Struggle

Genesis 9:8-17, Mark 1:9-15

March 1, 2009

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

Try to look at it from God’s point of view. All of God’s being and purpose, the very “Godness” of God is harmony, balance, peace, wholeness, all things that word “Shalom” we sang throughout Epiphany mean. Integral to God’s very character, then, is shalom, and all the cosmos was created to reflect and be shalom. Human beings, however, kept disabling the program. Things were out of balance on earth; the center could not hold. God saw the need for a radical readjustment.

The flood. That would do it, and it did. But horrible, horrible: the screams of children, of lions and kittens, the crashing down of great oaks and then a terrible silence; this is so not a sweet children’s story about animals all getting along on a boat. Another piece of the very nature, the “Godness” of God now cries out in struggle. Compassion, love, mercy, these also are central to who God is. Struggle, deep struggle within the very heart of God.

Have you ever held an archer’s bow? I loved archery at Girl Scout camp as a child, and I remember the first time I was given a full sized bow and tried to pull the arrow back. It always looked so easy when Robin Hood or Olympic athletes did it, that I was stunned at how hard it is, how much tension must be created to pull that string back in order for the arrow to be launched to have the power to go as far as it needs to go. As Noah’s ark floated on the debris of the world, God was pulled taught like that bow, full of tension and struggle over what might happen next on earth.

Thousands of years later, another divine struggle took place, this time in the wilderness of Judea. After 30 years of waiting and preparing, Jesus was ready to launch his public ministry, a ministry whose goal was to try again to restore shalom to earth. All those years had taught God the immense risks of what Jesus was about to attempt. Jesus went into the wilderness to face a time of struggle. Should he, as the Tempter suggested, merely take over all control and defeat anyone who defied him, essentially flooding the earth again but this time with controlling power, not water? Should he try to fix all the bad things then go away and hope it held? Should he give up on the idea altogether now that he had spent time as one of these people and understood their limitations? God’s need for all creation to be in shalom crashed into God’s limitless compassion and love for human beings and once again, there was struggle. Jesus was with the wild beasts, we’re told, and his heart and mind inside him must have felt like one of those beasts. Struggle.

If struggle characterizes God, and many stories in the Bible talk about God struggling, God changing a decision, God weeping, then struggle cannot be an altogether bad thing. We are living in a time and a culture that wants everything to resolve, to be all right. We don’t want to sit in struggle for very long. It is the “Disneyfication” of life. My favorite example is what Disney did to the story of the Little Mermaid. In the original Hans Christian Andersen story, the little mermaid learns that she cannot have legs to run after the handsome prince, but she must learn to be who she is. There is struggle for her in this realization, great weeping struggle, and we see that struggle in the statue of her sitting on a rock looking ashore in Copenhagen’s harbor. But the result of that struggle is for her to move to new understandings of the great potential within her and the release of new ideas, new creativity that had room to blossom as her struggle exhausted and enlightened her. Disney, on the other hand, took away her power to speak and sing, her central creative gifts, and gave her legs. She got the handsome prince, but lost her soul.

Struggle, and times in the wilderness, can be the impetus for creativity and new life, if we allow it to be. The default position for many of us when struggles come is to go back to old “safe” ways of thinking, which is a way of giving up. The newly-freed people of Israel wandered in the wilderness beyond Egypt, but when times got hard their first impulse was to want to go back to slavery in Egypt, where at least they had a bed and three meals a day. Their second impulse was to make an idol like the gods of Egypt and to worship as the Egyptians had, which seemed to work pretty well for them. Moses was on the mountain with God being taught about a radical new way to structure human society, a great creative experiment God sought to do with this small proto-nation. We’ve come to think of the Ten Commandments as conservative, but in the time of Moses, these would have been considered a radical way to structure a society, something never seen before in terms of how people are called to respect one another and the understanding of One God. To learn to live in such new ways would be a struggle, but the result could transform all the earth! But the people were impatient with struggle; they wanted legs.

I’m actually afraid that in these hard times that will happen here, that we will lose an opportunity to move through struggle to new insights, new ways of living with and for one another, that we will all become afraid and seek safety and the old and familiar. I watched that happen after 9/11, and I saw a creative struggle that might have led to a reframing of our thinking and acting lost.

So, the Great Flood which lasted 40 days, the Hebrew people wandering 40 years in the desert, Jesus with the wild beasts in the wilderness for 40 days and nights, the 40 days of Lent: all times of struggle for God and for humankind. Following the flood, the struggle in God brought forth something amazingly beautiful. That taut archer’s bow inside God relaxed and took on color as water and light mingled above the earth. The bow at rest, the rainbow, a sign to remind God that the only unchanging part of the divine nature is a refusal to give up on creation, to remind God that the struggle will continue but with hope that creative, not destructive ways of resolving it might win out. (from Wm. Loyd Allen).

After 40 years in the wilderness, a Promised Land and a people who would struggle to embody God’s very nature of shalom and compassion in how they lived and governed themselves, a struggle that would produce great creative ideas and movements as well as colossal failures. That is the risk of struggle.

After 40 days with the wild beasts, angels came to Jesus and cared for him. The struggle would continue, but with hope and joy and a belief in the power of healing and shalom at its center. He would tell them again and again, “You have heard it said; but I say to you.” New ideas, based on the old, and a call to a creative reimagining of human relationships on all levels. But the struggle would continue. It would cost body and blood.

What does it take for us to dwell in the struggle long enough to open our spirits to the creative work of God through us? Trust, I think. Trust that God does refuse to give up on us. Trust that God is still speaking and working in you and me and lots of other people. Trust that the wilderness is not a place where we are abandoned by God, but an incubator for new life, and a place where angels wait to care for us. Trust that God knows what it is to struggle and deeply desires to help us bring newness out of struggle.

If we count the Sundays, we have 42 days left in Lent. We’re not Jesus, so it takes a bit longer. Some of you are experiencing deep struggles because of work layoffs or loss of investments or budgets at home or work that won’t balance. All of us are involved in these struggles. Let us explore together how we can risk new thinking in the midst of them and see what God can make of us in the midst of creative struggle. Oh, and keep a lookout for rainbows. Amen.