Friday, July 17, 2020              (today’s lectionary)
Shadow of the sun
King Hezekiah is dying and Isaiah tells him that, yes, he will die. But Hezekiah weeps bitterly and protests. God hears his prayer, and the death angel falls back for fifteen years. This is not the kind of thing that happens every day.
There is one requirement put on Hezekiah. In three days he must “go up to the Lord’s temple.”
What is the sign for me to go up?
And Isaiah said,
Watch this. The shadow of the sun shall go backward ten steps.
Beyond Hezekiah’s personal contract with his Creator, this remarkable reversal of the sun’s movement also reverses time. First Hezekiah got ten minutes, but that primed the pump for fifteen years.
Is this a good thing, to postpone my death?
In the noontime of life I must depart!
I shall see the Lord no more in the land of the living.
My dwelling like a shepherd’s tent, is struck down
You have folded up my life, like a weaver
Who severs the last thread.
“The old man smiled,” wrote Willa Cather. “I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.” Death comes even for the archbishop, and we who are left without him, weep. But will I weep bitter tears over my own death, like Hezekiah? I guess I can’t yet say. For now the words flow freely from my mouth, “I trust you, Lord. I will wait for you. What will be will be.”
Those live whom the Lord protects
Yours is the life of my spirit
You give me health and life.
But these bumper sticker-sized faith slogans might not cut it when I am torn in two by affliction. What then? Will I ask God for ten minutes, then fifteen years? What theodicy will carry me if I can barely breathe, or if Margaret, or Chris, or Marc, or Andi, or so many others … can barely breathe?
Will my prayer last any more than eight minutes and forty-six seconds?
In his review of A Profound Ignorance by Ephraim Radner, R. R. Reno points to the words and will of a young protestor. Ranay Barton wept, “If the death of George Floyd doesn’t do anything, the world will fall apart.”
The poor you shall always have with you.
But you shall not always have me.
Ranay sighed, “I’m tired. We shouldn’t be facing this in 2020.” And conservative old intellectual guy R. R. Reno agreed with her.
Carrying the burden of theodicy is agonizing.
Is God dead? Has he stopped caring for his rebellious people? Did he never exist at all? Perhaps our quest for “solutions” to the problem of evil is misguided, but then what should we do? What does God say in response to evil? Are we in this together? The silence from the sky seems deafening to Ranay.
Rousing oneself to live in accord with the redemptive spirit animating a “movement” is exhausting. Our bodies beg for rest. And our souls hunger for home-making, even if that means making a temporary peace with our places in the finely woven web of history and its failings.
My friend asked, “What is it to suffer for Christ rather than for foolishness?” Jesus spoke to his question when he answered the Pharisees.
If you knew what this meant, “I desire mercy, not sacrifice,”
You would not have condemned these innocent men.
When I seek suffering and it turns me back onto myself, that is foolishness. When suffering emerges out of my actions for the sake of others, that is Christ.
God does not disdain our efforts to make the world a better place. But we break our deepest, most ancient promise when we disdain his. Beyond all temple ritual, it is God’s ordained sabbath of sharing that turns our efforts into gold.
Ordinary human realities are centripetal forces. They assert themselves and restore us to our sin-troubled but WELCOME condition as finite creatures under God’s providence.
At last.
I remember and recognize my body, my own particular all-too-finite composite of dust.
I have become exhausted and I can sleep. My eyes close and I fall into the deep basin of God’s peace. This is not death, exactly, but it’s close. This is the sleep that will wash my soul.
(Isaiah 38, John 10, Matthew 12)
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