A Dying Life, Part 1: Being Born [Lent 1]

Job 10:8-19

Luke 4:1-13

What God offers us is a limited life; a life with borders; a life that begins and ends.  We can either receive this gift with gratitude.  Or we can live in perpetual complaint  – wishing we had some other kind of life.  Since this is the first Sunday of Lent, let me put a finer point on it.  What God offers you is a dying life.  That’s the only kind of life there is.  It can be a wonderful life, full of love, goodness, beauty, and purpose.  But if we fail to receive our lives as God’s beloved creatures, then we will turn our lives into what we might call a “living death.” 

 

The life that God gives to each of us begins with birth.  All of us enter life in the same messy, painful, traumatic way.  We’re conceived in our mother’s womb, nurtured in the dark from our mother’s own bodies, and then born: slimy, purple, and gasping.  Now we don’t remember it.  But that’s how it happens. 

If we come to the season of Lent with the hope of experiencing growth, of deepening our faith, of increasing our love for God and others, it will require some difficult honesty about our limited lives.  It will require us to remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.  Finding a new path will require us to recognize that the lives we have been given are the small lives of God’s creatures, all of whom are dependent on one another for flourishing and well-being.

We probably don’t reflect on ourselves as God’s creatures often enough.  And when we do, we usually turn to the opening chapters of Genesis for its account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.  There are three reasons I’m not doing that today.

First, Genesis is primarily a story about the ways God delivers us from harm, and not primarily a reflection on what it means for us to be God’s creatures.  Second, in Genesis, death is an alien and unnatural feature of human life, a punishment for wrongdoing.  Had Adam and Eve not sinned, the story suggests, they would have never died.  Third, the Genesis story imagines God creating fully formed human beings.  And these adult creatures were perfect (at least before they “fell” into sin).  So there was no room for change, growth, and development.  The only change that happens is a falling from their perfection.

Now let’s consider the book of Job, from which our reading is taken today:

First, Job is “wisdom literature,” along with Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Song of Solomon.  “Wisdom” literature is quite peculiar.  Whereas most of the stories in the Bible deal with God delivering us and saving us, not so with the Wisdom books.  The Wisdom books, like Job, say absolutely nothing about God delivering or saving.  Rather than looking at God’s decisive acts in history to deliver and to save, they invite us to reflect on how God creates and sustains us through the ordinary, natural processes of birth, development, and death. 

Second, wisdom literature like Job assumes that all creatures are limited, fragile, vulnerable, subject to injury, accident, death, and decay.  In wisdom literature, death is a normal and natural part of life.  We don’t die because we’ve done something wrong.  We don’t die as a result of God’s punishment.  We die because God created a range of creatures with limited life-spans. 

Third, wisdom literature like Job directs our attention to the way all creatures change, develop, grow, and learn across a lifetime.  Human beings don’t come from God fully formed.  We are born as infants, utterly dependent upon our mothers and a larger network of caregivers for life and health.  As creatures who begin at birth, our bodies will grow into a range of powers over time and develop through several different stages of life.   This development and change is not a falling away from any standard of perfection.  It is simply the way all life unfolds across time.

Job tells the story of God creating him as the story of his having been born.  Notice that Job imagines God intimately at work in the normal and natural processes of conception, pregnancy, and birth.

“Your hands shaped me and made me . . . you molded me like clay . . . you poured me out like milk and curdled me like cheese . . . you clothed me with skin and flesh . . . you knit me together with bones and sinews” (v. 8-11).  (We might chuckle at Job’s picture of milk curdling into cheese, but before embryology and genetics, ancient cultures relied on vivid imagery like this to express the wonder of pregnancy and birth.)

The reason that Job appeals to the story of his birth is that he cannot understand his life.  His suffering, loss, and failure have confounded and confused him.  Life has become so challenging that he wonders whether God has turned against him.

“Your hands shaped me and made me.  Will you now turn and destroy me?” Job asks (v. 8).

“Remember that you molded me like clay.  Will you now turn me to dust again?” Job asks (v. 9).

Job knows that as one of God’s creatures, as part of the wider creation, he is responsible to God.  He is accountable for the shape of his life and particularly for how he responds to God.  “If I sinned, you would be watching me and would not let my offense go unpunished” (v. 14).  “If I hold my head high, you stalk me like a lion, and again display your awesome power against me” (v. 16).

Job’s troubles have become so intense and so overwhelming to him that he regrets being created at all.  He regrets having been born.  “Why then did you bring me out of the womb?  I wish I had died before any eye saw me.  If only I had never come into being, or had been carried straight from the womb to the grave” (v. 18-19).

Job’s circumstances are certainly unique.  God allowed him to be tested by the experience of losing his wealth, losing his health, and losing his own family.  No wonder Job questioned why God ever brought him out of his mother’s womb!  While we don’t share the severity of Job’s suffering, we do share his bewilderment and confusion.  We too wonder why our efforts to live a good life frequently come to nothing, while those who lie, steal, cheat, and harm others often seem to thrive.  We too experience a world that seems disordered and out of alignment.  And yet we know, like Job, that we are still responsible for our lives.

Job knows that human beings are part of the animal kingdom.  He knows that the processes of reproduction are basically the same for us as for the other kinds of animals.  And yet Job also knows that as one of God’s human creatures he is capable of responding to God.  He is capable of arguing with God about pain and suffering and confusion.  And God can hold him accountable for the nature of his response. 

It turns out that Job is an upright and honest man.  The difficulties that came his way were not, contrary to what his friends assumed, some kind of punishment for wrongdoing.  In this way, Job’s faithfulness can point us to Jesus himself, the one who is faithful to God even in the face of temptation. 

Jesus from Nazareth was born to a mother like us.  He began life as a vulnerable and dependent newborn, only to develop and mature into adulthood.  Because he was one of God’s creatures, he could feel the anxiety and confusion that is part of our experience.  He was tempted to avoid this small life by grabbing for some other kind of life – a life of success, comfort, and power over others.  And yet he resisted temptation.  He lived his dying life in utter fidelity to God.  He trusted God with his life from beginning to end, even when the religious experts and the politicians did the worst they could do to him.

So how would we live if we received from God the gift of our limited lives?  How can we grow deeper in our gratitude for having been born?

If reading Scripture is one of your Lenten practices, you may want to consider reading some of the “wisdom” literature, perhaps Job or Proverbs.

If praying is one of your Lenten practices, you may want to learn to pray in ways that involve paying attention to your surroundings, observing how the world around you works, reflecting on the way your own life is embedded within, and woven together with, the rest of creation. 

We might want to follow Jesus’ lead and walk out into the wilderness of our own temptations, facing with honesty the forces that pull us away from God’s grace and goodness.  Where have we have gotten caught in vicious cycles of “living death”?  What am I addicted to?  Where are my loves and attractions distorted or bent?  What do I think I can’t live without?  Am I loyal to a cause or a project that puts me at cross-purposes with my identity as one of God’s creatures?

We might want to pivot, shift gears, change directions, or try something new.  Far too often we assume that a faithful life is a life that stays the same.  And yet the life God offers to us is a life that begins with our being born and develops over a whole lifetime – physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  Through time, we discover new gifts and abilities.  In different phases of life new strengths and interests emerge.  Rather than return to some previous stage of life, we may need to press forward into new territory. 

We might want to stop fighting with our limitations and instead receive them as gifts from God.  Some of these limitations would involve the way we get tired and need rest and sleep; our need for time off of work to play and relax; our need for the nourishment of food and water; our interdependence with lots of others for help and support; the way we have to say no to some good things; the way our soft bodies are vulnerable to accidents and sickness.

Finally, we can begin the work of offering ourselves to God and our neighbors, but now without any complaint or apology for how small we are or how little we may have to offer.  We can begin the work of receiving from God the gift of a dying life, so that we can share it with others.       

If you’re like me, you don’t like to be reminded that the one we claim to adore and follow says to us, “Take up your cross and follow me.”  What we fear is that we’re being called to some kind of burden we would rather avoid.  Is this some twisted extra-credit assignment?  That beyond the struggle to get from day to day there is this call from Jesus to look around for extra difficult things to do? 

No.  When Jesus calls us as his disciples to take up our cross and follow him, he is not asking us to do something extra.  He is asking us to welcome the suffering and difficulty that is part of every life.  He is warning us against avoiding the pain involved in life; avoiding the heartbreak guaranteed to happen when our attempts to be kind, to share, to show mercy, to tell the truth are crucified by the forces of hatred, revenge, selfishness, and greed.

There is much that is difficult about receiving from God the gift of “a dying life.”  Yet it is the only life God offers to us.  And in welcoming it, we free ourselves from the vicious cycle of frantically trying to make something of ourselves.  And we welcome the only possibility of deep joy available for those who will follow their Lord into the way of death.