Subject
Hebrews 1:1-4; 2:5-12
It doesn’t take much looking to come to the conclusion that the world as we find it is not as it should be. We hear news reports about wars and rumors of wars, the fear experienced daily by families hunkered down in Syria, fearful of the last battle in that endless civil war. Or maybe it’s a famine caused by changes in rainfall due to our changing climate. Or it might be closer to home in communities surrounded by the flooding created by Hurricane Florence with nowhere to go and no way to get there if they did. And that is just what makes the news, that’s just what rises to the level of press coverage. It doesn’t include a family doing all that it can for a child lost to mental illness, or one that is estranged from one another over money, or one simply trying to break free of an abusive spouse, or a crippling addiction. It doesn’t make the paper when a young person starts cutting themselves in an effort to control a pain that feels out of control, or empties their stomach in the hope of purging something more than their last meal. The list of human suffering just seems to go on and on to the point where it becomes more than most of us can take and we fall into despair. What can be done about it all? We don’t know. But one thing we do know for sure is that it’s not supposed to be like this. Neighbors shouldn’t stop talking to neighbors, friends to friends, family to family because of something that gets said, or a difference of opinion. That’s just not right. The world is not as it should be. This cannot be what God intends for us. This cannot be what God intends for our planet.
Coming to that conclusion isn’t difficult. Deciding what to do about it, once we’ve acknowledged it, can be. One thing that we could do is to deny it, or minimize it at least. Well, it isn’t that bad, we might say. Or, I’ve never had that particular problem, so it can be as terrible as all that. We think that if we can make what’s gone wrong small enough, or ignore it altogether- then we won’t have to acknowledge that there might be a problem, or have to deal with it. We might be able to recognize that the world is not as it should be, but if we’re comfortable enough with where we are and how we got there, there’s little motivation for us to make a change. That might even be reason enough to resist making any kind of change at all. We don’t want to upset the apple cart, even if it is filled with road apples. So we look for diversions, or distractions. We might even go looking for a kind of empty solace, something to make us feel better about how awful it all is. Sure, the world is not what it ought to be, but if I can sing my song and think my happy thought, then maybe it won’t bother me so much.
Another thing we might try is to blame someone else, or something else for why the world is the way it is. It’s this person’s fault, or that person’s fault. Or if we’re really bold, it’s those people with their conspiracy, or their cabal. It’s that group with its agenda. It’s these agitators who are trying to take something away from us. Sure, we might say, the world isn’t as it should be, but if we could just get rid of this group, that tribe, things would be whole lot better. Nothing so wrong that few funerals wouldn’t fix. It’s a chilling thought when taken to its most extreme conclusion. But even when it’s not taken all the way there, the implication may actually part of the problem, and not its solution.
Because in our frustration at a world that isn’t as it should be and those we think are to blame, we might decide that the best thing to do is to armor up and go to battle. Fight the good fight. Rage against the machine. Take up a lance and tilt at the windmills. Convinced of the certainty of what we think, we can’t imagine that we ourselves might be wrong, or might not see the whole picture. We just barrel forward to take up arms against the foe and damn the consequences. Of course the consequences may just damn us in the process. Violence, whether physical or simply rhetorical, almost always begets more violence. To paraphrase Gandhi, if we are forever seeking to get even, an eye for an eye, the whole world goes blind.
Finally there is the fatalist option. The world is not as it should be, we conclude, and there’s nothing really that can be done about it. All we can do is wait for it to all be over and let the angels sort it all out. I call this the Uncle Vanya approach. Chekhov’s play by that name ends with words offered by his spinster niece, Sonya, to her uncle. “We’ll live through a long course of days and evenings,” she tells him, “We will patiently bear all trials...not knowing any rest and when our hour comes we will humbly submit and die, and there, beyond the grave, we shall say that we have suffered, that we wept, that it was bitter for us, and God will take pity on us, and you and I Uncle, dearest Uncle, will see a bright, a beautiful, a shining life and we will rejoice, and we will look back on our present unhappiness with emotion and with a smile, and we will find peace.” “We shall hear the angels, we shall see all the heavens in diamonds,” she assures him. It’s a popular approach. Plenty of people so heavenly minded, waiting on the afterlife, that they are of no earthly good.
But that is not the vision invoked here in Hebrews, a vision aided by these lines from Psalm 8. Small as we are in vast sweep of creation, the unfathomable scope of the universe, the psalmist asks, “what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?” And then marvels, “yet you have made them a little lower than God,” or as this writer amends, “a little lower than the angels.” We have an exalted role in the order of creation. Ours is not simply to do and die, to resign ourselves to a present unhappiness in anticipation of pie in the sky, but we are given a part to play in what God is up to with this creation. This marvelous, multi-faceted creation is made for us by God, given to us to steward and care for. It isn’t given to angels. It is given to us.This is what we are made for, to live in it, to love in it, to thrive and cultivate and curate the bounty of its riches. When someone gives you a gift this good, you don’t set it aside like so much trash waiting for something better.
And in giving the creation to us, and us to it, we can recognize it as both a blessing and a responsibility. So, when we look at the world as it is, the world as we have made it and conclude that it is not as it should be, it’s pretty clear we can no longer deny it, or minimize it, or blame it on someone else, or fight with one another about it. None of those things are helping. They are just how we got ourselves in the fix that we are in.
The world is not as it should be, or as the writer of this letter puts it, “As it is we do not yet see everything subject to [us]. But we do see Jesus.” We see Jesus, who is described at the outset as the appointed heir of all things, the one through whom God created all that is; the reflection of God’s glory and the imprint of God’s being. And yet this Son, whose spiritual place is right next to God, instead became himself a little lower than the angels. We look to Jesus because he didn’t look away from the pain of a world that isn’t what it ought to be, because he didn’t put the blame on someone else but took it upon himself when he took on human being. We look to Jesus because he didn’t go around calling down fire on people and doing battle, but instead reached beyond the tribal lines of his own people, healed the people he wasn’t supposed to touch, ate with the people he wasn’t supposed to sit with or talk to, and challenged the political structures of his time to such an extent that they killed him for it; hung him up on one of the crosses that the Roman Empire used to preserve their power and keep their perverted version of “the peace.” We look to Jesus to see the way we should go in a world that is not as it ought to be, because as the pioneer and perfecter of the trust we put in the one who made us a little lower than the angels, he lived and continues to live in the world as it should be, in order to show us and it what it can be.
We look to Jesus who doesn’t come offering the hazy comfort of some pie in the sky. No, we look to Jesus because he isn’t afraid to suffer the very real pain of living in a world that is not as it ought to be. We don’t take our comfort from some future promise, some abstraction of God’s love. We take comfort in our moments of struggle, our moments of strife, the moments of pain when we feel and know all too well how far the world is from what it is supposed to be- it is precisely in those moments that we take our comfort in the face of Jesus, in the fact of Jesus. And we follow him. We follow him in the way of radical hospitality. We follow him in the way of a different kind of peace, one that is beyond our understanding. We follow him in the way of love that isn’t looking for what’s in it for itself but rather lays itself down for the good, the life, the thriving of another.
When the world isn’t what it ought to be, and that is a whole lot of the time, we look to Jesus to show us the way, so that we too live in it as it should be, in order to show it what it can be. We look to Jesus, and live.
Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit. Amen.