Acts 18.5-17; Psalm 42
August 9, 2009
Patrick Preheim
“God of red and black”
We don’t often talk about failure, do we? Maybe we fear that failure is contagious, that merely mentioning it will hex us. Maybe talk about failure dredges up shame or anger from our own tough experiences. Yet, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain (John 12:24). And nearly half of our Psalter is made up of laments (communal or personal) (of which Psalm 42 is one). And in chapters 12 through 19 of Acts I counted nine different episodes where some trial or tribulation impacted the disciples. Despite all this our theology of grief is rarely outlined in sermons and worship. Life is not one unceasing crescendo of joy, accolades and worldly success. There are ups and downs, market corrections, and even entire years mired in the red ink of loss. In Christian circles we often limit debate of grief to Good Friday, and even then the loss in question is God’s. Resurrection is the keystone of our faith, but we should not minimize Good Friday. Paul’s experiences in Corinth afford us an opportunity to consider success and failure, black and red balance sheets, from a Christian perspective.
In Paul’s Corinthian trip he once again enters the synagogue and presents arguments for disciple-ship to Jesus. His results are mixed. A few embrace the way of Christ, but Paul’s sale falls much short of his expectations. He becomes so frustrated with the Corinthian synagogue that he lashes out with a couple of prophetic acts taken from the Hebrew Scriptures. Like Nehemiah (Neh 5:13) Paul shakes the dust off his clothes—signalling “their apostasy in rejecting the word of God” (Robert W. Wall, The New Interpreter’s Bible commentary on Acts; volume 10; p. 254). Like Ezekiel (Ezk 3) Paul tells them their blood will be on their own heads. Baldly stated, Paul has failed again in his effort to win over the synagogue to a Jesus form of Judaism. A bad day for the business we might say.
Tim Spacek knows about bad business days. Tim chronicled his experience in The Marketplace (March / April 1994; pp. 4-6). He wrote:
Even now, eight years since I lost the business and with my entire bankruptcy plan complete, the pain persists. Like a scabrous wound, the memory of that time still seems too delicate to touch...At that time I was working as an independent book producer...My business took off... and [I] quickly acquired several employees and a sizeable overheard. I poured every ounce of energy into this new venture. I soon found myself out on a limb. I had taken on a big contract to produce a complicated textbook for a major publisher...I sensed something was askew, so I made arrangements to receive payment at the time the final...product was delivered. This was agreeable, but when the day came for me to deliver the book and collect my invoice, I wound up having the product stolen under the pretence of having it “inspected”...After [a] meeting, my client made it clear that if I expected to collect my invoice I would have to sue him [which would take years]. He offered a settlement equal to less than one tenth of the final bill, take it or leave it...As word got out, my creditors began closing in on me. Their hounding became relentless...They phoned my home continually, sometimes making threatening remarks...They stopped by our house on weekends.
Tim Spacek is not the only one to have experienced a catastrophe—financial or otherwise. Many of us walk the tenuous road of black and red balance sheets with our health or the health of our loved ones. This week I reread a story about a pastor who suffered a major loss in his family (“The Power and the Presence” in Leadership; summer quarter 91, pp. 16-17). In this case the pastor was a man. He “and his wife had a “miracle baby”-- she wasn’t supposed to be able to get pregnant, yet she did. But when the little girl was born, she was so severely deformed that she lived only a week...people had told him that they had prayed that Joy Ann would be miraculously healed, and were sure she would be, and he must not be in any doubt about it”. But she died anyway, and the pastor was left to make theological sense of the experience of loss for himself and his congregation.
And then there are those catastrophes we unleash on each other. 64 years ago a supposedly Christian country dropped an atomic bomb on the most Christian of Japanese cities, using the cathedral as the target in the city. The atom is both useful (as in medical procedures) and horrific. Lest there be “red days” like Nagasaki or Chernobyl we must proceed with humility.
The presence of the “red” days / weeks / years on the balance sheet needs to inform our theology and practices. Here are a few of my general thoughts on loss and apparent failure:
-
If Jesus had tough days and if the early church had tough days, we too can expect to have our tough days. Servants are not greater than their master, nor are messengers greater than the one who sent them (John 13:16). We are not some privileged Christians who can or should expect to sail through life unhindered. Even as Jesus maintained his spiritual equilibrium in the midst of difficulties we too are called to remain grounded. Jesus maintained his structural integrity by regularly connecting with God in prayer and on retreats. He dealt with the sins committed against him by forgiving. If this is what Jesus did it is also good for his followers.
-
We are called to be faithful, and that will not always mean we will be successful by the world’s measure. I first encountered the distinction between obedience and effectiveness in John Howard Yoder’s book, The Politics of Jesus (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.; 1983 reprint of 1972 original). He wrote that ultimate good is “determined by faithfulness and not by results” (p.245). Obedience will, one way or another in this era or the future, ultimately lead to the coming of God’s reign.
-
We do not manipulate God. Like Jesus we can pray that the cup might pass from us. Like Paul we can pray to have the thorn in our flesh removed. Like Paul and Jesus we place our requests before God mindful that our petitions are not always fulfilled the way we want. When a prayer request is not answered the way we had hoped we must trust that God’s grace will enable us to go on living and ministering in strength that is not our own.
-
The spiritual power behind the God of Jesus is not one of protection, but one of redemption. We do not expect to be exempted from trials, rather to be given the strength to endure them and minister through them with faithfulness. God of the biblical text is able to take bad situations and redeem them for good. Even though people intend harm, God is able to transform it for good. The story of Joseph being sold into slavery only to preserve his family is a prime biblical example (Gen 50:20). The surviving Catholics of Nagasaki used their nightmarish experience to resolutely call for an end to all wars. Takashi Nagai was quoted as saying, “our lives are of great worth if we accept with good grace the situation Providence places us in, and go on living lovingly” (in Robert Ellsberg’s, All Saints, p.12).
So what happened in Corinth. Paul received some comforting news in the form of a vision. In the message Paul is encouraged to keep sharing his faith in word and deed; he is promised that he will not be physically harmed by his opponents. This is a good thing, but that does not mean church life goes smoothly in Corinth. Sosthenes is beaten terribly. From the letters of Paul to the Corinthian church (which scholars think come 4-5 years after the events recorded in Acts) we know they struggled with orderly worship, appropriate sexual boundaries, and divisions within the church. It is into this context that Paul writes his oft quoted love chapter. Our guiding light amidst divisions and discernment must be love. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends (1st Cor 13:7-8a).
So what happened to Tim Spacek. Tim shared about his crashing business with a group in his church. As he talked about the trust he wanted to have he “felt that something fundamental had changed inside”. Reflecting on that time he wrote
The great burden of failure, and the sense that I had wasted these years building this business were lifted, along with the guilt I felt over the damage I had inflicted on the lives of my employees. This made my grief easier to bear as I negotiated the many difficult situations and experiences that followed. A year after my bankruptcy, I tried to reconcile with as many of the people I had injured as possible. This was difficult, but very rewarding. As I reflect back I’m aware of many great lessons I learned through all this pain. I believe that most of what I really needed to know about business, I learned through my bankruptcy! The most important thing to me personally is the bedrock of trust I have developed in God’s provision, even during the times when it seemed there was no tangible evidence to support it...Throughout this period, many “minor miracles” and some major ones occurred which kept my family clothed, housed and fed. -The Marketplace (March / April 1994; pp. 4-6)
And how does a Christian pastor make sense of grief when he has suffered the loss of a daughter, in spite well meaning prayers and promises? In a sermon some time after this event he shared that God had healed Joy Ann by taking her to heaven. Joy Ann’s peaceful death was God, not ignoring, but answering the prayers that had been made. “People act as if this world were the only one, or least the most important one...As Christians, we need to say loud and clear, as Jesus did, that the other world exists...Christians and their children die, not out of life, but into life. And death, whether late or early, is a healing in the most profound sense. [God] bridges the two worlds” (“The Power and the Presence” in Leadership; summer quarter 91, pp. 16-17).
Paul dealt with ups and downs in Corinth. Spacek faced financial challenges. Illness and death mystify many of us. Takashi Nagai, and the other Christians from Nagasaki, suffered a crime of war. Each of these drew strength from the God who never leaves of forsakes. The structure of a Biblical lament follows a pattern used throughout the ancient Near East. An address of praise gives way to a complaint of distress. The complaint leads to a petition for deliverance. The psalms usually conclude with a vow to praise the Deity when fortunes reverse. The Hebrew Psalms took this format (and sometimes the actual text of pagan psalms) and addressed their words to Yahweh, the God above other gods (Bernhard W. Anderson, Out of the Depths: The Psalms speak for us today, p. 68). When the markets go south, when the ink is red, when health fails, when our loved ones die, when violence drops on us like a bomb may we have the faith to hold praise, complaint, petition and trust together in our acts of faith. May we continue to look to God who provides us what is necessary to live in this world and through eternity. Amen.