A bunch of people got onto an airplane
the other day. They were on vacation, going to visit relatives, moving to a new
place, taking a business trip. They were men and women, old and young, babies
in arms and folks in wheelchairs. The logistics of their trips had been planned
– where they were going and when, who was going to pick them up, whether they
needed to go to the currency conversion kiosk …they each had a checklist of
sorts, a plan of action.
And then something happened. A missile,
and then the plane was exploding and bodies were flying and nothing that
happened was part of the plan of action. And even the remnants of their bodies
and the plan that had carried them were no longer treated according to the
normal plan for such abnormal events.
So much for the checklist. So much
for the plan.
A few thousand miles away, parents
were dressing their children for school. Food was being prepared, very early in
the morning, before dawn since it was Ramadan, the month of daytime fasting.
Men were planning their workday at their tasks. Women were figuring out if they
needed to go to the market for more rice or bread for the iftar dinner after
sundown.
Nonpolitical people, Palestinians who simply wanted to live their
lives, regardless of the
political strife that has been a subtext of their
existence for decades. It was the normal plan of the day for these folks during
the holy month.
And then something happened. Bombing
from Israel, intent on destroying Hamas, viewed by Israel as a terrorist
political group, but who was killed? Children. Old people. Women. Maybe a few
Hamas leaders somewhere amongst the dead, but mostly not. Children who should
have been walking down the road with their backpacks filled with their books
and homework were in morgues. Mothers were in the emergency medical facilities,
being treated for shrapnel and for traumatic amputations. Men screaming,
looking for their families in the remnants of their demolished homes.
So much for the plan of the day.
What happens to us when our plan of
the day is shattered? When our child or our spouse is injured in an accident?
When we get a frightful diagnosis? When our friend is arrested? When our son
checks himself into rehab?
Plans of the day. The old joke is
this: “Do you want to make God laugh? Make a plan.”
The joke is predicated on the notion
that God knows that life is unpredictable and that we human beings, who think
we can control our universe, can forestall that unpredictability by making a
plan.
But our plans are waylaid by the
things we cannot predict, by human folly, by wars, by plagues, by the
unexpected.
And in those moments, like the
painful moments we have heard about these past few weeks, if we know nothing at
all, we can still know one thing: God suffers beside us.
God feels our pain, and weeps with
us, and holds us in the divine embrace to comfort us and say that bombs and
death and demonization of other people are not the only story to be told.
There is another one, one that is
based in our sure knowledge that God is with us. God sent our savior, Jesus
Christ, fully anticipating that bad things would happen, then as now. God’ s
son Jesus taught us to know our Creator in ways that humans could understand.
And then Jesus entered into our world of struggles and pain and brokenness in
the deepest possible way: he allowed himself to become a victim of betrayal and
to be crucified. To suffer pain.
To feel the sting of Judas’ kiss. To undergo
the lash and the cross.
When we cry out “does God know how
much pain I am in?” remember this: Jesus, the Son of God, willingly accepted
his death.
To know how it feels to be fully
human. To understand our cries. To have intimate and personal knowledge of what
we suffer.
And
that is why Paul says “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels,
nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor
depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Jesus
saved us. Jesus suffered for us. He feels the cries of mothers in Gaza whose
children have died. He feels the shock of families whose loved ones died on the
Malaysian flight over the Ukraine. He feels the fear of little children, sent
by their families across the Sonoran desert to find an escape from gang
violence in Central America.
Jesus
knows the drop in the pit of the stomach of a plan gone awry in an awful way.
And he doesn’t turn away. He stays with us in the confusion and the anger and
the grief. Because there is nothing, NOTHING, that can separate us from the
love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And
that love should then motivate us to make changes in the world, or our little
corner of it, in a way that is more in keeping with the Creator’s intent than
bombs and detention camps.
If
we are not separated from the love of God, how can we possible act in ways that
deny that all are given that love? How can we not feel their pain, as God feels
ours? How can we not speak out and say “Enough!”
Amen.
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