A Word from Joel - August 14, 2024

“The king was deeply moved and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept, and as he went he said, ‘O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!’”
 2 Samuel 18:33

There is an order to our lives that we must all recognize, and we fight it to our own peril.
The scriptures teach us about this order from beginning to end. Proverbs says,
“Whoever sows injustice will reap calamity.” In other words, if you consistently act in
ways that are not right, your deeds will eventually catch up with you. Another Proverb
says, “The wicked earn deceptive wages, but one who sows righteousness gets a sure
reward.” It’s not just our wickedness that has a cause and effect. It’s also our goodness.
When we sow kindness, we will reap it. When we live with honesty and integrity, not
everyone will return us the favor, but in the end, goodness is its own reward.

There’s a word for this causality in both Hinduism and Buddhism but the idea is also in
the Biblical tradition, and that word is karma. Karma teaches us that our actions in life
determine our future, and while Christians often don’t use the word, we can recognize
its inescapable truth. What we do matters. How we treat other people matters and has
consequences for our future and of those closest to us. Here near the end of David’s
reign, he reaps the calamity that he has sown. In this tragic moment, karma has finally
caught up with him. I am not suggesting that David is getting what he deserves,
because no parent should lose their child. But even kings cannot escape the order of
karma. David, an abuser of power and user of women, refuses to hold his first-born son
accountable for assaulting his own daughter. David, himself an usurper and murderer,
has a son who does the same. It reminds me of the 80s commercial about drug use
where the son says to his father, “I learned it by watching you!”

But there’s more to the story than just karma. Though there is an order to our world,
there is a power that’s older and deeper than karma, which is the chaotic and glorious
power of grace. Through grace, God introduces a power into our world that can neither
be earned or predicted. In this story, David weeps as he should. Grief often leads to the
grace of new beginnings. David mourns the loss of his son and what his life has
become, but this is not the end of the story for David because God promised to never to
take God’s steadfast love from him. This means that even when David makes a mess of
his life, grace will find him in the end. The same is true for you as well. Yes, the order
karma is real, but the grace of God shows up in our lives when we don’t deserve it and
least expect it. Frederick Buechner tries to define grace saying: “The grace of God
means something like…Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us.” 1 Beloved, when your life
falls apart, rest in the assurance that grace is God’s first word and will be the last.

1 Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1973),
34.