My God! How Could this Happen?

She said, as the hum of the Emergency Room air conditioner became white noise to soften the incessant bleeps of the monitors as his life slowly ebbed away.   How Could this Happen? he thought, leaving the personal care home where the mother who had held the family together sat gazing into space, unaware that she even had a son.   How Could this Happen? when the biopsy comes back, when the fire trucks scream to a halt at your curb, when she writes “This is the most difficult letter I’ve ever written, but…”   How could this happen when the invincible is wrecked around your shoulders?   My God!   My God!

Although the 22nd Psalm would well fit into our readings today, we’ll actually look at the Lamentations often ascribed to Jeremiah, first six verses.   The Holy City has fallen, the Babylonians have displaced the populace, and the sacred spots are in ruins.  Has God forsaken her?  “All her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they have become her enemies.”   The Prophets, living and dead, gather as a cloud of witnesses to wail, “We tried to tell you….”    How does this interpolate into a time of social carelessness, of global climate change, of mistrust of those unlike our own race and culture?  We think of “The Planet of the Apes” and so many of its progeny doom-flicks…..   My God!  How Could this Happen?    (And blessed are those who utter this as a prayer and not as a blasphemy.)

In spite of it all, says St. Paul from prison, keep the Faith.  (II Timothy 1:1-14)   One of my favorite instructions is v.7, “for God did not give us a spirit of cowardice, but rather a spirit of power and of love and of self-discipline.”   Workers in God’s Kingdom can get depressed pretty easily, for the Babylonians are always at the gates.   For every quiet voice of adoration and affirmation, there are hundreds of others shouting that our ethic is foolish and that “nice guys finish last”.  But Paul hangs in there, trusting in God.  “Hold to the standard of sound teaching that you have heard from me, in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus.  Guard the good treasure entrusted to you, with the help of the Holy Spirit LIVING IN US.”  (caps mine)

Luke’s Gospel (17:5-10) reminds the Lamenter that even a smidgen of faith is enough!   It doesn’t need to be “increased”, for even now the Believer can do much more that is probable, like throwing a huge tree into the sea.   But look, Jesus says, you’re gonna have to empty yourselves as would a slave, thinking first of the complete attention to the Master.  Are there good things we haven’t even tried, thinking we’re not faithful enough?  

Wordsworth wasn’t lamenting over what once was, yet he wrote, “And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things….” (Lines Above Tinturn Abbey)    The abbey itself had fallen to ruins:  dust on the high altar, moss on chancel rail…a sorrowful echo of evensong chanted by monks long gone….  And was God yet to be found there?   Evidently.

God Bless Us:  Every One                                         H    B    King