SIXTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: You are great, O God, and greatly to be praised. You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Grant that we may believe in you, call upon you, know you, and serve you, through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
The Lord is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
The Lord is good to all,
and his compassion is over all that he has made. Psalm 145:8-9.
This refrain echoes throughout the Hebrew Scriptures and finds expression throughout the New Testament as well. The God portrayed in the Bible hates nothing that God has made. God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked. Ezekiel 33:11. God would have God’s salvation reach the end of the earth. Isaiah 49:6. It is God’s will that all should reach repentance and be saved from the destructive power of sin. II Peter 3:9.
Sadly, I have spent a good deal of my ministry disabusing people of contrary perceptions of God. I have encountered several young people who left the church because they were convinced, for one reason or another, that the God preached from the pulpit had nothing for them but condemnation and threats of punishment. I have met more than a few people who have grown up in a church that compelled them to hide or deny their sexual identities because they were deemed sinful. In short, the church has often proclaimed a god who is vindictive and merciless, quick to anger, abounding in wrath, a god whose default posture toward creation is anger, disappointment and contempt. This is a god who cares more about obedience to its rules than the people it created; a god who throws a fit over a same sex relationship but cares not a flying fruitcake about government policies that impoverish thousands of people. I have said before and will say again, there is no such God. Nor should there be.
Nevertheless, I hasten to add that God’s love for creation cannot simply be equated with our human notions of love. God is God and we are not. God’s ways are not our ways and those ways do not always comport with liberal, protestant, ever white, ever polite notions of progressive ethics. God is entitled to do things forbidden to us mortals. Most importantly, God is entitled to take human life-and does just that. “Turn back, you mortals,” says the Lord in the 90th Psalm. Psalm 90:3. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you will return,” pastors intone as they impose ashes on our forehead. God means to make an end of us all. Nobody gets off this planet alive. For our part, we human beings are forbidden from taking human lives. Moreover, as Martin Luther points out, the commandment forbiding murder does not merely preclude violence. It imposes a positive duty to go out of our way and do everything possible to assist our neighbors to live and to thrive.
God alone is entitled to execute retributive justice, whereas we are not. As Saint Paul reminds us, “‘Vengeance is mine,’ says the Lord.” Romans 12:19. While the psalmists often cry out to God, begging for vengeance to be carried out against their enemies and frequently let God know in graphic terms how they would like to see it done, they wisely leave that task in God’s capable hands. Once again, God’s ways are not our ways. As the Prophet Jonah had to learn, God’s view of who deserves punishment for what, when and on which terms does not comport with our myopic views on the subject. The justice we human beings are called to practice is distributive rather than retributive. It is a justice that calls for protection of the most vulnerable in our midst, the equitable sharing of earth’s bounty and reverant respect and care for creation.
Judgment, like retribution, also belongs to God. Is it possible that a person becomes so thoroughly depraved that the Creator no longer recognizes the divine image in the creation and says, “I never knew you; go away from me”? Because Jesus raises that prospect, we would be foolish to dismiss it. But that question must remain introspective: To what extent am I being formed by Jesus and his community of faithful disciples? What are the demonic influences that threaten to shape my character in ways inconsistent with God’s gentle reign? Is the image of Christ recognizable in the way I live? As far as others are concerned, it is presumed that all people, even those who appear completely depraved to our eyes, are the object of God’s love and capable of redemption. Thus, Jesus warns his disciples, “Do not judge, so that you may not be judged.” Matthew 7:1.
One might well wonder why a God who is good and almighty does not intervene to prevent the catastrophic suffering witnessed by us on a daily basis. Indeed, if God is good and all that God made is good, why do these catastrophes occur in the first place? I do not pretend to have answers to these questions, but there are some counterquestions that I believe can help us think about this conundrum. Once God speaks the words “let there be,” is God still all powerful? Can God still be omnipotent once something other than God is called into existence? Is creating the universe a little like bringing a child into the world? Once a child is born and begins to grow, its parents might have hopes, dreams and expectations about its future, but every parent knows that a child has a will of its own. Its life often follows a trajectory its parents find distressing, disappointing and perhaps devastating. In many circumstances, intervention is difficult and can sometimes do more harm than good. Parents sometimes find themselves feeling as helpless as they are concerned. Is it the same with God and God’s creation? Are there limits to how much a loving God can do for a wayword world?
It seems that a degree of randomness is woven into the fabric of creation. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was planted among all the other good trees in the Garden of Eden. So, too, the serpent was a creation of God no less than any other living thing. We are told that it was “subtle,” but not that it was evil. The potential for things to go very wrong has been present from the beginning. Our world is not a safe playground. Lightning strikes the good as well as the wicked. Tornadoes demolish churches along with porn shops. A drunk driver hits a school bus, kills and injures numerous children and walks away without a scratch. Genetic irregularities cause birth defects, crippling diseases and premature death. Could God have made a universe without such devastating randomness? I don’t know. But I wonder what a universe without randomness would be like? I wonder what life would be like if everything went according to plan? What would it be like to live without surprises? Discoveries? Unanticipated endings? Is it possible to have love without heartbreak? Joy without sorrow? Anticipation without disappointment?
Of course, there is human evil and horrors that we bring upon ourselves. Could God not intervene to prevent the worst of these horrors? If God is God, could not God have stopped Hitler in his tracks? Diverted the airplanes away from the Twin Towers and Pentagon on 9/11? Prevented war from breaking out in eastern Europe? Again, it is not clear to me what God could or could not have done in response to these horrors. Again, did God surrender God’s omnipotence by the act of creation? I don’t know about that. What I do know is that God does intervene to save us from our self destructive instincts and acts-though not in the way we might wish. We might prefer a God who steps in and “fixes” things for us; a God who has the power to make us behave ourselves. We have had leaders like that throughout history. They are called dictators and the price they extract for the order, safety and stability we crave is steep and bloody. Is that what we desire from God? Stalin on steroids?
Whatever we might want from God, it is clear that God has no interest in ruling the world through coercive power. God does not want a world that behaves because it is terrified to do otherwise. God desires a world that obeys because it knows that its Creator loves it and wills for it abundant life. That appears to be the point of the Flood Story in Genesis. At the end of the story, as Noah, his family and the animals he preserved emerge from the ark and the scent of Noah’s sacrifice rises to God’s nostrils, God declares:
“I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest, cold and heat,
summer and winter, day and night,
shall not cease.” Genesis 8:21-22.
In sum, God is saying “No. I will not be that kind of God. This is not the way in which I will reign over my good creation.” Does God become angry? Is God wrathful? To be sure. But, once again, God’s anger is not to be equated with human wrath that is fequently petty and vindictive. Human anger is all too often the engine of vengeance and retribution. God’s wrath is directed at human injustice and the consequent suffering it inflicts upon humans. It is not directed against humans themselves. God is angry for us, not at us.
To be sure, God will overcome the world, but not by a show of shock and awe. God will overcome the world by gaining its trust, winning its heart, persuading it to believe God’s promise to bring to fulfillment its deepest yearnings for wholeness. To do that, God put’s God’s skin in the game. “The Word became flesh,” John the Evangelist tells us, to “dwell among us.” John 1:14. The Word dwells among us, not as a king, president or dictator, but as a child born to a homeless couple, a refugee from political violence and a victim of a corrupt criminal justice system. Jesus experienced human life at its worst, human beings at their most depraved and the world at the height of its cruelty-and gave his life to it just the same. Jesus was the best God had to give the world. When the world rejected and killed him, God raised him up and offered him back again. God continues to offer us Jesus and will do so until we recognize in him the face of a God who “is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.” God’s power is God’s pateince. God’s might is God’s refusal to be drawn into the vortex of retribution that has characterized so much of human history. God defeats evil by outlasting it.
Here is a poem by the mystic, Mechthild of Magdeburg, that testifies to the heart of the God professed in the Scriptures.
God’s Absence
God speaks to the soul
And God said to the soul:
I desired you before the world began.
I desire you now
As you desire me.
And where the desires of two come together
There love is perfected.
Source: Beguine Spirituality (The Crossroad Publishing Company, Inc., 1989) Mechthild of Magdeburg (1207-1282) was monastic and mystic born to a noble Saxon family. At age 12 she had the first of several visions. In 1230 she left her home renouncing all claim to wealth and privilege to join a Beguine order at Magdeburg. There she seems to have risen to a position of authority in the community. She became acquainted with the Dominicans and became a Dominican tertiary, studying many of the Dominican writers. It was her Dominican confessor, Henry of Halle, who encouraged and helped Mechthild to compose The Flowing Light. Mechthird’s criticism of church dignitaries and their religious laxity along with her claims to theological insight by reason of her visions aroused ecclesiastical opposition. Some clerics called for the burning of her writings. In old age Mechthird lost her sight and found herself alone and the object of much criticism. Around 1272, she joined the Cistercian nunnery at Helfta, where she was given protection and support in the last years of her life. You can read more about Mechthild of Magdeburg and sample more of her writings at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 