perhaps the defining question that echoes not only from the camps, but also haunts our own lives as well.

Elie Weisel describes the scene in his book Night.

“Then came the march past the victims.  The two men were no longer alive.  Their tongues were hanging out, swollen and bluish.  But the third rope was still moving: the child, too light, was still breathing… And so he remained for more than half an hour, lingering between life and death, writing before our eyes.  And we were forced to look at him in close range.  He was still alive when I passed him.  His tongue was still red, his eyes not yet extinguished. 

“Behind me, I heard the same man asking: ‘For God’s sake, where is God?’

And from within me, I heard a voice answer: ‘Where is he? This where—hanging here from this gallows…’”

No sadder words have been written, and no truer question has ever been asked.  “Where is merciful God, where is he?”

I listen to people’s pain for a living.  It’s what I do.  I may not be good at it and the Navy may not consider me necessary, but it’s what I do. 

The scenario’s change on a daily basis, “I don’t love my wife any more,” or “My husband is cheating on me…” or “when I was young my father put his hands on me…”  “I’m tired of hurting, Chaps….I’m tired of pain…”

Behind it all, whether they know it or not, they are all asking the same question, “For God’s sake, where is God?”

Now, this is not to compare my life, or any of our lives to the horror of the Holocaust.  There are no words to describe my horror at the events of the camps or to describe my awe in those that survived.  But there is a sense in which we all ask that same question when we think of the pain in our own lives.  Where is God in the midst of all the things we go through:

Broken marriages

Financial Crisis

Cancer

Estranged relationships

Parkinson’s Disease

The death of a beloved child

In my own life, I ask where “God” is in the midst of my estrangement.  I am in virtual exile from my church and my Christian Community. The people I work with on the ship neither understand what I do nor find any value in my position.  I am alone on the other side of the world wondering if this sacrifice is worth it.  More often that not, I feel alone and wonder what I have done to be ostracized.   There are times when I wonder if God is completely done with me, casting me out and abandoning me to the forces of oblivion.

“For God’s sake, where is he?”

As I encounter people on a daily basis, I wonder if God is aware of all that we are going through. 

This is nothing compared to the other horrors of the world.  A mother kills her daughter so that she can stay with her boyfriend.  A man shoots up a church in the name of racial cleansing.  And all day I am surrounded by people who laugh at other’s misery, who take bets on whether someone will kill themselves and who consistently advocate for violent and destructive answers to problems and who belittle and bereate and dehumanize people to accomplish their own goals of self-agrandizement.

“Where is he?”

Wiesel closes that section of his book with the following comment, “that night, the soup tasted of corpses.”

In that sentence, he perfectly captures the desertion of joy, the abandonment of hope, and the futility of life.   There can be no satisfaction in life while the cries of the wounded echo throughout our world.

“For God’s sake, where is he?”

As fate would have it, at the same prison camp that Wiesel wound up was a young theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was also asking the very same question, but from a different vantage point.  He writes, “The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who let us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually.  Before God and with God we live without God.  God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross.  He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us…The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering.  Only the suffering God can help.” (Letters and Papers from Prison). 

Only the suffering God can help.  God suffers.  He not only suffers for us, he suffers with us. God is not absent nor has he abandoned us to our fate with no more concern than we have for pizza boxes.  Jurgen Moltmann builds on this and states that the only help we have is the crucified God.  God knows our suffering because he Himself suffered and continues to suffer and will continue to suffer until his kingdom comes in full.

I come from a tradition that has a hard time the crucifix, or at least the corpus on the crucifix.  For a long time, I did too.  After all, Jesus has been resurrected, he is off the cross and no longer suffers the pain of death.  But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I begin to see the crucifix as a reminder that God still suffers.  He suffers on our behalf and he suffers with us and at times he suffers through us.  Perhaps this part of being crucified to the world through the cross of Christ (Galatians 6:14). 

When we are going through terrible times in our lives, we can perhaps join our voices with Wiesel, “Where is merciful God?” “He is there” and we can point to the cross, we can point to the wounds of our own lives.