FOURTH CHURCH PULPIT
September 30, 2001

God’s Love
and the 12 Apple Brown Bettys
John M. Buchanan

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.

Where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master, grant that I may not seck so much

to be consoled as to console,

to be understood as to understand,

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive,

itis in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
Attributed to Francis of Assisi

FOURTH
PRESBY
TERIAN
CHURCH
A LIGHT IN THE CITY

Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago
126 East Chestnut Street, Chicago, IL 60611-2094
(312) 787-4570

GOD’S LOVE AND
THE TWELVE APPLE BROWN BETTYS
September 30, 2001

JOHN M. BUCHANAN, PASTOR
FOURTH PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Psalm 86:1-13
Luke 15:11-24
Jeremiah 8:18-9:1

A Prayer for Mental Hlness Month: Out of the depths we cry to you, O God. We pray today for
those who suffer mental illness. Comfort and encourage them with your love. We pray for
those who minister to them—the physicians, psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, and social
workers. We pray for their families who stand with them and support them. And we pray for
our church, that we may be to the mentally ill—and to all your people—a safe haven, a place
of grace and acceptance and encouragement. Now startle us again with your truth and open
our hearts and minds to your love; in Jesus Christ, our Lord. Amen.

Is there no balm m Gilead?

When William Sloan Coffin Jr. was the chaplain at Yale, his college-age son, Alex, died in a car
accident. Alex and his friends had been drinking; on the way home, he missed a turn, crashed
through a barrier, and plunged into the icy waters of a river north of Manhattan. After the
memorial service, a woman, wanting to be helpful, said something about what happened being
the will of God. Coffin wrote later, “I wanted to grab her and say——‘Lady, that’s wrong. God
didn’t cause this. It wasn’t God’s will that my son die. None of us knows enough to say that. God
doesn’t go around the world hurting and killing people. When the waters closed in over the car,
the heart of God was first of all our hearts to break.’”

There are two basic responses to human tragedy and suffering, whether on a grand scale, such as
we have been experiencing as a nation after September 1 J, or as individuals, as we encounter
personal loss and tragedy.

The first, in some way, is to hold God accountable for it. God actually orchestrated it, did it,
carried it out—in order to teach us a lesson, or to punish us for our misdeeds, or to deliver a
wake-up call, or to make us stronger, better people. That response is as contemporary as the two
televangelists agreeing that the September 11 tragedy was something we deserved or, at least, it
was something God allowed by “lifting the veil of protection around us.” And it is as old as the
book of Job, in which Job’s friends try to explain his suffering as a result of his moral failures.
God blesses the righteous with good things and punishes the unrighteous. So if you’ve lost your
business, home, and all your children, obviously you’ ve done something terribly wrong and you

ought to be on your knees in sackcloth and ashes confessing and repenting of whatever it is and
begging God’s forgiveness. Job, by the way, doesn’t buy it.

I do not mean to make light of this response. Anyone who has ever sustained serious personal
loss has asked the question and at least entertained the notion that somewhere there is a cause-
and-effect principle at work. Nor do I mean to trivialize the very real dynamic of human
complicity in tragedy and suffering. Smoke cigarettes, and the odds are you're going to die
prematurely of lung disease. Enslave people, and it will be centuries before the remnants of evil
disappear from the culture. Glorify violence, feed it to your young on television along with their
breakfast cereal, produce movies that assault the senses with exploding buildings, burning cars,
strong men and women with megaweapons, and then put guns in easy reach of youngsters, and
you'll have a lot of personal and societal tragedy.

I do not mean to trivialize human complicity in suffering. I do mean to point out that although
the Bible gives voice to people who express the idea that God does bad things to us, just like Bill
Coffin’s would-be comforter suggested, the Bible finally rejects it. Job, ultimately, prefers
silence, the mysterious silence of God, to the explanation of his friends.

The second response to tragedy and suffering is more complex. It is despair. In biblical and
theological terms, it is the conclusion that God has turned his back on us, God has abandoned us,
Deus Abscondus, the old theologians called it. We have felt it, too, in the midst of intense
personal loss and the searing pain of grief, standing by a dear one dying—*Where is God? God
is not here. God has abandoned me.” “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” the
psalmist asked and Jesus cried as his own life ebbed away.

God’s absence—people have experienced it and expressed it all the way back to that formative
time in our faith tradition, Israel’s exile in Babylon at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. The
situation is this: God’s people, chosen and blessed by the Lord of the universe, are living happily
and prosperously in the land that God has given them, a land flowing with milk and honey. Their
kings are strong and just, their crops plentiful, their borders secure—up until now, that is. Now
everything has fallen apart. All the old certainties are gone. The old security has been shown to
be an illusion.

The most powerful despot in the world, Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, has sent his army south to
obliterate Israel and Judah, to lay siege to Jerusalem, the capital, Zion—the place of God’s
presence and the symbol of God’s power. Then the worst happens. The siege of Jerusalem
succeeds. The people give up. The Babylonians enter the city, destroy it, and drag all the
survivors away through the burned-out rubble of the beautiful capital city, past the ruins of
Solomon’s glorious temple, through the battlefields to see the skeletons of their soldiers—all the
way back to Babylon, where they will live in captivity.

Elegant poet that Jeremiah is, his words say for the people what they have no words of their own
to say:

My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick.

And he asks the age-old question that every one of those people asked, the same question you
and I ask and have asked in the past three weeks:

Hark, the cry of my poor people from far and wide in the land: “Is the Lord not in
Zion?”

Translate that, What happened to our God? Why has God abandoned us? Why, if God is God,
why if there is a God, has this happened to us?

It is beautiful poetry.

“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”

It was time for Rosh Hashanah—the New Year and the Festival of Booths, when families and
pilgrims gather at the temple for a glorious celebration of harvest and prosperity. But not this
year. Is there no balm in Gilead—Gilead, a district to the north known for it’s aromatic and
curative oils and ointments? Is there no balm in Gilead, no physician there?

But, also, in the midst of this powerful lament, the voicing of humankind’s most desperate fear:
that God is absent, that we are finally and ultimately alone. In the midst of that heavy,
oppressive, and depressing litany, did you hear the prophet’s voice becoming the voice of God?

For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt,
i mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me

God is not absent at all. God is not present, as the people have come to expect—as a heavenly
choreographer arranging storms and invasion and plagues, always protecting God’s people. God
is not present as divine protection. God is present in the grief and despair. God feels it too. God
takes into the very heart and soul of God, the pain and suffering of the people. It is the first
glimmer of the light of the incarnation. The first early glimpse of the idea, the word that became
flesh in a baby in Bethlehem, the early sense that in Jesus Christ God will come into our
darkness, to stand with us and bind up the wounds of despair and strengthen and renew and
restore broken spirits and broken hearts.

There is a balm in Gilead.

It was the great theologian Paul Tillich who resurrected the old concept of “sin-sickness” and
reinterpreted it for the modern world. “Where the ancients felt sin-sick,” he wrote, “I feel only
the absence of meaning. Where the psalmist felt threatened, I felt alienated. Where Luther felt
impinged upon by a too-near God, I feel abandoned by a too remote God” (quoted in Martin
Marty, A Cry of Absence, p. 107).

That is the sin-sickness of modernity: a sense of loss of God, a sense of abandonment. There
come “seasons of abandonment,” Martin Marty wrote in a book about his own suffering and loss.
Cancer sufferers feel abandoned by God, them embraced by God when remission happens, then
the final abandonment of God with reoccurrence. And at that moment, Marty wrote, the Christ of

“insufferably sad but not depressing,” in fact, an inspiring scene because “in human terms,
ground zero is a vast web of bustling goodness and acts of kindness from an entire planet.”

It seems that Gould, his wife, and stepdaughter had established a kind of streetside depot to
collect and deliver to the site items in short supply—facemasks, shoe inserts, hard hats, and
batteries. As they were leaving a neighborhood restaurant, late to make one last delivery, the

cook gave them a shopping bag. “Here’s.a dozen apple brown bettys, our best dessert, still warm.
Give them to the rescue workers.”

How meaningless, Gould thought, but they agreed to make the delivery and put the bag of twelve
apple brown bettys atop several thousand facemasks and shoe pads.

“Twelve apple brown bettys into the breech.”

Gould reflected,

I learned something important that I should never have forgotten—those twelve apple
brown bettys turned into drops of gold within a rainstorm of offerings for the stomach
and for the soul, from children’s postcards to cheers from the roadside. We gave the last
one to a firefighter, an older man in a young crowd, sitting alone in utter exhaustion as he
inserted one of our shoe pads. And he said, with a twinkle and a smile restored to his
face: “Thank you. This is the most lovely thing ve seen in four days, and still warm!”

(New York Times, 26 September 2001)
There is a balm in Gilead.
It is made of love: God’s love in Jesus Christ that does not abandon us but experiences our loss
and grief with us, love that will never let us go, love that lives and heals and restores in simple,
miraculous acts of human kindness.

There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul. Thanks be to God.

Amen.

the cross—the crucified victim who cried out in his abandonment—comes close. “He was the

true derelict,” Marty wrote. “The rest of us die in company, his company. Never again is
aloneness to be so stark” (p. 139).

The Christian word to suffering, grieving people, the Christian word for this time, this place, this
situation, is not that God did it, or allowed it, but that God is in it with us. How do you know

that? We know it because of him, Jesus the Christ, God incarnate, the light that shines even in
darkness.

The Christian word to suffering and grieving people is a resurrection word. Evil and death did all
they could and a good and faithful man was crucified, and in three days he rose and evil and

death were defeated. Nothing will separate us from his love. The Christian word is a word of
hope.

How do we participate in it? How do we experience it at the same time we are experiencing our
grief and our own sense of abandonment? I think we are given the gift of experiencing the life
and hope—the balm in Gilead—when we live out some of the love from which nothing will ever

separate us, when we receive it in the form of someone else’s love, and when we extend it in acts
of kindness.

Viktor Frankl recorded for posterity how the dehumanizing cruelty of Auschwitz was
neutralized, denied its victory, by the relentless propensity of the prisoners to be kind, to share
their bread and water. He wrote later about a particularly dreadful moment when ali seemed lost,
when hatred seemed to have won: “A thought transfixed me. The truth that love is the ultimate

and highest goal to which we can aspire. .. . The salvation of humanity is through love and in
love” (Man’s Search for Meaning).

I thought a lot this week about what we have been through and continue to go through and the
emotional and spiritual fallout. I thought about the ways human beings cope with and handle
tragedy and loss by holding God accountable for it or by concluding that God has abandoned,
departed, absconded. I thought about sin-sickness as having to try to live with that sense of
abandonment and how so many of us are depressed and discouraged and I wonder if we can
survive what has happened in any recognizable way. And I thought about how in the midst of all
the indescribable sadness, human beings never gave up, people kept extending help, giving
money, donating blood, children drawing pictures, writing poems. How life seems suddenly a
little softer, gentler, how clerks say “Thank you” and toll-takers on the Skyway actuaily smile
and say “Eave a nice day.” And I thought that there is something deep inside us that responds to
evil and suffering—with kindness and love.

I thought about how God’s infinite kindness was exposed in an act of love—‘For God so loved
the world”—and how acts of human kindness always contain and convey something of that love.
And I thought about those Twelve Apple Brown Bettys that I read about last week.

Stephen Jay Gould, professor of zoology at Harvard and popular science writer, had a piece in
the New York Times last week. Gould has been to ground zero in lower Manhattan, a scene