I Believe

John 20:1-8, Romans 8:18-21

“The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows forth his handiwork.” Psalm 19:1

​Throughout Lent, we have been exploring God’s creation. The beauty, the orderliness, and the vast scope point to a God of incredible wisdom, might, purity, and splendor. But admittedly, nature is an inconsistent witness. For every beautiful flower, there’s a toxic insect, and for every gorgeous sunset, there is a deadly storm.

It is hard for us to reconcile this dual witness of nature. “Nature red in tooth and claw” was the powerful phrase Alfred Lord Tennyson used in In Memoriam as he mourned in anguish at the death of his friend Arthur Hallam. People of Christian faith, other faiths, and no faiths feel a deep sense of injustice at this world that starves us, floods us, and sickens us.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ernest Becker wrote:

[The human] body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that it aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order to blindly and dumbly rot and disappear forever.

It is this existential crisis that Becker described that leads us to wonder that if God does exist, what kind of God is God? Why does Ebola exist?

As a result, people throughout history have seen in nature not only God’s power and wisdom but have also been misled to believe in a God of wrath and brutality. These beliefs about God have been used as the most evil excuse to justify murderous acts: 9/11, the assassination of Gandhi, and the enslavement of African peoples were all justified through a most wicked understanding of the nature of God.

Despite our blaming God for the worst ills of our own evils, rather than abandoning humanity, God doubled down on saving us. And so, because of everything, God set about fixing it all, "And the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth."

Jesus came to make it clear who God truly is—not a God of revenge, not a God of violence.

Jesus brought wholeness and true abundant life wherever he went. To those sick in body, he brought healing. To those feeling the sickness of guilt, he brought relief. And his force of life was so strong, it even restored Lazarus from the grave.

When people encountered Jesus’ actions and words, they felt as if they were encountering God’s very being. A radical new understanding of the true nature of God emerged.

Through Him, we realize that any anger God has is born of devotion. That any promise God makes will be made complete. That any life God creates is treasured—worth dying for, in fact.

So, Jesus endured suffering, shame, rejection, isolation from His family, scorn from His people, abandonment by the disciples—yet He did not waver from his mission.

As we remember this week on Good Friday:He died a most horrible death—for you, and for me, and for everyone. Even (or perhaps especially) for the man who killed Gandhi, for those who hated Him the most.

And this, perhaps, is the greatest power of God:He can turn evil into something beyond imagining.

Look out at nature—see how death brings life.

A tree falls to the ground and soon becomes a biome for all kinds of life that thrives and spreads, so that what comes next is even more bounteous and vibrant than what came before it. As Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”

This is true not only of life on Earth, but in the stars. At the dawn of creation, when stars first formed, they were simple—made of hydrogen, a little bit of helium, and a smattering of lithium. But over the course of billions of years, the stars exploded. In the unimaginable pressure, gravity squeezed the stars, and when they exploded into the universe, new elements emerged: carbon, oxygen, iron, and more.

From the death of those stars—and stars after them—eventually, a planet coalesced. It had more complex elements in it, and they became building blocks for life on the planet to be called Earth. Out of death comes life.

But it was the death of one man that brought life for all of us. God used our very brokenness, our very failures, to bring our redemption. And so the women wept. And the disciples were lost.

For they only knew death as the last word. But as the Apostle Paul realized, rather than defeat, the death of Jesus led to the final victory of God.The stone was rolled away, and Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead—and God healed the world.

For Jesus’ death and resurrection not only heals humanity, but it will restore nature to its intended state. As Paul wrote in Romans, creation itself will also be, “set free from the bondage to decay into the glorious freedom of God’s children.”

Think about what was happening when Paul wrote the eighth chapter of Romans.The Empire was beginning its persecution of Christians. Paul himself would be killed by them. His fellow Christians would have to go into hiding. He had been beaten, imprisoned. He had done evil things to others, and had evil things done to him.

He suffered greatly. And yet he wrote these incredible words, “I consider the sufferings of this present time not worthy to be compared with the glory that shall be revealed to us.”

He wrote these words because he saw in Jesus a God who could transform death into the final victory.

This is true not only when Paul wrote it thousands of years ago—but it is true today.There is great suffering in the world. We can get lost in the vast scope of it. But when we see it face-to-face, it strikes the hardest.

While waiting in the LaGuardia terminal, trying to fly to sunny Florida in February, I was eating a slice of pizza. It was a shared table, and a woman somewhat younger than me—perhaps in her 40s—was sitting across from me. She spilled her drink, and I handed her a few napkins, and that’s when I suddenly noticed the look of despondency on her face. I asked her a few questions, and immediately she opened up.

She, her husband, and her son lived in the exurbs of Connecticut. She is a software engineer—but you could tell her heart was not in it. You might even say she hated the work—not because it was toil, but because it completely uninspired her. What made the conversation all the more tragic was that there was no particular event or problem in her life at the moment. She and her husband got along just fine. They worked together. Their son was doing well in school, pursuing interests… sports and other activities. But she was utterly unfulfilled. She had always wanted to be a fashion designer, but instead, she went into corporate America to make some money. She didn’t especially hate Connecticut, but there was nothing about it that inspired her. She remembered fondly—even desperately—her time living in Singapore. She ached to move back, but simply couldn’t conceive of a way to make it.

And then she shared a memory of her father.

She grew up in India. Her father was an extremely successful cardiac surgeon—renowned throughout the district where she was from. Her twin sister had died at birth, and she was the only one to carry on the family tradition. He put tremendous pressure on her to pursue his profession. And not too long before he died, because she had become a software engineer rather than a cardiac surgeon, he said something that perhaps broke her for her whole life, “You are of no use to me.”

I offered her a few words of comfort.

I’m not sure if any of them made a difference.

And I never saw her again.

I don’t believe her memory will ever be healed—not in this life.

But I believe  

in the resurrection.

I believe  

in the restoration.

I believe  

in the reconciliation.

I believe the words of Revelation:      

“God will wipe away every tear.”

I believe God is a God not of condemnation, not of sorrow, but of hope and of triumph.

For I believe, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.”

That Word showed us what God is like—

A God of mercy, not condemnation.

A God of triumph. A God of victory.

I believe because God died on the cross and triumphed over the grave—so that all creation, everyone and everything in it, will be saved.​

And so I believe someday this woman will see her father. And through Jesus’ power, forgiveness will happen and at last, she will know joy again.

As will we all.

Amen.