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Reconciling The Ways of a Questionable God to Good Men and Women
Sermon
delivered at All Souls Community Church © The Reverend Doctor Brent A. SmithREADINGCatch-22, Joseph Heller, 1955
“And don’t tell me God works in mysterious ways,” Yossarian continued, “There’s nothing so mysterious about it. He’s not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about – a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed. Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His divine system of creation? What in the world was running through that warped, evil mind of His when He robbed old people of the power to control their bowel movements? Why in the world did He ever create pain?” “Pain?” Lieutenant Scheisskoph’s wife pounced upon the word victoriously. “Pain is a useful symptom. Pain is a warning to us of bodily dangers.” “And who created the dangers?” Yossarian demanded. He laughed caustically. “Oh, He was really being charitable to us when He gave us pain! Why couldn’t He have used a doorbell instead to notify us, or one of his celestial choirs? Or a system of blue-and-red neon tubes right in the middle of each person’s forehead. Any jukebox manufacturer worth his salt could have done that. Why couldn’t He?” “People would certainly look silly walking around with red neon tubes in the middle of their foreheads.” “They certainly look beautiful now writhing in agony or stupefied with morphine, don’t they? What a colossal immortal blunderer! When you consider the opportunity and power He had to really do a job, and then look at the stupid, ugly little mess He made of it instead, His sheer incompetence is almost staggering. It’s obvious He never met a payroll. Why, no self-respecting businessman would hire a bungler like Him as even a shipping clerk!” Lieutenant Scheisskoph’s wife had turned ashen in disbelief and was ogling him with alarm. “You’d better not talk that way about Him, honey. He might punish you.” “Isn’t He punishing me enough?” Yossarian snorted resentfully, “You know, we mustn’t let Him get away with it. Oh, no, we certainly mustn’t let Him get away scot-free for all the sorrow He’s caused us. Someday I’m going to make Him pay… [Besides] I thought you didn’t believe in God.” “I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.” Yossarian laughed… “Let’s have a little more religious freedom between us,” he proposed obligingly. “You don’t believe in the God you want to, and I won’t believe in the God I want to. Is that a deal?”
Job 38:1-7, 12, 17-18, 40: 2
Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind: “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you shall declare to me.” “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements – surely you must know! Or, who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Have you commanded the morning since your days began, and caused the dawn to know its place? Have the gates of death been revealed to you, or have you seen the gates of deep darkness? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Declare, if you know all this.” “Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it.”
JB, Archibald MacLeish
Sarah: Cry for justice and the stars Will stare until your eyes sting. Weep, Enormous winds will thrash the water. Cry in sleep for your lost children, Snow will fall… You wanted justice and there was none – Only love… Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling… It’s all the light now. Blow on the coal of the heart. The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart And we’ll see by and by…
SERMON
God is a classic underachiever! His parents must be disappointed, or confused at the very least! As a parent myself I think that the hardest challenge to contemplate, short of being the father of a child with a physical or mental disability, would be dealing with a classic underachiever. I feared the prospect with each of my children because I wouldn’t know how to respond. It is so antithetical to my way of thinking. Each is given gifts. Not by any means the same gifts. One has physical prowess, another emotional depth, another person is visually creative, and another is intellectually superior. To see one who possesses gifts not utilize them, not develop them to the fullest extent possible, would be to me the harshest reality that a parent could face. God’s parents must be beside themselves. They have raised the classic underachiever! This is not simply my opinion or an observation reached by a cynical and bitter modern mind. There are ancient witnesses to the unfathomable disparity between God’s abilities to create and capacities for goodness, and the world that God has wrought. The ancient Hebrews created a whole book of scripture, the Book of Job to chronicle God’s reluctance to exercise His power, or to exercise it irresponsibility. The book begins with God complimenting Job’s faithfulness, and Satan pointing out that Job is faithful because he’s blessed. If God ever took away those blessings and afflicted Job, pointed out Satan, God would see how faithful his servant really is! God is taken in by Satan’s slyness and brings untold and unjustified sufferings upon Job. The writer of the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes echoes the very same complaint of God’s underachieving: All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongs his life in his wickedness. (7:15) The good die young while the wicked seem to make out all right, even prosper! What kind of universe is this? All moderns ask of God is a little reasonable consistency! If you have lived at all you have witnessed this irreconcilable incongruity, called theodicy, a word first coined by German philosopher and theologian Gottfried Leibniz in an essay he wrote in 1710: How can, why does an all powerful, all good God permit evil? The past century changed the nature of how philosophers and theologians address that issue because of the enormity of its horrors and evils. WWI, the Great Depression, WWII, the Holocaust, all brought both a recognition of man’s capacity for destruction and God’s inability or unwillingness to alleviate suffering. Much of post-WWII literature is devoted to variations on this question. The Catch-22 is what we live in, the existential crisis envisioned by Beckett’s hobos as they are left Waiting for Godot, waiting perhaps for God to appear; what Harold Kushner’s enormously popular book tackled, Why Do Bad Things Happen to Good People?; or, most explicitly, in Archibald MacLeish’s Pulitzer Prize winning play, JB, the modern Job, wherein we hear the classic question of theodicy, the question that plagued the 20th century, the question that was bequeathed unresolved to the early part of the 21st: If God is God, He is not good;/ If God is good, He is not God. Take the even, take the odd. A twelve-year old boy inadvertently drowns because he is fishing along the banks of a creek that suddenly swells to ten times its size because of a downpour and a flash flood. Could God be so questionable, maybe evil, that He would allow such a thing? Maybe this world is just a battleground between the forces of good and the forces of evil and humanity is caught in-between. That’s what the ancient Manicheans thought, but the Hebrews and, later, the Christians, claimed that this creation was good and not this cosmic version of the WWF! The Hebrews countered with God’s booming retort out of the whirlwind: Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up your loins like a man. I will question you, and you shall declare to me.
Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding…
Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty? He who argues with God, let him answer it. But this sounds like overcompensation on God’s part, like a parent who is caught by His child in a great contradiction, not walking the talk so the talk becomes a little louder! If He’s God and He allows such evil, then maybe He’s not good after all, and to orthodox Christianity that is inconceivable. God must be good, that’s his job! And if He must be good, in the face of this horror, then it must be man who is responsible, either directly or indirectly, for the presence of such evil. It is either by our direct actions, or by the indirect action of not understanding fully, that something becomes evil. It is part of a plan we cannot comprehend. What we deem as horror, or tragedy, or evil, must not be that all. We just lack the capacity to understand that it is the Will of a good God whom we are to love uncritically, and to accept the horror in which we cannot understand its goodness!?! But this, too, is insufficient, and crumbles with simple maturing of the intellect and the spirit. I remember my first encounter with a phenomenon called “the 12 year old atheist.” About fifteen years ago a parishioner called me in great distress as her 12-year daughter had come home from school in tears, and angrily and defiantly pronounced, “I know there isn’t a God! I studied so hard for this math test, and Johnny DuFore next me, who torments everybody in school, didn’t crack the book once. He got an A and I got an F! I hate him and I don’t believe in God anymore.” She shoved the paper under her mother’s nose and stomped upstairs to her room. Her mother rushed to the phone and called me. What was I to say that could contradict the child’s experience? That she just didn’t study enough? That her experience of Johnny’s torments wasn’t real? That there is some larger justice she just couldn’t grasp? Lieutenant Scheisskoph’s wife, a character that because she is not named could stand in for anyone of us, echoes the 12-year old atheist and most of 20th century religious liberalism: “The God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God.” How could anyone who is intellectually honest believe in Him? One would need to be blind, believe people get what they deserve, to hold to a god of absolute and complete goodness when there exists so much undeserved injustice and suffering! How could someone believe in God and still love life? In Archibald MacLeish’s JB Job’s wife Sarah returns and delivers the lines which the 20th century religious liberal has lived by: “You wanted justice and there was none. Only love… Then blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.” Yossarian offers his human love, too, to Lieutenant Scheisskoph’s wife and others, a retort and rebellion against the Catch-22. His love of others and life is so deep it is the sworn enemy of all that diminishes life. “Blow on the coal of the heart!” It’s why Romeo and Juliet seal their fate, too, with death by their own hands. They, too, love each other with a human love so deep, a love of life with each other so deep, that the incongruities, injustices, and sufferings of this world they hate must be shunned in favor of their love. “Blow on the coal of the heart, my darling.” It’s why JB’s wife closes the play with the deepest, most powerful response the religious liberal of the 20th century can give to the heart-wrenching predicament of theodicy: Blow on the coal of the heart. The candles in churches are out. The lights have gone out in the sky. Blow on the coal of the heart And we’ll see by and by. Except it’s not the 20th century any more. Human love doesn’t endure. I love my wife but my love will end when my life does. And our love for one another alone, against the candles going out in churches and the lights going out in the sky, against the progress of the darkness surrounding us, weds the romance of rebellion and resistance, with death. The lights haven’t gone out in the sky. The candles still burn in churches, and some burn brighter and with more warmth than ever before. There is more than just darkness surrounding JB and Sarah, if only they would seek it. Romeo and Juliet had other choices then their love leading them in a rebellion against life itself! Yossarian lives in more than just a Catch-22. Job yells out at God and God yells back, and is that the end of their relationship? There is nothing more meaningful to life than fragile and ephemeral human love, which is destroyed by death? If my wife ended our relationship every time I was an underachiever, or every time I claimed one thing and did another, or every time I brought pain into our lives she would have escaped our relationship years ago. No relationship with any depth or endurance is bounded only by a fragile, ephemeral human love. If our relationship as minister and congregation is forged to beat back a dooming darkness or any of us escapes it whenever our love or our relationship falters, then our sight is so small as not to see larger possibilities of love and justice that God has embedded into existence and of which we cannot now conceive. Evil is not the product solely of a humanity gone wild over and against an absolute and completely good God. But, likewise, existence is not simply some great cold darkness made warm only by the resistance of a rebellious and fleeting human love, a view that is romantically attractive but ultimately in love with our anger, our finitude, and our death. Anyone with a modern sensibility is well aware of the incongruities of existence. Earthquakes kill tens of thousands just because they happen to have been born in a part of the world susceptible to underground instability. Innocent children suffer untold horrors not of their making through no fault of their own. We feel these incongruities, perhaps, as deeply as any other time in human history maybe in part because we allow them to cut so deep. The true Catch-22 is that you can’t escape the sufferings of the world. The claim that God is an all-Good God and that, somehow, suffering is the result of our sin and finitude is an escape. And the claim that the unresolved nature of theodicy leaves man with only the existential resistance and rebellion of “blowing on the coal’s of the heart” is also an escape, that is poignant but narcissistic because it claims finitude and the self are all there is. Perhaps, then, this existence is like a relationship; the self to itself, the self to others, others to others, humanity to Nature, humanity to God, or whatever terms one uses to describe the force that created existence and continues to move in it to insure its creative possibilities remain, whether we see them or not. Life, existence, all around us, is as a relationship, a covenant, deeper than love and stronger than death. There is no completely good God, nor completely depraved human being. Those are our concepts, not real things. There is first the relationship. Existence is not complete darkness, except if you want to limit your sight only to the romantic allure of that escape. There is first the relationship. We are not formed as isolated entities, but as creatures of nature, creatures for each other, creatures formed by some spark, some spirit that raised us above animals especially as we see the relationship that this spirit has had with us since our birth. It is beyond good, and certainly does not alleviate all evil. We belong to this life, and to this life of the spirit, which is a relationship larger than love and justice. But it is from this relationship that justice and love originate, and it is to that larger, more transcendent possibility that our petty notions of justice and love are both aimed and transformed. God’s justice is not our justice, for our justice executes innocents and is extended too often only to those like us. God’s love is not our love, for our love perishes when we do and is too often offered to but a few. But when we ask a question born of relationship, what God requires of us and what we require of God, then human notions of justice can be redeemed of their failures, and human notions of love can widen to form a covenant with all of existence. AMEN |
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