What I am about to say is probably going to get me in some trouble, or at the very least it will cause some controversy, and I’m not saying it for its shock value, but if you are upset I ask for you to stay with me so I can explain more on the other side of it. Sometimes the Bible is just wrong. I don’t mean that there are there are contradictions or mistakes, because there are and I’m not refencing that. But I mean that it’s just wrong and that Psalm we heard this morning is one of those times. I even had someone who was doing their prep work for today, for lack of a better term, say to me “are you going to talk about the fact that the Psalm doesn’t match reality?” and that’s exactly what I’m going to talk about. It’s a beautiful Psalm and wonderful imagery and a pleasant ideal, but it’s not true. What we are told is that those who “live in the shelter of the most high”, those who abide in God, will be delivered from “the snare of the fowler and from the deadly pestilence.” That “no evil shall befall you [and] no scourge come near your tent.” God will command angels on our behalf so that “you will not dash your foot against a stone” and a “long life” will come to us. And yet we know that’s not true. Because we are not delivered from deadly pestilence, we do fear the night, sometimes the serpent does rise up to strike us. This week was the 9th anniversary of the death of my nephew Wyatt who died at 9, and so he did not receive a long life, and we certainly know others for whom that is true as well. And we know that we are not always rescued from trouble. And since that is what our lives are really like, that leaves us with two possibilities. One of them is that we don’t actually love God or live in the shelter of God, that we don’t God’s name and don’t trust in God to deliver, and therefore we get whatever happens to us in life because we deserve it. Or, the second option, is that this Psalm isn’t true, that while God may love us and we love God that we are not guaranteed eternal protection from anything bad ever happening to us simply because of our faith. And of the two, I’m going to go with the second option.
And so today we conclude our series on forgiveness by looking at an area in which many people may also take some issue and that is forgiving God. While some struggle with the issue of forgiving God, others will say that it’s not even on the table, that we don’t need to forgive God because God has nothing to be forgiven for. I’ve done a lot of reading and study on the subject of forgiveness, and have only encountered the idea of forgiving God in two of them. One of them was sort of a new-age book, and the other was a book on forgiveness that one of our adult faith development classes read in the fall entitled Forgiving What You Can’t Forget, and the author there says sorta kinda that you don’t need to forgive God because God is not responsible for the bad things in our lives while also simultaneously saying that God is in total control and is responsible for everything, we just don’t understand it all and we should pray that God will help us to understand it. Not an uncommon articulation of what is known as theodicy, or if God is good then why do bad things happen. These thoughts are also sometimes accompanied by statements like “everything happens for a reason,” or “God doesn’t give us anything we can’t handle” or, thinking of the death of a child, “God needed another angel,” and if you have any of those statements in your repertoire I beg you, for the love of God, literally in this case, to stop saying them. We say them with the best of intentions, but in the midst of despair they are less than helpful, and they can also damage because what these things do is say that God is responsible. And if God is responsible then forgiveness has to play a role, and even if God is not responsible, which is what I am going to argue, then it still can be redemptive because of the thoughts that lead us in that direction.
In the first message on forgiveness, I began with the story
of the shooting at the Amish school in Nickel Mines Pennsylvania, and how the
community stepped up and demonstrated their forgiveness to the shooter and his
family. What I also mentioned was that the reason given by the shooter was that
he could not forgive God whom he said was responsible for the death of his
infant daughter. And because he could not strike back at God, he struck out at
his neighbors. And I’m sure that you have known people, like I have, who have
been mad at God for something that has happened in their lives and what usually
happens is that it gets directed to their faith, and at the very least they
leave the church, if not seeking to reject the idea of God altogether. And
often this happens not just because of the clichés they are told that say that
God is responsible, but also because they are also told that they can’t be mad
at God, that it was inappropriate and so they don’t know what to do with that
anger and their faith crumbles and sometimes their lives crumble too.
Because the truth is we don’t get mad at God about the small
things in life, and people don’t tell us that God is responsible when we fall
and skin our knee. We might get mad at gravity, but it doesn’t rise the level
of divine accusation and no one is going to say “everything happens for a
reason.” We blame God for the big things, those things that bring us to our
knees and leave us asking “why?” or even “why me?” Last week I talked about the
death of comedian Billy Crystal’s father when he was 15, and that the last
thing he said to him was shut-up. In
remembering that time, Crystal has an imaginary conversation with God in which
he tells God that he will never believe in God again, because life is unfair,
and he says there should be an 11th commandment which says “thou shalt not be a
schmucky God,” and then quickly adds, “I didn’t mean that.” We want to strike out in anger, and where
else are we to direct our anger except at God, after all we have the 91st Psalm
hanging there telling us that God will rescue us in our time of need, and that
bad things won’t befall us, that bad things will happen to bad people, that we
will be protected, and yet we aren’t. Or we hear as we did in the story of
Joseph when he confronts his brothers he tells them that while they meant to do
him harm in selling him into slavery, that it was actually the work of God who
intended it for good so that Joseph would be able to save them in the future.
God was responsible for it, and while Joseph might be able to see a positive
out of it, I can think of plenty of others who would want to have God apologize
for doing that to them, for all the pain and suffering and misery that came
along with it. And while we don’t have the time to talk about theodicy, or
answer the question of why, I am going to be bold enough to say that I don’t
think God was responsible for that. And God is not responsible for hurricanes.
And God is not responsible for cancer. And God is not responsible for any of the
other terrible things that can happen that we attribute to God, and yet we
still want to hold someone, or something accountable, because otherwise the
world is just random chaos, devoid of meaning, which I don’t think is the case,
and so we search for meaning or something.
Nobel Prize winner, and Auschwitz survivor, Elie Wiesel
tells the story of a trial of God that took place at Auschwitz, which he later
turned into a play. He says that one
day, late at night, the rabbis gathered around and conducted a court case with
God as the defendant. There was a
prosecutor and defense attorney and a judge to render a verdict. Wiesel says that at the end of the trial, the
rabbis rendered God not really guilty, but instead said that God “owes us something.” Then, he says, they went off to pray. I trust Wiesel’s account of these events
since he was there, but another ending says that they declared God guilty,
proclaimed the death penalty, and then a rabbi said, “God is dead, and now it
is time for the evening prayers.” In
interpreting that version, religious scholar Karen Armstrong, says that “that
is a profound religious moment, I think, which is God is inexpressible,
incomprehensible, undefinable by us. Ideas about God can live and die. But the
prayer, the struggle to understand, even in the darkest moments of life, that
effort continues…. Religion is not
supposed to provide certainty… when you say that you are certain, this is
usually ego. Because there can be no certainty about God. Nobody has the last
word about God. God exceeds our dogmatism. God exceeds our limited little
ideas…. And that if we try to limit God and make Him fit neatly into a
simplistic ideology, then we're cutting God down to size.”[1]
And so, we do blame God for things, and perhaps, maybe,
that’s even the right thing to do because God is big enough to be able to
handle it. That’s my answer when people say they can’t be mad at God. Why? Do
you think God can’t handle our anger? I think God is not only big enough, but
God is ready to do so. In the 121st Psalm, the psalmist says “I lift up my eyes
to the hills— from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord,
who made heaven and earth.” It doesn’t say that our troubles come from God, but
that God will help us through them. God will answer our prayers through the
presence of the Holy Spirit. Or as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, that
God can redeem all situations. God can bring something good out of everything,
not because God causes it, but because God is present with us in those moments
and we are never alone. And I think God is big enough to hear us say “I’m mad
as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore” and to tell God that we forgive
God, because if that’s what we need to do to move forward in hope and to
reclaim our power and our story, then I know that God can deal with it just
fine and help us to realize that movement forward. So how do we forgive
God?
The steps to forgiving God are the same we have been
covering in our other steps, except adding one more piece which we should also
apply to others, and that is dealing with our expectations. All of us have expectations for our lives and
for others. Whether they are good or
not, or realizable or not, is another matter, but what we have to recognize is
that while we have expectations, we have no way of enforcing them. So, for example, we should have the
expectation that we will be loved and respected and treated appropriately by
our parents and other family members, but unfortunately that does not always
happen. We can hold our family members
accountable for what they actually did to us, but we cannot hold them
accountable for not meeting our expectations, because that’s not on them,
that’s on us because we cannot enforce. So,
if we have expectations of God like those presented by the 91st Psalm, then we
are sure to be disappointed.
Which leads us to our thoughts about God, about who God is,
and what God does and does not do, because when it comes to our disappointments
with God, or things that we are angry with God about, it might be not only that
our expectations may need to be
adjusted, but so may our ideas about God.
That is what Karen Armstrong was saying, when she said that God exceeds
our dogma. Our ideas about God may need
to change when they don’t match the reality of our lives. When his son died of progeria, which is a
premature aging disease, not only did Rabbi Harold Kushner decide to write When
Bad things Happen to Good People, but he also had to rethink his ideas about
God. He said that he could continue to
believe in a God which controlled everything, that caused everything to happen,
that knew everything. But there were
problems with that idea, Kushner says, the biggest one being that claiming that
God causes everything to happen, and is behind everything, puts God not on the
side of the victims and those who suffer, but instead on the side of those who
are the perpetrators. Under this
theology, God is not on the side of the victims of the holocaust, but instead
on the side of the Nazis. God is not
suffering with those who have cancer, but God is with the cancer. That was untenable, and if he continued to
hold that position, Rabbi Kushner said he would have had to have lost God. Or he could believe in a God who was not in
total control, who allowed us to make mistakes, who was still in the process of
creating and so there was still chaos in the world, and thus things beyond
God’s control, and thus was also on the side of the victims and those who
suffered, and was not only on their side but who suffered along with them. And so, Rabbi Kushner changed his conception
of God and thus could also continue to struggle with God and be faithful to
God, and that might be what some of us need to do as well in order to learn to
forgive God. As the Rev. Dr. Forest
Church said, when someone says they don’t believe in God, I ask them to tell me
about the God they don’t believe in because it turns out I don’t believe in that
God either.
But the other step is the same as with forgiving others, and
that is to tell God exactly what we are thinking and feeling, including being
angry at God. God is big enough to
handle it all. In a poem entitle Love
Letter, Madeleine L’Engle begins, “Dear God, I hate you. Love, Madeleine.” Express everything just like we do with
others we need to forgive, and then we conclude by saying “I forgive you.” But with God there is one more step and that
is to ask God to walk the journey of healing with us. Not because God wasn’t going to do that
already, but instead because it reminds us that God is already walking with us,
that even though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, God is with
us and God’s rod and staff they comfort us. Or, simply to ask God to help
transform our pain, to transfigure it, into something new and powerful, to mold
for us that new future enveloped in God’s love and God’s forgiveness, to make
us that new creation in Christ.
Some of you may have noticed that as we have been working through this series that the pot which started out as broken has been being pieced back together, representing what happens when we start on the path of forgiveness, that we take the things which have broken us and we chose to be made whole again. We talked about this in our series on perfection last Lent that there is an art tradition in Japan called Kintsugi that if a pot, or a plate, or a cup is broken, that if it is put back together, rather than trying to hide the cracks, instead the cracks are painted gold in order to highlight them, and that it is the cracks that make the pottery more beautiful, and the same is true with us. We are not made weaker by forgiveness; we are made stronger and more beautiful. We are not restored to how we were before, but when we choose to forgive we take control of our lives, we take control of the story we tell about ourselves, and we are no longer left shattered. Because what forgiveness shows us is that by holding onto our hurts, we think we are hurting our offender, but in fact we are only hurting ourselves, and when we choose to let those who have hurt us out of the prison we think we have constructed for them, it turns out that we actually free ourselves and open ourselves up to be God’s love and forgiveness to the world in powerful and extraordinary ways because of the love and forgiveness we have first receive through Christ. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
[1] http://www.ushmm.org/mobile/blog_entry/karen-armstrong
No comments:
Post a Comment