Did you see the story about 13-year-old Lane Goodwin on
Facebook perhaps, or in Friday’s paper? The Courier-Journal headline read,
“Youngster who inspired ‘Worldwide Miracle’ dies.” Lane had a rare form of childhood
cancer, and like many people do, his parents had created a Facebook page to
keep friends and relatives updated on his daily struggle to beat the disease.
One picture that they posted showed Lane, a fragile, thin boy with beautiful
blonde hair and trusting eyes, smiling and giving a “thumbs up” sign of
confidence and hope, even as the cancer was filling his body. A stranger was
moved by the picture to create a “Thumbs Up for Lane” Facebook page that soon
went viral on the Internet, as people all over the world connected with the
little boy’s courageous gesture and sent pictures of themselves responding with
their own “thumbs up” sign. Movie stars, sports figures, and even an entire
stadium at a Western Kentucky University football game responded in a huge
outpouring of solidarity and hope. When Lane realized the wide scope of the
response and the attention that his photo was bringing to raising money to
fight childhood cancers, the young teen, who knew that he would soon die, told
his parents, “This is what’s going to find a cure … This is what we have always
prayed for … Childhood cancer is all going to go away.”[1]
Through Lane’s
courage in the face of great physical suffering and his loving concern for
others who suffer from disease, God issued a Facebook call to all of us, as he
does to Job, to “gird up our loins like a man”—to see and to fight for new divine
possibilities where none seem to exist. Lane’s picture put a new face on
sickness and death, and that new face spread across the globe, lighting up
other faces with hope and awareness, just like strings of newly lit Christmas
lights that spread out from tree to tree and building to building, until the
night sky sparkles.
As it does all
of us, suffering has made Job turn inward and has blinded him to the joy and
wonder of life. He longs to return to the darkness of his mother’s womb or to
the emptiness of death. He has lost all hope, begging God to let him go, “never
to return, to the land of gloom and deep darkness, the land of gloom and
chaos.” (Job 10:21-22) In the section of the story that we read today, God finally
responds to his suffering servant Job, descending upon him with awesome,
terrifying power and bombarding him with a deafening series of rhetorical
questions. While it might seem from the verses in our lectionary text that
God’s booming voice is bent merely on grinding poor Job down into dust, a
careful reading of the whole chapter shows that God is instead reframing the
way that Job sees the world. God is taking “thumbs up” pictures of the
foundations of the earth, the depths of the sea, the lights of the heavens, the
depths of the netherworld, the tumult of the weather, and the splendor of the
animal kingdom, and God is bombarding Job’s inner “inbox” until it bursts open with
the powerful possibilities poured into Creation through God’s ever-generative
abundance.
The power of
the snapshots that God assembles to create this panoramic vision of the
splendor and vastness of life[2]
in chapter 38 is remarkable, but I believe that our lectionary leaves out the
most striking example of what I am talking about here. In verse 25, God asks
Job: “Who has cut a channel for the torrents of rain, and a way for the
thunderbolt, to bring rain on a land where no one lives, on the desert, which
is empty of human life, to satisfy the waste and desolate land, and to make the
ground put forth grass?” As Samuel Balentine explains, God irrigates and brings
to life the desolate wasteland with a surge of divine water, even though no one
lives there to use the gift.[3]
Irrigating an empty desert certainly seems to us to be a waste of time and
energy! Yet even the wilderness sends its thumbs up picture to Job, proclaiming
the potential for life that our prodigal God can sustain there. For if God
chooses to sustain life in the desert, can God not also sustain life in the
barrenness of human suffering?
God’s powerful
affirmation of life in the face of our affirmation of death is a wake-up call
for all of us human beings, not just for those of us who suffer from pain or
disease. As a matter of fact, I heard Lane’s story and God’s answer to Job as a
striking call to us this week as we begin to talk about Stewardship. The cares,
concerns, and humdrum realities of our lives often reduce the expanse of our
vision almost as much as extreme suffering does. When we are focused in on
controlling our own problems, small or great, it is so easy to forget the
abundant grace that our Creator pours out upon us every day. As I learn more
about serving as the rector of a parish, I have become aware that my desire for
competence and success, my drive for us to “do things right,” to plan and to
strategize and to make progress—all those things can act as blinders, blinders
to God’s magnificently open and panoramic vision, blinders that limit joy and
love, blinders that don’t let me see that water is flowing in the wilderness. What
is it that keeps your own vision narrow? Is it the physical pain of illness or
age? Is it depression or spiritual desolation? Is it a certain rigid understanding
of what church is supposed to be? Is it a goal that you want St. Thomas to
pursue, something that you think just has
to be done before you can fully participate in and give yourself to the life of
the parish?
Listen to the
words attributed to Archbishop Oscar Romero, the martyred Salvadorean priest. They
speak to us like God from the whirlwind:
“The kingdom is not only beyond our effort
It
is even beyond our vision.
We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction
Of the magnificent enterprise that is God’s work…
No statement says all that could be said.
No prayer fully expresses our faith …
No program accomplishes the church’s mission.
No set of goals and objectives includes everything…
We plant the seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted,
Knowing that they hold future promise…
We may never see the end results…
We are workers, not master builders …
We are prophets of a future not our own.”[4]
Before we fill
out our pledge cards, before we hunch over our calendars to figure out how much
time we have to give to God in 2013, before we hunker down over our checkbooks to
figure out how much money we might have left over at the end of each month to
give to God’s work at St. Thomas, let’s pray for the gracious abundance of Almighty
God to knock us out of darkness into light. Joining the miracle of Creation, the
miracle that brings water to an uninhabited desert and hope to the death of a 13-year-old
boy, may every one of us gird up our loins like a warrior, standing strong against
any dark smallness that would limit God’s free action in this place. Look up at
the infinity of stars; squeeze the cool, loose soil from which we come and in which
we will someday rest; admire the strong wings of the birds and the sleek coats of
the deer; let the powerful wind sweep your soul clean. Only then let us pick up
our pens and make our pledges a “thumbs up” to the needs of the world around us,
a vehicle for divine possibility, a chance for God’s love to “go viral.”
[1]
Emily Hagedorn, “Youngster who inspired ‘Worldwide Miracle’ dies,” Courier Journal, Friday, October 19,
2012.
[2]
Robert Alter, “Voice from the Whirlwind:
God Answers Job in a Panoramic Vision,”
http://www.jhom.com/topics/topics/voice/job.htm.
[3]
Samuel Balentine, Job (Smyth and Helwys),
638.
[4]
Cited in Michael Jinkins’ blog, “Thinking Out Loud,” October 17, 2012.
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