Lightning Bugs Over The Mudhole
Sermon
Rejoicing In Life's 'Melissa Moments'
The Joys Of Faith And The Challenges Of Life
The usual way is to speak of the problem of evil. How can there be so much misery and suffering in the world if God is both all-powerful and supremely good? It would appear either that God cannot or will not prevent or overcome suffering. If we say that God cannot, we question divine omnipotence. If we say God will not, we impugn God's love. Certainly the reality of evil is a fundamental problem for believers. It erodes the faith of many. Paul Tillich was a chaplain in World War I. He reported that the atheism he found among soldiers was most often rooted in their experience of massive suffering they experienced in the mud and blood of the trenches. You may have heard that there are no atheists in foxholes. Well, there are, and some of them become atheists by living in those very foxholes in the hell that war is.
The problem of evil is as real and threatening today. Misery, pain, and injustice are all around us. They are an ever present part of our consciousness. We remember Hitler and the slaughter of millions of Jews and other people. The very mention of Dresden, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima brings to mind the horror of modern war. We read about hunger and poverty on a global scale. Our television sets keep vividly before us the images of starving children. They are no more than skin and bones. Flies walk across dirty faces that display their inner agony. We can give specifics about the deep hatreds fermenting for centuries in the Middle East. Young Israeli soldiers shoot teenage Palestinians. Both groups are caught up in a demonic destructiveness they neither created nor can control. We are well acquainted with the threat of global extinction associated with nuclear war and ecological catastrophe. Newspapers tell us about earthquakes and hurricanes, cancer and babies with AIDS. We are not ignorant of hopelessness, murder, rape, child abuse, and the drug problem. We have read Camus, Kafka, and Beckett. Evil in all its forms continues to be a threat to our lives and to our faith.
It is hard to understand the giant agonies of the world if we believe in an Almighty Love. Nevertheless, it may be even more difficult to comprehend the goodness on earth if God is indifferent or impotent. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is not that bad things happen to good and bad people alike. Maybe the biggest puzzle is the surprising, unexpected, unexplainable, gratuitous fact of life itself and its potential for enjoyment. What needs to be accounted for is the reality of pleasure, delight, and joy in the world. The problem of evil is urgent and inescapable. However, I want to turn the question around and deal instead with the problem of the good.
A friend of mine sent me an article he had written. The theme for the day is indicated by the title: "Fireflies in the Quagmire." Translated into a vocabulary reflecting my rural Georgia background, I ask, "Why are there lightning bugs flying over the mudhole?" Granted that the world is full of evil, nevertheless, how do we account for the good we experience in this life?
Take, first of all, the fact of existence itself. The most amazing, stupendous, inexplicable thing I know of is that I am, that I exist. A bedroom in the home of my parents in Georgia has a dresser in it that has been in the family as long as I can remember. It has a large central mirror with two smaller mirrors that fold in toward the middle. When I was a child, I used to amuse myself by standing in front of this dresser. I would pull the side mirrors against the back of my head and look at the endless reflections of reflections of myself that bounced off the three mirrors. After a while I would tire of that and look directly at myself eyeball to eyeball. Staring at myself at close range soon took on a kind of strangeness as all disappeared from my mind except the awareness of my awareness. I was conscious of nothing but being conscious. The mystery of this intrigued me. "Well, here I am, and I am really here. Why am I here? Why does anything exist? Why is there something rather than nothing?" I did not know it at the time, but later I learned that I was exploring in my childlike way some of the fundamental questions of philosophy. At the moment I knew only the weirdness of it all. I felt the bare, stubborn fact of being there, of being alive, of being real. I experienced that fact in the odd feeling of being conscious of nothing but my own consciousness. So I put it before you that the starting point of all reflection about life is the sheer, factual givenness of our own existence.
The second fact is, if anything, even more mysterious. I am, and it is good to be. I do not mean that nothing evil ever happens. Of course, life can sometimes be utterly miserable. All I mean is that the promise of life is good. As the philosopher in me would put it, life is potentially and essentially good when seen as a whole and its fullest dimensions.
Saint Augustine wrote a great deal that I find abhorrent, simply awful. On one point I find him the most excellent and eloquent witness I know. No one exceeded him in extolling the goodness of creation. In a magnificent passage he exclaims that there is something so infinitely sweet about the sheer fact of existing that even those who are miserable wish not to perish but to know relief from their suffering. Does not every animal, from the largest dragon down to the smallest worm, show by every movement and action possible that it wishes to stay alive? And do not even the plants send their roots deep into the earth and their leaves outward to the sun so that they may live and grow?
That insight of Saint Augustine is affirmed in our own experience. We feel it in our own awareness that life holds the promise of pleasure, joy, and moments of ecstasy. I remember an occasion more than three decades ago when the goodness of life broke into my own awareness with particular vividness. It was for me a rare moment of mystical ecstasy. I was walking from a classroom at Emory University to my apartment. It was one of those crisp days in March when the cloudless sky was totally blue. The sun was shining in all its Georgia brightness. The mixture of warmth and coolness told all that spring was already awakening the dormant earth. I walked through a grove of pine trees and heard the wind softly breathing through the thick branches. All of a sudden and unexpectedly, I felt a surge of good feeling. It can only be described as an acute, deep awareness of the pure joy of being alive. It was as if the pine trees and all of nature shared the experience. All around me was the busy world of living and dying. Not far away was a little shopping center where people bought food, clothes, and medicine. About a block in the distance was Emory Hospital where people of all ages and of all races and of all stations in life were suffering and dying. The world in all of its beauty and pain was still there. Nevertheless, in my little cathedral in the pines I knew for a brief few moments what it meant for Genesis to proclaim that God looked at the world still fresh and pure and saw that it was good, very good.
What I felt is confirmed in those simple joys of everyday life. Think about the experience of loving and of being loved, the sound of a good ragtime band playing the music of Scott Joplin, the thrill of achievement and success, the taste of honey, and the refreshing touch of a cool breeze on a hot day. A thousand other simple pleasures testify to the goodness of life. I see a similar witness in the play of puppies, in the luxurious stretch of a cat fresh from a nap, in the persistent effort of sprouting seeds to find their way around every obstacle on their journey toward the sun, in the curiosity of babies that leads them to explore the world they have so recently entered, and in the first smiles they offer to loving parents. These and countless other down-to-earth spontaneous reactions of animals and people tell us that the best things in life are free.
Let us grant that when things go wrong, life can be agony. Existence can be miserable. Living can be hell on earth that at its worst becomes despair itself. But when all goes right, the promise of life can be realized in a sweet taste of exquisite enjoyment. When life is lived in a healthy body in a just society in loving communion with others, life can be splendid indeed. Living is intrinsically good. Existing is worthwhile beyond the power of words to express. My favorite philosopher -- Alfred North Whitehead -- says that all life is driven by a three-fold urge "to live, to live well, and to live better." Life in all its forms instinctively affirms its inherent goodness by its tenacious efforts to stay alive and to improve the quality of existence.
Why should life be good? Why should existence even offer the promise of enjoyment? That is the mystery. How amazing that there should be fireflies in the quagmire! How stupendous that lightning bugs fly over the mudhole!
A third surprising fact of life gives rise to wonder. It is a little more difficult to describe. Yet it takes us close to the heart of Christian faith. I speak now of the experience of grace. I refer to that overplus of life-renewing mercy, joy, and strength that appears in the darkness to enable us to rise up from defeat and despair and to go on at the rising of the sun. Grace means unmerited favor. It means the gift that overcomes the power of evil and makes possible the triumph of the good. I speak here of the resurrection that follows crucifixion, of forgiveness that overcomes enmity and betrayal. I point to the reversal of reversal, the defeat of defeat, of the dawn that comes unexpectedly when it had seemed like the night would go on forever. In a word, I speak of the Easter experience. Jesus was dead and buried, but on the third day, he rose again. Israel was in Egypt, slaves in bondage, but God sent Moses to deliver them. The younger son came home in poverty and disgrace, but his father embraced him in loving forgiveness and said, "This my son was dead, but now is alive again; let us rejoice and be merry." A woman was taken in adultery, and some wanted to stone her. But Jesus said, "I do not condemn you; go and sin no more." Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. God sent Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead a movement for justice so that the Rosa Parks of the world would never have to go to the back of the bus ever again.
I could tell you of dark moments in my own life when I was not sure life had meaning anymore. Hope appeared to be dead forever. Finally, relief came. Joy returned as a surprise from heaven that I cannot explain but can only confess in gratitude. Now I invite you to add your own experiences of grace. Can you remember some moment in life when all seemed lost? Can you recall the victory that was given from beyond? Didn't it feel like a gift that comes as a surprise?
We are coming close to the heart of the gospel. The New Testament is all about grace, justification, liberation by a power from beyond, the triumph of suffering love, forgiveness for the sinner, reconciliation for the estranged, new hope for the despairing, new life for those trapped in despair. How uncalled for! Amazing grace! Amazing, wondrous grace! How did these fireflies get in the quagmire?
What are we to make of all this? How are we to account for the startling fact that we are at all? How can we explain the astounding awareness that the promise of life is good? How can we make sense of the experience of grace that brings light when darkness might have been expected to grow deeper? Let me suggest to you that in the Christian tradition, coming to terms with these deep mysteries of life is what God-talk is all about. The Christian who speaks of God is pointing to the Creator and the Redeemer, the giver of life and the savior of life. To believe in God is to have confidence in our hearts that we exist by the operation of some power beyond us. It is acknowledgment that we have the capacity for enjoyment as a gift of a goodness that we neither created nor can control. It is the affirmation that we are renewed by grace that freely breaks into life to surprise us with joy. To talk about God is to witness to the unfathomable mystery at the depth of things, the power that creates us, the justice that judges us, and the love that redeems us. To know God is to encounter the creativity that, without our knowledge or consent, bestows the gift of life and renews its possibilities with fresh energies and graces that keep us going.
I would not claim that the author of Psalm 103 was reflecting on exactly the same sorts of experiences that I have been enumerating. Rather I dare to think that I have been continuing the meditation on existence that the Psalmist was engaging in. This poetic soul looked at life and concluded that at the heart of all things is a Loving Kindness who created the world and all that is in it, who redeems life when it hits bottom. The ultimate fact is a Gracious Presence who forgives iniquity, who heals diseases, who crowns our heads with steadfast love and mercy. We are frail, weak, foolish, sinful, and mortal, but our Creator pities us as good parents have compassion for their children. Human existence is like grass that flourishes for a moment and then perishes; human flesh is like dust that the wind will soon carry away. Underneath and all around are the Everlasting Arms. Confronting the mystery of life before its Creator, the Psalmist was led to cry out with joy, "Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name!" (Psalm 103:1). When we see the lightning bugs over the mudhole, what else can we say but, "Bless the Lord, O my soul"?
How does it happen that we are? Why is it good to be? Where does saving grace come from? To deal with these mysteries in the church is to talk about, to believe in, and to worship the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Rebekah and Isaac, and of Jacob and Rachel. To reflect upon the coming to be and passing away of the flesh that is like grass is to acknowledge the God of Psalm 103. To have faith in this Creator-Redeemer is to trust in the One in whom Jesus trusted. How did the fireflies get in the quagmire? There can be only one answer: "Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name!" (Psalm 103:1).
The problem of evil is as real and threatening today. Misery, pain, and injustice are all around us. They are an ever present part of our consciousness. We remember Hitler and the slaughter of millions of Jews and other people. The very mention of Dresden, Pearl Harbor, and Hiroshima brings to mind the horror of modern war. We read about hunger and poverty on a global scale. Our television sets keep vividly before us the images of starving children. They are no more than skin and bones. Flies walk across dirty faces that display their inner agony. We can give specifics about the deep hatreds fermenting for centuries in the Middle East. Young Israeli soldiers shoot teenage Palestinians. Both groups are caught up in a demonic destructiveness they neither created nor can control. We are well acquainted with the threat of global extinction associated with nuclear war and ecological catastrophe. Newspapers tell us about earthquakes and hurricanes, cancer and babies with AIDS. We are not ignorant of hopelessness, murder, rape, child abuse, and the drug problem. We have read Camus, Kafka, and Beckett. Evil in all its forms continues to be a threat to our lives and to our faith.
It is hard to understand the giant agonies of the world if we believe in an Almighty Love. Nevertheless, it may be even more difficult to comprehend the goodness on earth if God is indifferent or impotent. Perhaps the greatest mystery of all is not that bad things happen to good and bad people alike. Maybe the biggest puzzle is the surprising, unexpected, unexplainable, gratuitous fact of life itself and its potential for enjoyment. What needs to be accounted for is the reality of pleasure, delight, and joy in the world. The problem of evil is urgent and inescapable. However, I want to turn the question around and deal instead with the problem of the good.
A friend of mine sent me an article he had written. The theme for the day is indicated by the title: "Fireflies in the Quagmire." Translated into a vocabulary reflecting my rural Georgia background, I ask, "Why are there lightning bugs flying over the mudhole?" Granted that the world is full of evil, nevertheless, how do we account for the good we experience in this life?
Take, first of all, the fact of existence itself. The most amazing, stupendous, inexplicable thing I know of is that I am, that I exist. A bedroom in the home of my parents in Georgia has a dresser in it that has been in the family as long as I can remember. It has a large central mirror with two smaller mirrors that fold in toward the middle. When I was a child, I used to amuse myself by standing in front of this dresser. I would pull the side mirrors against the back of my head and look at the endless reflections of reflections of myself that bounced off the three mirrors. After a while I would tire of that and look directly at myself eyeball to eyeball. Staring at myself at close range soon took on a kind of strangeness as all disappeared from my mind except the awareness of my awareness. I was conscious of nothing but being conscious. The mystery of this intrigued me. "Well, here I am, and I am really here. Why am I here? Why does anything exist? Why is there something rather than nothing?" I did not know it at the time, but later I learned that I was exploring in my childlike way some of the fundamental questions of philosophy. At the moment I knew only the weirdness of it all. I felt the bare, stubborn fact of being there, of being alive, of being real. I experienced that fact in the odd feeling of being conscious of nothing but my own consciousness. So I put it before you that the starting point of all reflection about life is the sheer, factual givenness of our own existence.
The second fact is, if anything, even more mysterious. I am, and it is good to be. I do not mean that nothing evil ever happens. Of course, life can sometimes be utterly miserable. All I mean is that the promise of life is good. As the philosopher in me would put it, life is potentially and essentially good when seen as a whole and its fullest dimensions.
Saint Augustine wrote a great deal that I find abhorrent, simply awful. On one point I find him the most excellent and eloquent witness I know. No one exceeded him in extolling the goodness of creation. In a magnificent passage he exclaims that there is something so infinitely sweet about the sheer fact of existing that even those who are miserable wish not to perish but to know relief from their suffering. Does not every animal, from the largest dragon down to the smallest worm, show by every movement and action possible that it wishes to stay alive? And do not even the plants send their roots deep into the earth and their leaves outward to the sun so that they may live and grow?
That insight of Saint Augustine is affirmed in our own experience. We feel it in our own awareness that life holds the promise of pleasure, joy, and moments of ecstasy. I remember an occasion more than three decades ago when the goodness of life broke into my own awareness with particular vividness. It was for me a rare moment of mystical ecstasy. I was walking from a classroom at Emory University to my apartment. It was one of those crisp days in March when the cloudless sky was totally blue. The sun was shining in all its Georgia brightness. The mixture of warmth and coolness told all that spring was already awakening the dormant earth. I walked through a grove of pine trees and heard the wind softly breathing through the thick branches. All of a sudden and unexpectedly, I felt a surge of good feeling. It can only be described as an acute, deep awareness of the pure joy of being alive. It was as if the pine trees and all of nature shared the experience. All around me was the busy world of living and dying. Not far away was a little shopping center where people bought food, clothes, and medicine. About a block in the distance was Emory Hospital where people of all ages and of all races and of all stations in life were suffering and dying. The world in all of its beauty and pain was still there. Nevertheless, in my little cathedral in the pines I knew for a brief few moments what it meant for Genesis to proclaim that God looked at the world still fresh and pure and saw that it was good, very good.
What I felt is confirmed in those simple joys of everyday life. Think about the experience of loving and of being loved, the sound of a good ragtime band playing the music of Scott Joplin, the thrill of achievement and success, the taste of honey, and the refreshing touch of a cool breeze on a hot day. A thousand other simple pleasures testify to the goodness of life. I see a similar witness in the play of puppies, in the luxurious stretch of a cat fresh from a nap, in the persistent effort of sprouting seeds to find their way around every obstacle on their journey toward the sun, in the curiosity of babies that leads them to explore the world they have so recently entered, and in the first smiles they offer to loving parents. These and countless other down-to-earth spontaneous reactions of animals and people tell us that the best things in life are free.
Let us grant that when things go wrong, life can be agony. Existence can be miserable. Living can be hell on earth that at its worst becomes despair itself. But when all goes right, the promise of life can be realized in a sweet taste of exquisite enjoyment. When life is lived in a healthy body in a just society in loving communion with others, life can be splendid indeed. Living is intrinsically good. Existing is worthwhile beyond the power of words to express. My favorite philosopher -- Alfred North Whitehead -- says that all life is driven by a three-fold urge "to live, to live well, and to live better." Life in all its forms instinctively affirms its inherent goodness by its tenacious efforts to stay alive and to improve the quality of existence.
Why should life be good? Why should existence even offer the promise of enjoyment? That is the mystery. How amazing that there should be fireflies in the quagmire! How stupendous that lightning bugs fly over the mudhole!
A third surprising fact of life gives rise to wonder. It is a little more difficult to describe. Yet it takes us close to the heart of Christian faith. I speak now of the experience of grace. I refer to that overplus of life-renewing mercy, joy, and strength that appears in the darkness to enable us to rise up from defeat and despair and to go on at the rising of the sun. Grace means unmerited favor. It means the gift that overcomes the power of evil and makes possible the triumph of the good. I speak here of the resurrection that follows crucifixion, of forgiveness that overcomes enmity and betrayal. I point to the reversal of reversal, the defeat of defeat, of the dawn that comes unexpectedly when it had seemed like the night would go on forever. In a word, I speak of the Easter experience. Jesus was dead and buried, but on the third day, he rose again. Israel was in Egypt, slaves in bondage, but God sent Moses to deliver them. The younger son came home in poverty and disgrace, but his father embraced him in loving forgiveness and said, "This my son was dead, but now is alive again; let us rejoice and be merry." A woman was taken in adultery, and some wanted to stone her. But Jesus said, "I do not condemn you; go and sin no more." Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus. God sent Martin Luther King, Jr., to lead a movement for justice so that the Rosa Parks of the world would never have to go to the back of the bus ever again.
I could tell you of dark moments in my own life when I was not sure life had meaning anymore. Hope appeared to be dead forever. Finally, relief came. Joy returned as a surprise from heaven that I cannot explain but can only confess in gratitude. Now I invite you to add your own experiences of grace. Can you remember some moment in life when all seemed lost? Can you recall the victory that was given from beyond? Didn't it feel like a gift that comes as a surprise?
We are coming close to the heart of the gospel. The New Testament is all about grace, justification, liberation by a power from beyond, the triumph of suffering love, forgiveness for the sinner, reconciliation for the estranged, new hope for the despairing, new life for those trapped in despair. How uncalled for! Amazing grace! Amazing, wondrous grace! How did these fireflies get in the quagmire?
What are we to make of all this? How are we to account for the startling fact that we are at all? How can we explain the astounding awareness that the promise of life is good? How can we make sense of the experience of grace that brings light when darkness might have been expected to grow deeper? Let me suggest to you that in the Christian tradition, coming to terms with these deep mysteries of life is what God-talk is all about. The Christian who speaks of God is pointing to the Creator and the Redeemer, the giver of life and the savior of life. To believe in God is to have confidence in our hearts that we exist by the operation of some power beyond us. It is acknowledgment that we have the capacity for enjoyment as a gift of a goodness that we neither created nor can control. It is the affirmation that we are renewed by grace that freely breaks into life to surprise us with joy. To talk about God is to witness to the unfathomable mystery at the depth of things, the power that creates us, the justice that judges us, and the love that redeems us. To know God is to encounter the creativity that, without our knowledge or consent, bestows the gift of life and renews its possibilities with fresh energies and graces that keep us going.
I would not claim that the author of Psalm 103 was reflecting on exactly the same sorts of experiences that I have been enumerating. Rather I dare to think that I have been continuing the meditation on existence that the Psalmist was engaging in. This poetic soul looked at life and concluded that at the heart of all things is a Loving Kindness who created the world and all that is in it, who redeems life when it hits bottom. The ultimate fact is a Gracious Presence who forgives iniquity, who heals diseases, who crowns our heads with steadfast love and mercy. We are frail, weak, foolish, sinful, and mortal, but our Creator pities us as good parents have compassion for their children. Human existence is like grass that flourishes for a moment and then perishes; human flesh is like dust that the wind will soon carry away. Underneath and all around are the Everlasting Arms. Confronting the mystery of life before its Creator, the Psalmist was led to cry out with joy, "Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name!" (Psalm 103:1). When we see the lightning bugs over the mudhole, what else can we say but, "Bless the Lord, O my soul"?
How does it happen that we are? Why is it good to be? Where does saving grace come from? To deal with these mysteries in the church is to talk about, to believe in, and to worship the God of Abraham and Sarah, of Rebekah and Isaac, and of Jacob and Rachel. To reflect upon the coming to be and passing away of the flesh that is like grass is to acknowledge the God of Psalm 103. To have faith in this Creator-Redeemer is to trust in the One in whom Jesus trusted. How did the fireflies get in the quagmire? There can be only one answer: "Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless his holy name!" (Psalm 103:1).
