The Unpredictable God

I am not sure why, but I trust conflict, When things are tough or when there is a problem, I enter a strange calm.

I saw this clearly being held up at gun point. I remember the gun, shouting, threats, and calm. Things moved in slow motion. My hands raised automatically when the gun was pointed at me, and then my hands lowered as the situation intensified. The more chaos the more ease I felt.

There must be something wrong with me. This is not normal. Yet, there is also something universally true. When things are tough, the tough get going. When people speak of the hardships of the depression in the 1930s, especially people who were children during that time, people will say things like, we had nothing, it was hard, but we were happy.

There is something clarifying in the storms of life.  When the winds howl, rain comes in torrents, trees fall, and then there is a focus, a clarity: just survive.  Like the eye of the hurricane: at the center of the storm is profound peace.

It's like the pressure of a deadline.  You need to write 2000 words with three critical sources and a clear theory to support your research.  You had two months to do this, but now there is ten hours, and you need to finish.  In the pressure, there is a focus, which was nowhere to be found two days ago when you said, you better write that essay. Hard times seem to bring out the best in us.

Juxtaposed is how success makes me nervous.  Things all going well, people doing the right things in the right places and all is well with the world, and yet I am confused, anxious.  Mistrustful.  I must be missing something. I am waiting for the other shoe to drop. 

Waiting for the other shoe to drop.  It comes from living in poorly constructed tenement houses where bedrooms were on top of one another, and the floors were thin.  If a person above you took off a shoe and dropped it on to the floor, you would wait for the other shoe to drop.  The inevitable.  If one shoe drops, the other will be coming soon. Why do we consider ruin of the good like the other shoe, inevitable?

Why trust chaos and find calm in it, and then distrust peace only waiting for it to end?   

The Grateful Dead said, I am having a hard time living the good life.  I am havin' a hard time living the good life.  Nothing is for certain; it could always go wrong.

Nothing is for certain; this is certain.  Yet, somehow hardship, challenge is easier to trust, more certain than success.  Bob Dylan wrote: There is no success like failure; yet failure is no success at all.  Failure I get—a call to act, to try, to strive.  Success feels like an invitation to withdraw, take your winnings and call it a night.

Consider how often when something has worked, you don't know why, don't know how, but you don't want to ask any questions, push too hard to understand otherwise you might ruin the success. We say, don't jinx it.  If it feels like magic, let it be magic.  Keep your head down and keep moving before someone figures out what you did.  

The French say hardship doesn't make character; it reveals it. Why is this true and so is the opposite?  Success so easily ruins us.  Our lottery win is . . . danger.  Our victory . . . watch out for pride and vanity.  Why is living the good life so hard?

I remember one night watching David Letterman and he was interviewing the basketball legend Tim Duncan.  Letterman was probing him for hardship, looking for struggle as Duncan seemed so easy going.  The travel must be hard he said to Duncan.  But the 5-time champion said, well, they take pretty good care of us.

Letterman cut him off and turned to the crowd and said, this man lives a great truth: There is no whining on the yacht. There is no whining on the yacht.  We say this in our house.  We do because it seems like we complain the most when we have the least to complain about.  Like the song, "it's my party I'll cry if I want to."  In the moments when we should be the most content, we are the least satisfied.  It's almost a guarantee.  When you have nothing, you have nothing to lose (and there is freedom in this), but when you have something, when you have it all you ruin yourself trying to keep it. 

The greatest example of these contradictions, these ironies, the greatest example in the Bible is Jonah. Jonah is an ironic tale of how little we trust the good and how little we can enjoy it.  God speaks to us and gives us clear direction, but we cannot follow it, cannot listen.  God brings the miraculous to us, the jubilee has begun, and we sulk and wring our hands as if all is lost.  Jonah is the truth: the closer we get to the light the more we pine for the darkness.

This is not the Sunday School Jonah.  The Sunday School Jonah is a morality tale.  Jonah is told to do something; he disobeys; God punishes him; Jonah obeys.  The moral of the story we tell our children is do what God says or you will get punished.  Not a bad story when you are six and the whale is fun.  But when you are thirty-six or sixty-six you need the ironic Jonah and the tree of dissatisfaction, not the moral of Jonah and the whale.

Most of us don't know the second part of Jonah's story.  The tree of dissatisfaction.  After the rebellion and the storm and the whale, John obeys, and he has great success.  The people of Nineveh hear his words and listen.  They repent and find freedom.  The city is saved from ruin.  Victory.  In this moment of success Jonah prays to God, just kill me now.  He has no joy in the victory.

Fleeing the city he pouts and complains beneath a tree.  He likes the tree, so God sends a worm in the night to ruin it.  Jonah again prays, just kill me now.  The Sunday School Jonah is a rebellious child corrected to obedience.  Under the tree of dissatisfaction, the ironic Jonah finds no joy in victory, no clarity in truth, no peace in the calm, only in the storm.

It's the ironic version Jesus calls the sign of Jonah. The crowd says, prove to us you are what is good, give us a sign, a guarantee you are the one we are to follow.  Jesus says, no.  No such sign for you.  But you will have the sign of Jonah.  The sign of Jonah is how we make the easy hard and have no peace in success.  If we find the good, we will ruin it trying to keep it.  In other words, the people cannot trust the miracles and the feedings and the teachings and the humility of Jesus.  We cannot trust the good, so we destroy it.  Jesus says, you will know I am good because you will destroy me.

Like Joni Mitchel.  You don't know what you have till it's gone.  They paved paradise and put up a parking lot. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, if Jesus came into our churches how he came to the synagogues of Palestine, we too would send him away.  Just as he was run out of Nazareth after reading the scroll, we too would run him off.  If Jesus were in our midst we would respond with violence, not joy.  We would not welcome him; we would crucify him.

Bonhoeffer was offering the sign of Jonah.  If God were to come into our midst we would flee or we would try to control the holy.  This is what we do.  This is what it means to be human and to encounter God.  It's a sure sign, predictable.

The one who truly captured the sign of Jonah the best was Michelangelo.  In the Vatican, in the Sistine Chapel there is a famous fresco covering the wall behind the altar, the Last Judgement of Christ.  The fresco has heaven and hell, victory and defeat, Jesus and the devil.  All of life painted from floor to ceiling. This is the certainty of life's end, the sure conclusion of God's judgement.  Our guarantee of what God is sure to do.

In a bold step, Michelangelo undoes all this surety, he turns the predictable on its head.  Sitting above the Last Judgement, above heaven and earth, Michelangelo painted Jonah.  He painted the sign of Jonah.  On the cover of your bulletin is his work of genius.  The elements of the fresco are profound.  Jonah is sitting, falling, turning away.  He is in motion.  There is an unsettled quality to him.  On his left is a great fish and an angel, as well as the Queen of Sheba.  Above him is the tree, the tree of dissatisfaction. 

Most importantly Michelangelo painted Jonah looking away from the Last Judgement.  He can't look at it.  He should have been the great witness, the one who sees the truth of the resurrection.  But Michelangelo got it right.  Like the life of the prophet, he cannot accept the good, the true, the beautiful; he must flee, turn way, be unsettled.  Instead of gazing at the Last Judgement, in the work of Michelangelo, Jonah is focused on the first day of creation.  He is looking at the separation of light from darkness, he is looking for wisdom.

Many years ago I took a pastor out to lunch. Dick Leon was a very successful pastor, and he was soon to be retiring.  As a young pastor I wanted to listen, to learn, hear how he navigated decades of ministry.  One of my grasshopper questions struck gold.  I asked him, when did you find a place, a time in your career, ministry when things became predictable, got the lay of land?  When did you get a sense of how things were likely to go? 

Dick Leon was great.  He laughed and laughed.  Finally he composed himself and said, Oh, I never saw that day.  Never saw it.

There are two ways of taking his laughter.  The first is that ministry is so mysterious, and life is so unpredictable that such certainty is never found.  And there is truth in this.  Who can predict tomorrow?  Right?

The other way to take his words is this: if you are following God, if in your life you are running to stand still, if you have learned to trust meekness and cherish mercy, if you have faith in the unpredictable God, you will never find certainty.  You will find salvation.  But you will always be undoing and being undone where curiosity becomes power.  You will find peace without possession, joy without fear.  The miraculous of the mundane, what slipped through Jonah's fingers, will come to linger with you.

There is a well-intended attempt to bring calm, to bring assurance and certainty with the love of God.  God loves you and will keep you.  God will keep your going out and your coming in.  If we confess our sins, God who is faithful and just will forgive us of all unrighteousness.  If we are baptized in his baptism, we will be raised in a resurrection like his.  If the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a house not made of hands eternal in the heavens.

These claims bring consolation to the injured, a guarantee.  Yet, I find no joy in their certainty.  Not that it can't be found in them. I just don't.  I pray to the unpredictable God defying all assurance, the one Jonah gazed at in the light and the dark.  The unpredictable God.  Amen.