Resurrection Letter No.22: Stop Looking for Explanations

 

Dear Good Shepherd and friends,

Let me begin with a statement that I've thought for years now, but am always a bit timid to confess. I just don't want to step on toes. But, here it is: too often our theologies and our ideas of God are too neat and too comfortable. 

Our natural human desire is for order and structure in life. We want life to make sense. We want our existence and this world to operate according to understandable and predictable laws. We want some degree of certainty that we are not at the mercy of randomness.

Yet, at the same time, if we believe modern science, it tells us that our world and our existence is the result of a random occurrence. Things happened to shuffle together in just the right ways to result in the possibility of our existence. And it seems that most of our lives play out the ongoing trajectory of randomness.

Yet, and ironically, we are always trying to provide some order and predictability to what we've deemed is random. We apply scientific study to define laws of existence, to explain and predict the random world around us. We so badly want things to make sense that we think we can make sense of our random, unexplainable existence through human minds that are the product of a cosmic explosion and random selection. If we cannot, we keep trying out hypotheses and theories until something fits or makes us feel good enough. And if it doesn't, we complain. 

Consider the Derecho this past summer. Meteorologists can predict hurricanes and violent storms. Yet this caught everyone off-guard. Our scientific models weren't good enough. We couldn't make sense of it.

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Perhaps the true reality is that we can't make sense of things as we'd like. What if our attempts at clarity ultimately fail? Do we actually think we can make sense of an existence that has been shown scientifically and though experience to be random? 

Even our confession that we are not the result of random atoms and cells coming together, but created with intention by a loving God, from our human standpoint our lives are still at the mercy of a random, unpredictable world. Our faith and hope in God does not always solve the problem.

Car accidents. Cancer. COVID. Even our own motives and emotions (or those of a teen-aged youth) are unpredictable to ourselves.

So, what if there is no logical explanation? What if even our science cannot give an answer to the randomness of our lives? What if our science is too neat and simple in its presumption to explain our existence? What if even our best attempts to explain how our world works cannot overcome the bare reality that life is unordered, unstructured, and unexplainable? 

And what if our overworked schedules and lives packed full of tasks and routines is only a way of masking and avoiding the raw reality of the nature of human existence?

And what if this all carries over into our ideas and expectations of God? What if our ideas and expectations of God are similarly too neat and simple? 

And what if people are giving up on God and faith because they've been given a version of God and faith that doesn't stand up under the weight of a world that is unordered and unexplainable? What if appealing to over-simplistic ideas of a "good" and "loving" and "all-knowing" God just don't hold water? 

Does this make you uncomfortable? Maybe it makes us uncomfortable because we have not sufficiently allowed for complexity. 

Our need for "justice" and order demands a certain idea of God who does not allow injustice. Maybe our human ideals of "justice" are too simple. Or maybe equally too simple are our ideas of a loving God that demand there to be a neat ending to our troubles, that it will all work out and we'll feel "loved" at the end of the day. 

But maybe the "all-powerful" and "all loving" idea of God who makes sense of disorder is just a figment of modern religious imagination. Maybe the real God, not the God we want or the God we make up in our minds, but the real God of the stories in Scripture, is more complex than this and we've just ignored it because we don't like it.

Maybe the problem is not that we ask questions and expect an answer. 

Maye the problem is not that we struggle with God and question God. Maybe God wants this of us. 

Maybe the problem is that we ask the wrong questions and we are trapped in our expectations of order and clarity. And maybe our disillusionment with "god" is because we've been mad at an idea of God, not the God who truly is.

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Maybe instead of certainty and order and explanations we should be seeking communion. 

I don't mean "communion" as in the Lord's Supper ritual with bread and wine that Christian churches celebrate on occasional Sundays. (Though this is, in fact, a very profound practice that points to the complexity and mystery of God.)

"Communion" refers to an intimate sharing, to a unity of life, body, and spirit through shared reality. When I speak of "communion," I mean finding a depth of connection with the realities of life that touches the Spirit of God. By communion I mean a connection with the Spirit of God through the randomness of life that does not depend on clarity and answers and order. 

By communion, I mean a richness of life that does not look for an escape from unpredictability, easy answers to chaos, or avoidance of disorder that upsets our schedules. Communion sits with the uncertainty and unclarity looking to meet God more deeply in it, rather than looking for God on the other side.

What if we abandon certainty and clarity and instead strive for communion -- with one another, with pain, suffering, uncertainty, and death? What if in striving for communion, rather than explanations, we find who we are and who God is? Instead of stability and making "sense" of things, the good life is about the quest for communion with the Spirit of God more deeply.

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This, I see, is where the stories of Scripture point all along. This is also the point where the Christian religion our culture has a tendency to cultivate is a faux faith, a human creation, rather than the way of life thing that brings true depth of meaning. It's a Disney-faith, not a life of meaning. 

In Matthew 25, Jesus said that those who run headlong to serve the brokenness and broken lives of this chaotic world are the ones who encounter Jesus. "Whatever you did to the least of these, you did to me..." 

Jesus did not say to find explanations for sickness, injustice, and disorder. He didn't say that the "blessed" ones were the ones who figured out how to overcome brokenness. The "blessed" ones are the ones who go, like firefighters to a fire, to embrace communion with the unreasonableness and struggle of life, and there find the face of God. 

This is, after all, at the heart of what Jesus was about. He showed us a God who defied our simple ideas of "good" and "love." Not because he is not good and loving. But the good and loving God who is Jesus does not simplify or explain away the human experience of disorder and randomness. He shows us a God who doesn't simplify complexity or give an easy escape. He shows us a God who, by choice, dwelled in the shadows of the unexplainable and "unfair" reality of human life. 

And it is in communion with others amid the complex, unexplainable reality of life that we find God. And it is this communion that brings us life.

In defiant hope,

Pastor Kyle