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I am quite blessed to have been present with Dana when she gave birth to William and Alice. As a man, I felt quite helpless to watch Dana go through all that pain and not really be able to do anything all that helpful. For me it is unimaginable what the pain of giving birth is like. If somebody were to cause as much pain to a person under different circumstances, post-traumatic stress would certainly ensue. But rarely if ever do we hear of women having post-partum traumatic stress symptoms where they relive the painful event of giving birth. Rather, it is quite often the case women are more than willing to go through it again for another child. Apparently, they say, the pain is quickly forgotten for from it comes a new life. The excruciating pain of childbirth is all a part of the miracle of bringing forth a new life, a new person. The instincts of love and hope and wonder and joy overshadow the injustice of the violent pain of the actual birthing.
When I first saw William and Alice, though they were red and wrinkly and looked like little alien babies, I immediately saw their links to people in their past. William had features of my Grandma Benson and Alice had features of my mother. They were part of me. I felt completely humbled and helpless and yet I was protector dad. These were my children and I immediately felt love and the wonder of it all and the reality of it. Things were now all new. The awaited day had arrived. Here were two little lives for whom I was responsible. Who would they become? Only God knows and only time will tell. Birth, life is such a wonder.
Well, it is interesting to me that Jesus compares all the disastrously bad stuff that happens in the world to birth pangs, to the pain of childbirth. Famines, wars, earthquakes, and if you read further, religious persecution and deception and all the suffering those events leave in their wakes are birth pangs. This certainly reframes the question of suffering, I think. Why is there suffering in this world, evil, and natural disasters? It’s because God’s good creation is giving birth to something new and really wonderful and these pains are what we must endure for this new life, this new world to come into existence.
This is Christ the King Sunday or as some call it Reign of Christ Sunday. This is the Sunday we make our case that Jesus is Lord of all creation, that he really is in charge amidst all the Hell that breaks loose in God’s good creation. This isn’t an easy case to make since reality is stacked against us. The number one reason people say they don’t, won’t, or will no longer believe in God, especially a God who loves us and gets personally involved in our lives, is that there is so much suffering, evil, injustice, disease, poverty, and so forth in the world. So, if God is so loving, how can he let these terrible things happen? Why doesn’t he wave his hand and heal this broken world?
Well, let’s take a look at the state of the world. Major earthquakes happen frequently on planet Earth with devastating effect, but sometimes we just have to say this was a bit excessive. I remember hearing the news of the tsunami caused by an earthquake in the Indian Ocean that hit southeast Asia on Sunday, December 26, 2004 killing over a quarter million people in an instant. Mother Earth seems to have hit Western Canada this year with climate change vengeance – wildfires, drought, and now floods. The consensus of the scientific community is that these weather events are all part of climate change. Earthquakes happen when they happen, but these weather events will become more frequent and violent and they are our fault. We’ve brought them about due to our love of fossil fuels and global leadership not wanting to make the unpopular decisions to curb the situation.
On the war front, the people of Afghanistan will go hungry this winter because of power hungry religious zealots who want to rule but don’t know how to feed people. But before we get too hard on that regime, we need to note that there is a global food shortage besetting humanity at present and all the while the human population will pass 8 billion any day now. It’s doubled in my lifetime. There are way too many people on this planet and over fifty percent of them, mostly children live in conditions of poverty. Meanwhile, we are all waiting patiently for Elon Musk to fork over those 6 billion dollars of his personal wealth that he said he would give if somebody could show him how it could solve global hunger…and somebody did but he hasn’t shown the money. Celebrity fixes aside, the problem of global hunger could be solved if global leadership would put feeding people and ending poverty at the top of their agendas instead of simply protecting the economic interests of those who have wealth hoping it will trickle down.
We are in the thralls of a pandemic that in the last 20 months has killed 5.1 million people. That’s just the tip of the iceberg as so many nations have not given accurate death counts because it makes their leadership look bad. Some very effective vaccines have been developed but the drug companies who developed them won’t release the patents so that generic versions can be produced and distributed faster and more widely to poorer nations. World governments won’t force them.
The state of the world is a mess and I haven’t even mentioned all the personal and family tragedies that befall us all that hurt us deeply. But from just taking a cursory look at the state of the world, I don’t think I’m wrong to surmise that global leadership, the kings and queens of the earth so to speak, for whatever reason are not making the necessary decisions that solve the problems that afflict humanity and the planet we live on. We need King Jesus to come and put things right. The situation is more precarious than it was 2,000 years ago. But where is he? It seems he rode into Jerusalem stirred some stuff up and is now sitting and watching from a neighbouring hillside and we are left asking the question he seems to avoid answering: When?
But to give credit where credit is due, I’m a person of faith. I follow Jesus not because I have made intellectual assent to doctrines because somebody threatened me with eternal consequences if I didn’t. My answer to the question of where is King Jesus is that he is with us. I have had too many personal experiences of his presence and his acting on my behalf to discount him and faith in him as rationally impossible. The work of the Holy Spirit in me has brought me to know that I am a beloved child of God. That has changed everything for me. I’ve encountered the presence and work of the Holy Spirit amidst Christian gatherings to the extent that I know God is working in his good creation in and through individual churches and individual believers as healing and reconciling signposts pointing humanity to the better future God has in store for us.
But, be warned, let’s not necessarily equate God’s work in the world with the religious institution of the Church. We know the religious institution of the Church has done horrible things throughout history in Jesus’ name. That’s not Jesus. Rather, He works dynamically in the power of the Holy Spirit Jesus through individual believers, through gatherings of believers, works that have set in motion larger movements that change the world for the better in order to point us forward to a better day coming. But, as soon as we make a stayed in the wool institution out God’s mighty acts and get religious about it and make religious practices the practice of our faith rather than actual faithfulness in the moment we go astray and, sadly, astray in Jesus’ name just as he said it would happen.
So, I know where Jesus is but I still have some difficulty answering the question as to why God continues to allow his good creation, his beloved humanity, his beloved children suffer and to suffer evil at that. There is a grave futility set loose in God’s creation that truly makes us question his justice and love and for some reason God lets it persist and only gives us small tastes of good things to come by making his presence known and felt.
The answer Jesus hints at for this delay is this metaphor of birth pangs. God’s good creation is in the process of giving birth to a new creation. All things will be made new. There will be resurrection. There will be justice rendered in the form of forgiveness and healing. God’s good creation will be cleansed of that futility. As in childbirth the labour pains can be excruciating and they start to come closer and closer together so that relief seems impossible, but the baby comes. No one can say exactly when a child will finally come forth and the labour pains end, but when it arrives, everything changes. Everything’s new, different, full of hope and wonder.
So let us stay awake and not lose sight of the hope and wonder of the new life that is coming. I don’t wish to dismiss the reality of the pain and suffering that we all go through and the terrible affliction that globally people are suffering, but as they say with childbirth, the pains and trauma of labour are soon forgotten. Paul writes, “I consider the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us” (Rm. 8:18). We must set our sights and gear our lives towards that new reality that’s coming. Love as we have been loved by God. Show kindness and hospitality. Be generous. Be beacons of hope in our communities as individuals and as faith communities. We are the ones who know that creation is pregnant and in the painful process of giving birth. So, we need to make sure we are doing everything we can to keep this birth from being anymore painful that it already is, but rather be good coaches, good midwives of the new creation. Amen.
