Table Talk Newsletter

Pastor’s Letter

I visited my mom the other day and brought her some orchids. As I was walking through the senior living facility, a woman turned to me and said, “What a beautiful flower arrangement.” Without much thinking, I responded with, “Yes, God makes beautiful things.” Later, during that same visit, I heard a resident at the facility comment about a member who was recently diagnosed with cancer saying, “. . how terrible that he has cancer, but it must be God’s will.”

I was struck by the person’s response to one of their friends having cancer and to my response regarding the flowers. I got to thinking more and more about what we attribute to God, especially tragic circumstances, you know, in those pious clichés. Such expressions sound, well, holy, don’t they? But at the same time, they also falsify human experience. They radically distort the wonder and majesty of God by twisting God into some distant and aloof deity, “God wanted it to happen, so it happens.”

This way of thinking, this folly, has several sources. Lots of things get attributed to God because we don’t like feeling out of control in the crazy world we live in. We take comfort in blaming and crediting a god for an inexplicable situation. We typically like or need the ability to have someone responsible for an act or experience; the unexplainable is unacceptable to us. In this way of thinking, God becomes the handy orchestrator of that terrible car crash, the cancer diagnosis, or Lynn and my loss of our only child in utero.

Another source of the folly is when we make God responsible for the good stuff that happens in our lives. In other words, we make God the source and the one responsible for things in our life when things are going well. This is our egocentric, sometimes self-centered thinking, where theological narcissism conveniently places “me” at the center of the universe. I have sometimes heard folks say that the new car they are able to afford, that job promotion, or the purchase of their fourth mansion was because God loved them and that they have found favor with God. Maybe you have heard it as well, “My prayers were answered”, “God was looking out for me.” Athletes just having won a major victory, when interviewed, can be heard attributing their victory because it was, “God’s will.” Really? So, I ask you, in the fire storms that have ravaged California these past years, where one house stands untouched in the middle of a waste land of ashes, is that a God thing? Were the prayers of the owner of the standing house answered, while the prayers of the owner of the house in ashes dismissed by God?

In conversation I found some believers resorting to language of God allowing certain things to happen, even if God was not the cause of them. For example, “It wasn’t God’s plan to have the Israel and US commit the atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank, but God allowed it.” This theological reasoning is problematic usually indicting God rather than complimenting God. For God to be an observer and allowing a tragedy to occur, even though I prayed and prayed, means God failed, forgot, or is out of touch with me? Maybe God doesn’t love me; maybe I haven’t been good enough to warrant God’s listening ear?

In all of scripture, Jesus never once counseled any one to accept their suffering as the Lord’s will. I shared this idea in a sermon I delivered in March. In addition I shared, “God may move in mysterious ways, but there is no evidence that God works in nonsensical ways.” We may attribute lots of characteristics to God, e.g. all-knowing, always present, all powerful, but the most prevalent characteristic in scripture and the most important is All-Loving.

In closing, I ask you to consider what and why we attribute things to God. Some envision God as a “puppet master”, one where we are helpless passive marionettes and God pulls all the strings. Others envision God as a “clockmaker”, one who made the clock, wound the clock and then walks away to let it work on its own, i.e. God created the world, and set it lose and sits back and watches. Others see God as a sort of “chess master”, one who is involved in a cosmic game between good and an evil adversary, namely Satan.

God is far beyond our human conceptions of things. And God does not require our understanding or our intellectual assent to go about creating the universe in the way that God wants to create it, in order to accomplish the purposes God has in mind.

For your consideration, what if an integral part of God’s purpose involves creating a universe that is not deterministic, but has a will of its own, and is able to act on its own initiative? What if God wants us to have free will, and wants the rest of the universe to have its own type of freedom, too? Who are we to say, “No, God! You have to
control everything!!!” Can God express God’s love and mercy, care and compassion for creation through vulnerability, for example, God providing us choices including whether to love God in return?

Salam, Shalom, Peace,
Pastor Raymond