NRSV PROVERBS 1:20-33
20 Wisdom cries out in the street;
in the squares she raises her voice.
21 At the busiest corner she cries out;
at the entrance of the city gates she speaks:
22 “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?
How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing
and fools hate knowledge?
23 Give heed to my reproof;
I will pour out my thoughts to you;
I will make my words known to you.
24 Because I have called and you refused,
have stretched out my hand and no one heeded,
25 and because you have ignored all my counsel
and would have none of my reproof,
26 I also will laugh at your calamity;
I will mock when panic strikes you,
27 when panic strikes you like a storm,
and your calamity comes like a whirlwind,
when distress and anguish come upon you.
28 Then they will call upon me, but I will not answer;
they will seek me diligently, but will not find me.
29 Because they hated knowledge
and did not choose the fear of the LORD,
30 would have none of my counsel,
and despised all my reproof,
31 therefore they shall eat the fruit of their way
and be sated with their own devices.
32 For waywardness kills the simple,
and the complacency of fools destroys them;
33 but those who listen to me will be secure
and will live at ease, without dread of disaster.”
NRSV MARK 8:27-38
27 Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” 28 And they answered him, “John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.” 29 He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” 30 And he sternly ordered them not to tell anyone about him.
31 Then he began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. 32 He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. 33 But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”
34 He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. 35 For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. 36 For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? 37 Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? 38 Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
The swirling winds and rains of Hurricane Florence are still around, having an effect on our weather – and our lives. So this seemed like a good time to talk about fascination. I have always been fascinated by the weather. Last week, before Florence showed up, we left our weekly spin workout at the YMCA with thunderclouds all around us, a meteorological amphitheater of atmospheric fireworks. Lightning flashed here, then there, then over there. It was impressive. It was powerful. It was fascinating.
I know not everyone gets the fascination thing. Hurricanes roll in, they cause incredible and mind-boggling damage, lives are lost or twisted, hopes and dreams devastated. And always people ask “Why did a loving God do this? Why did God let this life, this home, this area get so torn up?” And of course we have all known people whose faith journeys have been road blocked by those questions, those thoughts that a really good God would never have let such a thing happen.
I guess it was a desire to address such a road block in my own life that led me in my seminary years to work on the will of God. In the process of that I read Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book, “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” I‘ve cited it several times before so don’t worry, this won’t turn into a book review. But Rabbi Kushner centers his points around the book of Job, that wonderful classic of Hebrew wisdom literature about a good man who has all kinds of bad things happen to him, incredibly bad things: the loss of property, the loss of all of his children, and then the loss of his own health. Friends come and try to help but just make a mess of it, saying that Job must have done something bad. To which Job counters their claims by telling them that he did nothing to deserve this. Bad things happen to good people, and very often there is no overt reason why. Not exactly fascinating, but true nonetheless.
The kicker comes in the last four chapters of the book, when God comes to Job out of a whirlwind. And what is the answer God gives to Job about why all of these calamities occurred? It appears to be an evasive one – God does not come out and clearly say, “This is why this happened to you…” Instead God lays out all of creation before Job, as if to say, “This is the world I made. There is order here. A little chaos comes up here and there. It’s part of living. Don’t try to explain it, or to understand it. Just stand in fascination.”
In our world, with all of the meteorological conditions, there are storms; there are times when the wind is bad enough to blow things down. There are times when disasters occur. But I personally don’t think it is because someone messed up, and God went out to get them. We may like to think that, because then we can take God’s place and have it all figured out.
But God is not there to make life make sense to us, no matter how much our egos need to have that. God is beyond us, more powerful than we think, more powerful than we can think. So maybe the best thing we can do is not to try to explain everything, not to see how God has a purpose behind every single thing that happens to us. Maybe all we are left with, like Job, is a mystery; a mystery so wonderful, so beautiful, so awe-inspiring – even if it is messy – that it leaves us fascinated.
I thought about that as I read a sermon preached by Mark Ramsey, a colleague from my Michigan days, who was telling a story from noted emerging church evangelist Shane Claiborne:
“The other night I headed downtown for a stroll with some friends from out of town. We walked along the river, where there are street performers, artists, musicians. We passed a great magician who did some pretty sweet tricks like pour change out of his iPhone, and then there was a preacher. He wasn’t quite as captivating as the magician. He stood on a box, yelling into a microphone, and beside him was a coffin with a fake dead body inside. He talked about how we are all going to die and to go to hell if we don’t know Jesus. Some folks snickered. Some told him to shut up … A couple of teenagers tried to steal the dead body in the coffin. All I could do was think to myself how I wanted to jump up on a box beside him and yell at the top of my lungs, ‘God is not a monster.’ Maybe next time I will.”
And Claiborne went on to say:
“The more I read the Bible and studied the life of Jesus, the more I have become convinced that Christianity spreads best not through force but through fascination.”
And Rev. Ramsey added that, “Pentecost (the Christian season we are in now) is the gift of fascination. Renewing, enlivening, delighting. We seem to have lost the power and promise of God’s gifts of wonder and fascination in a world of management and survival, fear and division, coarse public dialogue and dulled expectations of beauty and hope. Pentecost gives the gift of fascination and stops cold all attempts by those who want to turn God into a monster. Jesus really did mean that the way of love is the way of life. Jesus really did intend for peace to rule and justice to prevail.”
I know that’s a long way around back to our Scripture readings for this morning. But I can’t help but feel that the fascination theme is there throughout. Proverbs is a picture of a lady – Lady Wisdom, a part of God’s very being – standing on a street corner, out in the middle of where people come and go, out in the middle of people’s lives. She shouts like that phony preacher with the fake dead body, and to some ears her message might be the same. But look closer: yes, she is getting on people’s case, but she is not telling them that they will go to hell. She is telling them that they are already there when they do not listen to the lessons she has for them; when people don’t pay attention to what our lives have to teach us. She is telling them in no uncertain terms that God wants more for them than that; more than to just sleep walk through life, making the same mistakes, doing the same dumb things, not learning.
That’s the message of all Hebrew wisdom literature – that what we learn about life and God and our place in God’s world is not in some complicated, theological argument. It is found in the everyday-ness of life, in the world we live in. It is found in our lives, even when those lives are a mess. In fact, it is found especially when our lives are a mess. Because when we get so low that we know we cannot save ourselves or we don’t have a clue how we got here, that’s when we are in the best position to learn what God has to teach us. That is when we feel God’s presence the most. That is when fascination can take place, even when we are hurting.
The story of Jesus walking with his disciples, asking all kinds of questions, also has a degree of fascination, but it comes after Jesus and Pete have a rather heated discussion. Jesus is off with his disciples, and he asks them who other people think he is; not because he has a problem with self-identification or self-worth, but because he is taking them somewhere, somewhere besides Caesarea-Philippi, and he has to start off with an easy question. They give their answers, one after another, feeling good that they have made a contribution.
But then Jesus asks them, and he still asks his disciples, “What about you? Who do you say that I am?”
Every once in a while we need to ask that question of ourselves. As Karoline Lewis noted in a recent devotion, how we answer that not only describes who we think Jesus is; but also who we are. If we are judgmental, always looking for other people to do something wrong so we can jump on them, that will be who Jesus is for us. If we are willing to be a bit more gracious, give people the benefit of the doubt and be a little less certain that we know exactly who they are and why they do what they do, then that will be seen in how we deal with them. Not with scare tactics, not with guilt trips. But with fascination.
But we have to be careful. Peter’s response to Jesus’ comments about a suffering Messiah was right in line with what many of us do. We want our Messiah to clean everything up, beat up our enemies, cast out those we deem unworthy. We have our expectations of what Jesus will do, and what he won’t do.
But Jesus yells at Peter – he really does go after him – about how Peter is so stuck in what he wants, in his own expectations of Jesus, that he has no room for what is Holy. In a way, Jesus is going after Peter because he wants the big fisherman to be open to fascination; to let God be in the radical freedom that God is, and not in a box of our harsh expectations.
That’s especially there as Jesus tells the whole gang – crowd as well as disciples – what they need to do if they are going to follow him. Deny themselves, take up their cross, and follow him. Deny themselves – as I get older, the more this means to me. To deny yourself is not to beat yourself up, but to admit that there are some things which are not true to your character as a child of God. Like thinking I am always in charge. That I can come up with my own world in which I don’t need God’s grace. Like thinking I can clutch and grasp everything, when Jesus’ character was wrapped up in letting go. Jesus emptied himself; we are called to empty ourselves, empty ourselves of all that is false, that is leading us nowhere, that is making us less than we are.
The part about taking up your cross is different than a lot of us think. This is not dealing with the aggravations of human existence – ‘oh, this is my cross to bear.’ This is not having to deal with difficult family members or friends, but letting nothing get in the way of our devotion to God. Looking on each person as a gift from God, not someone to use; looking on each person as a blessing, and not a competitor; being so committed to letting love be our guide that nothing else matters.
When that happens, fascination takes place. It takes place when we see people differently. It happens when we let political arguments not be the determinant of how we approach others. It happens when we actually let the Spirit of God, the Wisdom of God, change us and transform us, and allow us to look at others with the same fascinating love that God sees in us.
In a beautiful poem on the end of life, Mary Oliver has a great line. She writes, “But I am a bride of amazement…” No matter what our genders are, may we be “brides of amazement,” people open to the new thing God is doing, that we would live our lives not tightly drawn to what we want but open to a loving nudge from our Creator; a nudge to live in fascination. Amen.