The best social satire always reflects the truth about life. When it gets too far from reality, it’s merely comedy, perhaps funny, but the bite is gone.

 

That’s one reason the Colbert Report (Comedy Central) is so good. The show is meant to be entertainment, not journalism, but you learn a great deal about what’s happening in the world by laughing at Stephen Colbert’s scathingly witty take on the events of the day.

 

A recent front page story in The Onion made me laugh, and then pause at the deep sadness behind the satire. (You can read the story here.) It was a story on a new product called Advil Release, for “when feeling nothing is just too much.”

 

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals unveiled a new pain-causing line of Advil this week that will help millions of benumbed, hollow consumers to feel at least somewhat alive for up to four hours.

 

“Advil Release delivers a soothing burst of pain when cold and listless Americans need it most,” Wyeth CEO Bernard J. Poussot said during a press conference Monday. “Just two capsules can deliver all-day relief in the form of searing, life-affirming agony; the kind of agony Advil users trust when being a pale specter of humanity adrift in a meaningless and uncaring universe is just not an option anymore…”

 

Other pharmaceutical companies have also begun marketing their own brands of over-the-counter medications that will help the emotionally anesthetized feel briefly alive. The makers of NyQuil are reportedly developing a new product they describe as “the nighttime sniffling, sneezing, aching, screaming, crying, writhing, so you can possibly—for the love of God—experience some sense of normalcy medicine.”

 

It reminds me of a local tattoo shop, Infinity Tattoo. Their ads read, Infinity Tattoo: you’re damn right it hurts.

 

To feel numb and directionless, uncertain of any sense of purpose that can bring meaning to the random details of a frantic life is an expression of the Fall that brings people to the very edge of the abyss. I may not have felt it as fully as others have, but I desperately want ears sensitive to the sound of despair, and a life that allows me to offer the gift of unhurried time for listening.

 

The mysterious wonder of the gospel is that only Christianity claims a God who experiences utter abandonment, and the pain of being alive in a universe without God.

 

At the 2008 Rochester L'Abri Conference, in a workshop titled, "Inside the World of Movies," I interviewed film director Toddy Burton and showed her short film The Aviatrix. The conversation that developed was so lively it spilled over into the dinner period that followed. Now, after nearly a year of playing at international film festivals, The Aviatrix is finally available for viewing online through The YouTube Screening Room, a unique platform that programs short films from around the world.

A homily given by Denis Haack for the ordination of David Richter

Trinity Presbyterian Church / November 9, 2008

 

In his wonderful story, The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien gives us a piece of advice: “It does not do,” Tolkien says, “to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” Isn’t that great? It should be common sense, but if you are like me, we tend to forget.

 

Keep that in mind as I read our Scripture for tonight because I’m going to come back to it. The text I’ve chosen is a Hebrew poem, a psalm composed almost 3000 years ago, but it could have been written yesterday. Though ancient it is not archaic, but finely tuned to the glorious but broken reality where we live out our lives. The text is Psalm 73.

 

Psalm 73 divides into 5 sections—in the English translation we’re reading tonight those divisions are marked by the repetition of the word “but.” I’ll point them out as we go along.

 

The psalm opens with a single verse in which the poet makes a statement of faith. This is what, in other words, he believes to be true. Listen as I read: Verse 1: Truly God is good to Israel, to those who are pure in heart. He believes God exists, is good, and is a personal God who is calling a people to be in personal relationship with him.

 

The next verse, however, begins with “But…” and marks our first division. He believes in a good and personal God, but that raises a serious difficulty. Life just doesn’t seem to work out that way. The poet lives, as we do, in a broken, unjust, and cruel world where often the goodness of God seems to be a very distant, even dubious proposition. Listen as I read: Verses 2-15: But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped. For I was envious of the arrogant when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.
For they have no pangs until death; their bodies are fat and sleek. They are not in trouble as others are; they are not stricken like the rest of mankind. Therefore pride is their necklace; violence covers them as a garment. Their eyes swell out through fatness; their hearts overflow with follies. They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. They set their mouths against the heavens, and their tongue struts through the earth. Therefore his people turn back to them, and find no fault in them. And they say, “How can God know? Is there knowledge in the Most High?” Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. All in vain have I kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence. For all the day long I have been stricken and rebuked every morning. If I had said, “I will speak thus,” I would have betrayed the generation of your children.

 

The poet’s faith that God exists and is good is challenged by what he sees day by day. If God is good, why is life so bloody unfair? If he is good and truly God, why does he not simply stop the unspeakable cruelty in Congo’s seemingly endless civil war where pre-adolescent soldiers and gang rape are systematically used as weapons to terrorize innocent civilians? If God is good, why do executives that led their institutions into bankruptcy sail walk away with golden parachutes while ordinary workers lose their jobs and pensions? If God is good, why does injustice seem to smirk every time we open the newspaper? Do you not feel this tension? Only someone who is dangerously out of touch with reality could possibly miss it. I believe God is good, but the world is horribly unjust…

 

And this brings us to the next repetition of the word, “But…” marking the next division. Listen as I read: Verses 16-27: But when I thought how to understand this, it seemed to me a wearisome task, until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I discerned their end. Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! Like a dream when one awakes, O Lord, when you rouse yourself, you despise them as phantoms. When my soul was embittered, when I was pricked in heart, I was brutish and ignorant; I was like a beast toward you. Nevertheless, I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory. Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. For behold, those who are far from you shall perish; you put an end to everyone who is unfaithful to you.

 

Trying to sort it all out seemed to him “a wearisome task” he says. Day after day the evidence mounts, doubts rise, and the cynicism of our skeptical world seems to seep in at the edges of our consciousness. We believe God is good, but how does that square with the evidence of our eyes and ears?

 

A “wearisome task,” the psalmist says, “until”—“Until I went in to the sanctuary of God.” And it is here that something profound happens, it is in the sanctuary of God where he begins to see past the surface of things to the unseen foundations that lie beneath them. Life is not merely what it seems, but deeper than we can imagine, far richer than the details at the surface seem to suggest. There is, our poet claims, a hope that turns out to be far greater than our doubts and far more reassuring that our greatest confusion.

 

And this brings us to the final division of the psalm. Listen as I read verse 28: But for me it is good to be near God; I have made the Lord God my refuge that I may tell of all your works.

 

Here is the wonder of it. The psalmist has discovered there is a far better solution to his doubts than just having answers for them. After all, doubts and challenges can multiply faster than answers. He hasn’t sorted out all the difficulties that living in a broken world presents, because he can’t, just as we can’t. Instead, he discovers something far more profound and satisfying. He is reassured that justice will out in the end, that the story of history is not yet completed and is not swirling out of control. God is good, and promises that all things are in his hands and that the ending of the Story will be far better than we could possibly imagine in our wildest dreams. That’s the reassurance the psalmist finds in the sanctuary, a hope worth living for, even though it doesn’t stop the horror unfolding in the Congo, nor does it allow us even a glimpse of how the gross unfairness of life fits into the good plan of an almighty God. We are left standing at the edge of mystery.

 

The final answer we are left with is not a philosophical insight, or an airtight argument to forever unpack the mystery of God’s providential plan for justice in human history in this broken, unfair world. The final answer, instead, is God’s personal presence, and the evidence of his goodness down through all the centuries. Because it is here, and only here, that I have a deep reassurance that just because I cannot see a reason for suffering, that does not mean there isn’t a reason. Just because I cannot make full sense of things does not mean that everything is senseless. God exists, he is good, and as long as that is true, my smallness is swallowed up in the immensity of his grace and the incomprehensibility of his being. And make no mistake: this is not an escape from reality, it is escaping our limited finiteness to rest in his ultimate reality.

 

“It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” Doubt about a good God in an unjust world is merely one of the dragons we must face. If we had the time, we could name more of the dragons that lurk nearby. Most of the time, though, like the hobbits in Tolkien’s story we prefer to ignore them, acting as if we can stay safely out of their clutches, behind the carefully constructed walls of our homes, schools and churches. Dragons do not, however, stay buried in their caves, and our refusal to keep them firmly in our calculations is one reason Christianity seems so irrelevant, superficial, and inauthentic to the postmodern generation.

 

The Hebrew poet found relief from his nagging doubts in the sanctuary of God. It was within the meeting of God’s people, before God’s face, captured by his love, and in the hearing of God’s word that grace could be found. “But for me it is good to be near God.”

 

In Christ, God entered human history—our personal history—the same history that seems to make such a mockery of our belief that God exists and is good. Not only did he enter human history, he embraced the unfairness and injustice of that history so intensely that no suffering is now foreign to him. When we are near him, we are near the God who not only exists, and is good, but who knows the injustice with which we struggle not because he is divine and so knows everything, but because he walked through it and his body is ravaged with the scars to prove it.

 

I don’t know how it will get sorted out. I have no idea. But here is the good news. The One who has promised that it will be made right has made Christ the judge. In other words, in contrast to every other religion, Christianity claims that the God who walked through the injustice himself is the one who, in the end, make justice flow like a river until righteousness covers the earth like water covers the sea. I don’t know how he will accomplish that, but here’s the deal: when Christ was on the cross he tore down the barrier keeping us out of the sanctuary so that now we can have a personal relationship with the God who exists and who has proven his goodness in history.

 

Tonight we set apart a man to take his place—metaphorically speaking—in the sanctuary, who will now minister to those of us who believe, but who find it hard. It’s not that our statement of faith is incorrect or weak; it’s because we live, day by day, near dragons. The apostles tell us in the New Testament that one of the gifts God has given his church are leaders who listen before they speak, who know when to teach and when to remain silent. Leaders like David and Kelly who are so generous in offering their lives and home as a sanctuary, a safe place where people can find grace for wounds and doubts. Leaders who have not slain all the dragons, but who walk alongside us, assuring us that even little hobbits have significance in the cosmic scheme of things. That the dragons of doubt, or skepticism, or consumerism that sap our souls can be defeated, not because we are such great stuff, but because we have a champion who has gone ahead of us, has faced down death and come out the other side alive, forevermore.

 

Tonight, in a very special way we are given a chance to see beyond the surface details of things. Not because we are in a church building for one more service, but because we are about to witness something extraordinary. An ordination to ministry is actually a very auspicious event. It is a matter of church polity, true, but it is far more than that. It has legal ramifications in that after this David can baptize, marry, and bury people, but it is more than that, too. It has personal meaning for me, since in a few minutes when I join the other elders of the church to place hands on David to set him aside as a teaching elder, it will be for me a highlight in a long friendship I cherish as precious. But it is more than that, too. Mark my words: tonight heaven and earth will move in special concert, though so few of us have eyes trained to see beyond the surface of things that most of us may fail to notice the cosmic shift in reality.

 

Since I began with the words of J. R. R. Tolkien, I will end with his words as well. They are words of hope—the sort of words we discover when we carry our doubts and fears, bloody from stumbling upon a dragon, into the sanctuary to be near to God. They are words to hold onto, because they capture something of what it means to live in the in-between time, between Christ’s first coming to announce the arrival of his kingdom and his second coming when he arrives to consummate it. Hear them, beloved of God, and be filled with hope:

 

            All that is gold does not glitter,

            Not all those who wander are lost;

            The old that is strong does not wither,

            Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

            From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

            A light from the shadows shall spring;

            Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

            The crownless again shall be king.

 

In Ridley Scott’s action film, Body of Lies, the key moment comes not in an explosion (though plenty of bombs go off) but in a rather quiet moment of dialogue. C.I.A. agent Roger Ferris (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) meets Hani (played superbly by British actor Mark Strong), the head of Jordanian intelligence. Ferris has come to ask Hani’s aid in tracking down terrorists that have established a safe house in the Jordanian capital. Hani agrees, but insists on one condition. “Never lie to me,” he says.

 

On the surface Body of Lies exposes the dark underbelly of our dangerous world. Of how, if former CIA Middle East agent Richard Baer is correct in See No Evil, America’s intelligence agency has begun depending far too much on technology and far too little on developing human assets that can provide eyes and ears on the ground around the world. Of how much more dangerous the 21^st century is compared to the decades of the Cold War.

 

On a deeper level, though, Body of Lies is a study of trust. The same element that disappeared in the world of high finance, and suddenly solid Wall Street firms crumbled like a house of cards.

 

“Most people are against lying,” Sallie Tisdale says in, "Tell Me the Truth," a wonderfully insightful essay on salon.com, “at least, they claim to be. Who knows if they’re telling the truth? Perhaps the only thing we can really agree on about lying is that everyone does it sometimes. The person who claims otherwise has simply told you the first one.” For Christians the stakes are high, because we claim to follow not simply the One who insists his followers tell the truth but that we seek to incarnate the One who claimed to be The Truth. Tisdale continues:

 

Certain lies are oil in the social machine, the ritual courtesies of daily contact. A little exaggeration, casting careful shadows and flattering light upon ourselves, upon each other. There are ordinary lies I’ve never told. I’ve never lied about my age or pretended my hair color was natural. I’ve never cheated on a test. But other lies come quickly. I've always found it hard to say, “I made a mistake,” and would exaggerate to protect my fragile self-esteem. Most of us lie in just this way: little deceits and quick dissimulations to spare ourselves from some impending small doom—social embarrassment, parental anger or spousal punishment.

 

These lies, the ones we claim to engage in for the sake of other people, are often meant to save ourselves from a little discomfort. No more, no less… So many ways to fail here. We lie by commission, by omission and with silence. We lie to get and to avoid having to pay the various prices extracted from us, to punish others and to avoid punishment. We lie to stay safe. Everyone lies.

 

When my good friend Ed Hague first showed me Tisdale’s piece my initial reaction was to ask whether she isn’t overstating the case. Everyone lies?

 

Church potlucks are an occasion for lying, I think. We ask one another “How are you doing?” and reply, as expected in this social ritual, “Great.” Sometimes that isn’t really true—the truth would be to say, “I’m not doing well, actually, but you aren’t a safe person to explain that to.” The real brokenness here is probably not the social ritual response which hides the truth but the breakdown of trust that sadly infects us so deeply.

I don’t remember—no, scratch that. I was going to say I don’t remember when I’ve received so many fear-full emails from Christians as in the past couple of weeks leading up to this year’s election. But I do remember the last time. There were two times, actually: they were in the months leading up to Y2K and in the weeks leading up to Bill Clinton’s election. Now, my memory might be faulty, but as I remember, in neither case did the dreaded scenarios come to pass. But once again, the emails have been burning through cyberspace, warning of all sorts of horrible outcomes if we vote incorrectly.

 

About which I have a few reflections.

 

Reflection #1. We are a highly politicized people. I agree that Christians needs to be responsible citizens—that is a part of faithfulness as we live under Christ’s Lordship. But we must not be politicized—by which I mean grant the religious importance to politics that is common in our secularized society. Voting is important, but God remains sovereign. Our calling remains unchanged, and our gospel remains the power of God regardless of who is in the White House.

 

Reflection #2. We should work faithfully for just policies and vote for good leaders, without for a moment allowing our hope to rest in either. Or, to put it another way: Christians should never be either pessimistic or optimistic about politics (or about anything else in a fallen world, for that matter). We should remain hopeful, instead, whether the policy we seek to enact succeeds or fails, and whether the one whom we believe is the best candidate wins or loses.

 

Reflection #3. Even if you think you have a gift of prophesy, be humble about predicting the future. And if you claim to have that gift remember that the biblical standard is that all prophets whose predictions were less that 100% accurate in every single tiny detail were to be stoned.

 

Reflection #4. Know that fear—like guilt and shame, other common motivators in the emails I’ve received—are not how Christians should seek to persuade one another concerning what faithfulness looks like. Remember, we live before a watching world. If we are fearful over an election—an election! for goodness sake—what does that witness to our confidence in the sovereignty and grace of our heavenly Father?

 

Reflection #5. Cultivate Christian contentment so that it infuses, shapes, and informs every aspect of your citizenship—and our emails on the topic. “Christian contentment,” Jeremiah Burroughs (1599-1646) says, “is that sweet, inward, quiet, gracious, frame of spirit, which freely submits to and delights in God’s wise and fatherly disposal in every condition.” [The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment].