In the dead of night, troops stormed into a small town in Judea and with clinical precision and evil intent, slaughtered children.  When it was all over, there was nothing but the wailing of mothers and fathers and siblings stunned by the speed and sheer brutality of this murderous raid. 

Perhaps you’re thinking I’m talking about recent history, but I’m not.  The scene I described happened more than 2,000 years ago in Bethlehem, just after the birth of a Jewish baby named Jesus.  

The Gospel of Matthew tells us this often glossed-over detail of the Nativity.  It is a part of the Christmas story that doesn’t make it into sweet Christmas pageants.  There are no singing angels, or lowly shepherds, or exotic kings from the East. There was only the sickening stench of death. It’s not hard to understand why this is not the stuff of Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols.   

No, for us, Christmas is all about happy things.  Jolly Santas.  Family gatherings.  Singing Silent Night in a church lit by candlelight.  We thrill to the triumphant strains of Joy to the World. 

And yet from the first, death cast its shadow over Jesus. His very existence threatened the religious and secular leaders of the day. Like his ancestors in Egypt who painted their doorposts as a sign, he was spared death that night.  Of course, death would come to him, but not then.  Not yet. 

This is how Matthew describes it in Chapter 2 of his gospel:

“When Herod realized that he had been outwitted by the Magi, he was furious, and he gave orders to kill all the boys in Bethlehem and its vicinity who were two years old and under, in accordance with the time he had learned from the Magi. Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:

 

“A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

This has become known as the Slaughter of the Innocents, and I have been thinking a lot about it lately. Not far from where it first took place, today hundreds of Rachels weep for their children because they are no more.

Matthew is the only gospel writer who included this story of death intruding on the joy of birth. I’m glad he did. This story of mass murder tugs at our sleeves and says, “Pay attention. Look away for a moment from the beautiful lights and serene creches and see humanity’s darkest impulses. Look at people’s capacity for every kind of depravity.  This is why we need saving.”  This story kicks over the rock and reveals that just beneath the surface of “civilization” is swarming, unimaginable evil. 

This story is an example that faith shows us the world as it really is.   Believers are often mocked as silly Pollyannas who trade the “real world” for pious, pie-in-the-sky fantasies of angels and clouds and “everything happens for a reason.” (And to be fair, some Christians do sound like that).  But what I see when I study Scripture and read great theologians and even talk to “ordinary” believers is the opposite. They see the world for what it is:  beautiful and terrible, full of grace and venom, reflecting the image of God and of The Enemy.  And yet, in recognizing the fallen state of our world, there is never resignation. There is still an impulse to bring more beauty, more justice, more reconciliation to the world, even as we acknowledge we will never succeed completely. 

Advent is the time when Christians wait for a savior because they know they need one.  

Jesus was born into a world where darkness was never far from him. That shadow followed him all his days on earth, and at the last, it seemed to have the final word.  Lately, it still seems that way, when the airways and Internet are full of horror and death, death, death.  In our own lives, shadows of illness, loss, and rancor threaten to overwhelm .  

But that shadow did not — it does not —block out the light of His life.  Jesus escaped death that day as an infant.  And He escaped it again as an adult when the grave could not hold him. 

“In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” 

                                                                                 John 1:5 

This Advent I need to hang on to that in a way I never have before. I’m resolving to “cast off the works of darkness and put on the armor of light .”(Romans 13:12)   How about you?

Photo: National Park Service

Manassas. Antietam. Gettysburg. These Civil War battlefields are branded into our nation’s collective memory. Museums at each of these places have preserved artifacts and original sources so that we can hear the “voices” of those who fought here, through letters home.  We can hear the politicians’ proclamations, the newspapers’ screaming headline.  We can “hear” the pain in a letter from anguished mothers, sweethearts, and brothers. 

And then there are the silent witnesses.  Standing next to corn fields, peach orchards, and grasslands where the battles were joined are trees.  They’re called Witness Trees because they were there when the battles raged.  They saw it all. The barbarism. The bravery.  The fear, the kindness. And the death, so much death.  They stand there today, 150 years later, bearing silent witness.  

Many of them were themselves victims of the carnage.  Look closely and you can see faint pock marks on the bark where bullets grazed.  Look again and see where the cannon ball lodged.  Not obvious is the shock of looking to the fertile ground for nourishment and instead of finding life-giving water, only blood-soaked soil. 

Although many of these Witness Trees are still standing, not all have flourished. Some are just scarred husks giving no hint of their former life.  Limb-less with trunks reaching toward the sky at unnatural angles, like a bone hastily and improperly set by an overwhelmed field medic.

Yet some live on, their beauty belying the wounds within.  Some have literally absorbed the cannonballs into their trunks, treating them as a mere inconvenience to be circumvented as they went on with their lives.  Some continued undaunted by trauma witnessed and experienced, and on instinct or out of sheer stubbornness, just continued to form new cells, new branches, new leaves.  

It is hard to imagine, when the world around you reeks of death and shocks you with unimaginable depravity, that you will ever see beauty again.  I have felt that way lately.  When your own wound is fresh and you fear for your own survival, flourishing seems impossible.  Yet, standing on the sacred ground of Manassas or Antietam or Gettysberg, looking at their Witness Trees is to believe that life can come after death.  It is to believe that grievous wounds can heal.  It is to believe in miracles.  

The trees did not heal themselves, and neither do we. God took those beautiful rolling hills defiled by suffering and death, and He sanctified them with new life.  He did the same for the world after the flood.  He did it for the exiles returning to Jerusalem from Babylon. And He did it for us, when the horror of Calvary gave way to the triumph of the empty tomb.  

And He did the same for me the other day.  In recent posts I have talked about struggling to feel God’s presence.  And this week in worship, I felt joy.  It appeared suddenly and certainly not as a result of any effort on my part to manufacture it.  It just sidled up next to me, like it had never been gone.  That first small green leaf appearing when you wondered if there was any life left in you. God is in the business of grace and miracles.

“The hand of the Lord was upon me, and he brought me out in the Spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of the valley; it was full of bones.  And he led me around among them, and behold, there were very many on the surface of the valley, and behold they were very dry.  And he said to me, ‘Son of man, can these bones live?” And I answered, “O Lord, God, you know.” 

(Ezekiel 37: 1-3)

 

We ask in hope, but we receive in submission.

Man, was I proud of that sentence.  That happens sometimes with writing.  A sentence or a phrase appears, as if of its own power, and I say, “Wow, that’s good.”  

That sentence appeared in a post in which I explored the tension between asking God for something in prayer and being satisfied instead with His presence and His peace.  I had been praying for the return of something precious that I lost when I found my prayer had morphed into a prayer for God’s comfort in my grief, which he graciously provided.   

Then there was the time when loss overwhelmed me and God stilled my frantic thoughts with the image of his arms around me, comforting and strong.  

Or the time when I was stranded in a lodge in Yosemite, wracked with pain and waiting for daylight so we could make our way down the steep, dark, winding roads to the hospital.  My husband reading Psalms aloud got me through that night, those ancient words of lament crying out on my behalf, ultimately reassuring me of God’s faithfulness.    

And God’s presence and comfort make all those “unanswered” prayers bearable, don’t they? 

People of faith have a more expansive view of healing and provision which includes emotional, spiritual, and relational restoration.  Why?  Because the Bible tells us so: 

• “It is the Lord who goes before you.  He will be with you, he will not leave you or forsake you.” (Deut. 31: 8)

• “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34: 18)

• “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” (John 18)

But …  But what if we get neither the healing nor the comfort? God’s sovereignty tells me that he is not obligated to do one or the other, certainly not in my timing.  

What if we ask in hope, prepare to receive in submission, and get …… Silence? 

An Unresolved Chord 

I have been living with this question for quite a while. I have been through several months of the worst physical pain I have ever experienced.  Worst in terms of its severity, yes.  But worst in its randomness and its fierce resistance to any form of relief.  Pain that had me moaning and howling like a wounded animal, which I guess I was. Pain that had me begging for someone or something to help me endure it.

The pain was not just physical, because no help came.   “Heal me or help me” was my prayer through those long nights.  I waited for God to do what He had done so many times before —Give me strength to bear up.   Make His presence real to me.  Bring to mind His reassuring words of comfort and fidelity. 

I heard words all right, but they were not His.  I heard whispers of the one who saw an opportunity to pick off a wounded member of the herd.  

 “God isn’t helping you.  Why are you even asking?” 

“So much for ‘When you pass through the waters, I will be with you…’” 

“God says he is faithful, that He will never leave you, but where is He?”

I wondered what it would be like if I took the advice of Job’s wife and “cursed God and died.”  Yes, I was that vulnerable, that exhausted, that disillusioned, that sad.  But if I did that, I figured I’d still be in pain, but without any hope of healing or comfort.  No thank you.   I continued speaking into the void.  

In music, there are unresolved chords and I was living in one. An unresolved chord just sounds wrong to our ears that are so used to harmony.  They are used to convey tension and discord.  In most conventional music, the chord ultimately “resolves” — returns to harmony — and we experience relief and satisfaction that order and beauty have been restored. 

In scripture, the Psalms do this, too.  Of the 150 Psalms in scripture, 70 of them are considered laments — people crying out to God in pain, distress, confusion, even disappointment with God.  It amazes me that these holy howls are scripture, that God not only allows us to confront Him, but honors our pain enough to consider them his Holy Word.   Of those 70 laments, all but two end the same way: in praise of God’s faithfulness, in thanksgiving for His provision, in confidence of His goodness. The most famous of these is Psalm 22, which Jesus quotes from the cross: 

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are yo so far from saving me, from the words of my groaning?”

But even this cry in extremis “resolves” : 

“You who fear the Lord praise him!  All you offspring of Jacob, glorify him and stand in awe of him.”

But there are two Psalms that do not end in an exhale of praise and hope.  Psalms 39 and 88 are two “unresolved chords” in Scripture, two that leave us in tension, in the unpleasant and uncomfortable dissonance of waiting for the praise that does not come.  There is no comfort here, at least not yet.  

Perhaps when you hear my story you are as uneasy as I am.  Perhaps you are waiting for the “But then I heard God, but then I felt God, but then I saw God’s hand.”  You are probably listening for it like the satisfying sound of a chord resolving dissonance, moving from the cringeworthy screech of fingernails on a chalkboard to satisfying, soothing harmony.  

I am waiting for that, too.

It is the most beautiful thing I own. 

It is a diamond and sapphire ring that belonged to my mother. She designed it herself when she was all of 15 years old, taking the gems from a necklace that belonged to her grandmother.  When I was little, I used to love to try it on, watch it sparkle, and listen to the story of how it came to be.  It was her prized possession, and after she died, it became mine. When I was a young single woman, people told me it looked too much like an engagement ring, and would scare off potential suitors. I didn’t care.  I wore it every day, just as she did, until I got married, when I ran out of ring fingers.  

I still keep it close at hand and wear it occasionally.  I wear it when the deep blue sapphires compliment my outfit.  I wear it when I just want to feel her near.  Like the day when I thought I’d “bring Mom to church with me” by wearing her ring. 

Only it wasn’t in my jewelry box.  It wasn’t in my jewelry drawer.  It wasn’t in my secret hiding place.  It wasn’t anywhere I looked.

I have rarely felt such panic.  Yes, the ring was valuable from a purely monetary point of view.  But my panic was because I lost something irreplaceable, something no amount of insurance coverage could compensate me for.  It was the only tangible thing that connected me to my mother and I couldn’t imagine living without it.    

I emptied the jewelry box over and over again, hoping that it would peek out from a corner and all would be well again.  I looked for clues and rehearsed when and where I had last seen it.  I was inconsolable.  It felt as if I had lost my mom all over again. 

And compounding the grief was fear.  How on earth could I lose something so precious?  How could I just forget where I put it? Did I accidentally throw it away?  Was this evidence of some early cognitive decline?  Did someone steal it? 

Grief and fear drove me to prayer.  I begged God to reveal to me where it was.  I pleaded for Him to restore it to me.  I wondered why God, who knew what this piece of metal and stone meant to me, could withhold it from me.  

Days went by and it remained missing.  I began to consider that it really was gone, and I began to pray differently.  I still prayed that if God wanted me to have this thing in which I placed so much value, so much of myself, to please reveal it’s whereabouts to me.  And I also prayed that if He really wanted me to go on without this touchstone, to please help me in my grief. 

This is the great tension, the great mystery of prayer.  I believe that God wants me to bring my life to him, in all its messiness.  He wants me to come to Him with my requests, sorrows, and questions.  Prayer is not a pointless performance; God does “answer” prayer.   

But at the same time, He expects me to come with humility, with surrender, with a willingness to release the outcome into His hands.  The most famous example of this is Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane:

“Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done.” And there appeared to him an angel from heaven, strengthening him. 

(Luke 22:42-43)

This is one of the most challenging things about prayer.  We ask in hope, but we receive in submission. 

And so I prayed my paradoxical prayer.  “Lord, help me find it.  Lord comfort me in my loss.”  

This new prayer allowed me to try on for size the idea that this ring was gone from my life, just as the woman who wore it was.  Don’t get me wrong — I still hated the idea.  But I felt an unexpected peace believing that God would help me through my grief. 

I didn’t believe that when my Mom died. I was not a believer at that point in my life, and if anything, her death just reinforced the idea that if there was a God who could allow this kind of suffering and death, I wanted no part of Him.   And so, I lived through her death and through a cascade of losses that followed utterly alone in my mourning.  

Could it be that God was giving me another chance at it?  Is it possible that in re-creating that loss, He was saying “Let me comfort you this time”?  It certainly felt that way.   One thing I’ve learned about God is that no hurt is too deep or too old for Him to heal it.   And so He did.  

And yes, in due time He did restore my precious ring to me.  Its return did bring me great joy.  But I do not hold it as tightly as I once did.  I do not cling to it so desperately, as if its loss would be catastrophic.  I still wear it occasionally, but it is no longer a reminder of what I’ve lost.  I look at it and think about how God redeems and God restores.

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort”

(2 Corinthians 1:3)

When I was a kid, every Saturday afternoon I walked to St. Margaret Mary Church, took my place on line and waited to confess.  Once inside the dark tomb of the confessional, I recited the words I had been taught, “Bless me father, for I have sinned,” and listed my 9-year-old transgressions.   “I yelled at my sister. I coveted my friend’s Barbie dream house.”  

I couldn’t see the priest’s face, although I could guess by his voice who was behind the screen.  Still, it had the appearance of anonymity, which I liked. I could pretend I was alone, speaking into the void. The idea that today the Rite of Reconciliation (aka confession) is often conducted face-to-face makes me appreciate the days of dark anonymity. 

It’s not surprising then, that for a long time, I thought of confession as a solitary undertaking. The church where I worship now says a corporate prayer of confession every week before communion and it took me a long time to get used to. What bothered me was “we.” 

 “Merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against you…”

It was grating to my ears.  After all, wasn’t confession just between me and God?  Well, yes and no.  

Certainly, I am called to confess my individual sin to God. Psalm 32 expresses this beautifully:

“Blessed is the one whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered … For when I kept silent, my bones wasted away through my groaning all day long.For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer.I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not cover up my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the Lord, and you forgave the iniquity of my sin.”  

This is a beautiful picture of God’s faithfulness to forgive the actions I have taken that offend God,  But those actions spring from something deeper and more intractable than a simple lapse in judgment:  sin as part of our nature.  A corporate confession recognizes that sin is more than actions; it is a part of human nature, common to everyone in the sanctuary with me.  

Confessing that we’re all in the same boat — that we share in this “sin nature” — actually frees me from the solitary shame that can come from concentrating on my own transgressions.  

And because it is common to all,  it removes the belief that I am uniquely sinful, alone in my sin.   In his classic book Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer puts it this way: 

“He who is alone with his sin is utterly alone.”

Which is exactly where the Enemy of my soul wants me.  Isolated, shamed, cut off from the consolation of community.  

And so, I have come to see the necessity and the beauty of our corporate confession.  Yes, I am still called to bring my individual sin before God.  But in adding my voice to others’ I am breaking through my solitary shame and strengthening the bonds of community.  I am laying down my pride and my perfectionism and acknowledging my frailty and accepting others’. 

In Romans Ch. 12, we hear St. Paul describing the qualities of a believer: “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep”. He might also have said, “Confess with those who confess.”  In joy, in mourning, even in sin, we are not alone.  This is the great gift of community.  

In his introduction to Life Together, Bonhoeffer proclaims this most profound truth:

“Therefore, let him who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let him thank God on his knees and declare: It is grace, nothing but grace, that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brethren.”

I love crosswords with all their delicious words, foreign words, words that only appear in crosswords, words so delightfully obscure they send you scurrying to the dictionary!  I love the fact that crosswords are a closed universe: a perfect square containing more perfect squares, intersecting and interacting in perfect harmony.

Whatever the day’s frustrations or how much chaos threatened to overwhelm, crosswords offer the consolation of order, the satisfaction of correct answers, and the beauty of symmetry.  I can, by the sheer force of my intellect, will, and a good eraser, achieve perfection and bring order out of chaos. 

In other words, crosswords offer what the world does not.  

There are frustrations, too. Sometimes I scratch my head, saying, “If this answer is right, then the answer it crosses can’t be right.“  You see, the answers don’t exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on one another, like scaffolding.  Each piece supports the other, or else the whole of it falls.  

Which is why crosswords remind me of Scripture.  Like an answer that seems right, but somehow isn’t, you can think something in Scripture doesn’t fit with what you’ve been taught about the nature of a good and loving God.  Perhaps it seems to conflict with another part of Scripture. So some questions arise:   Why are there two creation stories, that differ (even if slightly)?  What kind of God orders genocide so His chosen people can occupy the land?  How could a loving God consign someone to eternal damnation? How can God love mercy and demand justice? 

These are some of the questions that believers puzzle over and non-believers use as “Gotchas!” to prove that this foundation is cracked and thus cannot bear the weight of belief.  These questions can be like a critical crossbeam whose removal threatens the whole structure. 

We can react in one of three ways.  First, we can throw up our hands, and abandon the belief that the Bible is authoritative and worthy of our trust and obedience. This is what those hostile to the faith hope their “Gotchas!“ will do.  

Second, we can willfully ignore the contradiction or troubling passage because it is just too painful to contemplate that we have built our faith on shaky ground.

Or, Like Jacob at Penuel, we can wrestle with God and His word and emerge with a better understanding of God and ourselves.  In 20 years of leading Bible Studies, I have grappled with such questions in a community of believers who are not willing to give up, even when understanding or interpreting scripture is difficult.  So, the question behind the questions that arise is: “How are we are to understand and live with challenges that Scripture presents?”

Some thoughts:   

How Does it Fit Into the Big Picture? 

Creation, fall, rescue, restoration. These four words describe the arc of the Bible story.   Difficult passages can become less so when they are viewed in the context of this Big Picture.  Why is there suffering and pain?  Genesis explains they are the result of our rebellion.  Why does God forgive and show mercy when it doesn’t seem warranted?  Scripture tell us His goal is relationship and restoration.  Why does God’s judgment seem harsh?  Scripture says God is holy, and cannot be in the presence of sin.  

When we struggle with Scripture, we should ask “where does this fit into the big picture?” 

Scripture Interprets Scripture. Like crosswords, Scripture is a closed universe — not in the sense of not allowing interpretation, but complete, and sufficient unto itself. For all its supposed “contradictions” or ideas that make us uncomfortable, the Bible is remarkably consistent for a document written over the span of thousands of years, in three different languages, across different cultures.  So the first question I ask when presented with a challenging passage is — what does it say elsewhere in Scripture?  Is the idea positively affirmed or denounced elsewhere?  What can we learn from other passages that touch on the matter we’re considering?

I have heard it argued that if we are to take the Bible’s view of marriage seriously, we should allow polygamy, since that appears in Scripture, and is not explicitly forbidden. While it is true that polygamy is mentioned, it is never held up as good or desirable. In fact, if you read the instances of polygamy mentioned (for example Abraham, Jacob, or King Solomon,) it always leads to pain, brokenness, and in the case of Solomon, nothing less than the demise of the Kingdom.  In other words, in Scripture (as in crosswords) “answers” do not exist in a vacuum. 

Many Books, Many Genres

The Bible is not any one thing;  in fact, the word from which it is derived (biblios) means books.  And those books are written in a variety of genres.  There’s history and poetry and metaphysics, prophecy and apocrypha, wisdom literature, prayers, and letters.  When you read a book of poetry, you don’t expect to find history.  When you read  a metaphysics textbook, you won’t find prayers there.  So the first order of business when confronting something difficult or discordant is to ask “How does the genre of this scripture affect my understanding of it?” 

When we read  in Psalm 22, “I am poured out like water and all my bones are out of joint,” we do not think think this poor wretch has dislocated every joint in his body.  We understand he is using metaphor to describe his anguish.  

People are sometimes puzzled when the Gospels seem to disagree on details or chronology.  We need to remember that the Gospels aren’t biography, at least not in the way we read biography today.  Each one was written in a particular way for a particular audience, through the lens and memory of a particular writer.  Like any writer, they emphasize some things, exclude others.  But the Gospel writers, in spite of any different paths they may use to lead us there, bring us to the same, immutable truth:  that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Leave Room for Mystery

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, answers elude us.  And that is when we need to allow for mystery.  I know it sounds like a cop out.  But if we believe what is written in 2 Timothy 3:16  — “All scripture is breathed out by God”—  then we have to admit to some mystery because we cannot completely know the mind of God.  Perhaps it is a mystery that will be revealed to us at a later reading; perhaps not until we we see God face to face.  

How to understand and interpret the Bible has been discussed and debated for millennia, by people far more learned than me.  These are just some of my musings, by no means exhaustive or even authoritative. I do have some suggestions for resources if you’d like to explore this further:

• A Good Study Bible.  These are enormously helpful in understanding difficult passages by giving historical context, explaining word meanings and cross references to other related scripture.  Some study Bibles are too “directional” for my taste, especially the ones that say “This is what this passage means.”  But that’s just me. 

• Commentaries.  A great place to start is a series of commentaries by Tom Wright (for example, “John for Everyone”).  These are solid theology written for the lay reader.

• Shaped by the Bible by William Willimon

• Eat This Book by Eugene Peterson.  This is a good treatment of “the art of spiritual reading.” 

• The Bible Jesus Read by Philip Yancey.  This is an engaging exploration of the Old Testament and its relevance to Christians.

And these are just the ones on my bookshelf!   I leave you with this: 

“All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete for every good work.”