It is difficult to imagine Jesus distressed and agitated. But within the personhood of Jesus, we are told, he had the capacity to fully experience the human condition. So, why not distress and agitation? What was it that affected him so? The way people were treated? The way the authorities treated the marginalized? The way people were treated because of their injuries seen and unseen? As a minister, I have been really confronted, distressed and agitated spiritually with the way in which our country handles military service people with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. The ambiguity of the injury is problematic: there is no broken bone, no scar, no remnant to show for the internal wound continuing to cause the exacerbation. Because of the invisibleness of this injury, it goes unnoticed. Where is God in this trauma? We learn quickly that God promises that God will be with us both in our distress and our anguish.
Yet, we live in a society that say we ought to have the fortitude and wherewithal to ‘go it alone’ to ‘be our own person’. But, what God says is, "That is wrong!" It is a myth of autonomy. “We haven’t come this far for God to leave us now.” In her book, Spirit and Trauma, theologian Shelley Rambo, stated it this way, “Trauma is described as an encounter with death. This encounter is not, however, a literal death but a way of describing a radical event or events that shatter all that one knows about the world and all the familiar ways of operating within it…yet, the shape of life, in the Spirit—the work of testifying to the oozing of love into the space of life and of discerning life where it is not. The Spirit persists there.”[1] The Advocacy of the Spirit of God is to proclaim life in the face of death, love in the face of hate, clarity in the face of fuzziness, and wisdom in the face of ignorance.
[1] Rambo, S. (2010). Spirit and trauma: A theology of remaining. Lousiville, KY: Westminster John Knox, pp. 4; 160.
