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Hebrew Scripture Reading—Jeremiah 8:18-9:1
One of my least favorite memories of college was the semester I decided to take a course entirely devoted to Dostoevsky. Those of you who read my recent newsletter on Tolstoy will no doubt now conclude that I have an antagonistic view of Russian novelists. Whatever one concludes, I did at first enjoy the class on Dostoevsky. The goal of the class was to read just about every single short story and novel written by the prolific author in chronological order.
Early on I loved the story “Notes from Underground” as well as Dostoevsky’s first novel “Poor House,” but in time I encountered a serious problem. I am a notoriously slow reader. I like to ponder over things while I read, and I don’t like to let a single word pass by without it being well considered. This reading habit of mine became my downfall as the semester wore on because as some of you might know Dostoevsky’s novels tended to get longer over the course of his career. His last novel The Brothers Karamazov was over a thousand pages. By the end of the semester, I was a nervous wreck and had dropped out of a math class in my effort to keep up with the reading assignments. I had not yet learned how to skim.
Perhaps because of my experiences in the course I felt an involuntary groaning come from deep within the recesses of my soul this past week when a book I was reading on biblical views of suffering devoted a number of pages to The Brothers Karamazov. However, just as I am slowly learning to appreciate Tolstoy, I am also learning to appreciate Dostoevsky now that I don’t have the pressure of letter grades. As I was reading the book on suffering, I was struck by the author’s synopsis of a deep theological discussion Ivan Karamazov has with his younger brother Alyosha who is a novice at a monastery. Ivan “explains that, for him, the suffering of innocent children can not be explained, and that if an explanation from the Almighty ever is forthcoming, he simply won’t accept it.” For him, there is nothing that can “justify cruelty done to children.”[i]
When we decided to select the Children’s Alliance as our social action partner and when it was suggested that we focus this Sunday upon the international plight of children, it did not immediately occur to me that contemplating the suffering of children can throw one into such an agonizing theological abyss, an abyss that brings to mind Jeremiah’s sense of being utterly abandoned by God amid an onslaught of sickness and poverty. This abyss perpetually lurks nearby whenever one gives serious consideration to the kinds of injustices that an organization like Jubilee USA addresses. Some time ago Jubilee USA made the decision to not only focus on debt relief for impoverished countries but to also advocate for the fulfillment of the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations. In the year 2000, the leaders of 189 countries agreed to pursue the eight ambitious goals you see listed in your insert. The goals include the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger, the achievement of universal primary education, the promotion of gender equality, the reduction of child mortality, and so on.
Child mortality statistics by themselves can provoke a theological crisis. Unicef, for example, estimates that 8.1 million children under the age of five died in 2009.[ii] Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? One might easily ask why God would create a world in which there is so much suffering by the innocent. Even if our theology is sophisticated enough to think that God didn’t cause this suffering or desire it in any way, there is still the theological question of what God is doing in response to the vast suffering of children today.
This is where I find myself struggling theologically. We could have all the medical and technological advancement in the world, and we could have an outpouring of well-intentioned volunteers willing to travel anywhere to be of service, and we could have world leaders make the grandest declarations about ending poverty, but none of that would change the underlying inequalities that cause children to die before the age of five. Ask yourself what can. For me, the inescapable answer revealed to us by history is social movements. For this reason, I have come to appreciate even more the social movements at the core of biblical history, especially the Kingdom of God movement led by Jesus. I have also come to realize that in order to have a theologically grounded hope that substantial strides can be made to alleviate child suffering on an international scale then one has to believe that God works through social movements and that such social movements are indeed feasible.
I personally have no trouble believing that God has worked through social movements in the past and present, but I think where I get stuck is seeing this same God at work in my own life in such a way that I don’t find myself stumbling over the feasibility issue. More than any other question, I have felt this one to be the theological marshland impeding my spiritual progress over the past year. In fact, in an effort to address it, I have been exchanging letters with a former professor of mine for the past several months. On a more practical level, however, the Moses Project has been one of my outlets for endeavoring to cross through this theological swamp.
I am not sure I have fully gotten a handle on it yet, but this past summer I felt like I made something of a breakthrough in attempting to cross this swamp. I was listening to a radio show called “Speaking of Faith.” One day the show featured a discussion about a famous Muslim poet. Many of you are probably familiar with the 13th century Sufi mystic Rumi. We actually read some of his poetry in worship this past year. Part of the show reflected on a poem by Rumi in which he speaks of a reed that is cut and separated from its reed bed. Rumi compares the crying sound of air rushing through the resulting reed flute to the longing of one lover for another or to the deep longing one might have for God.
The host of the show along with a Rumi scholar went on to discuss how this sense of longing is not only part of being spiritual but part of being human. They talked about how it’s this sense of longing that propels one forward in life with an uncanny power. They talked about how it is this sense of longing that never ends but is a kind of destination in itself. They talked of how “counterintuitive” this kind of longing is in a culture in which we are always seeking to have our desires met and satisfied in a fast and finalized way. In contrast to this, Rumi was saying that longing can be redemptive and can be a form of progress in itself. This doesn’t mean that one should seek to inundate oneself with personal longings over anything and everything but rather it is about cultivating a form of intentional longing. It is an intentional longing for the divine that can enrich our lives rather than burden our lives.[iii]
So Brooks why was all of this such a breakthrough for you in trying to cross that theological swamp? I think it was a breakthrough for me, because it reframed my spiritual quandary. No longer was it a burden to wrestle with whether or not I could find the same God at work in the civil rights movement at work in my own life, it was now a marvelous longing, a longing capable of propelling me down the path of one of the hardest but most rewarding spiritual journeys of my life. On this journey, I don’t need to worry about whether I am inadequate or whether I am going to flunk the course. There is simply a love for a loving God. There is a longing that can be lived and experienced each new day. Thanks to the Moses Project and thanks to the work of the Children’s Alliance it has become that much easier for me to feel good about my spiritual longing and where that longing is taking me. For that, I am grateful to this church, I am grateful to Emijah, and I am grateful to God. Amen.
[i] Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer, (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 266-267.
[ii] Unicef, “New Release of the Latest UN Estimates on Child Mortality,” Childinfo, <www.childinfo.org>.
[iii] Krista Tippett and Fatemeh Keshavarz, “The Ecstatic Faith of Rumi,” Speaking of Faith, (December 13, 2007), <http://being.publicradio.org/programs/rumi/transcript.shtml>.