From the Prophet Amos:
Do two walk together unless they have made an appointment?
Does a lion roar in the forest when it has no prey?
Does a young lion cry out from its den if it has caught nothing?
Does a bird fall into a snare on the earth when there is no trap for it?
Does a snare spring up from the ground when it has taken nothing?
(From the Daily Office Lectionary – Amos 3:3-5 (NRSV) – December 3, 2013.)
This series of questions is asked by Amos just before he asks, “Does disaster befall a city unless the Lord has done it?” (v. 6b) He’s provoking his readers (originally, his listeners) to answer each preliminary question, “Of course not” so that their answer to his capper will also be “Of course not.”
Amos’ question: “Does disaster befall a city unless the Lord has done it?” Amos’ answer: “Of course not!”
What is Amos saying here? Is Amos promoting that sorry sort of pop theology that says, “Everything happens for a reason” and implies that the reason is the will of God? Is the prophet promoting that equally sorry sort of personal religion that, when some misfortune strikes, asks, “What did I do wrong?” and implies that personal unhappiness, too, is punishment from God for a failure of faith or a paucity of piety?
If so, I reject the notion. I think the prophet is just dead wrong! “Does disaster befall a city unless the Lord has done it?” Sure. Everything does happen for a reason, but not every reason is God’s doing. Sometimes, perhaps more often than not, the reasons have nothing to do with God, and everything to do with the nature of the physical and human reality within which we live.
I used to practice personal injury law litigating cases where misfortune befell people who then sued other people because everything has to be somebody’s fault . . . somebody else’s fault . . . and that somebody should be made to pay damages because of my inconvenience. I reject that notion, too. All too often the cause of injuries and misfortune is pure accident. Nobody did anything wrong. They couldn’t have done anything other than what they did. And yet … well … there’s a bumper sticker that (politely rephrased) reads, “Stuff Happens.”
That’s the nature of reality . . . that sometimes “stuff” just happens. Not because somebody willed it so, not because somebody made a mistake or acted negligently or did anything wrong, and certainly not because God decreed it. It just happens. The great British preacher Leslie Weatherhead once said, “Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.”
In fact, Weatherhead suggested that to blame catastrophes and other terrible events on “the will of God” is “a greater blasphemy than the denial of the Holy Trinity.” He went on to say, “One of the first things we must do is to dissociate from the phrase ‘the will of God’ all that is evil and unpleasant and unhappy.” Evil, he noted, is never creative of good; I think that was his polite British way to say “stuff happens.” But in every circumstance where calamity and misfortune befalls us, where “stuff happens,” there is opportunity for good to be revealed.
So what does a person of faith do with that? When “stuff” happens, what should a person of faith do? That’s a pretty good Advent question because one thing I know about Christmas celebrations is that, invariably, stuff happens. Things don’t go according to plan. Presents get lost or broken. Special dishes don’t get cooked properly (or at all). There are arguments. Feelings get hurt.
Be prepared for it! And when it happens look for the opportunity to redeem it, to sooth the hurt, to be an instrument of God’s good and creative will to redeem the “stuff.”
====================
A request to my readers: I’m trying to build the readership of this blog and I’d very much appreciate your help in doing so. If you find something here that is of value, please share it with others. If you are on Facebook, “like” the posts on your page so others can see them. If you are following me on Twitter, please “retweet” the notices of these meditations. If you have a blog of your own, please include mine in your links (a favor I will gladly reciprocate). Many thanks!
====================
Father Funston is the rector of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Medina, Ohio.
In the library of my parish church is a pen-and-ink drawing of Jesus laughing. It’s not a picture I particularly like, nor is it particularly well executed. In fact, if someone hadn’t told me that it is supposed to show Jesus laughing, I would have thought he was angry! Whenever I look at it, this verse from the Psalter comes to mind.
Friday was a Holy Day in America! It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, of people breathed prayers of thanks. It was a day when all across the nation thousands, if not millions, improved the lives of many, many others. It was a day when news organizations from the smallest local radio station to international broadcast and cable conglomerates asked Americans across the nation, “How did you participate?” Yes, Friday was a Holy Day in America!
Black Friday. The day after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. A day whose name comes from financial accounting and the ancient practice of recording profits in black ink, losses in red. Supposedly, at one time, this was the day when retail merchants who might have been running “in the red” the whole year would see themselves “in the black” at long last. I don’t know if that is still the case, but the name has stuck. Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving Day.
I had to read the first line of this familiar parable three or four times this morning before my eyes (it had to be my eyes; it couldn’t have been my brain) focused well enough to properly read the word landowner. On first reading, I read it as lawnmower. 
Read it carefully, it’s not what you think it is. It’s not what you expect. It’s not a call to make agricultural implements out of the weapons of war . . . it is quite literally the opposite!
This part of Isaiah was written shortly after the return of the Jewish exiles from Babylon, which Cyrus of Persia had allowed in the middle of the 6th Century BCE. Isaiah (on God’s behalf) was promising two things with these images of laborers enjoying the fruits of their own efforts: first, that the people would no longer be (if not slaves) subjugated workers of foreign (or domestic) overlords and, second, that there would be peace. Israel’s and Judah’s history had been one of regular (if not constant) upheaval with invaders coming in and taking control of the vineyards and seizing the people’s lands and homes: the simple planting of vineyards with an expectation of enjoying the crop was a metaphor of peace and security. 
“You shall draw water with rejoicing from the springs of salvation.”
Both my father and my father-in-law were veterans of World War II. My father was gravely injured in France — while he was running from his position as a forward artillery spotter to convey information for the gunners (running because his radio had malfunctioned and he had vital data to convey), shrapnel entered the bottom of his right foot, exited, entered and exited his calf, then entered his thigh and damaged the bone. Wounded, he made it to a place where his information could be transmitted. He was eventually evacuated to England, underwent surgery, and was sent home to the States for therapy and convalescence. He was nearly always in pain from those injuries and frequently found relief in a bottle; it was that drinking that eventually killed him when he lost control of his car in a single-vehicle accident.
Today is the first Sunday in November which means that instead of the normal sequence of lessons for Ordinary Time, we are given the option of reading the lessons for All Saints Day, which falls every year on November 1. So today we heard a very strange reading from the Book of Daniel, a to-my-ear very troubling gradual psalm (in which we sing of wreaking vengeance on the nations and punishment on the peoples, of binding king in chains, and of inflicting judgment on the nobles bound in iron), a bit of Paul’s letter to the Church in Ephesus extolling the riches of the inheritance of the saints, and to Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in which Jesus not only blesses the poor, the hungry, and the weeping, he sighs woefully over the future plight people like ourselves – the comparatively wealthy, those whose bellies are full, and those in relatively good state of mind.
The saints whom we celebrate on this day (and the many who are given special days of individual recognition) were people who tried to live according to the Bible as they understood its teachings. Like us, they read it and encountered those troubling visions, those petulant patriarchs, those bloodthirsty psalms, and somehow looked past them and through them to see the God of faith, the God who Incarnate in Jesus said, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.” We extoll the virtues of those saint and we celebrate their lives and their witness because they help us to do the same. By their lives and their examples, they clean the windshield for us; they clean away the bug blood and the mud, so that we no longer focus on the window, but on the God the window shows us.
