Questions for God: Does Everyone Get into Heaven?
Romans 5:12-21
March 27, 2011
Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned— sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law. Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come. But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man’s trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man’s sin.
For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification. If, because of the one man’s trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ. Therefore just as one man’s trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all. For just as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous. But law came in, with the result that the trespass multiplied; but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, just as sin exercised dominion in death, so grace might also exercise dominion through justification leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.
A controversy has been brewing in the Christian world the past three weeks. I’d be surprised if you were aware of it, but you may have been. The controversy regards a book coming out this week by the pastor of the Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan—Rob Bell. His church is a 10,000-member church that caters mainly to younger folks. The controversy is that his new book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, says that there is no Hell and implies that all are saved (at least that’s what the critics say—the book has yet to be published). Christians of all stripes have been blasting him, saying that his teaching is unbiblical and heretical.
The fallout from the book is spreading beyond just Bell’s circles. For example, a Methodist pastor, Chad Holtz, was fired from his church, Morrows Chapel in Henderson, NC, after posting on his Facebook page that he agreed with Bell. According to those in the know, he was probably fired for a pattern of statements that the members found objectionable. Still, the official reason he was let go was his saying that there is no Hell.
So, what do you think? Should Rob Bell be receiving so much criticism? Should Chad Holtz have lost his job? Is this a tempest in a teapot, or a controversy that strikes to the core of Christian belief?
Do you want to know what I find amazing about this controversy? It’s how adamant and angry people get about things they don’t know, haven’t experienced, and can’t prove. Nobody arguing their points has died, they are arguing over speculation—you can’t know what happens until you die. Rob Bell may be wrong, but so may his critics. When people get this angry I often wonder what their response will be at Heaven’s gates (if there are gates) when they find out they were wrong. Will they get upset and say to God, “Well, if it ain’t the way I thought it was gonna be, I don’t want in anyway”?
It’s not just Christians who argue about what happens to us when we die. People outside the Christian faith argue about it. Some argue that Christians are all wrong, and that when we die we are reincarnated. Others—atheists, mostly—argue that we’re all wrong and that Nada happens (you know,… nada—nothing). Whatever their theories, one thing is certain: everybody’s certain,… everybody’s right. And they’re convinced that everyone else is wrong.
No one seems to agree on who gets into heaven when we die. But I’m going to tell you something that most people aren’t even aware of when they argue about what happens to us when we die, especially Christians who are so certain about what happens. When it comes to the Bible and what it says about the afterlife, even the Bible doesn’t agree with itself. Most Christians think the Bible is clear on what happens after we die, but if you look at the Bible with biblical honesty, taking into account what it says and not what we think it says (and we Presbyterians, above all, believe in biblical honesty), you’ll find that the Bible has at least four divergent beliefs about the afterlife.
First, there’s the ancient Jewish view, which is a belief in a place called Sheol. If you look through the Old Testament, and especially the psalms, you’ll find mention of Sheol. Sheol is much like the ancient Greek belief in Hades. It is a misty place where people live shadowy existences. People really don’t have substance after they die. The soul goes there, but there’s not much life. The ancient Jews instead focused on life in this life, not the afterlife. They believed that this life was the one that mattered, and for as long as we were alive the drive was to live according to the Law and to get God to bless us in this life. Blessings, according to this Old Testament view, came in the form of property, wives, children, goats, and sheep. The belief was that if we lived a pure and holy life, God would bless us in the here and now.
The Sadducees also had a belief. They believed in nothing. They didn’t even really believe in Sheol. They believed that this life was all there was, and it was important to live a pure live so that God would bless us in this life. For them, purity came through observance of the Law and Temple sacrifices.
The apostle Paul had a different view of the afterlife. His belief emerged out of the beliefs of the Pharisees, which Paul was one of until his conversion. They believed in “resurrection of the dead.” We’re familiar with that term, and we have a tendency to think of it as meaning we go to heaven, but that’s not what they believed at all. Belief in resurrection was a belief in the idea that God created history with a beginning and an end, and that someday the end would come on what was called “the last day.” On that day the trumpet would sound and the messiah (for the Pharisees) or Jesus (for Paul) would return to create a new world. This belief is reflected in the Revelation of John that says that when Christ returns, a new city will come down from heaven, all pain would be gone, and God would wipe away every tear. Paul and the Pharisees believed that until that last day, the dead who are to be resurrected lie in the ground in something akin to suspended animation, and on the last day they would be given new bodies—imperishable bodies.
So what did Jesus believe? At times he seems to share in the idea of resurrection, but he also seems to express the belief that we’ve commonly come to accept, which is the idea of Heaven and Hell. For instance, in Luke 16, Jesus tells a parable about a poor man named Lazarus, who is covered with sores and vies with the dogs for scraps that come from the table of a rich man, who feasts sumptuously every day. They both die. Lazarus is in Heaven with Abraham, while the rich man is in Hell (well,… actually Hades) looking up at the other two. He begs Abraham to dip his finger in water to relieve him from the fiery torment. Abraham says no, that the abyss between them cannot be crossed. He then asks Abraham to let him return to life to warn his brothers, but Abraham tells him that if they would not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not listen to him. Looking at this parable, it seems that Jesus believes in the idea of Heaven and Hell.
Along with these four different views are different views on what gets you into whatever happens after we die. And each one seems to have a biblical backing. Some believe that God only lets in the most pure. These folks base their beliefs in Revelation in which it says that only the 144,000 who are righteous can get in. Of course, the folks who believe in this always place themselves among the 144,000, which means that they place themselves among the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of the 1% of all of the 6 billion people alive today. It’s interesting how easy it is to justify ourselves, but not others.
Others believe that God lets you in if you’ve done enough good works in your life. They base this on different parts of the Bible, such as Jesus talking about separating the sheep and the goats and James saying that faith without works is dead.
Others believe that God lets some in and puts others in Hell. For Presbyterians there’s an augment to this, which we call “double predestination.” That’s the idea that God chooses, before birth, that some will go to Heaven and some to Hell. If you are chosen for Heaven, then you get to go there no matter how bad your life is. And if you are chosen for Hell, you get to go there no matter how good your life is. To be honest, you’d be hard-pressed to find many Presbyterians who still believe in this, but there are some.
Then there are others, such as Rob Bell and Chad Holtz, who suggest that because God loves everyone, and Jesus died for all of our sins, we’re all saved and let in.
All of this makes the topic of what happens after we die, as well as who gets in and who doesn’t, easy to argue about. So, what do you think the answer is? For us Presbyterians (who are good at arguing, too) the answer really comes down to one simple concept: the sovereignty of God. What does this concept mean? It means that when it all comes down to it, God gets to decide, and whatever the basis of God’s decision-making, we aren’t necessarily privy to it. When I came into our presbytery 15 years ago, I was asked (as part of my examination to become pastor of Calvin Presbyterian Church) whether I believed everyone got into Heaven, or some went to Heaven and some to Hell. I told them what I truly believe, which is that God gets to decide, and God does not consult with me.
So what do I believe? I believe that the God revealed in Christ is the one who wants all of us in, but that doesn’t mean that all of us get in. I’ve spent a lot of time studying this question, but I don’t only limit myself to the Bible. I’ve also spent a lot of time reading about the afterlife, especially the accounts of people who have died, had an afterlife experience, and returned to life. You’d be surprised at how many people there are who have had these experiences. I know quite a few of them. In the past 50 years there have been a lot of books published by them.
For example, there’s a recent book by a Baptist pastor named Don Piper, who wrote the book, 90 Minutes in Heaven, which chronicles his experience of being in a horrendous car wreck in which he was pronounced dead at the scene for 90 minutes, and then resuscitated. He talks of being in a place of amazing love where there is no pain. He also says that he did not come face-to-face with God, and believes that if he had he would not have been able to return to life. There are the Life after Life books by Raymond Moody, a physician who, at the University of Virginia, spent time interviewing over a thousand people who had had experiences similar to Don Piper, what we call “near-death experiences.” Not all accounts are the same, but many are similar. And in some of those books he talks about there being a Hell, but it being a place where people go who choose to be apart from God. George Ritchie, who had a near-death experience in 1941, in which he was declared dead for twenty minutes, talked of being showed Hell by Jesus. He asked Jesus what these people had done to be consigned there. Jesus said that they were not there for punishment. They were there for love. These were people who were so corrupted by their own pride and selfish desires that they would rather live in corruption than choose God’s way. Jesus implied that many of them were so selfish and self-consumed that they weren’t aware of Jesus even if he stood next to them. They didn’t want to live eternity in God’s love. But they were given eternal lives, even if it was in Hell, with the hope that eventually they would choose God.
C.S. Lewis writes of something similar in his book, The Great Divorce. In it, people from Hell visit the outskirts of Heaven, which are beautiful fields outside of a great forest with snow-capped mountains in the distance. They are constantly invited in, but so many of them would rather live in Hell (in this case, a dingy English town) than take a chance on heaven. Lewis has a great statement about them, saying in the book, “There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.”
When it comes down to it, what I believe is that God gives everyone the opportunity to go to heaven when we die, but that we are also given the freedom to say yes or no. I believe in a God of infinite love who has an infinite desire for all to be reconciled and to be with God. I don’t agree with the idea that God gives us this possibility only in this life. I agree with George Ritchie, with the idea that God calls us constantly and eternally to say “yes,” but that there are people who would say no to God. The great 17th century poet, John Milton, captured these people when he said, in his epic poem, Paradise Lost, “It's better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven.”
As a result of all this, I really don’t worry that much about my family and friends, or even those I think are evil, because I believe in a loving God. I believe that when Jesus was dying on the cross and said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” that same forgiving grace is extended eternally to us.
Ultimately, I believe that this loving God is in control, that God loves each and every one of us with a love we can’t imagine, and that God works eternally to bring all of us to God. God’s in control of it all, and we can trust in God’s love to take care of us and everyone else. But no one is going to be forced to live in this love.
The only question that we have to answer is this: when God gives us the opportunity after death to be with God, will we say “yes.”
Amen.
Questions for God: What Does God Think of Muslim Terrorism?
Matthew 5:43-48
March 20, 2011
“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers and sisters, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.
As Connie mentioned last week, we are doing a fun, but challenging sermon series during Lent, which is “Questions for God.” Between January and Ash Wednesday, we collected over twenty questions that our members would like to ask of God. The questions were challenging, some unexpected, and all very good. Our question for this morning, “What does God think of Muslim terrorism” was one of those questions.
As I try to share what I think is God’s answer to this question, I want to start with a question of my own: Do you remember where you were on 9/11? If you were old enough to understand what was taking place on 9/11, you remember. I had a profound experience on 9/11 because of how I experienced God in the aftermath.
When the events of 9/11 began, I heard about them through our church secretary, Michelle. I was in my old office, which is now the prayer room and library of the church. She came down to my office and told me that a plane had just crashed into one of the World Trade Center buildings. Fifteen minutes later, she told me that another had crashed into the other building. At that point we realized that something terrible was going on. Fifteen minutes later she told me that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. All of us at the church at the time were stunned and confused.
Later that morning I went home for lunch, where our sitter was taking care of our two year-old daughters. As I sat at my kitchen table, I kept an eye on CNN on the television in our family room as it replayed the events of the morning. I was crushed by the trauma, and by the thought of all those people dying. But as I sat, I also looked outside my kitchen window, which overlooked the Zelienople airport in the valley below. Do you remember how clear and beautiful that day was? The day was stunningly crisp and clear. As I looked out the window, a flock of geese flew by. I was struck by the fact that the geese didn’t seem to know or care about the World Trade Center buildings being destroyed. In fact, the whole world outside my window was still at peace. It didn’t know to be scared, upset, and confused. I kept looking back-and-forth between the two scenes. And in the disparity of the two I sensed God’s guidance. It was as though God was saying to me, “This all looks terrible. And it is awful. But I am still in control of everything, and my will and peace will outlast all of this. Be still and know that I am God.” Since then I’ve realized that the terrorists were not doing God’s will, and that God’s will would work everything out.
A lot of things changed on 9/11, but nothing more than in how we looked at Muslims and the Islamic faith. Prior to 9/11 we generally looked at Islam as another religion rather than as an evil religion. Most people were pretty ignorant of the Muslim faith. If they thought at all, they may have thought that it was a religion much like Christianity. Or they thought that it was another religion, but inferior to Christianity. Some, thinking about the Intefada in Palestine, or Hamas, might have linked Islam with violence, but that certainly wasn’t the dominant opinion. Whatever they thought, most people never thought that the religion itself would spawn terrorists—at least not like this.
Today, many people argue over just how evil Islam is. I’ve heard so many pundits and pretend prophets proclaim Islam to be an evil religion that teaches its adherents to become terrorists or to support terrorism. This change has been kind of shocking to me because of my past experiences with Islam.
Back in 1994, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, I studied Islam,… a lot. In our dissertations we were supposed to study our topic not only through the lens of Christianity, but also through two other lenses: social sciences and what was called a “non-adhered to religion”—a faith other than our own. I chose Islam. I spent a year reading whatever I could on Islam, and learned a lot about it. What I read was not books on a violent, terrorism-generating faith, but a religion of peace that called its adherents to a personal, communal, and societal struggle for God’s will, justice, and peace. I’ve had a hard time reconciling what I studied with what so many were saying, post-9/11.
After 9/11 I wondered if I had made a mistake. I read more on Islam, and did some work to engage with Muslims. You may remember that in 2003 we invited Farooq Hussaini, the president of the Islamic Center of Pittsburgh, to talk with our members. I had originally met him when he spoke at the dedication of the Jewell in the Woods chapel at the Woodlands Foundation. When he came and spoke, it was clear that he was a gentle man of faith, and he clearly said that what the terrorists did went against Islam. Interestingly enough, a year later, when everyone was asking why moderate Muslims weren’t speaking out against Muslim terrorism, he wrote a long letter to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette condemning terrorism, which was placed in the back of the paper.
This past fall, we took members of Calvin Presbyterian Church and our presbytery to the Islamic Center to visit them. It was clear from our visit that these were not terrorists in the making. They were very happy to have us there, and many of the members sat with us during the talk, and were smiling because of this Muslim/Christian dialogue. Actually, that visit cemented my belief that Islam doesn’t sponsor terrorism. Setting up the visit was a bit comical. I had called them in August to set up our visit and left a message on their voice machine. After no one called me back three weeks later, I called again. The next day I got a call from the Imam, and we set up the visit for a Thursday in September. Two hours later I got a call from the same Imam, saying to me that he picked up a message that I wanted to bring a group to visit the Islamic Center. I told him, “Yeah,… I just spoke with you two hours ago.” He said, “You did? Remind me who you are again.”
When we showed up for the visit, it was obvious that they had forgotten about us visiting. They had to scramble to get chairs for us so that we could sit and observe their evening prayers. My conclusion: if these people were terrorists, we have no fear, because they can’t even organize a visit, let alone a terrorist plot.
Since 9/11 I’ve done more reading about Islam, and what I’ve concluded is that the problem is not Muslims, but fundamentalism of every stripe, whether Muslim, Jewish, Christian, or even what I would call political or constitutional fundamentalism. Fundamentalism creates ideologies that lead people to violent acts, whether they are physical, social, or psychological violence. But more on that later. My conclusion is that what I originally thought of Islam is the same as it was back in 1994—it is mainly a religion of peace.
The problem is that people of violence can hijack even religions of peace, and it happens not only in Islam, but in every faith, including Christianity. Look at Christian history. We have a history of violence, despite the fact that our tradition and the gospels teach non-violence. Look at what our passage says about how we are to treat our enemies: “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven…” How do you turn this into some of the stuff Christians have done. For example, the Crusades of the 11th century were incredibly violent. Most people don’t realize that in the first Crusade the Christians never even made it to the Holy Lands, so they attacked the Christian city of Constantinople instead. Over time Christians took control of the Holy Lands and were much more brutal towards the Muslims and Jews than the Muslims had ever been to the Christians and Jews. We also have the Catholic Church inquisitions of the 16th through 17th centuries, which used violent torture against anyone suspected of being heretics. You had violence of the Roman Catholic Church against Protestants, and in England’s case, violence of Protestants against Catholics and vice versa. You had harshness and violence in some of the American colonies against non-Puritans or non-Anglicans. Only the colonies of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island enforced tolerance. Even in the last century you had the rise of Christian terroristic violence by white supremacist groups against African Americans and those of other ethnicities. And today you have fundamentalists like the Rev. Fred Phelps (who, ironically has been accused of abuse by his own adult son) and the Westboro Baptist Church, which protests at the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, committing psychological terrorism against grieving families.
Islam does have one major difference with Christianity that allows terrorism to find a home in it easier than in Christianity, and this difference allows fundamentalist adherents (make no mistake, the terrorists are fundamentalists) to abuse the religion. While Christianity teaches turning the other cheek, loving enemies, and treating our persecutors well, Islam, like Judaism, does teach “ an eye for an eye,” if it is in self-defense or defense of someone innocent. Another problem, seemingly is the idea of jihad, although the term has been hijacked by Muslim fundamentalists. If you were to define the word “jihad,” what would you say it means? Most of us would say “holy war.” And you would be wrong. Only the fundamentalists interpret is at “holy war,” and it’s an interpretation that has really only existed for the past 50 years of Islam’s 1400 year history.
The term, jihad, is a term that literally means “struggle.” For 1350 years, Muslims understood that struggle to be a personal, familial, communal, and societal struggle to do God’s will in all of life, a struggle to bring peace and justice for the poor to all areas of life. It wasn’t until 1951 that the definition changed among many Muslims. A Pakistani journalist and politician named Abul Ala Mawdudi, believing that the West was looking to crush Islam, promoted jihad as an armed struggle against oppression. He was heavily influenced by Marxist thought that had spread throughout the world during the 20th century. His writings were picked up by an Egyptian named Sayyid Qutb, who became influential in the Muslim Brotherhood, which many of us have heard about in connection with the democracy movement in Egypt. Qutb embraced the idea of jihad as “holy war,” which led the Muslim Brotherhood to eventually attempt to assassinate Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, and to eventually assassinate Nasser’s successor, Anwar Sadat. The vast majority of Muslims don’t believe that jihad means holy war. But, Osama bin Laden spent time in Eqypt studying with the Muslim Brotherhood, although now he has nothing but contempt for them because in the past twenty years they’ve changed and now condemn violence while promoting a democratic vision for Egypt.
So, what does God think of Muslim terrorism? God doesn’t have so much a belief about Muslim terrorism as God has a belief about terrorism in general. It is clear from our passage, and from a Christian perspective, that God is against terrorism of any kind. It goes completely against what God intends for the world. Jesus is the one who shows us what God intends. Look at his teachings. Our passage shows us. The Golden Rule shows us. The Great Command to love God with all our body, mind, heart, and soul, and others as ourselves shows it. And Jesus’ life demonstrates God’s intention. Jesus was terrorized. He was arrested as an innocent, falsely imprisoned, tortured, and crucified. Instead of calling for holy war, he said, “Father, forgive them for the do not know what they are doing.” And our belief in the resurrection shows God’s intention, which is to respond to human violence not only with peace, but with grace.
Even in Islam terrorism is against God’s will. Islam teaches that we can only wage war in self-defense, and that even in waging war or protecting ourselves, no violence can be done against the innocent. The terrorists warp this idea to say that anyone who lives in America, because it is a democracy, is no longer innocent. That’s an abuse of the Muslim faith. Also, since it’s beginning, Islam has taught a tolerance of other faiths, teaching that all other faiths are from God. They believe that their religion is the preeminent faith, but that all faiths are an attempt to live under God’s will, and so should be respected. Just as we’ve learned about Christians, that doesn’t stop some Muslim countries and governments from abusing the faith and attacking those of other faiths. But in Islam’s history, it has a better history of tolerance than Christianity does. Christian tolerance is a relatively new phenomenon of the last 100 years.
The real problem of terrorism—whether Islamic, Christian, IRA, Falun Gong, White Supremicist, Black Panther, communism, or even American constitutional terrorism—is that it devalues people while valuing only ideals. I believe the problem of terrorism is part of a bigger problem of fundamentalism in every religion. Every terrorist is a fundamentalist who cares more about their ideals than about the people their ideals are supposedly for. And this kind of fundamentalist, reductionistic thought is what promotes falseness. Let me give you an example of this kind of falseness. Back on December 6th of 2010, Glenn Beck said about Islam and terrorism that estimates of how many Muslim terrorists promoted in the media is wrong. He said that the media says that only about 1% of all Muslims are terrorists, but that the real number is 10% of Muslims are also terrorists. He then lamented that the media won’t tell the public this truth.
Doing the math on about Beck’s claims tells you how silly they are. You can Google my math if you like. There are approximately 1.6 billion Muslims in the world (compared to about 2.2 billion Christians). If 10% of them are terrorists, that means that there are 160 Muslim terrorists in the world. Now, if you took all of the armies in the world, it adds up to only 73 million soldiers. If Beck is right, then the number of Muslim terrorists in the world is more than double all the militaries in the world. That’s preposterous, but it doesn’t stop him from falsely teaching about the connection between Islam and terrorism. In fact, even if the number is 1.6 million terrorists, that means that there are more terrorists than are presently soldiers in the U.S. military, if you include reservists. At present, there are approximately 1,136,000 members of the U.S. military. The point? There is so much misconception about Islam and it’s connection to terrorism, it hides the fact that even in Islam terrorism goes against the teachings of the Quran.
To me, here’s the reality. God’s not only against terrorism, but you can see God’s response to terrorism—especially Muslim fundamentalist terrorism—in the Middle East. The democracy movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Iran, Bahrain, and more is how God is working. The thing you have to realize about the way God works is that God doesn’t combat terrorism like we do, with military power. God combats terrorism with time, patience, and compassion. And make no mistake, God is at work. You can see this in the fact that terrorism doesn’t work. You would have a hard time finding successful examples of terrorism of any kind actually successfully bringing about lasting, positive national change. It hasn’t worked in Northern Ireland, Egypt, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, of even in America. God is at work, and God is working to overcome terrorism of every kind.
You know, back in 1976 I had a revelation in a high school class. It was on a warm spring day when our teachers took our class outside. We were sitting in the grass, having a discussion of the age our world was in, and what we thought the coming age would be. A lot of my classmates promoted that we were entering an age of peace, unity, etc… I had a moment of prophetic clarity. It doesn’t often, but occasionally I do get glimpses. When it was my turn, I said that we were going to enter into an age of terrorism. I remember this event so much because of how quickly my classmates dismissed what I said. I guess ego sharpens memory, and their dismissal bruised my ego. I look at the past three decades and I think I was right to some extent.
But I’m also having a bit of a prophetic vision now, and I see us as entering a new, post-terroristic age. I believe that we are seeing the beginnings of the death of terrorism. Make no mistake, acts of terrorism will always be around, but I see global terrorism diminishing as a force. Why? Because God is at work to overcome this violence. We just have to trust.
Amen.
Questions for God? Why do we struggle so long? Psalm 71:14-18
by Connie Frierson
Today is the first Sunday of our new sermon series, “Questions for God.” Boy! Did we get the questions! But we only have six Sundays in lent so we have got to pick and choose. Graham and I employed a very scientific method. We pulled questions out of a hat. So here is the hat. Let’s see what is inside. Hmmm. Why do we suffer? Next question, “Why do we suffer?” Next question, “Why do we suffer?” I am detecting a trend. Next question, Oh here’s one that is different, I’ll save that one for Palm Sunday. Next question, “Why do we suffer?” You see the pattern. The interesting thing is that each question isn’t exactly identical. Each reflects something personal and unique, while carrying the common thread of suffering and struggle and bad things happening. The biggest questions for God, all surround why we hurt; why does God ask us to do hard things; why does God permit terrorism. On this weekend of all weekends, the suffering in Japan from the terrible tsunami and earthquake shakes us. This suffering is almost too much to imagine. It seems too much to bear, too much to comprehend. This is when I must admit I am a small person. My mind is so small that this type of disaster is hard to take in. I don’t do well with abstract ideas, or global questions. In my experience God speaks best to me when God speaks to a question that is little, local and close. God’s great big answers often come to me in little packages. So this morning as we pray for Japan and the world, I am going to ask us to turn to one little local question by one friend that we probably all know. When we do this perhaps God will provide a blessing, so that we can then pray and act better in the face of such big tragedies. The question that I pulled from the hat is this one. “Why do we often have to struggle so long before we finally experience God?”
I have already confessed that I don’t do well with global, abstract questions. I can understand my world by thinking about it in context, in a particular situation or circumstance. What is the situation of this question? Most of these questions don’t come with names attached. But I am going to make some assumptions about this person. I am going to make predictions about this person’s context. So if you are this person forgive me if I am wrong, but here are my predictions. This person has suffered. To struggle often means to suffer. This person is concerned with how long it took them to come to faith. Notice these words, “sooooo long” and “finally.” I think this person is old. I think this person has been wrestling around with life and trials and God for a long, long time. I think this person is feisty. This person has tussled and thrashed around with God, like Jacob wrestling that angel and getting a blessing. I think this person has had true experience of grace and of God. But man, oh man, it took a while. This person is like many of us. This person is asking the age-old question, “How come we are too soon old and too late smart?”
“Too soon oldt and too late schmart.” You might have seen this expression from Amish Dutch kitsch. When I was a kid I would see this expression on a trivet or potholder, or a plaque in every other kitchen. Why did I see it everywhere? Because this silly nick knack captures something universal about our experience. Translate this to our spiritual journey. We are too soon old and too late smart. We struggle so long until finally we rest in God. The question is why is this and is this the way it has to be? I think we need to look at the young and the old, youth and age. If we have a general assumption that young people don’t have faith and old people do, let’s ask if that is actually true. Let’s see if this is the way it has to be. If it is true that people often come to faith later in life I think this is a function of two things, trust and experience.
How we view the world is so often a function of trust and experience. We come into the world primed for trust. Perhaps this may seem a fanciful notion to cynics, but I think we come from God and we return to God. I think babies have known the presence of God, that infants have had experience of God before birth. I think babies know how to attach and to trust because they came from attachment and trust in our heavenly father. I believe babies are primed to trust, just as they are primed to breathe. As babies we gaze into our mother’s and fathers eyes. Physiologically, that only place we, babies, can see, only about 12 inches in front of our eyes. That space is also the distance from a baby’s eye to a loving parent’s eyes. God has primed us to look with trust and love at our parents, and for our parents to look with love and caring at us. This loving gaze is one of the most powerful things on earth. The loving gaze is how we start to love and to trust. As babies, we start out trusting. That is the characteristic that Jesus talks about when Jesus says, “We must become like children to enter the Kingdom of God.” That openness and trust helps us enter the Kingdom of God, to have faith. We start out high on the trust chart. But then things happen. People prove untrustworthy. Our needs aren’t quite met. We get preoccupied. We seek our own way. And often trust diminishes over time.
This leads to the second universal fact of life, experience. Just living and breathing, crawling or walking or talking we have experiences. As babies we start out with very little experience. The world is a new place. But over time we learn about the world from each experience. We experience suffering. We experience joy. We experience hot and cold and fear and comfort and sickness and health. Our experience grows and grows through age. Experience is both good and bad. If our understanding of God and life is that only pleasant things are evidence of God. Experience is going to be quite confusing. The bible says, “Rain falls on the just and the unjust.” (In an arid country, rain was considered good, like a blessing.) So experience is both good and bad. Regardless whether they are experiencing good or bad we get lots of it. But this alone doesn’t lead to wisdom or to faith. So empirically we see older people who have grown in grace and wisdom and we sometimes see older people who are hard, cynical and bitter. We sometimes see young people with wisdom beyond their years. We have a saying for this, “out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom.” But we also see young people who are foolish. How do we explain this? But that’s not all we run into people who have suffered great tragedy and pain, yet they have trust and faith and joy. Or we know other people who have lived with every advantage or money, health, love, looks and education, yet they are miserable and despairing. How do we explain that? My conclusion is that experience is neutral. Experience is good and bad. But experience alone, (good or bad) doesn’t lead to faith or God. The path to faith, to experiencing God’s grace is to infuse trust into each and every experience of life. We need to take every experience and wash it in trust, let trust soak way in until we sense that God is somewhere or everywhere in that new experience. We need a chart line of high trust. This leads to faith. This leads to the God infused life.
So why does it take us so long to get this merging of trust into our experiences? When we are babies, trust is a gift. When we grow older trust is a choice. The shock of terrible things often jolts us out of the gift of trust and in that time we need to do the much harder thing. We need to choose to trust. Perhaps we are deceived by evil that tells us we cannot trust God. Perhaps we deceive ourselves by thinking we have control over everything and that we should trust ourselves. Perhaps we choose to trust money, or medicine, or science, or some person. Or perhaps we choose to trust our own philosophic worldview that God isn’t there or God can’t be trusted or God is mean. We choose.
The God that saves and heals us assures us that it is never too late to change the direction of faith. We can infuse trust into the chart of our life. We can even go back to our experience line and rewrite it with trust. We all have times when the foundation of trust is shaken to the core. Times perhaps of abuse, or of a sudden death, or of health crisis, or joblessness. A path to grace goes back to revisit that time and ask God to breath trust in God into that terrible time. This is one of those things that finally, after so long, we can look back and see the blessings, the gifts, the providences and look for the presence of God in the whole time line of our experience.
There were once two little girls who were watching their grandmother read the bible. And one little girl says to the other, “Why does Grandma read the bible so much?” The older little girl says, “I think she is studying for her final exam.” Maybe. Or maybe the older woman was rereading her life in the light of trust and faith. Can we go back after so long to finally get the trust and see the grace of God throughout our life? I think that is one of the spiritual tasks God wants us to do. It would have been better if we had lived our life trusting as each new experience comes in. If we did we would have this lovely purple high line of trust and experience flowing through life. But sometimes what we need to do is to circle back and to re-see our lives through the eyes of God’s graces.
I have a film clip that helps to illustrate this spiritual task of a life review in trust and spiritual insight. This clip is taken from the film, “The Immortal Beloved” which is a story about Beethoven’s life. At the very end of Beethoven’s life he wrote his ninth symphony, which includes the Ode to Joy. One of the things that perhaps broke Beethoven’s trust was his early experience with a brutal father. Beethoven’s father was an alcoholic and would beat him. In this film clip Beethoven is deaf, standing before the orchestra as they play his ninth symphony. He is replaying this God given music though a night in his life as he ran from his father and experienced the glory of God in a pond out in the country. He is replaying that experience and I think this illustrates how trust in the God who created the universe can break into our life in significant ways. At the end of this boys run from his father through woods and paths. The boy lies down in the pond. He lies in the pond in which all the stars are reflected and looks us at this infinite starry sky. In this moment that boy understands that he is one part of this magnificent creation. The boy touches the stars and the stars are in him and around him. This is how God heals us. This is how God uses one starry night to remind us that we are part of God’s wonderful creation. We are not alone, but the stars of all God’s beloved souls surround us too.
God wants us to wash all our experiences in life with grace and love. Why do we struggle so long before we experience God’s grace? Because we don’t live life with trust though all our experiences. But it is never too late to ask God to help us choose to trust. Amen.
Today is the first Sunday of our new sermon series, “Questions for God.” Boy! Did we get the questions! But we only have six Sundays in lent so we have got to pick and choose. Graham and I employed a very scientific method. We pulled questions out of a hat. So here is the hat. Let’s see what is inside. Hmmm. Why do we suffer? Next question, “Why do we suffer?” Next question, “Why do we suffer?” I am detecting a trend. Next question, Oh here’s one that is different, I’ll save that one for Palm Sunday. Next question, “Why do we suffer?” You see the pattern. The interesting thing is that each question isn’t exactly identical. Each reflects something personal and unique, while carrying the common thread of suffering and struggle and bad things happening. The biggest questions for God, all surround why we hurt; why does God ask us to do hard things; why does God permit terrorism. On this weekend of all weekends, the suffering in Japan from the terrible tsunami and earthquake shakes us. This suffering is almost too much to imagine. It seems too much to bear, too much to comprehend. This is when I must admit I am a small person. My mind is so small that this type of disaster is hard to take in. I don’t do well with abstract ideas, or global questions. In my experience God speaks best to me when God speaks to a question that is little, local and close. God’s great big answers often come to me in little packages. So this morning as we pray for Japan and the world, I am going to ask us to turn to one little local question by one friend that we probably all know. When we do this perhaps God will provide a blessing, so that we can then pray and act better in the face of such big tragedies. The question that I pulled from the hat is this one. “Why do we often have to struggle so long before we finally experience God?”
I have already confessed that I don’t do well with global, abstract questions. I can understand my world by thinking about it in context, in a particular situation or circumstance. What is the situation of this question? Most of these questions don’t come with names attached. But I am going to make some assumptions about this person. I am going to make predictions about this person’s context. So if you are this person forgive me if I am wrong, but here are my predictions. This person has suffered. To struggle often means to suffer. This person is concerned with how long it took them to come to faith. Notice these words, “sooooo long” and “finally.” I think this person is old. I think this person has been wrestling around with life and trials and God for a long, long time. I think this person is feisty. This person has tussled and thrashed around with God, like Jacob wrestling that angel and getting a blessing. I think this person has had true experience of grace and of God. But man, oh man, it took a while. This person is like many of us. This person is asking the age-old question, “How come we are too soon old and too late smart?”
“Too soon oldt and too late schmart.” You might have seen this expression from Amish Dutch kitsch. When I was a kid I would see this expression on a trivet or potholder, or a plaque in every other kitchen. Why did I see it everywhere? Because this silly nick knack captures something universal about our experience. Translate this to our spiritual journey. We are too soon old and too late smart. We struggle so long until finally we rest in God. The question is why is this and is this the way it has to be? I think we need to look at the young and the old, youth and age. If we have a general assumption that young people don’t have faith and old people do, let’s ask if that is actually true. Let’s see if this is the way it has to be. If it is true that people often come to faith later in life I think this is a function of two things, trust and experience.
How we view the world is so often a function of trust and experience. We come into the world primed for trust. Perhaps this may seem a fanciful notion to cynics, but I think we come from God and we return to God. I think babies have known the presence of God, that infants have had experience of God before birth. I think babies know how to attach and to trust because they came from attachment and trust in our heavenly father. I believe babies are primed to trust, just as they are primed to breathe. As babies we gaze into our mother’s and fathers eyes. Physiologically, that only place we, babies, can see, only about 12 inches in front of our eyes. That space is also the distance from a baby’s eye to a loving parent’s eyes. God has primed us to look with trust and love at our parents, and for our parents to look with love and caring at us. This loving gaze is one of the most powerful things on earth. The loving gaze is how we start to love and to trust. As babies, we start out trusting. That is the characteristic that Jesus talks about when Jesus says, “We must become like children to enter the Kingdom of God.” That openness and trust helps us enter the Kingdom of God, to have faith. We start out high on the trust chart. But then things happen. People prove untrustworthy. Our needs aren’t quite met. We get preoccupied. We seek our own way. And often trust diminishes over time.
This leads to the second universal fact of life, experience. Just living and breathing, crawling or walking or talking we have experiences. As babies we start out with very little experience. The world is a new place. But over time we learn about the world from each experience. We experience suffering. We experience joy. We experience hot and cold and fear and comfort and sickness and health. Our experience grows and grows through age. Experience is both good and bad. If our understanding of God and life is that only pleasant things are evidence of God. Experience is going to be quite confusing. The bible says, “Rain falls on the just and the unjust.” (In an arid country, rain was considered good, like a blessing.) So experience is both good and bad. Regardless whether they are experiencing good or bad we get lots of it. But this alone doesn’t lead to wisdom or to faith. So empirically we see older people who have grown in grace and wisdom and we sometimes see older people who are hard, cynical and bitter. We sometimes see young people with wisdom beyond their years. We have a saying for this, “out of the mouth of babes comes wisdom.” But we also see young people who are foolish. How do we explain this? But that’s not all we run into people who have suffered great tragedy and pain, yet they have trust and faith and joy. Or we know other people who have lived with every advantage or money, health, love, looks and education, yet they are miserable and despairing. How do we explain that? My conclusion is that experience is neutral. Experience is good and bad. But experience alone, (good or bad) doesn’t lead to faith or God. The path to faith, to experiencing God’s grace is to infuse trust into each and every experience of life. We need to take every experience and wash it in trust, let trust soak way in until we sense that God is somewhere or everywhere in that new experience. We need a chart line of high trust. This leads to faith. This leads to the God infused life.
So why does it take us so long to get this merging of trust into our experiences? When we are babies, trust is a gift. When we grow older trust is a choice. The shock of terrible things often jolts us out of the gift of trust and in that time we need to do the much harder thing. We need to choose to trust. Perhaps we are deceived by evil that tells us we cannot trust God. Perhaps we deceive ourselves by thinking we have control over everything and that we should trust ourselves. Perhaps we choose to trust money, or medicine, or science, or some person. Or perhaps we choose to trust our own philosophic worldview that God isn’t there or God can’t be trusted or God is mean. We choose.
The God that saves and heals us assures us that it is never too late to change the direction of faith. We can infuse trust into the chart of our life. We can even go back to our experience line and rewrite it with trust. We all have times when the foundation of trust is shaken to the core. Times perhaps of abuse, or of a sudden death, or of health crisis, or joblessness. A path to grace goes back to revisit that time and ask God to breath trust in God into that terrible time. This is one of those things that finally, after so long, we can look back and see the blessings, the gifts, the providences and look for the presence of God in the whole time line of our experience.
There were once two little girls who were watching their grandmother read the bible. And one little girl says to the other, “Why does Grandma read the bible so much?” The older little girl says, “I think she is studying for her final exam.” Maybe. Or maybe the older woman was rereading her life in the light of trust and faith. Can we go back after so long to finally get the trust and see the grace of God throughout our life? I think that is one of the spiritual tasks God wants us to do. It would have been better if we had lived our life trusting as each new experience comes in. If we did we would have this lovely purple high line of trust and experience flowing through life. But sometimes what we need to do is to circle back and to re-see our lives through the eyes of God’s graces.
I have a film clip that helps to illustrate this spiritual task of a life review in trust and spiritual insight. This clip is taken from the film, “The Immortal Beloved” which is a story about Beethoven’s life. At the very end of Beethoven’s life he wrote his ninth symphony, which includes the Ode to Joy. One of the things that perhaps broke Beethoven’s trust was his early experience with a brutal father. Beethoven’s father was an alcoholic and would beat him. In this film clip Beethoven is deaf, standing before the orchestra as they play his ninth symphony. He is replaying this God given music though a night in his life as he ran from his father and experienced the glory of God in a pond out in the country. He is replaying that experience and I think this illustrates how trust in the God who created the universe can break into our life in significant ways. At the end of this boys run from his father through woods and paths. The boy lies down in the pond. He lies in the pond in which all the stars are reflected and looks us at this infinite starry sky. In this moment that boy understands that he is one part of this magnificent creation. The boy touches the stars and the stars are in him and around him. This is how God heals us. This is how God uses one starry night to remind us that we are part of God’s wonderful creation. We are not alone, but the stars of all God’s beloved souls surround us too.
God wants us to wash all our experiences in life with grace and love. Why do we struggle so long before we experience God’s grace? Because we don’t live life with trust though all our experiences. But it is never too late to ask God to help us choose to trust. Amen.
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