The Roots of Suffering

This week is Holy Week, the week leading up to Easter. I'll be posting more often as I process thoughts on suffering.

The story of humanity from the Bible claims that the world was created without sin allowing a perfect, direct relationship with God. But this relationship was not coercive, God did not demand love and affection from his image-bearers. Instead a tree was planted in the middle of this paradise with a prohibition against eating from it. This was the relationship escape valve. The promise was that if they wanted out from the relationship they could have it, and in obtaining their out they would die. But of course, the story goes that they didn't die immediately; they didn't experience a physical death immediately.

Instead the first thing they experienced was shame, shame that caused them to sew leaves to cover themselves with (Genesis 3:7). And when they next encountered God, they were afraid because of their shame (Genesis 3:10).

From their choices, our first parents Adam and Eve introduced sin into the world and all the rest of creation was touched by the stink of death and suffering.

Last week, I reflected on the idea that suffering is less about the (in)justice of God and more about the destructive nature of sin. In this post, I want to present three areas that have been distorted by those first sins that results in our personal and collective suffering.

• Human choice
• Creation
• Powers and Principalities  

(Excerpts are from Reynoso's essay "Formed through suffering" in The Kingdom Life)

Human Choice
When we choose our own way over God's way, we can inflict "intentional and malicious harm...[that] causes a world of grief, pain and injustice."

But we can also make choices out of "ignorance, neglect and indifference" which "passively, but effectively hurt individuals and people groups, sometimes perpetuating unjust systems on entire nations of people."

And we also have to live with the limitations of our humaness. "Sometimes we cannot prevent tragedy simply because our strength and knowledge are not sufficient or we are not in the right place at the right time." It only took a moment of my distracted crazy for my son to fall off his changing table and break his leg.

Creation
I don't know about your influences, but a lot of arguments and advertisements I come across claim something is good because it is/was natural. But in the light of very natural disasters like tsunamis or very natural critters like bed bugs or very natural diseases like malaria or very natural biological processes like cancer and aging, how good is nature?

"All creation suffers hurt, damage, erosion, death and decay (see Romans 8:20-22) because God linked nature to the consequences of Adam and Eve's sin...God allowed sin to distort His creation and cause suffering...Meanwhile until its liberation the natural world suffers pain and humans suffer with it through the wildness of nature..."

Turns out nature is bent by sin too. It's not that there is nothing good in nature--it is product of a good God's creativity--but like humans, it has been warped by sin and is capable of inflicting great suffering.*

So while "God may use nature to carry out His plans...he is not the source of damage and death in this world." Natural disasters are so beyond our control we call them "acts of God", and in doing so we fail to grasp how thoroughly sin has warped even nature.

Powers and Principalities
These words carry a lot of Christian "voodoo" in them, but Paul seems to be describing "human and spiritual structures" which includes both the sense of evil spiritual forces as well as human institutions found in our culture, economics, and politics.

The latter "come under the influence of damaged and corrupt world systems, insatiable desires of the flesh (i.e., greed), and Satan, who desires to enslave the hearts and souls of men and women. The result is suffering beyond measure. Powers in the form of war, ethnic cleansing, slavery, systemic prejudice, and unjust dominance of the strong over the weak...break spirits and bodies by the weight of suffering they impose."

On Palm Sunday, we celebrated the triumphant entry of Jesus into Jerusalem even while on the back of a common donkey. On Easter Sunday, we celebrate the risen Jesus having defeated death. But in these days in between, we travel with Jesus in the consequences of sin. Before resurrection there is the cross, and Jesus hung on the cross as the definitive act of bringing restoration to a broken world. His death was costly in that it paid off an enormous debt, righting countless wrongs. To understand the glory of a risen King, we have to be willing to stare into the darkness. To live in grace, we must understand how wholly broken we are individually, corporately, and in the world at large.

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*This is why comparing the love of God to a hurricane may be inapt.

Preparing for Lent

After a few years of celebrating Advent and Lent, I am finding them a nice "spiritual corrective". If in Advent, I am taught a particular lesson, I have a few months between Christmas and Lent to apply that to life, and then Lent starts and I get to reexamine my apprenticeship with Jesus and then a bit more than half a year to practice before another Advent and another season of reflection. Anyways, Lent this year is rather late and starts tomorrow, March 5th.

Lent is frequently associated with "giving up" something of removing something such as meat from the diet, or sweets, or tv, or social media. People have lots of reactions to this. One useful voice in the commentary is this talk on asceticism by Dallas Willard. The language is a bit heady, but it's worth the work to get through.

Lent is typically conceived of as the 46 day period between Ash Wednesday and the Saturday before Easter. A number of people have recommended using the time for focused reading in the Bible. Here are a few plans I found.

Small: The Gospels
Medium: The New Testament
Large: The whole Bible

For something different: Readings from the Church Fathers
EDIT: The above link lists a website for the readings that is incorrect. It should be http://www.churchyear.net/lentfatherscomplete.pdf


God bless you as we journey toward Easter.

Happy Easter!!

Our family is having our second child in the next bit, so I'll be on bloggy hiatus. I didn't, however, want to miss the opportunity to wish people a HAPPY EASTER!! He is risen!!

Stations of the cross

A guest blogger on internetmonk.com is posting daily meditations for Stations of the cross. I have found them very helpful in preparing to celebrate Easter on Sunday. Unfortunately, I'm not sure how to link to just the Stations of the Cross meditations, but it's worth it to scroll down the site (maybe subscribe to it in your feedreader) to get to them.

Fasting this Lent

Lent is about to draw to an end. It's the 5th week and Palm Sunday is coming up.

This year I gave up "meat" except for the Sunday feast days, "meat" in the Catholic sense where fish isn't meat. Given that I rarely eat meat except for at dinner, and I'm Chinese, and I like fish, this has not been nearly as burdensome, as say, the first time I gave up news and politics. When I have fasted from food, there has been visceral craving, emptiness, and a need for immediate comfort. I have not experienced that at all.

Instead, this year, since not eating meat is different but not wholly painful, the experience has been very different. What I've found is that I just generally long for Easter to arrive. There's a bit of a quickening in my chest, a little bit of tightness, low level anticipation. Part of me just wants to get back to my usual routine, be able to cook more meals that both my husband and I can eat, not worry about meeting up with other people and so on. That part says, "Let Easter come for my convenience and food reasons." That doesn't feel that holy at all. But part of me wants to embrace all the flavors that are out there, to savor steak the way I savored it a couple weeks ago on a Sunday feast day, to not take such moments for granted. That part says, "Let Easter come so we can celebrate Jesus and the new dawning he brought, the freedom, the grace, the wide open wonder." That feels expansively glorious.

Raised in the American Evangelical culture, Easter can feel very plastic in a wash of limp pastels. But the celebration of the resurrection should be the biggest event of every year marking the biggest event in human history. This is where divinity intersected humanity and love triumphed over death in the gory, most real, most definitely not-a-Hollywood-romance-or-Mel-Gibson-Passion-of-Christ way. I have to admit that Easter still does not outrank Christmas or March Madness on my anxiously-gripping-my-seat meter. But with every year, with every observation of the Lenten season, I find myself ever more drawn into the drama of Holy Week and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Come, Lord Jesus, Come.

Why I'm observing Lent

Lenten musing 1

I come from a Protestant background that is not without tradition in the sense that the two churches I attended as a child had their own way of doing things and their own rhythms, but they were never articulated as such. I don't know that I had met anyone who observed any part of Lent until I went to college, and at that point I was not a fan of the "organized" part of "organized religion". So as far as I could tell, Lent was a religious ritual that was nice to see in a highly secular setting, but not for me.

So why am I observing Lent now?

A couple books have been really influential in moving me toward the liturgical church calendar. The first was Girl Meets God in which Lauren Winner wrote about her conversion experience from observant Judaism to Christianity. There's a bit in her book where I think she was talking about joining a Christian community around the world that was reading the same passages and prayers according to the Book of Common Prayer, the Anglican prayer book. Given that the local church dropped vastly in my esteem in college, the idea of wanting to join in a worldwide body of Christ was really new yet appealing. In the intervening years between college and reading that book, I had spent time in the former Soviet Union and I realized that my time in that country would come and go, but the local church body I participated in would continue (hopefully) beyond my stay. Church practices that keep me connected to believers around the world pulls me out of my small individualistic perspective and I think that is healthy. So part of why I am observing Lent is to join with brothers and sisters around the world in doing so.

The second influential book was Marva Dawn's Keeping the Sabbath Wholly. This book talks about the blessing of the Sabbath that God gave the Jews. But the one message that really stuck with me is how the Sabbath provides a rhythm of celebration and work. I am one of the least sentimental people I know, so it takes real effort for me to connect with what I consider non-pragmatic things. So I come to an appreciation of holidays and rituals really late in life--like in the past 5 years. What I have come to appreciate does end up having a pragmatic slant, but that's just me. What I've been realizing is that every day can't be work and "progress". In fact, to do good work regularly, we need rest; to enjoy the day to day and the ordinary in life, we need the exceptional and extra-ordinary. Holidays and holydays help us out by refocusing us and highlighting important things that we may otherwise lose in the everyday.

Easter has been rising in importance to me as a believer, and Lent as a precursor helps me experience Easter as a season. In the meditative subtraction of Lent, the celebratory glory of Easter stands out more. And for a pragmatic curmudgeon, that's a pretty big deal.