The Sacred Echo


10/03/2010 - You Are Not Alone



Many of you know my son Christian and some of the challenges that we’ve faced this year after learning about his hearing loss. We began this journey with him last summer; one day my wife was trying to tell him something and, out of the blue, he responded with, “Mom, that’s not my hearing ear.” Obviously that came as quite a surprise to us - we needed to find out what was going on with his ear. After a battery of tests and getting to know a few of the specialists in the area probably a bit better than we would have liked, we learned that he had significant loss of hearing in his right ear that would need surgery to correct. After two surgeries this summer, we’re still awaiting his final test, which should come in the next week or two. But I’ll never forget his comment to Joy driving home from the first test where we confirmed that there was something going on with his ear: “See, Mom, I told you I can’t hear you!”

This morning we close out our series in dialog with the book The Sacred Echo. We’ve spent a number of weeks over the summer thinking through the ideas of prayer and the ways in which God tries to get our attention. But there is another question that we need to think through before we conclude this series. It’s been one that’s been in the back of my mind for some time, and I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that many of you have been thinking about it as well. What happens when we don’t hear God, when, no matter how we ask or how long we pray or how open we are to the Spirit, we simply do not hear anything? In short - what do we do with the silence of God?

I want to say at the outset that this has been one of the most difficult teachings that I’ve ever prepared. I’m comfortable with theology, I know something of ancient near eastern history, and know my way around ancient Greek. I can construct a theological argument that explains the silence of God and sits squarely with scripture. But the this is a question that actively resists that sort of discussion. In fact, there’s a deep tradition in scripture that takes another tack entirely when attempting to answer it, and I want to pull a few strands from that thread together for us this morning.

First, I want to reflect on an experience of Jacob’s that, by any measure, crosses over into the bizarre. So to begin this morning, let’s turn to Genesis 32, beginning in verse 22. To put this story into context, Jacob was the grandson of Abraham and the son of Isaac. Isaac had two sons, Jacob and his brother Esau, and the whole family was steeped in the tradition of the blessing and promises of God to Abraham, to make him into a great nation. As Isaac grew old and approached his death, he made plans to pass his blessing onto Esau, but Jacob deceived him and stole the blessing by disguising himself as Esau. Esau was furious and determined to kill Jacob, so Jacob fled to his uncle Laban in Harran, a city in the area that is now southeastern Turkey. Jacob remained with Laban for twenty years, until he began to see that Laban’s attitude towards him was beginning to sour, and God told Jacob to return to his family. There was only one problem - Esau. How would he be received? Jacob determined that he would send gifts to Esau, and separate his family and herds into smaller groups so that they had a better chance to escape in case Esau decided to attack. As we come to verse 22, only his immediate family is left with him, and they prepare to cross over the ford of the Jabbok:

That night Jacob got up and took his two wives, his two female servants and his eleven sons and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. After he had sent them across the stream, he sent over all his possessions. So Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him till daybreak. When the man saw that he could not overpower him, he touched the socket of Jacob's hip so that his hip was wrenched as he wrestled with the man. Then the man said, "Let me go, for it is daybreak."

But Jacob replied, "I will not let you go unless you bless me."

The man asked him, "What is your name?"

"Jacob," he answered.

Then the man said, "Your name will no longer be Jacob, but Israel, because you have struggled with God and with human beings and have overcome."

Jacob said, "Please tell me your name."

But he replied, "Why do you ask my name?" Then he blessed him there.

So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, "It is because I saw God face to face, and yet my life was spared."

The sun rose above him as he passed Peniel, and he was limping because of his hip.

If you’ve read this story before, or even if this is your first time hearing it, perhaps you’ve had some of the same reactions that I have to it: who is this dude? Where did he come from? Why is he wrestling with Jacob? Did Jacob get his blessing or not? In short - did I just read that Jacob wrestled with God in the flesh for a full night and the only things that he got out of it were a new name and a limp?

Normally, this is the part where I’d explain all of the weird customs and historical illusions and try to make this story make sense. But I’m not convinced this time that this story is easily resolved. I think it sits here in scripture like a discordant note in a blues song - purposefully out of place and intentionally jarring. We aren’t meant to walk away from this story nodding our heads, but rather scratching them.

Can anyone identify with Jacob in this story? Has anyone else ever been in a situation where God has felt like an adversary? Have you ever experienced the God that tackles you in the dark and wrestles with you in silence, with no explanation of what He’s doing there or why you’ve been so graciously selected for this kind of attention?

I’m not saying, of course, that God is hostile towards us, or that he in some sense wants to cause us harm or inflict pain. The scriptures are clear that God is a loving God who wants all people to enter into a relationship with Him. But the scriptures are also clear that he sometimes has a funny way of going about it. We experience this side of God when we encounter unexpected an unexplained tragedy or when a prayer that we’ve prayed diligently goes unanswered or when we need and seek guidance on a situation in our lives but hear nothing.

I’ve experienced this side of God probably more than I’d care to admit in my life. Most recently, some of you may remember the miscarriage that my wife and I suffered through in 2008. As painful as that event was, and in some sense continues to be, I think what has been the hardest for me to understand was the deafening silence that I heard from God about the situation. No voice of comfort, no sense of peace, no experience of the presence of the Spirit to guide me through. The heavens were like glass, and my prayers seemed to be bouncing off.

I think that many of us no doubt can tell similar stories. St. John of the Cross calls the experience the Dark Night of the Soul. We see it in scripture in the person of Job, taken by surprise in testing that he did not expect and did not want. We see it in the person of Jeremiah, told that God was giving him an impossible assignment to prophesy to a people who would not listen, no matter what he would do. We see it in the story of Hosea, commanded to marry a woman who would not be faithful to him in the same way that Israel had been unfaithful to God.

Margaret Feinberg talks about this experience in The Sacred Echo. One of the ways that we deal with this experience, according to her, is by drawing lines around our experience with God. This can take different forms - perhaps we stop praying entirely, or perhaps we pray for others and not for ourselves, or maybe we stop being able to trust and so don’t ask for anything at all. In whatever way it manifests, these responses to the experience of God as adversary can deeply damage our faith - and I say this as one who has wrestled long and hard with God.

I wish I had an answer to the questions - questions about my specific wounds, or the larger questions about why God allows His children to experience this kind of deep hurt and disappointment or why He seems silent when we need to hear from him the most. I’m here to tell you this morning that I don’t. Just as God wrestled in silence with Jacob and, at the end of the encounter, refuses to give His name, the scriptures are likewise silent about why God chooses to encounter His children in this way. Nobody in scripture is as closely identified with suffering as Job - in fact, his name to this day remains a way to speak about unbearable suffering. Job experiences the loss of all of his possessions, the death of his children, and the debilitating effects of illness, and is left, by the end of chapter 2, a broken man. His friends come and sit with him in total silence for seven days because they see how badly he is suffering. At the end of chapter 42 - that’s another 40 chapters of debate, discussion, accusation, soul-searching, and an encounter with God Himself - Job still doesn’t know why he has experienced the things that he’s experienced, even though God blesses him and restores to him all of what was taken away.

I don’t quite know what to do with that. It’s a dissonant chord in an otherwise beautiful melody. And it appears to be purposeful, if we believe that scripture is inspired by God. Think about that for a moment - the scriptures that we believe to be in some sense authored by God are intentional about leaving this question unanswered. It’s not just our personal experiences - it’s written into the foundational documents of our faith! So are we left to wonder, to come up with some way of dealing with this struggle on our own? What are we to do with this struggle?

I can tell you this - wrestling with God about tragedy in my own life has caused me to begin to think about suffering in a different way. I don’t believe that God wants to leave us with unhealed wounds and boundaries drawn around our relationship with Him. And I do think that scripture itself suggests a different way that we can begin to think about these experiences. At the very heart of the Christian faith is the belief that Jesus Christ is the incarnate son of God the Father - in other words, God Himself made flesh and bone. We believe that in the person of Jesus, God became fully human while also remaining fully God (as though we haven’t wrestled enough for one day!). And if you’ve been a part of the telling of the story of Mark that we’ve walked through as a community, you know that suffering is a significant part of the story of Jesus. Jesus experienced loss, betrayal, pain, physical suffering, and even death. And at a key moment on the Cross, Jesus also experiences the agony of a silent God, when we hear him cry in Mark 15, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

Stop and think about that for a moment. It’s a startling, maybe even shocking, passage. The one who Christians would later call “true God of true God” finds himself cut off from the communion with the Father that he’s known for all of eternity. What does this mean? How is it even possible? Theologians have wrestled with those questions for as long as we’ve had the story to tell. But at least one thing is for sure - God isn’t a being who is stuck up in heaven passively watching what happens on the Earth. He has entered into the creation, not just as creator, but also as a man, a human being who is described as knowing and feeling all of what we as humans experience. We do not worship a God who is so alien that he doesn’t understand what we are going through right now. We worship a God who has experienced it all Himself - a suffering God whose love for us took Him to death and beyond.

As we begin to wrap up this morning, I want us to think about the encouragement that Feinberg has for us in The Sacred Echo. We are reminded in her book that we are not alone. And that’s such a crucial encouragement for us when we are experiencing these periods in our lives. It’s easy to feel as though our world is collapsing in on itself and we have to face it by ourselves. But - and this is the part where I put on my theology hat, because sometimes that’s what keeps our experiences from overwhelming our faith - we need to trust that, although God may seem silent or distant or absent or even against us, His love never ceases. We can say with the author of Lamentations:

Yet this I call to mind
and therefore I have hope:
Because of the LORD's great love we are not consumed,
for his compassions never fail.
They are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.

In the middle of this great poetic work about the exile of the people of Judah, the author inserts a reminder that we can share, and trust in faith that God is present, even when he feels so very distant.

But we can be encouraged also and know that we are not alone in our experience. As we’ve read this morning, scripture is rich with the stories of those who have known what it is like to experience unanswered prayer or even the absence of God. This is so important, because I think it’s common to feel guilt and pain over the questions that we have. Scripture affirms those questions, placing them firmly within the canon and giving them a place within the larger story. When we walk through these times in our lives, we walk in the company of great men and women of God, including Jacob, Sarah, David, Jeremiah, Paul, and of course many others that I could name. Asking these questions is not just normal - it’s a part of the Christian tradition.

And let’s not forget that we are together a part of a great community of believers right here in Valley View. We can be of great help and support to one another by reaching out in prayer, over coffee or dinner, with a hug or handshake, or by coming alongside one another in a tangible way such as through Helping Hands. If you are in a place today where you feel alone, be encouraged - I think that you can look around and see a community of people who, like Jacob, have wrestled with God and whose walk was changed as a result.