First Congregational Church, United Church of Christ
When Things Fall Apart...
"Nietzsche warns us, 'If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.' But there can be darkness without doom. The edge does not have to lead to nihilism. If we are careful, it is possible to recognize, accept, even grow from spirituality's borderlands without being consumed by them." (Niles Elliot Goldstein, God at the Edge)
When we become followers of Jesus, we choose to reconstruct our lives with a new center. That center is the grace of God.
Grace is a form of healing that moves deeper than any disease. Grace always invites us to
substitute trust for fear--which means that we have to learn to name our fears and actually, in a sense, befriend them.
Our fear becomes the ground from which our trust can grow. You may have heard it said fear is a natural reaction to moving closer towards truth. Think how many times the angels of God have to tell people, "Do not be afraid!" before those people can hear the truth that will transform them.
When our lives fall apart, we have an opportunity to put them together differently. There's always an invitation and a risk in that process. The reason that we read and study stories from the Bible is so that we can "re-script", "re-invent" our old ways of doing things in light of a new, spiritual and graced power that comes from God.
Walter Brueggemann, one of the great Biblical scholars of our day, writes, "We now know (or think we know) that human transformation (the way people change) doesn't happen through certainty, but through the playful entertainment of another scripting of reality that may subvert the old given text and its interpretation and lead to the embrace of an alternative text and its redescription of reality."
Transformation is a process of letting things fall apart, encountering our fears as they do, and then trusting that a new story, a new story of life will be able to root from the past that is gone. Things are always in transition and we are always participating in change. When things are shaky, when situations are uncertain, we are actually on the threshold of transformation. We are on the verge of something.
If we can allow our trust to speak louder than our fears, we will find that that "something" is a new experience of Grace. The trick is to keep trusting and to not abandon the path, even when the path looks different than we envisioned.