Where Is God?

Pentecost 23A, 11/16/14
Matthew 25:14-30

Lord God, prepare us for the day of your coming. Protect us against destruction, and help us to live as children of the light. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

Elie Wiesel is a Romanian-born Jewish Holocaust survivor who has become a notable writer, activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner.

Wiesel’s most well-known book is a little novel called “Night,” based on the time he spent in Auschwitz and Buchenwald as a boy.

But that one’s not my favorite. My favorite work by Elie Wiesel, the one I keep coming back to, the one I have reread almost every year since I first discovered it in college, is a play called The Trial of God.

This play is clearly a commentary on anti-Semitism as the author had experienced it during the Holocaust and afterwards, yet Wiesel sets this play in the fictional small village of Shamgorod, in Eastern Europe in 1649.

In The Trial of God, the main characters are an innkeeper and his daughter and their servant, and a group of traveling entertainers who are hoping for a meal and warm bed in exchange for their services.

What the travelers don’t realize is that the innkeeper and his daughter are the only surviving Jews in the village since a pogrom two years ago, when the rest of the villagers killed all of the Jews.

As the travelers figure out where they are and what tragedy these people have endured, the characters engage in deep discussion.

Throughout the play, one question continually recurs, as the Jewish characters consider their fragile place in a world filled with hate.

Where is God in all this?

When it seems like all hope is lost… where is God?

When the chosen people are persecuted… where is God?

When righteous people lose their lives, or when children lose their innocence because of cruelty done to them… where is God?

It’s a question that people have been asking for thousands of years.

How does a loving, caring, just God permit the suffering of the people?

One traveler asks, “Where is God in all this, innkeeper?”

And the innkeeper responds, “Don’t you think He can handle his own affairs? Do you think He needs you to represent Him?” (page 13-14)

Where is God when things go wrong?

Or as the innkeeper might argue, why should we even bother looking for God’s presence anymore in our broken world? With all that’s going wrong with the world, isn’t it clear that God has abandoned us?

The innkeeper is upset that all his peers were killed off – and can you blame him? So when the travelers encourage him to celebrate the festival of Purim with them – a festival that is marked by laughter and revelry – he refuses. Instead, he asks the travelers to provide a different type of entertainment for him: in exchange for their food and shelter, the travelers must stage    a trial of God.

After a fair bit of convincing, the entertainers grudgingly agree to put God on trial for the entertainment of the innkeeper, and for a roof over their heads.

The three travelers are the panel of judges.

And, of course, the innkeeper volunteers to be the prosecutor.

But who will be bold enough to serve as God’s defense attorney? No one who has seen as much tragedy as these people wants to be the one to defend God in a court of law, even if it’s an imaginary court.

“Misery of miseries…” says one of the entertainers, “In the whole wide world, from east to west, from south to north, is there no one to plead on behalf of the Almighty? No one to speak for Him?” (page 109)

When things go wrong and we can’t make sense of the suffering in the world, it’s hard for any of us to have the courage to stand up for God.

Each of us has seen tragedy in our lives.

A child contracts a terminal illness.

A relationship goes down in flames with one person mistreating the other.

A young adult dies in a violent accident.

A community has to grapple with extreme crime, or poverty, or natural disaster, or other hardships.

Where is God in all this?

We’ve heard the platitudes: everything happens for a reason… God needed another angel… it’s all part of God’s plan… God will never give you more than you can handle… you shouldn’t question God.

Really?

You know, it is OK to question God.

God can handle it.

The tragedy in our life is real, and if we’re mad at God, it’s OK to say so.

When we’re in the midst of despair, all the explanations that people try to offer us usually don’t help at all. Sometimes we just feel abandoned by God, and there are no words of comfort that can bring us back until the circumstances around us change – until our loved one is either healed or passes away, until the tragedy around us is somehow resolved.

Where is God in all this?

Where is God in our lives?

Where is God in this parable that we heard from the Gospel of Matthew today?

Seriously, sometimes it can be really hard to find where God shows up in some particular Bible passages, and how these stories are supposed to be meaningful to us.

Where is God in this reading?

Normally in a parable, we look for God to be found in the forgiving father or the benevolent master. These are the images that describe God to us – the creator of heaven and earth, who sent his only son to die for our sins so that we might spend eternity in heaven.

That’s the God that we believe in – that’s the God that Christianity is built around.

But there is no such character in today’s story. There is no forgiving father or benevolent master. There is only a man who encourages the growth of an unjust economic system.

This parable has a master who is a harsh man, reaping where he did not sow and harvesting where he did not scatter seed.

This master encourages his servants to break the law – loaning money at interest was clearly against religious law, and yet the master chastises the last slave for not earning interest on the money, even though it would have required breaking the law.

The third slave returns to the master what rightfully belonged to the master, but he gets punished for it.

This does not sound like the creating, loving, redeeming God that we know through Jesus. This master is not the kind of man who would sacrifice anything on behalf of anyone else.

The master in this story is not someone we would want in the place of God.

He is nothing like the God we know from elsewhere in the Bible and from our own experiences.

Where is God in the parable?

In the ancient world, prior to the existence of the stock market, it was basically impossible to double any amount of money without taking advantage of someone else somewhere along the line – and this isn’t just any amount of money. One talent was equivalent to about 20 years’ wages for the average worker. There was no way to amass the sort of fortunes that the first two slaves gained through any kind of honest work.

According to all the other people in society, including the people who heard this parable, the first two slaves would be seen as unethical.

And yet the master rewards them for their unscrupulousness?

Where is God in all this?

When the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, when unethical leaders are rewarded for their unbiblical financial practices, when an honest person can’t find a way to get ahead in the world – where is God in all this?

Today’s parable isn’t a simple allegory where humankind is represented by one character and God is represented by another.

Today’s parable is much more complex.

Some scholars believe that this is a parable about the current state of the world, not about the kingdom of God, like the parable we heard last week.

Matthew chapters 24 and 25 are a series of parables and explanations from Jesus in response to the question from his disciples, “What will be the sign of your coming and the end of the age?” (24:3)

So Jesus isn’t talking about what heaven will be like, he’s describing the end of the world.

How can this ungracious master have the authority to reward two of the servants while punishing the other?

And what did that third servant do wrong, anyway? All he did was follow the law of God and return to the master what has originally belonged to him. What’s so bad about that?

It may be that we’ll never know. When things start to happen like what we hear about in this parable, Jesus tells us, the end of the world is at hand. We’re getting close to the second coming of the Son of Man, and to the destruction of everything familiar in our lives.

Where is God in all of this?

I think this is the critical question for us to be asking, as we read this parable from the Gospels, and as we look at the world around us.

Where is God in war?

Where is God in the deaths of our loved ones?

Where is God when the dishonest people get to be in control of the world?

I don’t know.

In the book I was telling you about, The Trial of God, they did finally find a prosecutor.

The only person willing to defend God was the only one who truly knew God’s power… because he was constantly working against it.

That’s right.

The devil showed up in the little village of Shamgorod to defend God when the faithful people put God on trial – because the devil was the one who was most closely acquainted with the depth of God’s power.

The evil power that can work against God, who can make our lives miserable, might also be the power that can help us understand when nothing is going right in the world – because that is the only explanation for everything that’s going wrong.

What if we took the traditional interpretation of this parable and turned it upside down?

Instead of the master of the slaves being a God figure, what if he represents the opposite?

Instead of the first two slaves being faithful, what if they’re actually working against the kingdom of God?

Instead of the third slave being a worthless lazy fool who doesn’t produce anything, what if he’s actually the most faithful person in the parable, because he actually acts with prudence and follows the law of God?

Finding God in the ups and downs of our world can be difficult, and sometimes the stories in the Bible do more to confuse us than clear things up. But I can promise you this: God IS in all this, somehow, somewhere.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.

Quotations are from The Trial of God, by Elie Wiesel, published by Shocken Books, New York, copyright 1979. http://www.randomhouse.com/book/190356/the-trial-of-god-by-elie-wiesel/