Hearts, Broken

The Treehouse: Conversations About God

It is difficult to know where to start.

I’ve been putting off writing about Jesus and the Crucifixion event. It gets all tangled up with this whole horrible system of “a debt paid,” what’s called Atonement Theology. I’m unable to go there, and I’m not alone. Let’s leave it at that for now.

As far as the historicity of Jesus being crucified, extra-biblical corroborations matter. One such mention given a good deal of weight comes from Josephus, a 1st century historian. A recent book provides an extra boost by pointing out that Josephus possibly drew on primary sources who had attended the trial of Jesus and later the apostles.

I accept the likelihood that Jesus was crucified. But rather than focus on theological statements I can’t even say I believe, I want to turn to Luther’s always piercing question, “What does this mean?” and instead look at the motif of crucifixion in the long story of a broken relationship being mended.¹ Not the “how” but the “why.”²

Previously, I’ve pointed to the “withness” of God as being key to my own theology. That may be because I grew up almost like an only child, an “add-on” with sisters who were eight and ten years old when I was born. Landing in an already established family (they even had their own theme song), by the time I was eight both sisters had gone to college, and I grew up wandering the woods and meadows of our northeastern Ohio farm, supremely happy to wander off by myself and stay gone for a whole day. I still tend toward those loner journeys. I relish them. But also, it can get quite lonely. So it’s no surprise I’m drawn to a theology of “God with us” (Immanu-el).

In my years as a pastor, as I walked with those in grief and despair, my belief that we are powerfully accompanied by Divine Love in our human vulnerability, our broken places and our mortality, was what I could offer. It’s not a system. It doesn’t “solve” anything as far as theological arguments go. But it’s what I could say I believed then, and somehow, on the good days, I believe it now. That in suffering and the emptiness of despair, in times of howling grief, the one who is Love has intimate knowledge of those depths and has chosen to share in our ultimate vulnerability rather than remain distant and impenetrable.

Those words seem paltry and utterly inadequate today as we watch the news coming out of Texas, as we learn of the shattering realities that mothers and fathers and families are trying to absorb, grief too enormous to be named. My heart is heavy. I know that dark place of child loss.

But what I keep remembering today as I rail for the zillionth time, “Where are you, God?” is something that happened during my chaplaincy at the children’s hospital in 1990. At the time, I was at my lowest point there. Toddlers with AIDS, teens with cancer, the tiniest infants fighting for their lives in the NICU, and my heart constantly torn between fury and despair.

In the midst of all this, one busy weekend when I was on call, a charge nurse paged me to ask if I could come upstairs to Pediatric ICU and look in on the family of a nine-year-old boy who was dying from complications that had arisen following his latest open-heart surgery.

She told me the family was Roman Catholic. The priest on staff in the Pastoral Care department, who I knew and liked a lot, was on vacation that week. The nurse thought I could offer some support while they waited for their parish priest to arrive.

I stepped into the curtained-off area and introduced myself as the chaplain on call. The mother, in a chair at the boy’s bedside, sat with her arms wrapped around her body as if holding herself together, rocking back and forth. She gave me the briefest nod, then shifted her gaze back to her son and did not look at me again.

The boy lay in the bed, unconscious, light brown hair falling from his smooth brow, his arms outstretched, taped to splints and threaded with IV lines on either side. A strip of wide clear tape covered the long vertical incision down the center of his torso. I stood quietly at the foot of his bed and touched the boy’s feet, praying for peace and comfort to come into the room. I was glad their priest would be there soon, feeling out of place, and glad for the family, too, imagining the relief they would feel when a familiar face arrived to offer familiar words.

About a half hour later, their priest slipped in, but instead of approaching the child or the distraught mother to offer words of comfort, he stood back and off to one side with his Bible open, moving his lips as he read scripture passages in a low voice. I was furious and could not understand why he didn’t go to the mother, to the child. Selfishly, I also was angry he hadn’t taken the weight from me. Exhausted from long hours in the ER with the mother of a five-year-old girl who’d been seriously injured in a car accident and at any moment would likely be declared brain dead, I felt I had nothing left to give.

I moved closer to the priest, inwardly raging. “What are you reading? What possible help could that provide? This child is dying! Have you no heart?”

The God of Presence was conspicuously, horribly absent, and I was losing patience. Then, I looked to see what the priest was reading. Written at the top of the page in his open Bible, the words in bold print jumped out at me — And blood and water flowed from his side.

Jesus dying on the cross as told in John’s gospel. I looked at the child, his outspread arms taped to wooden boards.

I read the words again. And blood and water flowed from his side. Beneath the clear tape over the boy’s wound seeped a mixture of blood and serum.

I excused myself and slipped out of the PICU and paced the empty back hallways, choking on tears. What had I just seen? Was Jesus in the dying boy? Did Jesus walk these halls at night, tiptoe from room to room, inhabit the suffering of all the children? And was God, through Jesus, then truly present in all our sorrows, all our grief? I recalled the night my son died, how the front door opened and friends and neighbors poured in, arriving as if on wings of something that against all odds promised to carry me through.

When I returned to the PICU, the priest had gone. The boy kept dying. The mother kept rocking.

At long last the rest of the family gathered, grandparents and parents and an older brother, and we surrounded the bed in a circle of love, holding hands and praying their dear, sweet boy into the next world as he left this one.

All I can say is, on the days when I do believe, I believe that somehow Divine Love has crossed into our reality — our vulnerability, our despair, our mortality, along with our joys and hopes and dreams — to inhabit all of it with us in a way that will never leave.

I know it’s not enough today. How could there be words that are enough, what could possibly be sufficient to the horrors of these past hours? There are no words for what is unbearable. There is only love, so that no one has to bear it alone.

PLACES TO DONATE FOR VICTIMS OF THE TEXAS FLOODS:

Loving with your dollars counts as love. Southern Oaks Church is in Kerrville and is mobilizing response. World Central Kitchen is en route to Texas. Austin Pets Alive is helping with injured and displaced animals. Feel free to add other suggestions in the comments.

1. Reminding you, I approach this whole enterprise as a love story.

2. Check out the work of Jürgen Moltmann here. Among other important books, he wrote The Crucified God, which you may want to take a look at and which may reframe how you think of “God.”