Forgiving God

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was the 91st psalm:

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.

Forgiveness

 Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Genesis 50:15-21:

There is a story told about a new minister to a congregation and on his first Sunday there he preached a sermon on forgiveness, which was well received. The next Sunday he preached exactly the same sermon, which left people a little puzzled, but wondering what he would do the next week. But on the third week, he delivered exactly the same sermon of forgiveness, and so that week some leaders of the church paid a nice visit told him to tell him that while they appreciated the message the first time, they wanted to make it known that they expected to hear something different the next Sunday. But, for the fourth time he delivered the same message, only this time he added at the end, and when we start practicing forgiveness in all that we do, then we’ll move onto a new topic.

Now giving the same sermon on forgiveness over and over again is probably over-kill, although it does make sermon prep really easy, we can’t really hear about forgiveness enough because while we very often talk about God forgiving us, it’s also, and just as importantly as us forgiving others and us seeking forgiveness. Indeed, Jesus says that unless you forgive you will not be forgiven. Pretty high standards. But here is some good news. The first is that holding a grudge, the desire to get revenge is actually programmed into us by evolution. We want retribution for what has wronged us. We want vengeance. We want something bad to happen to the other person. This is a natural part coming from the base part of our feelings. Even people who are opposed to this, still feel it, as maybe perhaps summed up by an essay written by Rev. Mary Lynn Tobin in response to September 11, called “Vengeance is the Lord’s (but something inside me wants to ‘bomb the hell out of them’).” and so if you judge yourself because you hold grudges and want revenge, you can let that go because it’s natural. But it’s a matter of what you do with those feelings.

And so here is even better news. Forgiveness is also a part of who we are. It too has been programmed into us by evolution. The desire to heal and rebuild relationship and community are just as much, or maybe even more, a part of who we are as revenge is. In fact, in every animal that has been studied except for one, they have demonstrated acts of forgiveness, conciliation and reconciliation.  The one animal that doesn’t do this is the house cat, and for those who own cats, and those who dislike cats, this should not come as a surprise.  The reason why it is found in other animals, including humans, is because we live in community, and to stay in community which is necessary if we are to survive, we have to have the ability to forgive wrongs.

Nahum: Vengeance Is Mine

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Nahum 1:1-9:

In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner recounts an event early in his career when he was called on to help a couple whose only child, their 19-year-old daughter had died suddenly and unexpectedly of a burst blood vessel in her brain. He said that when he went over to their home he expected anger, grief, shock, but he didn’t expect the first words they said to him which was “You know, Rabbi, we didn’t fast last Yom Kippur.” Yom Kippur is the Jewish day of atonement, the most important of the high holies in Judaism, a day in which people, even many non-observant Jews, will refrain from work and will fast and seek forgiveness for the sins they have committed in the past year, and committing not to do those sins again. When this couple was struck by tragedy, they reverted back to a basic belief that God punishes people for their sin, and thus the death of their daughter had to have been caused by their failure to participate in Yom Kippur six months earlier. If only they had done that, they thought, then their daughter would be alive.

When my brother was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 20, my father had the same thought. He believed that God was punishing him for the sin of pride, by striking out at my brother. My brother’s cancer was a lesson that God was trying to teach my father and to punish him for a perceived slight to God. These are not unique stories, because they happen all the time with people seeking to give some meaning, some reason, some purpose for something that has happened in their life, and often it comes to a belief that God has caused this to happen, which often comes with a statement like “everything happens for a reason” or more specifically “This is part of God’s plan even if we don’t understand what that plan is.”

When Why is not the Right Question

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  This was preached in reaction to the death of my 9-year-old-nephew Wyatt, who also attended the church. The text was Romans 8:18-39:

In order to be a good journalist, or really to be able to tell a good story, you have to be able to answer five questions: who, what, when, where and why.  Of those, the why question is probably the hardest to be able to explain or to find.  After all what do we hear all the time in the news about some criminal investigation, “police are still looking for a motive.”  The motive is the why question.  Why did they do this, why did this happen.  Sometimes the why question is never really fully answered, and even when it is it is often unsatisfactory, but that doesn’t stop us from asking it, especially when bad things have happened.  I remember one person saying that they didn’t ask why when their first child was born happy and normal, they didn’t think about it because that’s the way things are supposed to be.  But when their second child was born severe mental and physical handicaps they were asking a lot of why questions.  These are the cries we lift up not in the best moments of our lives, but in the worst, even Jesus asks these questions as we are told that he cries out on the cross, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

We want things to be orderly, to be predictable, to be understandable, we want things to go the way we think they are to go, and when they don’t we wonder that question why.  That has certainly been flowing around our house the past week following Wyatt’s death.  I would have been perfectly content continuing to preach on the Sermon on the Mount, which we’ll have to come back to, and so I wonder why did this happen?  Why is a seemingly healthy boy no longer here?  Why did what seemed like successful surgery go downhill so fast?  Why did God let this happen?

I was just two months into my first pastoral appointment when I got called on to perform my first funeral.  I had assisted with one funeral in my internship, but it was for someone who was 96.  As Pastor Gerry said last week, when performing funerals for people who have lived long lives, it’s more of a celebration, there aren’t a lot of questions being asked, and certainly not a lot of why questions, but this was not one of those funerals.  Ethan had been born with a rare genetic defect called Spinal Muscular Atrophy.  It is a disease caused by a recessive gene which means that both parents have to carry the gene, and even if both parents carry the gene there is only a 25% chance of the child being born with it.  Jane and Anil had two children when Ethan was born, neither of whom had the disease, and they did not know they were carriers until they sought help from their pediatrician when around three months Ethan stopped growing.  They  were told the disease would cause his muscles to continue to deteriorate, that he would never be strong enough to lift his head, let alone walk or crawl, and his respiratory functions would be  most affected, and that with a good outcome he might live to be two years old.  He didn’t make it that long, dying at 15 months.