Stephen
Terry, Director
Waiting
in the Crucible
Commentary
for the September 10, 2022, Sabbath School Lesson
"I call on you, my God, for
you will answer me; turn your ear to me and hear my prayer. Show me the wonders
of your great love, you who save by your right hand those who take refuge in
you from their foes." Psalm 17:6-7, NIV
The world we live in is a
troubled place. In case we were tempted to forget, we are bombarded with media
reminders of just how troubled it has become. When I was younger, people talked
about the news cycle and watched for events at certain times of day, but now
the bad news seems to stream continuously like a polluted stream choked with
stench, decay, and offal. Where once we would buy a radio or a television and
these would be gateways for the heartaches of the world to enter our homes, the
expense was then relatively minimal and the programming free of cost, but
today, we each spend thousands of dollars annually to provide a digital freeway
from the world into our homes. While we would never allow through our front
doors the activities, thoughts and personalities we see through the media, we
willingly throw open the digital doorway to the family home. It saves evil the
trouble of having to show up in person. In a way, it is sort of like Zoom
Church, only for the opposition.
This may spur some to write
letters, protest, boycott advertisers, and become reactionary activists in many
other ways. But with multilevel shell corporations, powerful and wealthy
political lobbyists, and corruption founded on greed, the tide of evil seems
overwhelming. Trying to force evil to stop usually has limited success anyway.
If evildoers could be forced to be good, they would not have become evil in the
first place. They would have been naturally inclined to observe those laws that
benefit us all. However, the mere existence of those laws demonstrates that
evil does not care to be restrained.
Even more problematic is who
those people are who are doing all the evil. It's you and me.[i]
Theologians argue about whether we are this way because that is how we are born
(original sin), or if we have become this way because of our ongoing failure to
love as we were made to do in God's image. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that
we can sooner change our skin than we can change our desire to do selfish, evil
things.[ii] We
are like a tray full of crabs scrambling around trying to pinch one another.
When God put his finger into the tray in the form of his Son, we pinched him,
too. We are like that. We want to grab everything we can and hold it in our
pincers and never let go. It doesn't matter how useless the thing is we are
holding tightly on to. It may be garbage, but it is our garbage, we found it,
and we aren't sharing! What a terrible world for Jesus to be born in. But he
has returned to heaven. He will come back one day, but in the meantime, we must
live here. How do we wait amid the mess, especially when we are contributing to
the problem?
First, we need to come to terms
with what we can and cannot change. We cannot fix ourselves. Who among us has
not tried to be a better person and failed, usually repeatedly. The longer we
live, the more that reality comes home to dwell. This is often referred to as the
wisdom of age. We begin life seeing the world as full of promise. Perhaps this
is even a latent memory from the long-lost Eden of Genesis. But as plans fail
or are thwarted in the process of realizing those promises, we begin to
discover the brokenness all around us and find brokenness and bitterness seemingly
seeping in from everywhere. At that point, people will often do one of two
things. They will either simply do those things that seem to work after a
fashion simply to move forward, or they will give up. This is the world
imposing its will upon each generation, for everyone to conform for the sake of
convenience. Life does appear to go easier as a result, until it doesn't. When it
doesn't, the collapse that ensues can bring a willingness to try a different
path. They may even try the self-sacrificial cross of religion. But if they
continue to be driven by the desire to conform for the sake of avoiding the
struggles of growth, once an alternative path that shows it might work becomes
available, they will return to their former ways. Jesus shared this pattern in
the Parable of the Sower and the Seed.[iii]
If we are truly honest with ourselves, we have succumbed to this kind of
temptation as well far too many times to feel good about. Most seem to muddle
through life in this fashion, and we end up eventually looking back at life and,
despite some good memories, wondering what that was all about anyway, feeling
we may have missed something along the way. Our desire to achieve what others
before failed to accomplish and our own dreams both unrealized.
Second, we need to understand,
we can no more fix others than we can ourselves. Politics denies this reality.
At its root it is the science of using power to control the activities of
others. The only reason for needing such control would be to shape the
direction of society and the individuals submissive to that power. Put simply,
it means fixing society despite being unable to fix ourselves. When we try to
fix ourselves, our own will often stands in the way. It is not different when
we try to fix others. If their will is not amenable, change is resisted and
even prevented. Political power is touted as the answer to overcoming that
resistance, but it is a false hope based on our selfish nature. Society may
acquiesce if it sees even a temporary advantage, but then readily rebel if it
sees a better advantage now lies elsewhere. Once we understand this, the
attempt to fix others by any means of our derivation has no more promise than
those attempts to fix ourselves. Entire societies can look back at their
continually repeated failings and see that our failure to reckon with this has
often returned us back to where we began. But this too often is not without the
forfeit of countless lives and endless resources along the way.
The answer to all this is
probably the hardest thing for us to admit. We do not have the answer, at least
not within us. We see this often on social media. No matter how obvious someone's
errors are to everyone else, almost never will they admit that they have made
an error and apologize. Pride stands in the way, and fear. We fear the loss of
respect from people we will never meet, people we have
never even shared so much as a meal with. Some of these people are hiding
behind false profiles with stolen photos and hidden lives, yet we fear what
they might think of us if we do not prove we are right, and they are wrong. As
we let them crank up the temperature while we attempt to prove ourselves to
them, their only desire is to prove that they were able to provoke us into
losing control, demonstrating they are the ones in control.
When we see ourselves as more righteous
than others, more spiritually advanced, it becomes very difficult to love
others as ourselves, for we will always be loving ourselves more. But when we
see their plight as no different from our own, we can love with understanding.
We can love according to their need because we have that need also. Sadly, so
much in our lives argues against seeing things that way. We spend cart loads of
money and decades of our lives accumulating knowledge just so we don't have to
admit that we don't have the answers. Admitting it could betray the futility of
much of what we have lived for. But there is only a very small pathway off that
frustrating road and admitting that we are not the answer for fixing everyone's
problems is the key that opens the tiny gateway to that path.
When we open that gate, we will
find the truth about ourselves, about life, and how to become whole. The truth
is not about how much knowledge we can buy. It is not about how much we can
possess that others cannot. It is not about what people we have in our phone's
contact list. It is not about sitting around waiting for Jesus to come and
proving by our resistance to any change how faithful we are. Jesus was concerned
that because of the evil in the world, love would die. He revealed that those
who managed to keep love alive despite that would be saved from the evil.[iv]
Even so, looking down the centuries to the future he also worried that when he
came faith could be gone from the earth.[v] Our
job then, if we can set aside our own ambition and arrogance, is to keep love
alive while waiting in this crucible. Thereby, we will not only bless the lives
of others, we will save ourselves.