Rector's Blog: God and Terrible Things

Christians, you have to admit this is a fair question, and even if we haven’t nailed down a definitive answer, each of us should have done some serious work trying to sort this out for ourselves by now. That is to say, if you’re a Christian and you haven’t actually thought about this before, you probably should. Right now.

Jesus’ people, the ancient Israelites, believed that God would send someone into the world to make things right. They called this someone the Messiah, or the Anointed One. The first Christians were Jews who believed Jesus was this Messiah. That he was the Anointed one whom God had sent to set the world right. Furthermore, they believed that Jesus had accomplished the work – he had made things right - by dying and being resurrected. Of course, all the first Christians were publicly executed for believing this. Had Jesus saved them?

When I was in seminary, I used to drive about an hour away, up to a friend’s parents’ house for dinner. They would take me in and treat me like family and cook for me and make me feel like I was home every once in a while. They were Jewish and I was training for the priesthood so, sometime after dinner, religion would inevitably come up. I remember one night, we were listing the major differences in our beliefs, and I observed that most of it just came down to the fact that I believed Jesus was the Messiah and they did not. To which my surrogate mother immediately replied, “Well of course we don’t believe that: He didn’t do any of the things the Messiah was supposed to do!”

And I, the seminarian, had no good response to that. Because Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, apparently had made things right in the world, but so many things were still terrible. At this point I could launch into some theological treatise in order to justify why I believe in Jesus when bad things still happen, but you’d feel like I was selling you something, and you’d be right. Because I do not fully understand it, and it wouldn’t be healthy of me to pretend otherwise.

I’m not saying I’ve never thought about it. I’ve overthought about it. And read and studied. And none of that makes terrible things any less terrible. And somehow none of the terrible things keep me from believing in Jesus. Faith is a funny thing. So today I’m not going to try to solve this problem. Today I’m going to reflect on what I’ve come to believe about God and terrible things, since I believe in both.

Let me say the hardest thing first, so that you can check out early if you want to: I don’t believe God is weak or powerless. And that means I believe God allows terrible things to happen. And I believe that I will never fully understand this reality. That may seem like a copout to you, and if so, that’s fair enough. But let me say this: I find it odd that we think that we should be able to understand God, God’s decisions, and God’s actions fully in order to believe in God. I don’t understand my wife and I sure believe in her. I don’t even understand myself most of the time, but I believe in me too.

We say we’re made in God’s image, and I’ve come to believe our unfailing inscrutability is one of the things that makes us like God. To say God is mysterious may sound trite, but I still believe it. Because I believe life and love are endlessly mysterious, and God is Love, and God made life. We want God to be the answer of so many things, but so often God is the question.

The second thing I want to say is that I believe God plays the long game. This may actually be my least favorite thing about God. But it’s also one of those areas where both Scripture and my personal experience are so consistent, that I have no choice but to believe it. I am writing this in the aftermath of another Election Day – a day that seemed to have enough disappointment in it for everyone. And I notice the yearning that bubbles up within myself each Election Day. Every time, regardless of previous experience, I feel myself wanting the outcome to be clear and definitive. I want justice in one fell swoop. I don’t just want my team to win – I want it to be 100%, as if we could all wake up one day on the same page. I don’t want to hear that line about the arc of the moral universe anymore. I’m tired of it. I want things to be made right – right now.

God moves slow. When the Israelites are delivered from slavery in Egypt, God walks with them in the wilderness for forty years before they are able to enter the Promised Land. And, of course, once they get to the Promised Land, a whole new set of problems present themselves. After Jesus dies, it takes him three days to get back from Hell, and that is a remarkably brief turnaround in God’s timing. That’s utterly expedited. Before Jesus leaves for Heaven, he says he’ll be back. It’s been nearly 2000 years and that hasn’t happened. The long game. The work is ongoing. And it takes stamina, patience, rest, and renewal.

It's quite possible that, whether we prefer God’s pace or not, we have the capacity to learn from and be shaped by it.

And the last thing I want to say for now about God and the terrible things is about faithfulness. I believe God is faithful to us. We often think of faith as something we are supposed to have in God in order to be the right kind of people. But our faith tradition speaks much more about God’s faithfulness to us than vice versa. And I believe that faithfulness manifests itself not in God sitting back and being patient or understanding – but in God’s sharing in the suffering with us.

See, if we Christians believe Jesus is fully God and fully human, that means we believe God doesn’t just sit back and watch: God experiences our humanity. God experiences the terrible things too. How ready I am, in the face of terrible things, to think of God as observing my fear and misery from afar. But the truth is that God isn’t watching us suffer: God is suffering too. My relationship to terrible things shifts when I realize that they pain God too.

So if there are still terrible things, then what does it mean for us to be saved? For starters it means we are not alone. The terrible things are not symbols of our abandonment. They are not punishments. And they do not mean God’s away on business. God is totally and inseparably with you right now.

And we are saved from the terrible things being the final truth about our lives. Death is not the end of Jesus, neither is it our end. Loneliness and tragedy may scrape and scar us, but in Jesus they do not define us. We are defined by our utter belonging to God and to one another. We are defined by the spark of hope that lights our darkest days.

I have written too much and still not answered the first question, at least not definitively. So we will keep talking about it. But I wonder how you answer the question. How are you saved?