Rector's Blog: Where is God

Where is God?

I ask this question a lot, and I get asked it a lot. A friend who is really going through it recently asked me, and followed up by saying they were not asking rhetorically. It’s not a new question. Some biblical scholars believe that the Book of Job is the earliest story in our Scriptures. Which means not only is “Where is God?” not a new question – it might be the oldest question anyone who believed in God ever asked. And it’s important to remember that “Where is God?” is asked most frequently by people who believe in God, because we often think it’s a question rooted either in faithlessness or cynicism. But in my experience it is one of the most faithful questions anyone can ask.

Where is God?

I need to tell you that I will not answer this question in anything like a satisfactory way. So please know that going forward. Just the same, my first answer is that God is with us. This is the stated belief of the Christian – even when we don’t understand, even when we question, even when we doubt, even when we are furious with God. God is with us. When I was growing up, the spectacular Bette Midler sang, “God is watching us from a distance.” It was beautiful and it was believable, but it was also not true – at least not according to the Christian narrative. We say that God is here right now.

Tom Long once wrote that because of Jesus Christ, because of his divine humanity, his solidarity with us, his suffering, his awful death, the Christian cannot witness suffering and say, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Long insisted that the Christian must say, “There, because of the grace of God, goes God.”

Which is to say that God is experiencing your loved one’s pain, not merely observing it. God is dying alongside the one you love. During every mass shooting, God’s very body is being destroyed again and again. Suffering and death is not a sign of God’s absence. God is not watching us from a distance. God moves toward us in our pain not away from us. Well, ok, but then what is God bothering to do once they get there? I thought God was love: If they’re not going to answer our prayers, what is the point of God?

If God is love, and God is with us, and God is powerful, then why isn’t God fixing the problem? This is a place I need to sit for a moment. Because this question says more about me than it does about God. I’m realizing my assumption is that if God loves me then God should be solving my problems. That if God is not solving my problems, God must not love me. Is this what I think love is? Well, honestly, yeah a lot of the time I do. I try to solve problems all the time. Chances are that if you have ever come to me with a story of your pain or sorrow, I have immediately been stewing over how to fix your problems, how to fix you.

One thing I keep learning when I listen to others, especially the women in my life, is that me trying to fix your problems – even if my solutions might work – does not always feel like love. And in fact, solving the problem isn’t always love. Sometimes my trying to fix things is more about my discomfort than it is with my desire to love. Yet these are our expectations of God: If you love me, fix this. If you don’t fix this, either you’re not here, you’re not capable, or you don’t love me.

“My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” David asks in Psalm 22. “Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?” Jesus repeated David’s cry on the cross, mere hours after praying that God would keep him from experiencing that exact moment, that exact fate. At the end of the Psalm, nothing has been solved, but still David insists that, “future generations will be told about the Lord, and proclaim his deliverance to a people yet unborn.” And indeed the Christian believes Jesus was delivered. Only we do not believe he was delivered from death, but rather through death. In our baptismal liturgy we say that we are baptized into Christ’s death. Through it, not from it. In our sorrow, we find the God who finds us.

I am writing these words on the Feast Day of St. Julian of Norwich. Mother Julian lived in the time of the Black Death when over half of her city’s people were killed by plague. She herself experienced great illness, solitude, pain, and loneliness. In her Revelations of Divine Love, she once wrote, “If there is anywhere on earth a lover of God who is always kept safe, I know nothing of it, for it was not shown to me. But this was shown: That whether in falling or in rising, we are always kept in that same precious love.”

We know that love is healing. Yet we see that love does not always heal. We know that love saves us. Yet we see that we are not always saved – leastways not in a manner we like or understand.

What if Love does not exist primarily as a response or solution to our problems? How might we understand God’s presence and power differently? Is a love that does not always keep us safe something in which we have any interest?

I do not mean to suggest that God’s love will not bring justice, that God will not, as the prophet says, wipe every tear from our eye, that God will not recover the lost, liberate the oppressed, avenge the marginalized, and lead us to beat our guns into plowshares. And I certainly do not want you to hear that we are exempt from partnering with God in the work of addressing this world’s problems. We are not exempt. It is our work, and it is certainly love in action.

But I still find myself asking, is that the only thing love is for? To fix us? Or can we find ourselves kept in the same precious love whether we fall or rise? Can we locate God’s presence in our suffering, in our death? Can we see God not despite our death but within it, through it? When love shows up, what do we expect to happen?