Rev. Tom Lenhart
Sermon October 19, 2008
“If God Is Alive – Where Is He?”
Exodus 33: 12-23 and Isaiah 45:1-7

          Let us pray.

Early this week someone asked me what I was going to preach on today and I replied “providence’. They looked at me quizzically and I quickly responded not Providence, Rhode Island  -- but the word, the concept of providence. Though the more I’ve thought about it – the more I concluded it might be easier to talk about the city.  But the times in which we are living raise the question of God’s providence. Providence is defined as “divine guidance and care.”[1] I don’t know about you but in these last few weeks I have certainly found myself asking, “where is God’s care and guidance in our world?”  The economic news is constantly dreadful. Everywhere one looks people are hurting, not simply on Main Street and Wall Street but in the hollows of West Virginia, on the high mesas of Arizona, in the north woods of Minnesota and amidst the bayous of Louisiana. And violence seems never to end but simply to move from one location n in our world to another -- always shattering the lives of the innocent. And global climate change continues to affect the whole world.

Ministers too wrestle with faith questions. In my life I have struggled repeatedly to understand God’s care and guidance.   Why does God permit children or anyone to develop cancer? Why does God let those who bend the rules and skirt the law – who treat their neighbors as assets to be exploited not loved -- so often succeed? Why are many in this country and around the world, losing their jobs, their homes and their savings? For most it’s through no fault of their own but because of the poor judgment or worse the greed and arrogance of others.  Why did you let these things happen, God? Why don’t you stop it?  These are times that try men’s and women’s souls -- when doubt in God can turn to anger and disbelief.

To understand God’s providential role in our world, we need to start with how we understand God. For most of us God is the Creator of all being. That is not to say that we see God as the intelligent designer – the little old clock maker -- who designs and assemblies everything. Instead we understand that in some way God stands behind creation - initiating and setting things in motion. God desires that creation in all of its diversity develop and flourish. God, of course, did not have to create but chose to do so as a voluntary act of commitment and love. (I will use interchangeably female and male pronouns in this sermon because no one pronoun captures God fully). It is from this that we derive our sense that God is love and loves us and all that lives and moves and breathes.

But doesn’t that beg the question. If God loves us, how can God allow us to get into the kind of mess we find ourselves in? And today, even more, why is God not getting us out of it? This is the question we ask when loved ones and other human beings suffer. Where is God’s care and guidance?

There is no universally accepted answer to this paradoxical dilemma. But for me it is wrapped up in that notion that God is love – that at its heart the essence of God and God’s relationship with human beings is love of one another. Said another way we are most fully human --in God’s image -- when we embody love of God and neighbor. What does such love require? Freedom -- for no one can be ordered to love another. It is something which springs freely and voluntarily from within.  To say we are made in God’s imagine means we have been given freedom to love and the freedom to make good choices and bad choices. And we must confront the consequences of both choices all the time.

Yet, even accepting responsibility for our own actions good, bad and indifferent -- don’t we still want God to pick us up when we fall down – to make things better? Can’t you imagine a figure in what might be the world’s largest TV production room with an infinite number of monitors, showing what‘s going on everywhere.  Don’t we want someone like a divine TV director who can at anytime change or stop what’s happening on a particular screen? The problem is what would that say about God and about us? Can’t an all powerful and all knowing God override our freedom to make bad choices and to pull us out of the soup? The answer is perhaps yes -- but what then of our freedom? And which of the multitude of soups does God get us out of? What difficult situation, what type of suffering is bad enough for God to intervene? Isn’t suffering always unacceptable? The problem is that God cannot intervene without eroding our freedom to nothing.  As one theologian has written

the Creator accepts the risk of
[suffering] as a condition of realizing
the goal of free [loving] fellowship of
[human beings]
with [God]himself.  .[2]

 It is important to remember that there is a distinction between what God accepts and what God seeks or desires. As the source of creation (and its attendant gift of freedom) God is responsible for suffering which arises from that freedom. That is not, however, the same as suggesting that God desires or wills suffering.  William Sloane Coffin wrote a letter to a young man who had just lost his roommate and best friend to a car accident. In that letter he captured what it means to be given freedom;

Why should I survive and not you?
God doesn’t go around the world with his
hands on steering wheels, his fists around knives,
his finger on triggers. On 9/11 He watched in horror.
Come to think of it the whole surface of the earth
is soaked with the tears and blood of the innocent,
almost all of it our own doing. The one thing we
can hold up against God is giving us our freedom.[3]

And so it is possible to understand that God loves and cares for us even though God doesn’t pull us out the soup. Indeed, we are most fully in God’s imagine when we are responsible for ourselves – exercising our freedom and thus capable of loving God and others. To think of God this way is to focus on a God who is out there – separated from us – loving and yet distant. It is the God in today’s passage from Exodus who is so awesome and distant from us that even God’s most faithful servant Moses cannot look directly at God.

Even if I accept that the divine gift of freedom deters God from intervening directly in our world, I still feel quite isolate from and unsupported by such a God.  There is, however, a second and crucial aspect to thinking about God. Paul in the book of Acts says that God is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” (17: 28). In these words Paul reminds us that God is not simply out there but in here with us in everything we do. To see God in this way is to realize in Marcus Borg’s words that God is “’in, with and under’ everything – not as the direct cause of events, but as a presence beneath and within our everyday lives”[4] God’s care and guidance bubbles up through the acts of human beings. As Isaiah reminds the Israelites in the passage read this morning, even Cyrus, the King of Persia, reflected God’s care for them. It was Cyrus who after defeating the Babylonians, with divinely inspired fairness permits, indeed encourages, the Israelites to return from Babylon to Jerusalem and to rebuild the Temple. The presence of the divine is in and with us all.

Paul Tillich, one of the leading theologians of the last century, talks about God as “the ground of all being”.  That understanding serves to remind us that all that is good within us flows from that divine spark. When we love our neighbors – all of them – we are reflecting that ground of being. Jesus is the manifestation of the link between the God out there and the personal God with us. William Sloane Coffin once said that Jesus Christ is “a mirror of humanity and a window to divinity.”    God manifested ultimate care for us in the life, preaching and sacrifice of Jesus. When we cry out to God to make things better, we want a strong God so we can be weak. But in Jesus, God was weak – accepting an unjust death -- so that we can be strong. In Jesus, God made love real and alive – and love is the force which truly changes the world. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote many years ago that

The world has tried in two ways to get rid of Jesus:
First, by crucifying him, and second, by worshiping him.
Jesus doesn’t [however] ask us to worship him …
[but] to follow him.[5]

The problem with seeing God solely as out there is that it means God is absent from us –simply something up there to worship. What Christ represents is a God who is always present-- not curtailing our freedom but who is there for us as a guide to enhance our freedom. God’s care for us is always there -- not something we have to ask for but it is something we have to work at. As the late Bob Luccock, a family friend and teacher, wrote,

To practice the presence of God [in our lives in the workplace, in school or at home], does not call for “devotional exercises” in … non sacred spaces. It does not mean that we necessarily begin to think “spiritual thoughts.” What matters is the sense that we are in the presence of God, or if one has trouble with theological language that we have within us the very best of reality, and that we can

call upon it whatever may be our needs.[6] 

God’s presence within gives us the tools to pull ourselves and others out of the soup. 

So for me the present situation in the world does not call into question God’s providence. God is always with us -- Christ is there always to be followed. The challenge is with us. Sometimes we don’t want to follow we would rather sit and worship. Christianity has been tested and never fund wanting but it has been found at times difficult.  Is there a loving and caring God out there or in here? The answer is definitely, yes. Let’s get up and follow her! Amen