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/ 

Prophet

Pentecost 22A, 11/9/14

Amos 5:18-24

Holy Wisdom, guide our actions in life. Keep us attentive to your presence among us and help us be ready for the day of your coming. Amen.

Once upon a time, God created Adam and Eve and placed them in Paradise. All was going well, until they decided to go against God’s commands and do something that would separate them from God.    They sinned.

And they got kicked out of the Garden of Eden.

Then the population of the world grew and spread, and all seemed to be going well for a while. But then the people started doing evil things – they sinned.

And God destroyed them all, except for Noah and his family and a boatload of animals.

Several generations passed, and the Israelites eventually ended up enslaved in Egypt. God sent Moses to free the people from slavery, and he did – but once the people got their freedom, they complained about the food that God was miraculously providing for them in the desert.

         So God made them wander there, and eat that food, for 40 years.

Finally the Israelites got to the Promised Land, and in time they formed a country united under a single ruler, but after the reign of only three kings, the people sinned. They argued about how best to follow God. The kingdom split.

Eventually, the people will be conquered by neighboring kingdoms and taken away from the Promised Land and into exile.

But first: enter Amos.

Amos was a prophet sent by God to warn the people about their sin, to help prevent the calamity that God knew was coming.

Amos was just one of many prophets sent to the people of Israel over the years. Most of the books of the Old Testament that are named after a person    are named after one of these prophets. It seems that whenever the people were in danger of slipping so far into their sin that God would need to correct them, a prophet or two would show up.

When we hear the words prophet or prophecy, we tend to think of speculations about what the future will hold.

But Hebrew prophets weren’t fortune-tellers – they didn’t predict the future.

Hebrew prophets spoke out against the injustice and unfaithfulness that they witnessed in their current world situation.

God gave them a message to share, they were bold enough to share it – they were compelled to do so, regardless of how that message was received.

Prophets were known to get in to trouble with religious leaders, political leaders, and the general population… kind of like Jesus, actually, except that most of the Hebrew prophets weren’t put to death for their teachings.

So the Hebrew prophet Amos wasn’t predicting the future.

But it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to look at the history of the Hebrew people and realize that they’re about due for another catastrophe.

As had happened a number of times in the past, the chosen people strayed from following the law that God had given them. They lost faith in God’s guidance. They were setting themselves up for another disaster, just like the ones that had come to put the people in their place every time throughout known history that the people had strayed from God’s law.

And Amos could see it. So – at God’s urging – Amos chose to warn the people.

Here is the gist of Amos’ message:

Your actions outside of worship matter more than your acts of worship.

If your daily actions aren’t making the world a better place, you should be afraid of what God has planned for you.

So coming to Sunday worship, praying before every meal, serving on church council, attending to the needs of your own faith community – none of these is relevant, according to Amos.

         Instead, what God wants faithful people to do is create justice in society.

Faithful people are supposed to make sure that everyone in the world is fed, regardless of the cost to themselves. Faithful people are supposed to make sure that all God’s children have access to clean water and to other health care needs.

Faithful people should make sure that everyone is treated fairly, regardless of race or nationality, and that suspected criminals get their day in court.

The list could go on and on.

Here’s another way to summarize Amos’ message today:

Would an outside observer be able to tell that you are a follower of God by the way you live your daily life?

If not, a change is in order.

If every action that you take in life is not directed by God, and if you aren’t constantly working for the kingdom of God to show up in the world, then you are not doing a good job of following God.

OK, let me clarify a bit here.

We’re not talking about salvation.

There is nothing that you can do to earn that – God has already taken care of your salvation for you.

That’s what we call grace – whether you’re deserving of it or not, God welcomes you into the community of the chosen, the saved, the people who have been faithful throughout the generations.

What we’re talking about is what we do with our lives before God welcomes us into that community of faithful people for all eternity.

One of my seminary professors says this about the readings for this week:

[God’s] judgment… affirms those people whose lives express the virtues Jesus embodies: faithfulness, perseverance, readiness, obedience, and compassion.

Matthew Skinner, oddesynetworks.org/on-scripture-the-bible

Here’s an analogy that a friend of mine shared about the importance of Christian living. I hope it can help you understand the meaning of the readings today.

         Everyone in Christian community is part of a football team.

Some of us are starters and some are benchwarmers, but each of us has been chosen by God to serve on the team.

OK. So we’re all teammates. But we have to figure out a play, we have to strategize about the upcoming game.

So we huddle. We figure out what we think is the best thing to do.

         And then we go out and do it.
We start making plays. We start scoring points. We start using our God-given talents for the good of the team.

Coming to worship is like participating in the huddle of that football team.

We can learn some good information and have some fun here.

But faithful people are not supposed to stay inside the church walls. God wants us to go out and be involved with what’s going on in the world.

No one says, at the end of the football game “Man! That was the most amazing huddle I’ve ever seen!”

It’s the plays that count.

When we’re actually acting in faith, that is when we are following God. We heed the prophets’ warnings by going out onto that field and playing a really stellar game.

So let’s listen to the message of the prophet today. While we are waiting for the day of the Lord, when we’ll begin spending eternity with generations of faithful people, until the day of the Lord comes, let’s live a life full of faithful actions.

Amen.

Blessing

All Saints' Sunday, 11/2/14
Revelation 7:9-17; Matthew 5:1-12

Salvation belongs to you, O God. Bring us to the water of life and wipe away all tears from our eyes. Amen.

Long ago a baby was born to a Hebrew woman. Though not much is known about this baby between his notorious birth and the beginning of his ministry, we know that this man spent most of his adult life in a very close relationship with God. He attracted some followers, and tried to help these other people grow in their relationship with God as well. This man spent some significant time on mountains – they seemed to be places where he could always be sure to meet God. On one particular day, this man shared a list of messages from God with the people, hoping that it would help them to follow God more faithfully.

Does this story sound familiar?

The man in question, by the way, is Moses.

Moses was one of the top prophets in Judaism, and he ended up having a huge impact on the religious people of his day. Among other things, Moses introduced the people of God to the law that would help them more faithfully follow God’s wishes for their lives.

The Gospel of Mathew was written in such a way that Jesus would remind the reader of Moses.

Jesus is the new prophet, following in line with Moses and the other prophets of the Hebrew Bible. The first followers of Jesus, who still considered themselves to be Jewish, would have been glad for the comparisons that placed Jesus right in line with other Jewish prophets. By casting Jesus as a new Moses, the Gospel of Matthew immediately carries credibility – Jesus as a teacher is immediately recognizable to the people.

This past week in Confirmation we played a game with the kids.

Each group of students came up and acted out a movie or TV show for the rest of the class. We had Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Dora, and other shows that I can’t remember right now.

And we learned the very important lesson that if you weren’t familiar with the show being acted out, you had no hope of guessing what the charade was all about.    Some previous knowledge was required.

That’s why I’m starting a sermon about the Beatitudes by talking about Moses.

If you don’t understand the cultural reference that’s being made in this story, you’re going to miss a lot of the meaning of the things going on right in front of you.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is portrayed as a prophet in line with Moses and others in the Hebrew Bible.

You don’t need to be a biblical scholar to understand the basic comparisons.

The law that Moses taught the people is comparable to the teachings of Jesus.

Just as Moses had direct communication with God, and spoke with God’s authority, so does Jesus.

So in today’s passage, the teacher is Jesus, not Moses. Jesus doesn’t come down from the mountain with the law of God written on tablets of stone… he brings his followers onto the mountain with him and preaches them a sermon about how to grow in relationship with God.

Jesus’ sermon on the mount begins with a list of those people who are blessed.

This list is descriptive, not prescriptive.

These verses are not presented as a to-do list for the listeners – Jesus isn’t saying, “Go! Make yourself become poor in spirit     so that God will bless you!”

Instead, Jesus is describing the people whom God has already blessed.

         “See that shy, timid, meek person over there? God has blessed that person.”

The people listening to Jesus would have had a hard time believing him.

That guy? Blessed? In what universe?

Blessed was a Greek word used in literature and in Scripture to describe the gods, or humans who had died and gone to the world of the gods, or people in the upper classes of society, or those who had many possessions and an overall happy life.

(Brian Stoffregen, Gospel Notes)

From God’s perspective, Jesus tells us, blessing has nothing to do with those earthly measures of success. The ones who are blessed by God are the ones who are least valued in society.

And Jesus speaks with the authority of a prophet, so even if we don’t understand everything he’s saying, we know that it comes from God and is true.

According to one author, “Matthew’s beatitudes are not practical advice for successful living, but prophetic declarations made on the conviction of the coming-and-already-present kingdom of God.”

(Boring, Matthew, New Interpreter’s Bible, quoted in Brian Stoffregen, Gospel Notes)

So, God’s kingdom is present in those places where these words are true – in the kingdom of God, the meek will be blessed, and in fact, since they will be blessed in eternity, which has no beginning and no end, the meek are already blessed, even in our world, even when we don’t see it.

Are you following? This is kind of heady stuff.

Let’s go back to the Bible passage for a closer look.

The Beatitudes are a list of blessings – that’s where the word “beatitude” comes from, the Latin word meaning “blessed.”

Blessed are the poor in spirit.

Blessed are those who mourn.

Blessed are the meek. 

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

Blessed are the merciful.

Blessed are the pure in heart.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake.

Blessed are all these people, because Jesus has declared it to be so, and he has the authority of God to bless whomever he chooses.

For us, today, on All Saints’ Sunday, this is good news.

By at least one of these measures, each of us can probably fit into the framework of the Beatitudes somewhere.

In a few minutes, many of us will come forward to light candles in honor of our loved ones who have died.

And today, in our grief, Jesus tells us, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Jesus doesn’t tell us to go out into the world and seek grief – he simply states that for those of us who are already living with it – we are blessed.

Or, maybe mourning isn’t your thing today. Maybe you’re pretty happy with your own life, actually. But you see the unrest in the world around you. Whenever there’s a school shooting or military action or gang violence or armed robbery, it pains you. And so you work to stop the violence.

         You are a peacemaker. And you are blessed. 

Jesus says so.

And by saying it, Jesus makes it so.

That blessing is God’s promise to us when we die, as well.

On All Saints’ Sunday, we remember those who have passed away, celebrating that they are all saints, even if they will never be canonized by the church.

We hear in Scripture that a great multitude that no one can count, from every tribe and nation, speaking all kinds of different languages, all of the faithful who have died, will spend eternity in heaven praising God.

This is true because God makes it so.

It’s not true because everyone who dies was so wonderful.

I mean, sure, sometimes they are. But that’s not always the case.

        

Several years ago I did a funeral for a woman who was… very difficult to get along with. She was not close to her children – in fact, they didn’t like her very much.

This woman was grumpy and judgmental all the time.

I couldn’t find anyone who had happy stories to tell about her.

Some folks from the church remembered the contributions she had made in the quilting group or by helping out in the kitchen – they respected her, but they didn’t particularly like her. Just about everyone who showed up at this funeral did so because they felt that they should – they didn’t come out of love for the woman who had died.

         It’s kind of a sad story.

But here’s why it’s important.

That woman is still a saint.

She wasn’t sweet and loving and generous and kind – she wasn't’ any of those things that we usually say about people who have recently died.

But none of that matters, because God still chose her. God still claimed this woman, and she still gets to spend eternity with the rest of that countless multitude before the throne. That makes her holy – it makes her a saint.

You remember the movie The Ten Commandments? The one from the 50s, with Charlton Heston as Moses.

Yul Brynner played Pharaoh in that movie. He had a line that got repeated several times, that has stuck with me.

When he made a command, Yul Brynner’s character would say, “So let it be written. So let it be done.”

Pharaoh’s power, however, was not the strongest in this story.

God won out in the end. God’s power is shown every time God speaks – nothing needs to be written, nothing needs to be done – once the words are spoken, a new reality is made.

“They will hunger no more, and thirst no more;

the sun will not strike them,
nor any scorching heat;

for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd,

and he will guide them to springs of the water of life,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

All the dead have become holy – they are saints – simply because of God’s word.

Blessed are those who mourn.

And so it is.

Wherever you find yourself in the Beatitudes, or whenever you recognize that God’s unexpected grace has show up in your life, then, you are blessed – not because you earn it, but because God says so.

Thanks be to God.

Amen.