Science, medicine, and politics can answer lots of our questions about where the coronavirus came from and what it is doing in and among humans. But another set of questions arises in times like this. Can we find any meaning or purpose in this suffering? Can we find any meaning or purpose in our lives right now? Is God present, and loving, and real? Where is God in the midst of suffering? In this episode, Amy Julia looks at what Paul writes about who Jesus Christ is as a way to understand who God is in the midst of suffering and how voluntary self-sacrifice motivated by love equips and empowers us to find meaning and experience God’s loving presence in our current moment.
Show Notes:
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Thanks for listening!
Science, medicine, and politics can answer lots of our questions about where the coronavirus came from and what it is doing in and among humans. But another set of questions arises in times like this. Can we find any meaning or purpose in this suffering? Can we find any meaning or purpose in our lives right now? Is God present, and loving, and real? Where is God in the midst of suffering? In this episode, Amy Julia looks at what Paul writes about who Jesus Christ is as a way to understand who God is in the midst of suffering and how voluntary self-sacrifice motivated by love equips and empowers us to find meaning and experience God’s loving presence in our current moment.
Show Notes:
Connect with me:
Thanks for listening!
Note: This transcript is generated using speech recognition software and does contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
1 (2s):
Hello. And welcome to season two of the love is stronger than fear podcast. I'm your host, Amy Julia Becker, and each week we're going to take a look at current events, AKA the Corona virus, and we're going to consider a small portion of Paul's letter to the Philippians. Paul wrote this letter under adverse circumstances, and he wrote about how to know joy, peace, hope, and love, not by denying the hardship of the moment, but by knowing God in the midst of that hardship, I hope that reading the Bible in our current moment of uncertainty and turmoil will help us to turn away from fear and toward love.
1 (48s):
Thank you for joining me
2 (53s):
Like many Americans. I have been reading the news and listening to the news and hoping that the news will change all the time. I wake up in the morning and I check my phone and I scroll through multiple different websites and pretty much everything that I see has the word Corona virus or COVID 19 in the headline. And what's strange is that even though I don't want everything to have that in the headlines, I also don't particularly want to read the stories that have to do with anything else, because it seems irrelevant.
2 (1m 27s):
And yet one of the things I've noticed as I have been reading the news and listening to the news and watching the news in recent weeks is that although we have a preponderance of scientific stories, economic stories, and medical stories to consume, there have also been a number of stories about religion, about Judaism, about moral philosophy, about Christianity. And I think that I have not done any sort of data driven study to confirm this, but I think that these stories, these articles and these essays are appearing in and amongst secular news sources more often than they typically do.
2 (2m 11s):
So for example, a couple of weeks ago, there was a lovely article in the new Yorker about church, about rural church in particular about being a part of a worshiping congregational body. I'll make mention of that in the show notes, if you want to read it, there was recently an article in the New York times that was a profile of a Lieutenant governor out in Washington state, who was a rising political star. And recently decided that instead of pursuing his political ambitions, he wanted to become a Jesuit priest.
2 (2m 44s):
And this article was linked to the coronavirus. Although this man had been headed in that direction for some time, recognizing the questions that come up in a time of global suffering, made him all more ready to ask questions of meaning and purpose and to say, you know what, having it all in a worldly sense is actually not what I want. I want to serve people. I want to love people. I want my life to make a difference and to write who is a British theologian and Bishop was writing for time magazine.
2 (3m 23s):
You wrote an article that was entitled. Christianity offers no answers about the coronavirus it's not supposed to. And I want to just quote from the end of his essay, he's writes, it's no part of the Christian vocation to be able to explain what's happening and why, but in some ways the reason that anti right has an article in time is because people are saying, how can we explain what is happening and why people are asking that question?
2 (3m 54s):
And we have scientific answers for what is happening and why. And we have economic answers and we've got medical answers, but human beings don't just need science and economics and politics. We don't even simply need psychology and sociology. We need a sense of meaning. We need a sense of purpose. We need a sense of what matters and why it matters as human beings. And we tend to turn to philosophy and religion to try to answer those questions.
2 (4m 28s):
And I think that is why in the New York times and in time magazine and in the new Yorker and also in the Atlantic and in the Washington post and in Vox and insulate and all these different places, writers are able to speak to religion and philosophy right now. And it's relevant. It's relevant in the age of the Corona virus, we are looking to make meaning out of our current situation. Even as I think many of us are afraid that there might be no meaning to be made C S Lewis is most famous, probably for being the author of the Chronicles of Narnia.
2 (5m 4s):
He also was a British professor and theologian, and he wrote a number of books. And in one of them, he wrote a man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread. He may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic, but surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race, which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist in the same way though, I do not believe I wish I did that.
2 (5m 38s):
My desire for paradise proves that I shall enjoy it. I think at a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. So what Lewis is saying here is that our longings actually tell us something about who we are, our longing for bread, which is to say hunger, physical hunger tells us we were made to be people who eat and who actually, as he says, repair our bodies by eating our longing for human connection, tell us that we were not made to be alone.
2 (6m 12s):
We were made for each other. We were made for families and for friendships and for connections and our longing, I believe for a sense of meaning and purpose for something that will, in some way, explain to us or answer for us. The suffering in the world indicates perhaps that there is a way to uncover that. Meaning I believe that that longing points to at least the possibility of a personal God points to at least the possibility of human beings, having a spiritual dimension to who we are in all of us that is always present, but that we are attending to even more right now because of the uncertainty and the suffering that's going on.
2 (7m 4s):
Where is God in the midst of human suffering? It's a question that's been around probably since human beings have been around, but it is around in a more pressing way right now because of the death toll and the degree of fear for the future that human beings are facing apparently starting on April 7th. So now a couple of weeks ago, COVID-19 became the highest daily cause of death in the United States.
2 (7m 37s):
It was soon followed by heart disease and cancer. There are over 1500 people who die every day in the United States of both heart disease and cancer. And right now there are also in an unexpected way. Uh, there are 1700 people a day dying of COVID-19. We've been jolted into an awareness of our vulnerability and our limitations and the reality of death, but it's not just this grim reality that we all face our human mortality that we're seeing right now.
2 (8m 9s):
It's also that when suffering starts to happen, we see all sorts of other things. We might rather not see about ourselves and the people around us. We see abuse and violence. We see addiction and despair. We see vulnerable people who are being harmed. We see injustice, we see nursing homes where vulnerable people are dying in really large numbers and do not have the staff or the capacity to be cared for.
2 (8m 41s):
We see people without means for education, who are just being left by the wayside. We see this virus running through prisons and other populations of people who are in close quarters and who do not have recourse to medicine. We see this virus harming people with lower socioeconomic status and, uh, of different racial and ethnic groups who are on the margins. Virus is also actually revealing fissures in families and in marriages, in the Wu Han province of China, when the lockdown restrictions were lifted, apparently there was a surge of couples who went to file for divorce because they had just seen things.
2 (9m 28s):
They didn't want to see presumably about themselves and about each other. So all this is to say that there's a lot of suffering right now, and it's not just the suffering that comes from sickness and from death. And there's a lot of question about where is God, is there meaning, is there a purpose? Is there a God who is both personal, loving and powerful? Because if there is, how can we make sense of this all?
2 (9m 58s):
So in last week's episode, I talked about when Paul writes to the Philippians that they should have the same love that they should lay down their lives for one another, not consider themselves more important than other people. It's a vision of unity and harmony. It's really beautiful. It seems very unrealistic and idealistic. And so we talked about what keeps us from having this kind of love, what impedes this vision of unity and harmony in the human condition.
2 (10m 32s):
And I mentioned that distraction, fear and injustice are all these agents of keeping us from that kind of love agents that keep us from that kind of love. And honestly, these are agents that destroy over time, our human souls and our human connections, distraction, fear, and injustice. And I'm turning to the question of what allows and motivates this vision of human cooperation, what allows and motivates human unity.
2 (11m 7s):
But to do that, to talk about how we get to love, we actually have to talk about suffering because what's strange is we don't overcome distraction by just starting to pay attention to the right things. We don't overcome fear by praying correctly. All of a sudden we don't overcome injustice with activism. We overcome those things with love and love might show up as paying attention and praying or getting some therapy love might show up through activism, but the way we overcome distraction, fear and injustice is by understanding the source of love, connecting to that source of love and living out of that love.
2 (11m 54s):
And for us to do that, we need to look at the person of Jesus and understand more about what it meant for Jesus to live a life of love and to offer that life to us at a different point in the Bible. Paul writes that Jesus is the image of the invisible God. In other words, if we want to know what God looks like, then we look at Jesus. So is God angry and judgmental is God distant and disconnected.
2 (12m 25s):
Scott absent. Nonexistent is God loving, but impotent. These are the types of questions that human beings have thrown around for many, many ages. And they, again, lead to this question of how can God be good and loving and personal and powerful. If so many people experience so much suffering. And what Paul says is Jesus shows us what God is like the way to try to answer that question is to look to Jesus.
2 (12m 56s):
And so Paul goes from this vision of ideal human love and unity and harmony to an exclamation about the person of Jesus. And here's what he says. This is Philippians chapter two, verses five through 10. He says, let the same mind be in you. That was in Christ. Jesus, who though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness and being found in human form.
2 (13m 38s):
He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name. So that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bend in heaven and on earth and under the earth. And every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God. The father, most commentators think that what Paul is doing here is actually quoting from a really early Christian him or liturgy something that the Christians said to each other, to remind themselves of what they believed about this person, Jesus Christ, who they had known, who they had come to worship after they began to believe that his death was meaningful after they began to believe that he had been risen from the dead, they began to remind themselves that Jesus was in the form of God, that he was preexistent in some mysterious and mystical way that I'm not going to get into right now that he was a co-creator and that he chose enter into humanity, not just by becoming human and walking around and teaching and healing and doing all of those things, but even becoming obedient to the point of death and death on a cross, the worst form of human torture and crucifixion that we had come up with by that point.
2 (15m 13s):
And Paul doesn't actually say why Jesus did that in this passage here, but he does say it elsewhere. In Romans chapter five, verse eight, Paul writes to demonstrate his own love for us. Christ died for us. And there are other famous passages in the Bible like John three 16 for God. So loved the world that he sent his only son. In other words, God is motivated by love and the way God enters into human suffering, the way God demonstrates the love that he has for us is by sending his son to us.
2 (15m 58s):
So God is motivated by love and God's power is only ever expressed through love, which is to say it is not expressed through coercive action. It's not expressed through just getting his own way without any reference to us, but rather it is invitational and sacrificial. That's what we see here is an act of voluntary self sacrifice, motivated by love.
2 (16m 31s):
That's what Paul is pointing to in what Jesus did in both becoming human, but then also in becoming human to the point of death, to the point of entering in all the way to human suffering, even death on a cross, I think there are a number of things that we can glean from this. When it comes to where God is in the midst of suffering. One is that God does not cause suffering. God does not want suffering.
2 (17m 3s):
God does not intend for suffering to exist, but two is that God does not eliminate suffering. God does not use power to wipe out suffering, but rather God suffers with us. And God suffers for us. God enters into suffering in the person, the work, the life and the death of Jesus. And then God redeems suffering.
2 (17m 33s):
God does not allow suffering to have the last word, but actually overcomes the worst that suffering has to offer. And God invites us to participate in that work invites us, participate in the intentional sacrificial, redemptive, ongoing work of love to undo the pain of suffering. Even as we endure the pain of suffering.
2 (18m 4s):
This might all seem really abstract. And I'm sorry about that. I can get off on some theological, not tangents, but just into some Hetty theology pretty easily. If it feels really abstract, what I have to recommend is taking time to look at the person of Jesus, because these are abstract ideas about suffering and God and the nature of the universe. And God has made that also concrete in the person of Jesus.
2 (18m 34s):
And we have the witness, the testimony to who Jesus is written down in the gospels. So if you want to know what God looks like, if you want to know how God engages with humans in the midst of suffering, then the way to know that is to look to the life of Jesus and spend time there. But for us today, and looking at this passage from Philippians, where I want to close is by talking about what could motivate us to enter in to voluntary self sacrifice in the same way that Jesus did Jesus entered in to humanity and entered in even to death.
2 (19m 17s):
And he did that because of love. Similarly, for us, we do not volunteer for self sacrifice because we want to show off and we don't volunteer for self sacrifice because we want to harm ourselves, right? We volunteer for self sacrifice because we have been equipped and empowered to do so by the love of God. And because we are motivated to participate in the love of God In this passage, Paul writes earlier about the Philippians already having encouragement, constellation, sharing, compassion, and sympathy.
2 (20m 2s):
If you've already experienced the love of God, Paul is saying, then live that way, participate in the love of God. Look for the ways that you are being distracted from love. Look for the ways that you are letting fear win instead of love. Look for the ways that you are participating in injustice. Look for the ways that you can live a life of voluntary self-sacrifice that is motivated by love.
2 (20m 38s):
I mentioned the word privilege and at some length last week, and the way that privilege is a set of unearned social advantages that lead run just social divisions. But I want to close today by talking about a different type of privilege. This is a passage actually from my book, white picket fences, where I'm writing about suffering and about experiences of being invited into relationships, particularly with my mother-in-law in which the privilege of being human was very different from the social privileges that I've enjoyed in my life.
2 (21m 17s):
So I want to close here. This is from a chapter in white picket fences called looking up the privilege of whiteness and wealth can become a wall against the privilege of being human loved, not for status or performance, but simply loved and able to give love in return, not because of obligation, but in grateful response to an invitation. I have been given much that I do not deserve. And my very real social privilege has cut me off from others as much as it has also made my life comfortable.
2 (21m 53s):
But social privilege is not the end of my story. The real privilege of my life has come in learning what it means to love others that love involves suffering and sacrifice and sleepless nights and tears and heartache and great gifts. It makes sense to talk about privilege in terms of access to private clubs and schools and bank loans and preferential treatment by authorities. It makes sense to expose the injustices of privilege and call for them to be rectified.
2 (22m 24s):
But there is also the privilege of cleaning the wounds of people you love, or of participating in healing and new life of becoming vulnerable and needy and receiving love and care. There is another type of privilege privilege that connects instead of divides that shimmers through the air, like a line of light available. If only we stop counting the coins and look up right now in this time of global suffering in this time of global questioning, does God exist?
2 (23m 1s):
Where is God in the midst of suffering? What are the lines that divide us? How can I make meaning out of my life right now, we have an invitation to look for the love that underscores the universe to receive that love and to participate in it. It will involve suffering for us to be a part of the love of God, because we too will willingly enter in to sacrifice on behalf of other people, not for the sake of sacrifice, but because we believe that love is the most powerful force.
2 (23m 43s):
That love is more powerful than suffering death. That love is stronger than fear or that love will ultimately be all that remains. I wish that I had airtight answers to the question of where God is in the midst of suffering. I wish I had airtight answers to how this is all gonna work out and how we are going to see redemption and how we are going to see love when I don't have those things.
2 (24m 17s):
But I do have the experience of knowing a God who has shown himself through the person of Jesus, not only to love humanity so much that he came to join it, but actually to love humanity so much to say, I will enter all the way into suffering and death for you. I am so motivated by my love for you, that I will endure the worst that you've got to offer.
2 (24m 49s):
I will take it for you. I will be there with you and I will remain, but I do have the promise throughout scripture and throughout the life and death and resurrection of Jesus that God does not avoid suffering. That God does not deny soft suffering, that God does not ignore suffering, but rather enters into it. Suffers with us, suffers for us, redeems our suffering and invites us to join him in lives of voluntary self sacrificial, ongoing participatory love.
2 (25m 34s):
I hope you will join me in figuring out what it looks like to live lives of love, even at a cost in these times of suffering and hardship and sorrow. And I hope that we together will discover what it means to be go deeper in our souls to live lives of attention of prayer of action, rather than lives of distraction and fear and injustice. I hope you will join me in learning what it means in our fumbling and limited and vulnerable ways to be people who believe that love is stronger than fear.
2 (26m 17s):
I realized after I finished recording this podcast episode, that I hadn't intended to go back to the N T Wright article that I mentioned from time magazine earlier in the episode, because I wanted to just read his full quotation earlier. I read this initial part where he writes it is no part of the Christian vocation, then to be able to explain what's happening and why, but he says more than that. And honestly, I do recommend the whole article, which I will put in the show notes, but here's the full quotation.
2 (26m 53s):
It is no part of the Christian vocation then to be able to explain what's happening and why. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation, not to be able to explain and to lament instead as the spirit laments within us. So we become even in ourself isolation, small shrines, where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. And out of that, there can emerge new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific, understanding,
1 (27m 28s):
New hope. So I had to just record that at the end of this podcast, because it sums up so much of what I want to offer to you all new possibilities, new acts of kindness, new scientific, understanding, new hope as we become small shrines, where the presence and healing love of God can dwell. May it be so thanks again for tuning in to the love is stronger than fear podcast.
1 (28m 1s):
If you enjoyed this podcast, you can find more resources at my website, Amy, Julia, becker.com. And if you found today's episode helpful, please share it with friends and take a minute to rate and review it wherever you find your podcasts, see you next week.