Tohu wa-bohu

Order out of chaos. That’s the business God has been in since the beginning of time, when Genesis tells us that the universe was formless and void. In Hebrew, the phrase that describes this chaos is tohu wa-bohu. Over six days of creative work, order was fashioned out of unruliness. No wonder a day of rest was needed.

Later in the Hebrew Scriptures, Jeremiah uses the same phrase to describe judgment that will come on the people of Israel. Chapter 4 of that prophetic book describes the reversal of creation, moving from order to chaos. Tohu wa-bohu.

I’m wondering if you ever feel tohu wa-bohu. The phrase in Hebrew has a certain ring to it. When I’m feeling like a mess, I say to myself that I’m tohu wa-bohu. A dose of daily news may be enough to trigger that feeling.

What to do about it? If order is to be discovered, our faith tells us that it will be God’s work. It will be holy work. We acknowledged yesterday in church, in the collect included above, that God can bring into order unruly wills and affections. We also recognized that if and when that happens, it will be as gift. It will be a grace that allows us to love what God commands and to desire what God promises. On our own, our hearts can devolve into chaos. The consistent message of Lent: we need help.

Yesterday’s collect recognizes that we navigate life amidst swift and varied changes. That certainly can be seen in our political system. That can surface in our congregations, often marked by transition. That can happen in the face of an unexpected health crisis or a sudden change in employment status. It can happen in relationships with family and friends. Who knows what a day might bring? Chaos can be right around the corner.

Again, what to do about it? The prayer we heard yesterday invites us to keep our hearts fixed where joys can be found. So here’s the question that keeps coming up for me this Lent: Where is the heart fixed? Maybe in the chaos, you’d say it’s not fixed anywhere, thank you very much. Maybe you feel like you’re playing whackamole with the chaos of life, contending with unruly wills and affections. Maybe you’ve given your heart to that which will not satisfy your heart. That can make us feel totally tohu wa-bohu.

Let me suggest a favorite story from the gospels that may help. The disciples were in a boat in the middle of a threatening storm, which is a biblical image of chaos. Right in the thick of it, Jesus comes walking on the water. Peter got the idea that he could walk on the water, too. He put one foot over the gunwale. Then the next. He discovered that he actually could walk on water. He could weather the chaos. As long as his gaze was fixed on Jesus. When he lost that gaze, he sank.

Take some time this Monday morning to think about where your gaze is fixed, where you are giving your heart. As we prepare for Holy Week, set gaze on the one who stretches out arms of love on the cross to draw us into his saving embrace.

-Jay Sidebotham

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I’ve fallen and I can’t get up

I was recently reminded of a pastoral encounter in the first days of my ministry. It had to do with a quite elderly woman who lived alone in a big house, a crusty New Englander whose unhappiness with life was somewhat contagious, making the people around her as unhappy as she was. She was especially tough on this clergyman.

I was the only one at the church on the day when the call came to the office. It was an alert from one of those “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” buttons. I went over to her house. It turns out she had been shuffling around on the floor for well over 24 hours, maybe more, never losing consciousness but simply unable to get up. She was so stubborn in her commitment to her own self-sufficiency and independence that she refused to push the button. She finally realized that she had no power in herself to help herself. But boy was she unhappy to realize her dependency, to have to push the button. We spent a good many hours together as we waited for her children to arrive from out of town. By the end of the time, she admitted that she now liked me. I wonder if recognition of her vulnerability had something to do with that shift. I bet Brené Brown would say so.

“God helps those who help themselves.” Contrary to popular opinion, that adage is not in the Bible. It may be a commendable call to take responsibility, but it bumps up against truth conveyed in the collect we heard in church yesterday. That collect begins with the premise that we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves. In other words, we need help.

The season of Lent, with a focus on self-examination, may help us realize that. Have you ever felt that you had no power in yourself to help yourself? The great Swiss theologian and pastor Karl Barth was once asked where he liked to preach when he visited the states. He said that he preferred to preach in prisons because that’s where he met Americans who actually knew they needed help, knew they needed the gospel.

The recognition of powerlessness seems to be key to the spiritual journey. The good news of our faith means that power is in fact available and accessible. I suspect many are familiar with the first beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit (Matthew 5:3). I’ve come to favor the paraphrase which says: Blessed are those who know their need of God. The first step in accessing holy help is to admit we need it. That is why we have a penitential season like Lent. That is why we regularly say the confession in our liturgy. That is why at baptism we promise to repent and return to the Lord whenever we sin. Not if ever we sin. Whenever.

And what kind of help are we looking for? The collect says we need help to be kept in body and soul. We need holy help in all aspects of our lives.

When we ask for help so that our bodies can be defended from all adversities, it may mean prayer for healing, for release from physical ailments that render us helpless. It may be prayer for those who face persecution from adversaries, like the people of Ukraine. The phrase reminded me of Ta-Nahisi Coate’s painfully beautiful book Between The World And Me, written to his son about how racism threatens his son’s body.

And we need help as our souls may be assaulted and hurt by evil thoughts. That’s why the refrain from Psalm 51 is so important as we ask: Create in me a clean heart. Renew a right spirit within me. Evil thoughts, coming in great variety, may be murderous, lustful or vengeful thoughts we’d be embarrassed to have projected on a screen. They may be thoughts of comparison: envy, jealousy. They may be thoughts that arise from an unwillingness to forgive, so that we stew in resentment. We need help to live with those.

We admit we don’t have power in ourselves. Thanks be to God, that does not mean that there is no power available to heal and protect and bring new life. That’s good news. That’s gospel. That’s what Jesus is about.

-Jay Sidebotham

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RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

Going astray

The first Christians were not called Christians. They were called People of the Way. For many reasons, that might have been a good name to stick with. I’m guessing that name grew out of the way Jesus spoke about himself when he said: “I am the way.” It was an invitation to his disciples to follow him, to stick close to him.

That in turn echoed the notion from the Hebrew Scripture that God would show the way through the wilderness, either as the children of Israel left the slavery of Egypt, or later on, as the exiled children of Israel tried to find their way home.

We are finding our way through the season of Lent. The season has been compared to the wilderness. One of the things that was both challenging and frightening about wilderness was that it was described as a trackless wasteland. In other words, there were no road signs. No directions. No paved roads. No rest stops. Certainly no GPS. It was easy to wander. It was easy to get lost. It was easy to give up hope. Which is why it was important to have someone or something to follow.

The prayer we heard yesterday in church confesses that some of us (maybe all of us) have gone astray, perhaps an echo of the biblical text set to music by Handel: All we like sheep have gone astray. In yesterday’s prayer, there is a call for a penitent heart which is really an admission that we have either lost our way or deliberately chosen to go off on our own path. We’re headed in the wrong direction. Penitence, an expression of repentance, suggests an intention to turn around, to make a course correction.

So in this season of Lent, a season of self-examination, we might want to think about the way we travel through our own version of wilderness. (We all know something about wilderness.) Where are we headed? Do we have a clue which way to go?

As the prayer suggests, this season is an invitation to embrace and hold fast the unchangeable truth of your word, Jesus Christ. What actually might it mean to embrace and hold fast that truth, which we encounter in the person of Jesus?

It goes to what it means to be a disciple, someone who follows. It means asking the question posed by pastor and theologian Brian McLaren to our congregations: Are we a club for the elite who think they have arrived or are we a school for disciples who are on the way?

One way to focus on the way is to reflect on the way of love articulated by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry. He’s boiled that way down to seven verbs. These words chart a course in the wilderness, based on a relationship that makes it possible to follow the one who will lead us through the wilderness. The verbs? Turn. Learn. Pray. Worship. Bless. Go. Rest. (Scott Gunn, Exec. Director of Forward Movement has written a grand and succinct book on this way of love, reflecting on each of these words. Definitely some good Lenten reading.) As you unpack each of these verbs, and figure out how they apply in your own context, they provide a way to keep on track, a way to keep from going astray. This expression of the way of love is obviously not the only way to think about how to move forward faithfully. But I have found its simplicity helpful in my own spiritual journey.

The bottom line is that we are not invited to follow a set of rules. We are invited into a holy relationship with a person, to follow Jesus who invites us to come and see new life available to us. Take these days of Lent to consider what that kind of relationship might look like in your life, and how you can cultivate it. By God’s grace, you’re going to make it through the wilderness.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth