67. What if the Formula Fails? - Better Questions

Text in your questions. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Hello. Welcome to another episode of Better Questions. We wrest with hard questions and seek to ask better ones. And it's been a minute, and I apologize. I've been getting many emails and notes making sure the podcast isn't gone forever. And the fact is it's not. You probably hear it in my voice, but I've just been fighting for my life over here with originally was some kind of respiratory infection and then turned into allergies, and then my body's just really taking its sweet time adjusting to Ohio Spring. Not just the insane, chaotic weather, uh, but also to the blooming of all kinds of new spores. So, all right, no excuse. I should have not taken a month off, but I'm back and hoping to drop this one on a Thursday, and another one will hit your podcast feeds on Monday. That's the plan, at least. This week a question comes in, uh, it comes anonymous. Uh, so I'm just gonna say anonymous. And this is a very personal question. Uh, the question, and I'm gonna paraphrase it because it really came in the form of a paragraph. Um, but the question is like, look, I I'm a person who feels like I've done everything right. I've I pray, I I tithe to my church, I show up, I serve, I read the Bible, I'm in a small group. And even though I did all the things I'm supposed to do as a as a Christian, Jesus follower, my life still fell apart. And now you're asking the question, sort of that wrestling with the big question of if I did everything right, then why didn't it work? And that's a really good question. And I just want to name up front that in this question, I'm not gonna give a tidy answer. You know, that's not really the purpose of this podcast. I'm not gonna tell you that, you know, maybe God was teaching you a lesson or there's something better on the horizon, or give you kind of the pat answer. Um, because you know it's possible that those things could be true. But I think what's probably more helpful is to maybe go into what it's like to be in the wreckage and in the hard thing, whatever the circumstances of your life, which you hinted at but didn't go into too much detail, like the thing that you're feeling is very real. So I think we want to we need to start there. And I hope that whoever's listening today that this would be something that ministers to you as well. Um because I think all of us can relate to it on some level. You know, I think we all receive in the messaging of church, in sermons, in self-help Christian books or whatever, we we sort of absorb this formula, right, that goes like this. If you follow Jesus, then your life will generally go okay. It's not gonna be perfect, but there's gonna be like a baseline stability of protection, of God's blessing that you can expect if you're doing your part. And if something is to go wrong, right, in your faith or your obedience, or maybe you miss a day of prayer or whatever it is, if you fix that, then well, things will get better. Right now, nobody says it that directly, but I feel like that's how sometimes it gets communicated through sermons, testimonies, or whatever. Um it's through the way we talk about answered prayer, right? We celebrate the stories where God says yes and does awesome things when we ask him to. We'd celebrate the times where we overcome really hard things. Um, but we don't always know what to do with the stories where that wasn't the outcome. Theologians will sometimes call this prosperity gospel or like health and wealth gospel. And most of us would say, yeah, we don't we don't believe that. But I think even though we may say we don't believe it, I think it actually lives deeper, more deeply in us than we realize. Because when things go wrong, so often the first place we go is to ourselves. What did I do wrong, or what did I miss, or what did I need to fix? Right? That's the formula at work. And here's the thing I want to say there's no formula that's not good news. I actually think it's a distortion of good news. It becomes, it makes faith sort of this manageable or transactional thing that makes God very predictable. And predictable gods are gods that we think we have some kind of illusion of control over, which ultimately that's a god that we invent ourselves. That's that's not that's not actually the way in which uh we live and move and have our being in this world. And so let me just say this when the formula fails, and it will fail, um, and not just like a you know, oops, I had a bad day. I'm talking about like, oh, your life falls apart. There are some natural things that I think we need to name. One is grief, right? When you've lost something you've loved, whether that's a person, whether that's a community, whether that's a relationship, a job. Um, when you lose that thing, you experience grief. And grief is not in any way, shape, or form a lack of faith. Right? It's it's part of what it means to be human. And I think the second thing that happens is more subtler and maybe even more damaging. It's the shame that comes alongside, and not just the sadness that things went wrong, but there's like this deep almost suspicion that whatever went wrong was somehow my fault or your fault. That if you had prayed harder, believed more, were more faithful, that it would have turned out differently. And so now you're not left holding, you know, you're you're you're not just holding the loss, but you're holding the weight of wondering if you were the person that caused the loss. And it brings about this kind of shame. And I want to be careful here because I also want to recognize that, like, you know, our our choices do have consequences, like they do. But I'm saying that the theological instinct to make every bad outcome as a result of insufficient faith is a bad instinct. And I think it does real damage to people. You know, Brene Brown doesn't really write about theology, but she writes very carefully about um shame and says that shame thrives in secrecy and silence, and that the antidote to shame is not positive thinking, but she argues it's empathy. It's someone saying, Me too, I've experienced that, I've been there. And I think that's that's a deeply biblical principle. Because you have the Bible who are full of people who did everything right and still suffered, right? Take Job, for example, or Joseph, or I mean, the most famous example of Jesus Himself, right? As the disciples watch him die. The formula has never been the deal. The deal has always been something much harder and stranger, and I think more beautiful and more profound than that. And so we could start maybe with the book of Job quickly, because I think many of us know the story, but we haven't really sat with what it's actually saying. Job is described in the first, uh in the first verse of the book as blameless and upright, right? He's followed the formula. A man who feared God and turned away from evil. That's the Bible's description of him, right? Not not his own opinion. That's the that's how he is described. And God himself says this man was doing it right. So you have that piece of the story named, and then what happens if you know the story? Everything falls apart. His children die, his wealth is destroyed, his health collapses, his body is like covered in sores. And then there's this moment where his friends show up, and here's the thing about Job's friends that we often miss that their first instinct is to blame him, right? Because if Job's suffering this badly, he must have done something to deserve it, right? And so Job pushes back, and they there's kind of like this theological debate that's going on because he doesn't accept their explanation. You know, he argues with God, he demands an answer, he refuses to accept that his suffering is simply for the punishment of sin that he can't identify. And there's this part at the end of the book where God rebukes Job's friends. Um, he tells them, you know, they would not have spoken of me. What is right as my servant Job has, and then God vindicates the man who argued and demanded and refused easy answers and Job, right? Not the men who defended the formula. So, like you have these guys who so desperately were trying to explain the why, right? And in the end, God says, No, it was it wasn't the one who was trying to explain it away. It was the fact that Job had suffered and refused the easy answer. And so what does that tell us? It tells us that honest protest, that honest lament, that honest before being honest before God is more faithful than false comforting. That God would rather you tell him that it hurts, that be honest about the pain, be honest about the struggle and the grief and the lament, than to try to have a false sense of comfort and and and almost fake hope. It's like when your friend suffers and you tell them, Well, there's a reason why you're going through this. And it it may the intention and the heart behind that is good. You want them to understand that that maybe there will be some greater purpose, but I don't think it's helpful in the moment because it it sort of diminishes the reality of pain rather than what we see in the Psalms, which is a true expression of lament and struggle. Um so I just think that there's more room in faith for grief and for anger and confusion than maybe we like to think. And we can't stay there forever, you know? We can't stay in our anger, we can't stay in our grief forever, we can't stay in in the pain. Like there is a time in which we are lifted from the ashes, but I think the other opposite danger is if we skip over it or we avoid it, or we try to pretend it doesn't exist. You know what? We're gonna be in the Psalms this summer. Uh, if you're if you're a member of our church, and um there's some really amazing Psalms. Nearly a third of them are laments, right? They're protests, songs of grief and confusion and unanswered prayer. Like Psalm 88 just ends without any resolution, it's just darkness. Psalm 22, Jesus quotes himself uh, or he he quotes from the cross, right? My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That's the exact quote Jesus uses, it's all the way back from Psalm 22. I mean, he puts the songs of people who felt abandoned into like his hymnal or the worship manual we have of the scriptures. And I think what that means is when you feel like God has gone silent, when it seems like the formula is not working, you are not outside his story of faith. You're actually deep inside of it. So even though your life's falling apart, man, that just means you're in good company. It means you're in the same place as the psalmist, it means you're in the same place as Joseph, means you're in the same place as Jesus on the cross, right? It doesn't fix the pain, but it does change what the pain might mean. You know, Walter Brugeman uh wrote a bunch of books on the Psalms and I read a few in in seminary, and he he says that Psalms of Lament are gifts to the church, not problems to be explained away, but invitations to honest prayer. And he argues that when the church loses the practice of lament, it loses the capacity for genuine hope. Because you can't get to resurrection without going through death, right? And so I think it's important for us to recognize what it means to be human. And uh let me let me end by just saying something that I think is true, but I think maybe it's hard to say. Uh, because I it could sound like I'm trying to put a bow on something that that doesn't really have one, like there's a tension here. But a lot of people who go through genuine and sustained suffering, right, the kind where the formula has failed them, come out on the other side with a genuine, different kind of faith. Not a smaller one, right? But a quieter one, maybe a more honest one. Less interested in the performance of certainty, but more interested in the staying and the closeness and the pressing in to Jesus. You know, C. S. Lewis wrote and in grief observed that after his wife died of cancer, you know, he had been one of the great Christian apologists of the century, man could outargue almost anyone on the existence of God, but when Joy, his wife, died, he wrote, Where is God? Go to him when your need is desperate, when all your help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in the face. Man, that he wrote that. Honestly, publicly. But in writing that, he continued to move forward. He didn't land on easy answers, but he landed on presence, on trust, that the silence of God was not the absence of God. And that's what I think survives sort of the once you recognize that the formula isn't gonna work, right? Certainty isn't gonna work, but rather there's a deeper, more powerful, more profound wisdom that is gained when you're faced with deep suffering. And I think that's how faith and spiritual formation truly is formed in us. And so let me leave you with this. If you're in the middle of it right now, if you're holding um the wreckage of something you did, or maybe it's just being in a dry season or wilderness season, just hear this. You are not being punished, you are not a failure, you're a human being in a broken world, held by God, who is neither surprised by your suffering, nor is one who has left you in the midst of it. Because the deal is with that, in the deal is this, in the middle of your exile, he is with you. In the lament, in the silence, in the questions you can't answer, and the prayers that haven't been answered, he is with you. So take heart, hold fast, one step at a time, one lament at a time, one prayer at a time. And in time, I believe that God heals that he puts back the pieces and brings us out of the wreckage. So, with that, thank you for your question. I thank you for listening to Better Questions. If this question or episode landed with you, send it to someone who needs it. If you've got a question you want to wrestle with, send it in. We've got a list going. It's gonna take a while to get through all these, but keep sending them in. Ask BetterQuestionspod at gmail.com, or you can text directly to in the show notes. Uh you can text in your questions there. With that, hope you have a great week. Hope to see you again Monday. Take care. Grace and peace.