Katniss Everdeen lives in a world of poverty, starvation, oppression and the aftermath of war. She lives in a world where hope exists only in the stolen and forbidden moments when she slips into the woods hunting live game with bow and arrow. If she’s lucky she will get a squirrel to feed her family.
It’s illegal to leave her district and go into the wood to poach, but she’s not afraid of being caught. She is afraid of the annual Hunger Games.
The Hunger Games has taken place for 74 years is this post apocalyptic world of Panem, ever since District 13 dared to revolt. Each year a girl and boy ages 12 to 18 years will be chosen by lot and fight to the death until only one remains. All of that will be required television viewing.
Suzanne Collins the author of the Hunger Game trilogy said she got the idea for the story channel surfing on television. On one channel she saw people competing in a reality show and on another channel coverage of the Iraq
This is Hunger Games, a story that has been told over and over again throughout the ages.
Jeremiah tells a similar story. It’s the story of the Israelites. People, who had lost their hope, who were oppressed by a ruling nation and who suffered in the aftermath of war. The Babylonians destroyed the temple of Jerusalem Judah
Have you ever felt that way? You pray and pray for something to happen and nothing happens, nothing changes. What, then, is this relationship with God? Why should we bother with a God that is impotent or just not terribly interested in our lives?
Who needs a God that can’t make the cancer go away or turn a daughter back home after she’s wandered on the streets? Who needs a God that let’s bad things happen to good people and the bad people get away without a care? Who needs a God that let’s children starve? [1]
These are age old questions. The people of Judah
The prophet is announcing a new covenant. That’s fine but there’s one problem. A new covenant implies that the old one was broken. Was it broken because, as the prophet suggests, the people couldn’t keep their part of the bargain by keeping their sticky fingers off of sin?
Or is there another more difficult to bear possibility? Is the failure not of the people but God’s? Could God not fulfill his side of the bargain? Had something shifted in the calculus of covenant people God and the people?
There are too many stories where bad things happen but not because of human unfaithfulness. The Psalms and the book of Job are testaments to that. Not all of the people of Israel
Katniss isn’t thrown into the Hunger Games because she has done something wrong. Her father didn’t die because he was unfaithful. Her mother wasn’t caught in the desperate hole of depression because she sinned.
A bargain with God is often thought of as a quid-pro-quo. We do what we’re supposed to do and God does what God is supposed to do. But what are we to think when the covenantal calculus doesn’t hold?
What are we to think when our prayers aren’t answered or even seem to be heard? The choice may be to blame God, get angry or abandon God altogether. Those are the most common responses but after that there is another possibility. There is a response that takes our spirituality to another level. That brings our practice into a greater depth of who we are and who Got is to us.
That journey of depth is here as we enter the last days of Lent. The stories grow darker and hope dims.
Jesus is talking more openly about his death and the darkness that is to come. ‘Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies there is no life’, he says. And ‘those who love this life will lose it and those who hate their life in this world will keep life forever’.
In these last days of Lent the “shadow of the cross begins to fall over everything” – including the hope we have that God will somehow make everything better before it all falls apart.[2] What are we to make in the changed calculus of the covenant, the deal made with God to behave ourselves and God will provide? Where are we going as we toward the cross? What is to become of us, the beloved of God?
The answer may be in the obscure passage of Hebrews that reads like some secret code. The Book of Hebrews was written to Christians who had suffered persecution. Out of fear they had stopped gathering together, praying and attempting to bring into fullness the kingdom of God.
Jesus is likened to a priest in the order of Melchizedek. He is the son of Noah, carried the robes of Adam and gave Abraham bread and wine. In other words, he carries the story of our beginning and the story of our journey through this world and all the troubles we encounter because we are human.
It is said that Jesus takes away the sins of the world, but that not what the writer of Hebrews is saying. Hebrews is telling us that Jesus is the chalice of all humanity holding our darkest secrets, carrying our deepest wounds, pouring out our most wrenching sadness and grief. The sacrifice Jesus offers to God is not doves or even his life but the grief and supplications of all people.
People who suffer. People who feel real pain. People who wonder whether hope has passed them by yet again.
What leads Jesus to arrest, trial and death is his willingness to make known the grief of the world, to make real in flesh and blood human anguish, loneliness, fear, guilt, things done and left undone. He cries out for his own sake but he also cries for us. If that wasn’t true, if he hadn’t cried out for us, he would have lived and died at an old age from natural causes.
We may think the covenantal calculus doesn’t hold, that God isn’t listening or doesn’t care that the cross seems all too real in our lives. When our circumstances or the circumstances of the world drive the nails into our hands and we feel silvers of wood stab us in the back the truth may be that the calculus is different than we imagined. The calculus reveals how we called to enter a deeper level of what it means to be the beloved of God. We’re asked to find our way through the pain and darkness in order to have new life.
Deep in Lent the cross looms large and it is a reminder that there is no path around the darkness. Unless a grain of wheat falls and dies, unless we dare to enter a thousand deaths that life will bring there is no transformation.
That was true before there was a cross or even its shadow. It was true for the people of Israel
A few years ago a young woman read her poem “Lost Generation” on YouTube. She said:
I am part of a lost generation and I refuse to believe I can change the world
I realize this may be a shock but “Happiness comes from within” is a lie, and
“Money will make me happy”
So in 30 years I will tell my children
They are not the most important thing in my life.
My employer will know that
I have my priorities straight because work is more important than family
I tell you this
Once upon a time
Families stayed together but this will not be true in my era this is a quick fix society
Experts tell me 30 years from now I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce.
I do not concede that I will live in a country of my own making
In the future
Environmental destruction will be the norm
No longer can it be said that my peers and I care about this earth.
It will be evident that
My generation is apathetic and lethargic.
It is foolish to presume that
There is hope
And all of this will come true unless we choose to reverse it.
And then she began to read the poem backwards. “There is hope. It is foolish to presume that my generation is apathetic and lethargic. It is evident that my peers and I care about this earth. No longer can it be said that environmental destruction will be the norm. In the future I will live in a country of my own making. I do not concede that I will be celebrating the 10th anniversary of my divorce …” The reversal of the poem ended with her saying, “I can change the world, and I refuse to believe that I am part of a lost generation”.[3]
Across every generation the tears and cries have come. Jesus took all of that to the cross, hung there with it. To go there again is to remind ourselves of the challenges of being human and that God through Jesus is telling us God knows what it is to be me and you, to be hurting and broken, to suffer and to die. And we can make it.
There is suffering in being human. There is injustice and cruelty, oppression, poverty and unfairness. Good people die and bad people will too often win. All that reality pulled on Jesus. He died holding the weight of our sorrows, the heaviness of our grief. He suffocated from the injustice and the oppression of the world.
Because he took that on and because he died and because he lived we find a different calculus for our lives with God. It isn’t about God taking all the hard times away; it is about going through the hard times with God and discovering that there is still life or even a new life to be lived.
The story of what happens to Katniss doesn’t end with the Hunger Games. There are two more books before we know her fate and how she is transformed and creates transformation in those around her. It’s not a pretty story. It is a story of darkness and moral ambiguity. It is our story. It is the story of our ancestors.
We come to the darkest day of Lent. The cross looms over us. On that cross Jesus will die and then he will rise and find his frightened and disheartened friends. Those friends will find the strength to move on. They too will suffer but they are able to interpret the meaning of their suffering through the experience of knowing Jesus, watching him die and seeing him in a new way.
Every generation is caught in the shadow of a cross. Every generation has struggled or suffered from the weight of poverty, disease, loss and sorrow. Every generation has had to fight the good fight for the oppressed and the downtrodden. Every generation has walked through the bloody streets of a Syria and heard the cries of children in a Sudan
There is hope and it is foolish to presume that we are apathetic and lethargic
We can change the world and We refuse to believe that we are part of a lost generation.
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