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November 27, 2005
Does God Still Speak to Us?
Psalm 119: 33-40 / Jonah 3: 1-10
Galatians 1: 11-23
November 27th, 2005
“Does God still speak to us?” It is fitting to speak of this question today that is the first Sunday in Advent. Advent season reaches its peak at Christmas. On Christmas Day we remember that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” Jesus was born as God’s clearest word to us. For thirty years people had the chance to see and hear, even to feel, to taste, to smell God. It seems almost irreverent to say all this. But this was how it was the Gospels tell us.
To whom did God speak His Word when Jesus came? Jesus came not to the most righteous people but to sinners. He was called the friend of sinners. If this were said of you and me maybe good people wouldn’t take this as a compliment.
Jesus was born in poverty as God spoke to the most needy to demonstrate how deeply He loved a world made up of people who think they have no need as well as of people who know they are desperate with need. Jesus enjoyed the devoted friendship of both women and men. Dan Brown would have had no basis for his idea in The Da Vinci Code of Jesus’ relationship to Mary Magdalene unless Jesus had risked being a close friend with women in a day when men didn’t have close friendships with women. Shortly after He was born old people held him in their arms and heard the sounds He made. As an adult Jesus sat little children on His lap and spoke to them. How intimately God spoke to all kinds of people when Jesus was here.
But God can seem far away now. This is why someone asked me, “Does God still speak to us?” I told a friend I was going to speak about this question today and she told me very forcefully, “God does speak today.” She said she’d heard God’s voice speaking to her. This is a friend I trust.
But there are many of us who have not had her experience. Does God still speak to us? I think we ask that question self-consciously. We believe that God has spoken and that God still speaks, but we have missed out, and we’re guilty because of it.
It may be that we can’t hear God because we’re not in the mood to listen. Scripture tells us, “If I regard iniquity in my heart the Lord will not hear me.” By the same token, God may not speak to those who have no desire to hear.” Sometimes God intrudes with a sharp word, but not with that reassuring word we desire.
We believe the Bible is the Word of God, but we capitalize the word “Word,” and probably put the word “hear” in quotation marks because we don’t hear God speak when we read the Bible. In fact we’re embarrassed that most of us have given up on reading the Bible. We buy it. We give it as a present to children. But we don’t read it because when we tried to read it, it didn’t make sense. We couldn’t understand it.
But we don’t give up on the idea that God speaks because something inside of us keeps the hope alive. We know that life is deep with meaning beyond the obvious. We have feelings. We have longings that are not satisfied with what we can buy. All the gold in Ft. Knox isn’t enough to satisfy the gnawing inside. We need to hear God’s voice. When we say we need “meaning” in life, we are, I believe, saying we need to hear that voice that ties everything together—the voice of the One who made us for fellowship with Him—and with one another—and for simple peace of mind inside.
I see on the television how mad is the search for satisfaction, how surreal the images of bodily glamour and consumption of material things and exploitation of all the senses in the quest for sensations that satisfy. Pop music has taken to screams and violent, primal rhythms, abandoning all refinement. On one of the channels I see women so miserably demeaned, and they allow it and even cultivate their own demeanment. It makes me very sad and I turn the channel. When that deep instinct of our sexuality is probed far beyond its capacity to satisfy, so that it leads to further despair, I see a desperate attempt of the soul to satisfy that deep longing inside without God. When all along what will satisfy is to hear the voice of our Creator who can calm the storm not only on the Sea of Galilee but in the heart.
When the need is so great, why is the sound of God’s voice so elusive? What keeps us from hearing the voice of God? Or perhaps do we hear the voice of God but do not recognize it? We don’t know what to listen for. We maybe expect a masculine voice, preferably a deep voice, maybe like Charlton Heston’s voice. When Israel heard God speak from Mt. Sinai they heard thunder and saw lightning and the mountain shook. We’d prefer God not speak to us in this way.
We cast about for clues in the Bible to how God may still be speaking today. God told Jonah to go to Ninevah, but who hears God speak this way now? In our Old Testament reading this morning we learn that God spoke “a second time” to Jonah. That means there was a first time, and there were more times that God spoke to him. These moments of Divine discourse were specific enough that Jonah did specifically the opposite of what God told him. He didn’t want to go to Ninevah.
We read of Elijah feeling desperately lonely after fleeing for his life from Jezebel after that contest with the priests and prophets of Baal that ended in their slaughter. God told Elijah to stand on a mountain before Him. So he went to the mountain. We read that “the Lord passed by [but did not speak as He passed by Elijah—as though to taunt him], and a great and strong wind rent the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice.”
When Elijah heard the still small voice, he wrapped his mantel around his face and stood at the entrance of the cave on the mountain to which he had gone. Wrapping his mantel around his face was an action suggesting he was comfortable. God took notice of him and spoke in a way that resonated with his deep need. He knew that God spoke in that still, small voice. We cling to that term, “a still, small voice,” so that we listen for God to speak in this way away from the bombast of much of the religious marketplace.
God said to David, “Be still and know that I am God.” Often I remember that.
Of course. But having said this, tell me how to hear God’s voice. Let me begin with once again saying what you’ve heard so often, “Read your Bible.” One of the illuminating aspects of our time with people in the County Correctional System on Tuesday evenings has been to see how much the Bible speaks to them. There is a lady that comes to our study that we find copying out, word for word, what the Bible says about needs that she feels. With beautiful penmanship she has copied many pages of the Bible so she can go right to these words in her own handwriting when she needs God’s reassurance to her. Folk in jail have time on their hands. How often I’ve been inspired to see that when people there take the time to linger long with the Bible how it opens to them. Few of these folk have the kind of education that is common in this congregation.
Try again to hear God speak when you read your Bible. But it will take time and there is no method I can or anyone can give you to make it happen.
Soon after I became a Christian—I was nineteen years old—I began to memorize the Bible. I memorized verses that I knew were important, but then whole chapters too—Romans 12, Isaiah 53, various of the Psalms. I memorized just about all of the Book of James for its practical advice. I memorized Paul’s exquisite letter to the Philippians. I have found that the sections of the Bible I memorized back then have stayed with me. I still memorize. The words come to my mind when I need to remember them. They come to me sometimes as advice, sometimes as comfort, sometimes as rebuke. I have found, as so many others have found, that when God’s word is in my heart, in my mind so that it informs how I think, I am aware that God is speaking to me.
We teach our children at every Vacation Bible School, “Thy word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” “Thy word have I hid in my heart that I might not sin against Thee.” When we read the Bible publicly we say, “Listen to the word of God.” This is not a fruitless emphasis. If we allow ourselves to be exposed to Scripture, we will hear God speak. Most often it will be “a still, small voice” arising in your mind as the words play back in your thoughts.
There is a lot of talk nowadays about theories of how God speaks. There are carefully thought out doctrines of how God inspired Scripture, and how it is authoritative for us. There is some use in these efforts that show a high regard for the written Word of God. But far more important to us is that we read it and allow to happen in our hearts whatever God will accomplish. We derive no benefit from having a high regard for Scripture if we do not read it and let it speak to us, and listen to it—and then act on what we understand.
Christians separate from one another on the basis of theories of inspiration and authority of the Bible. But if we would all humbly read the Bible and say, as Samuel did in the Temple, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” the Bible would become to us far more than a holy book about which to say nice things.
But it has been the experience of God’s people that He speaks not only through the Bible and long ago when Jesus lived on earth, but through intimate personal experiences.
The prophet Amos, writing to Israel twenty-eight hundred years ago said a fearful word.
The days are coming when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread . . . but of hearing the words of the Lord. They shall wander from sea to sea, and from north to east; they shall run to and fro, to seek the word of the Lord, but they shall not find it.
The famine of the words of the Lord that Amos referred to probably meant that God would no longer send prophets along to remind the people to set their lives in order. But God does not only speak as a means of getting His people to behave themselves.
Very often it seems that this is the case in the Bible. But this is only a means to an end. The goal of the prophets of the Old Testament was to restore fellowship between God and His people.
We read in Paul’s letter to the Galatians this morning that he learned directly from Jesus Christ the things that were at the heart of his teaching. The things Paul learned from Jesus Christ had to do with the cross, not only as the cruel means of Jesus’ death, but as the sign of how to live. This passage ends with Paul saying, “And they glorified God because of me.” The effect of Paul’s acceptance of the meaning of the cross that Jesus Christ taught Him was to change Paul’s life. In the next chapter Paul writes, “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not I but Christ lives in me.”
And as Christians through the ages have read those words of Paul, they’ve heard the note of triumph in them. Rather than being a confession of resignation, they are like a trumpet call of excitement—not because life is not worth living, so give up and die. Far from that, a life wholly given over intentionally to obedience to Jesus Christ from the heart, a life where self-satisfaction is found in Christ-satisfaction, is a joy-filled life. Rather than life being stripped of its meaning, it finds it.
It is in deliberately following this kind of life that God speaks in the still, small voice that we read of in the story about Elijah. The forum in which God speaks to us today most often is in the community of those who purposefully attempt to live together under the authority of Jesus.
I don’t at all put it past God to speak directly to people so that they hear a voice. But I believe God’s usual way of speaking is different from this. If it is true that Jesus is with us when we are met in His name so we can expect that among the impressions that come to us when we are in close communion with each other are impressions on our hearts that Jesus is making. You hear a voice that sounds like the voice of a friend, but that friend, whom you love and trust, has become the implement God is using—because your heart is open to the sound of this friend’s voice.
The reason why fellowship with one another is so vital to life is that here you and I will find that range of communications from God that we need to hear—most of the time. God may speak personally, in a mysterious way, from time to time, but as a rule His chosen method is through the Body of Christ—which we are. We hear from this person or that an accent we understand.
I have sometimes wondered, in times when I find being a pastor a very stress-filled task, how did I ever think I was to be a pastor to begin with? And I think back and see how I was nudged by my fellowship with Christians in this church and that in such a way that I was steered toward the work I have now done for more than three decades. The first impulse came through a Bible study at Great Lakes Naval Training Center as this multi-racial group jovially turned to me for leadership I didn’t feel fit to give. And the chaplain there turned over his pulpit to me when I didn’t have a clue how to preach. And a Baptist pastor who happened to by my uncle made me preach once when I think he didn’t want to preach the weekend I visited him—and though my sermon was a colossal flop, it was a piece of the puzzle. It was a syllable of God’s word directing my life.
And so it will be with you and me if we will live in communion with each other. All that the New Testament tells us about how to keep in close communion with one another has as one of its purposes to keep alive the means by which God can speak to us from day to day. If you and I love, trust, respect, serve, forgive, build up, and otherwise care for one another, God speaks to us in a still, small voice that we don’t even realize until after we’ve realized its good effect. We don’t need to ask if it was God speaking. We know it was, though we might not speak of it in this way.
Indeed, I believe you and I should be very careful about announcing that God has spoken to us. To some who hear us it is discouraging to hear this because they don’t know how the word from God came and assume that since they’ve heard no audible voice they have never heard from God. They are inadequate.
It is best to let God’s voice guide you if you have heard it. You will know if it is from God when you follow it and see its good effects. Let others see the effects and sense how God is blessing them through you.
Does God still speak to us today? Yes. God still speaks to us in the Bible. God spoke most clearly at one moment of history in His Son who revealed more than we realize about God. And God speaks today. The Holy Spirit of God may use various means of communicating with you and me. If God surrounds us; if God is everywhere, we may expect Him to speak even in the rustling grass, as the Gospel song puts it so beautifully. God may speak in a dream. God may speak through the voice of your friend. The means God will use are varied, according to how you best hear.
If we want to hear God speak, we need to keep our hearts open. Be a faithful, loving part of the Body of Christ so that God may not only speak to you, but may use you as part of the means to some other needy person here. There is an out-working momentum that gets going when God speaks. He moves us to do something, and this something will make Jesus visible in a way people can understand.
If Jesus were to appear dressed in first-century clothes, speaking in Aramaic, nobody could understand Him. But when Jesus uses someone dressed in 21st century clothes, to speak for Him, whether it be in American dress or in Indian or Zambian dress and language, people can understand.
My father told me in the sermon he preached at my ordination that my life was the only book a lot of people would read to know about Jesus. The same goes for you if you are a Christian. People read us, actually hear us, because we’re talking books. And it is so by God’s design. Not everyone likes to hear the same kind of talking book. God may have made you a comic book—your sense of humor reaches one kind of person. God may have made you a science book—so you can be read by people who read science books. Maybe God made you a history book, or a sports book, or a nursing book or a mothering-book. But you and I are books of one kind or another, if we are Christians, where people will read all they’ll ever read about Jesus.
Isn’t it wonderful that God should offer such a library, such a menu of means by which the world may hear God and know that He loves them and invites them to find forgiveness, purpose, and rest in Him.
If you think this idea of how God speaks takes away from God as the one actually speaking then you may have forgotten who made you. The God who made you and me can use us for many purposes, even against our will. We know that one of the purposes for which God uses us is a means by which He can speak today.
Let us pray: O Lord God, we thank You for speaking through Moses and the prophets, for speaking most clearly in the person of Your Son, Jesus. We thank You that You still speak to us today. Help us to want to hear, so that we may indeed hear your voice and do Your bidding. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 20, 2005
Disappointment with God?
Psalm 43 / Isaiah 64: 1-7
John 11: 1-21
November 20th, 2005
This coming Wednesday evening we will gather in this place to say thank you to God. It has been the custom in this land to celebrate the fourth Thursday of November as a national day of Thanksgiving since President Lincoln declared it so in the midst of the Civil War. I had not realized this coincidence that at a season of great disappointment with our fellow Americans this wise president realized we needed to give thanks to God.
The year that is drawing towards its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies . . . In the midst of a civil war of unequaled magnitude and severity, which has sometimes seemed to foreign States to invite and to provoke their aggression, peace has been preserved with all nations, order has been maintained, the laws have been respected and obeyed, and harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.
“Except in the theatre of military conflict.” How many mothers and wives in our land must have wept their prayers to God, as they realized their sons and husbands were fighting to the death against uncles and cousins, “Lord, how long will you let this conflict go on?” They knew that on the other side of the Mason Dixon Line other Americans were calling on the same God to help in defeating their armies.
But in the midst of this time of great disappointment President Lincoln said to us, “Let us give thanks to God.” Thanksgiving may be an antidote to disappointment, but disappointment with God is not an inappropriate response to God.
The Bible shows us a God who causes the rise and fall of nations, who is so concerned with the small details of His creation that He knows when a sparrow falls, and who invites us to pray to Him in time of need and He will answer our prayer. But how often the prayer of faith seems not to have enough faith lofting it before the throne of grace. The heavens remain silent when we cry out to God. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina destroyed the homes of a lot of people who prayed to God to spare them.
I am aware how delicate a thing it is to propose that disappointment with God is not a fault. But Jesus called us who obey Him friends. Friendship is a delicate relationship. I wonder if there is a person here who has not had ups and downs in her friendships with anyone. We say that true friendships stand the tests of disappointment. And so it is with God.
In fact, I believe that the Scriptures tell us our duty to love our neighbor as well as our God because we learn much about loving God from loving our neighbor—who disappoints us. John asks, “How can you love God whom you have not seen if you do not love your brother whom you see?” Why are we tempted to stop loving our brother and sister whom we can see? Isn’t it because they disappoint us. Do we not respond the same to God?
God tells us in His Word, “You cannot love God whom you do not see unless you love your brother that you see.” And you want to say back to God, “It would be a lot easier to love my brother and sister if they weren’t so infuriating!” Jesus’ beloved disciple is getting at something at the very heart of faith. We are afraid to admit our disappointment with God because we think it is a sign of lack of faith. But maybe disappointment with God is as appropriate as disappointment with your brother or sister in Christ.
I found the diary my father kept during the years immediately after our family returned to India in 1951. Many of you know my folks were missionaries in India. Reading my Dad’s diary is a bit like reading the diary of David Brainard, one of Dad’s heroes, who was an 18th century missionary to Native Americans. It seethes with the same longing for God. After coming back to India for a second term of service my dad taught in a seminary in central India. But he also did village evangelism. He would ride his bike out from the small city where we lived and in his excellent Hindi, speak to people in the villages of Jesus.
But this was a very dry period in his life. Though Dad was extremely devout and disciplined, his diary reflects his disappointment. Few people responded to his earnest village preaching. Once he was chased out of a village by men brandishing canes. There was conflict within the seminary where he taught. How discouraging the ministry can be. Every now and then, however, I read that Dad praises God. The praise always comes after something good happens. And when good came it was good from people.
Dad’s diary was like any number of letters I have received from missionaries who persist in their work in the face of continuous difficulty. Financial worries, health concerns, the extreme difficulty of the work itself, separation from their children, hard times getting on with fellow missionaries are all part of the life for missionaries. But when light breaks through as a result of some unexpected good, a word of praise to God erupts on the page. How much nearer and more gracious God seems when we see His hand at work through someone.
Is it any different for you and me? Maybe things are tough at home. Maybe you’re desperately lonely. When your home life suffers, when work is tedious and you hear little thanks from your employer, when bills stack higher than your income, and you’re plugging along as hard as you can, do you ever wonder why God isn’t giving you a smoother road to walk? It doesn’t really help when you’re told to think how much better you have it than folk have it in Rwanda.
Someone said to me this past week, and I’m paraphrasing because I probably shouldn’t use his words from the pulpit: “Life is really tough, and then you die.” And the one who said this gave up on God some years ago though born into a Christian home.
Disappointment with God is one aspect of the life of faith. This is a hard thing to say because it seems impertinent. Paul tells us, “In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God in Christ concerning you.” But within the Bible itself those who are closest to God do not hesitate to express disappointment.
After admitting that it was Israel’s sin that brought God’s judgment the prophet Isaiah writes, “There is no one that calls upon thy name . . . for thou hast hid thy face from us.” Moses told Aaron to bless Israel with these words, “The Lord bless you and keep you, the Lord make His face shine upon you, the Lord lift up His countenance upon you.” It was a prayer that God would not hide His face from Israel. But God did hide His face from Israel.
The psalm we read together this morning concludes with David’s sadness: “Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?” He answers his own question, “Hope in God; for I shall again praise Him, my help and my God.” For a moment David stopped praising God because he was cast down in spirit. But he knew he would again praise God when this time was past.
The story we just read of the death of Lazarus presents us the interesting moment when Jesus’ dear friend, Martha of Bethany, comes to him with her face scored with tears, disappointment with Jesus oozing out of her eyes. She blurts out, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
Then, perhaps because Mary was more deeply disappointed in Jesus than Martha, she came to the Lord after he finally arrived. She had waited as her sister darted out the front door to confront Jesus after hearing that He was approaching their house. Mary, who had sat at Jesus’ feet, looking up into his face as He spoke, said those stinging words that intended no hurt, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.”
It’s not as though Jesus didn’t know Lazarus was very sick. He stayed where he was two days after he was told Lazarus was very ill. Then, as though it was just another friendly visit, Jesus ambled to Bethany—perhaps enjoying the beauty of the countryside, the vista of colorful birds and flowers along the way.
But this family had showered on Him the utmost care and affection. He owned them better than this. Once when he was their dinner guest Mary kneeled at His feet and anointed them with ointment and wiped his feet with her hair. What kind of a friend waits two days before setting out to do something that needs to be done right away—for people who have loved Him so well? Remember the Gospel of John begins by letting us know this Jesus was God made flesh. Jesus was acting as God acts because Jesus was God.
And thus Scripture presents to us a view of interaction with God that includes the way we feel when we interact with one another. How many friendships have you had that ended when someone disappointed you? I’ll never trust her again,” perhaps you’ve said, your feelings very hurt. In the Bible just such responses come from believing people toward God.
Disappointment with God is part of the give and take of the life of faith. If we were to make a graph of how faith works we’d see it looks like a wavy line. Faith goes up, rising when we are encouraged, and it may go down when we are discouraged. It may dip nearly to the point of seeming to be unbelief. But this fragile thing called faith keeps on; it rises again after it is down. God does not expect omniscience out of us.
What God does expect out of us is that we participate in His work of grace in behalf of one another. You and I would not be so disappointed with God, often enough, if we were not disappointed with one another—and show it. In the 42nd Psalm David remembers how he used to go “with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God.” But something happened. “I say to God, my rock; ‘Why hast thou forgotten me?” The answer comes, “Because of the oppression of the enemy. As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, ‘Where is your God’?” It was people in church who taunted David. Part of the painful fallout of theological differences is that we belittle others with whom we disagree. Fellow worshipers inflicted David’s deadly wounds. The most painful wounds of all are those that come from those we think we have reason to expect the best from—our Christian friends.
So here’s one antidote to disappointment with God. Let’s not tempt others to be disappointed with God because of how we are to them.
A second antidote to disappointment with God is determining to be thankful. “When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost, count your many blessings, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”
How do I merit such a study flow of ordinary blessings each day? Name the ordinary blessings of each day and see how long the list becomes. Include in that list the names of others who are agents of God’s blessing.
When I was in Zambia one of the strongest impressions the students made on me was how happy they were. Dirt poor. Living in tiny, cramped little flats with a monotonous diet of enshima, a paste-like mush made of maize, and a few vegetables, they were happy people. And when they prayed they overflowed with gratitude that began with, “I just want to thank you for waking up this morning.” In a land where malaria and AIDS don’t make waking up in the morning automatic, they remembered to give thanks for waking up. How near God seemed in that chapel when the students prayed.
You and I have been given the privilege of creating in our congregation an environment in which God does not seem to be far away. We bolster each other’s trust in God when we radiate thankfulness, and when we apply our shoulders to the burdens others are carrying. They notice and their faith is nurtured at a time when it needs nurturing. Disappointment with God is remote when you and I love one another with a pure heart, fervently.
Let us come this Wednesday evening to thank God for His many blessings. But let us very intentionally make this place such a center each Lords’ Day, indeed each time we are here, where others can feel the tender regard of God because we here notice His goodness, and because of how tender is our regard for one another. Disappointment is inevitable in this troubled life. But disappointment does not have the last word in the life of faith.
I’m convinced that when we determine to be grateful and when we nurture love in our hearts for one another, through the ups and downs of our life together, we are learning how to love God through the ups and downs of life—which we trust is in God’s hands. This is part of the immense role of the local Church, where we meet to worship God, to learn to love Him, and where we nurture and love one another. I pray we may all see how this is so, and make of this community a sanctuary of blessing, of God’s blessing and of ours.
Let us pray: O Lord, we trust in You through the ups and downs of life, trusting that You do all things well. Grant to us the grace to prove to one another how this is so. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 13, 2005
What Happens When We Die?
Isaiah 25: 6-9 / Westminster Larger Catechism Q 86
II Corinthians 5: 1-7
November 13th, 2005
What happens to us when we die? It is a question you probably don’t think about when you’re healthy and when those dearest to you are healthy. But when loved ones die the question may have some interest. And when we realize our own strength is subsiding and the end is near, perhaps the question becomes pertinent. What happens to us when we die? The simplest answer to this question is, as the old King James Version put it: “It doth not yet appear what we shall be.”
The question is a little bit like the one a child may ask about how she will look when she is sixty-five years old. She can’t really conceive of being that old. Not enough fingers to count. And you and I can’t “see” what we’ll be like when we’re no longer “older people,” but people who have taken the next step in our pilgrimage.
I am convinced that death is just one stage in a pilgrimage of the soul. I have been present when a number of people died. I have seen what seemed a far off look take over the face. Sometimes those on the point of death see other people in the room. One of our saints of the past at Faith Church looked at the door and said “not yet” to people nobody else in the room could see. And when death has ended the life of the body something seems to stay in the room briefly.
Catharine Marshall tells of not being able to make it to the hospital in time when her preacher husband, Peter, died. But when she got to his hospital room she sensed Peter was still there, apparently waiting for her. And then he was no longer there. The sense was vivid to Catherine, his wife.
I want to get at this question in two stages: first, what happens right away? and second, what happens in the long run? But these two stages are artificial. I suspect they won’t make sense very quickly after we die. Because what is time when you no longer have clocks? When you are not going to wake up to go to work, who cares about an alarm clock? And when there is no end to the workday, and no scheduling of doctor’s visits, and no appointments with the broker or the banker or the candlestick maker, there is no difference chronologically between right now and whatever follows.
What place shall we choose in the Bible to instruct us? Luke read for us from the prophet Isaiah. There the Lord promises the end of death and a great banquet with the finest of food and drink. Tears will be banished from the earth. A bit farther on in Isaiah the prophet refers to the “lords” who have ruled over Israel. “They are dead, they will not live; they are shades, they will not arise.” By contrast, “Thy dead shall live, their bodies shall rise.” But what this is like we’re left to guess.
In II Corinthians 12 Paul described an experience that most of us don’t know what to do with because it goes beyond the ordinary. But it had a beginning and end. It was a parenthesis in his life. He modestly described this event as though it happened to someone else. It was so heady he could hardly keep from being elated so that God had to give him a “thorn in the flesh,” to keep him composed. He wrote, “I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise . . . and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.” He had to wait 14 years to tell this.
Then seems to have crossed a bridge between ordinary life and what many would call a “mystical” experience, except that it did not seem mystical to him. He stepped into the beyond. But it was an “ordinary” experience for him--like visiting a palace for you and me, or for Peter, James, and John like seeing Jesus transfigured with Moses and Elijah standing there before them. I mean it was an event. It was something he saw. But how unlike anything he’d experience in this life.
We wonder what Paul saw. Was it what the Medievals called the “beatific vision,” the sight of God? Was it God whom he saw in the way we will see God in heaven, after the gulf between sinful man and holy God has been erased and we are fit to look Him? Did Paul see himself as he would be, having seen Jesus face to face? “We shall be like him when we see Him face to face,” John writes. Did Paul get this glimpse and he was amazed at what he saw of his unblemished self. Did he get a premonition of what he described in Romans 8 as “the adoption of sons,” the redemption, the restoration, the wholeness that is so blemished in the course of this life?
I look at myself and I look at others and wonder what we will be like when all the blemishes of personality and character are erased, so that we are the perfect beings God had in mind when He shaped us in His image and breathed into us His breath. We don’t realize how we have been disfigured by many of life’s experiences. It is very evident when you look into the faces of some people. But behind every hard and tortured face there is a potential saint whose face, once healed, will be the same in size and color but scarcely recognizable after it sees Jesus. “It does not yet appear what we shall be!”
But then Paul was plunged back into ordinary, clothed in his ordinary sinful body once again. He didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what he saw on the other side. But I wonder if this was a foretaste of what he was to see the moment after Nero ended his life. Paul was a martyr.
His experience was like what Jesus described happening to a poor man named Lazarus in a very sobering parable. Jesus told of a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen, who feasted sumptuously every day. People sometimes refer to him as Dives, which is the Latin word that means “rich.” At the gate of the rich man’s estate lay a poor man named Lazarus, his body covered with sores. Dogs came and licked them, a kindness on the part of “man’s best friend.” Lazarus hoped to get scraps of food left over from the rich man’s table.
Both the rich man and Lazarus died. Angels carried Lazarus to Abraham’s bosom. This referred to the custom of reclining on couches at the dinner table where the head of one person was almost in the lap of the one reclining next to him. So Lazarus enjoyed intimate dinner fellowship with Abraham in Paradise.
The rich man also died and was buried. He went to Hades, the place of the dead who don’t go up to Paradise. He was in torment and saw far off that Lazarus, who he had seen lying outside his gate, was now Abraham’s dinner guest. In the parable we get no hint that the rich man regretted what he had not done in life. No “If only I had done something!” Charles Dickens was kinder to Scrooge, giving him a second chance.
The rich man cried out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me. Send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame. But Abraham said, “Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things, but now is comforted here and you are in anguish.”
The rich man pleaded, “Then tell my five brothers to warn them lest they come to this place of torment.” But Abraham had to tell the rich man that would be of no use. Even if someone went back to them from the dead, they wouldn’t change their ways. Where the rich man went right away was very unpleasant. Where the poor man went was paradise.
Jesus told one of the thieves who was crucified with Him, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” But we read elsewhere in the New Testament that Jesus crossed the divide that Lazarus could not cross to cool the rich man’s tongue with a drop of water.
Paul writes of Jesus, “He descended into the lower parts of the earth.” Again in I Peter we read of Jesus that, “being put to death in the flesh . . . He went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” This speaks of a between world, not hell and not heaven—and not like Purgatory. No one is sure exactly who is referred to as the “spirits in prison.”
Paul was able to come back from his moment in Paradise. He could not tell what he saw there perhaps because, as Jesus said of Lazarus, nobody would believe him. But this experience no doubt informed what Paul wrote in the lesson that we read a few moments ago. When he wrote, “We would rather be absent from the body and present with the Lord,” I wonder if he meant he wished he could remain in Paradise where he once was—unsure if it was in the body or out of the body.
I have the hunch that Paul was telling us about how it will be when we are separated from our bodies.
But another issue comes into the picture about which we do not think too often. We who are Reformed in doctrine appreciate greatly that we are justified before God by faith. By faith we appropriate God’s unmerited favor, a favor we cannot possibly earn. It is all of grace that we are saved.
But I get the impression from Scripture that being saved is like being allowed inside the front door of heaven. Being saved means you’ve got a ticket to get into heaven. Then what? The Apostle Paul, who made most plain the doctrine of justification by faith, writes
Each one’s work will become manifest; for the Day will
disclose it, because it will be revealed with fire, and the
fire will test what sort of work each one has done. If
the work which someone does builds on the foundation
survives, he will receive a reward. If any one’s work is
burned up, he will suffer loss, though he himself will be
saved, but only as through fire.”
“Saved, but only as through fire.” That is, like a branch plucked out of the campfire. It is not completely burned up with the rest of the wood, but its end is charred. It has the smell of burnt wood. Paul, who had a vivid understanding of the grace of God also had a vivid awareness of the implications to us of receiving this grace.
In the Second Epistle to the Corinthians Paul writes, “So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive good or evil, according to what he has done in the body.”
We are presently watching the confirmation process of the successor to Justice Sandra Day O’Conner. Judge Samuel Alito has put together quite a paper trail over his past fifteen years as an appellate judge. The senators can scrutinize opinions he has written on all sorts of cases. They can tell how he thinks, what he’s like, so as to get some idea what he will be like should he be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice. Of course, they can’t see how he may change once on the bench, but they hope to gain an assessment of what he is now from how he has presented himself in the past.
Similarly, you and I are developing a paper trail in this life. We are developing our credentials, we might say, that will be exposed to the eyes of the One who by grace allows us inside the front gate of heaven. It is not just a paper trail—that may include letters we’ve written, or emails, and the like. It will include the indelible record of our thoughts and intentions. This is why Paul urges us to make every thought captive to the obedience of Christ. It will include those words we’ve said that we wish we may not have said. All of this forgiven. The guilt erased. But still it’s there on the carbon disc of the cosmos, a record of our accumulated character. No wonder we can be saved only by grace. Who can survive such a scrutiny? But somehow the result of examining our paper trail, to discover with what we have built our lives is involved in our reward once let into heaven by grace. What we do—will this be given to us on the basis of our paper trail? Maybe those assigned to strumming harps on fully clouds are the ones who’ve strummed away their lives. I say that with tongue in cheek, of course, because no doubt no one will be fixed to a cloud for eternity with a harp in his hands. Jesus told His disciples, “My Father assigned to me a kingdom that you may eat and drink at my table in my kingdom, and sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel.” But we don’t know what that means.
When God makes all things new, when there is a new heaven and a new earth, I take it that we’ll have plenty to do that will make all that interests us here seem like a baby’s fascination with a rattle. And somehow we are now equipping ourselves with the capacity for what will be offered to us then. And some of us will find we can do very simple things like pushing elevator buttons, no matter how clever we were in this life. Some of us will do more complicated and interesting things like designing landscapes. Then quantum mechanics will be as simple as plucking a flower. Some of us who in this life saw the hungry person and fed him, the person in prison or ill and visited him, and the naked and clothed him, will be welcomed to speak with Jesus as friend with friend, because we will have known Him from this life—and didn’t realize it. We are developing a paper trail in this life which may include a happy relationship with Jesus.
I discovered an Old English dialogue between the Soul and the Body. The soul is made for friendship with God, but the body is trapped in fascination with the temporary things of this brief moment we call “this life.” The dialogue begins, “It behooves every hero to ponder his own soul’s pilgrimage, how deep it is when death comes, sunders the siblings who were once together, body and soul.” The soul speaks to the dust that once was the body:
“How have you oppressed me? Little have you
thought what you later would become in your soul’s
journey, after it was led away out of its own body!
Wretch, what torment for me! Listen, you little thought
to be worm’s food . . . And out of heaven the almighty
Measurer sent you a soul through an angel, through his
own hand in his princely power, and then bought you
with holy blood! Yet you bound me with hard hunger
and held me prisoner in the torments of hell! I lived
inside you. Enfolded in flesh, I could by no means
come out of you, and your sinful lusts sank me down.”
The soul, we might say, is made for God. And your soul and mine is interested in what is most important. But our flesh and blood, that Scripture tells us cannot inherit the kingdom of God, have the ability to control, to dominate the soul. Your soul looks out and sees a family where the bread-winner has lost work and the family is about to be evicted from the home. I have a family in mind—living down on Klondike Road. Your soul understands what your eyes read that our criminal justice system is grievously flawed in this free land. It now claims at least one person from every ten families in our country. Your soul registers what it means when your eyes see pictures of people helpless after an earthquake, or in the grips of famine, and little people with bulging eyes whose parents have died of AIDS. Your soul comprehends and feels something ought to be done for them.
But our body balks at responding. The extent to which you and I compel our bodies to do what our souls, our hearts know the body needs to do; we are creating a paper trail of use later on. But we find it hard to think in terms of the hereafter, so only the love of Christ that we may allow to fill our hearts can guide our bodies to do the good that the Kingdom of God has to offer this troubled world.
When the end comes to us we will be struck with the wisdom of the little adage: Only one life, t’will soon be past; only what’s done for Christ will last.” How do we do anything for Christ? Why would we want to do anything for Christ? Because Jesus told us where He is now—where we can see Him. Jesus is in need. Because we are grateful for the grace of God. Because God loves us and has given to us His love. And this love needs to be expressed. And God has given us bodies to express love—in many ways. And when these bodies of ours have run their course, however long that might be, when they come to the end and know they have spent their energies on what is of lasting importance, then death has no remorse.
A favorite book of many Christians in days past was Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying. Taylor saw all of life as a preparation for death, because death introduces us to a phase of our pilgrimage that lasts a lot longer than this brief span we call time. Modern medicine has made it possible to live longer now, but not very much longer than in the 18th century. And our bulging nursing homes inform us that the added years are not always happy years. So let’s make good use of the good years. Love God with all your mind, soul, and strength. Love your neighbor as you love yourself. And cling to the grace of God without which we are without hope in this life or the next.
Let us pray: O Lord, support us all the day long, until the shadows lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in thy mercy grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest, and a peace at the last, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. (John Henry Newman)
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM
November 06, 2005
When Bad Things Happen, Where is God?
Job 24: 1-12, 21-29 / Revelation 6: 7-11
November 6th, 2005
Job, sitting in misery, his body covered with sores, alone, accused by his friends of what he was not guilty, lamented:
From out of the city the dying groan, and the soul of the wounded cries for help; yet God pays no attention to their prayer . . . If it is not so who will prove me a liar, and show that there is nothing in what I say?
Is it any wonder that from everything Job could see God couldn’t have cared less, and he did not blush to say so.
The second passage from the Bible that we read records the Lamb of God opening the fourth and fifth seals describing the fourth and fifth kinds of pain coming before God’s restoring the earth. The gentle Lamb of God opened the fourth seal that described a pale horse—death by sword, famine, pestilence and wild beasts. The fifth seal pronounced suffering for the martyrs for the word of God. One of these cried out, “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long? They were told to wait until the number of martyrs was complete.
We read from the Book of Job and the Book of Revelation words that validate the suffering we experience, and the far more vast and profound suffering beyond us. Maybe you think, “How odd that it should have to be this way when our Creator is a good, all-powerful, and loving God!”
The psalms tell us “The Lord is good.” John’s first Epistle tells us, “God is love.” The Apostle Paul tells us the ancient poet had it right in saying of God, “In Him we live and move and have our being.” Which means that God is not far away, but near to us. Paul wrote of Christ, “In Him all things hold together.” Yet there are times when it seems that things are not holding together very well. God pays no attention.
Not all respond to suffering this way. Many of us knew Gavin Sinclair. He was a member here. He loved life. He loved God. It was evident. He was awfully kind. He had an irrepressible sense of humor. But he got cancer when he was about twenty-four years old. A really bad kind of cancer, so bad that all the early doctors he consulted said he had no hope. The people at Sloan Kettering were able to help, but the help they gave affected his heart and lungs. During the time we knew him his body slowly deteriorated.
Yet I have rarely met a more cheerful person. His life verse was Romans 8: 28, “All things work for God to those that love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Nothing could dissuade him that this applied to his life too. He wrote his book, All Things Work for Good as his body was slowly dying.
But not all think as Gavin did. It is clear Job didn’t. Where is God, this good, powerful God, when in His world such agonies as we cannot begin to describe happen in great quantity and agonizing variety? Remember the common vocabulary of misery: Hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, AIDS, malaria, cancer, genocides, suicide bombers, serial killers, animals that eat other animals alive. The vocabulary of misery boggles the mind. We sing the Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” but we might sing another song.
There have been many thoughtful people who have decided they don’t believe in God because the almighty God they learned to trust was described as a loving God. But there is so much pain throughout every aspect of creation that it appears that God is either not powerful or not loving. Maybe, as Elijah poked fun at the prophets of Baal, God is asleep or on a journey. Maybe God is incapable of doing any better, as Rabbi Kushner proposes. When bad things happen, where is God? It is a question that matters to us because we are told to love God with all our heart, soul, and strength. How do we love God when, if He is in control, He sure allows a lot of suffering to happen?
Two kinds of people ask this question. First there are those in the throes of grief or pain. Second, there are those who see not so much their own pain but the vast quantity and diversity of pain in the world. Then they ask, “How could an all powerful all loving Being possibly allow this?” These are often very compassionate people.
First, let me say that there is no completely convincing rational answer to the problem of suffering. But I am convinced that, as wise, old Pascal put it, “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” The answer to the problem of suffering takes place at the level of the heart, much more than at the level of the mind.
Gregory Boyd, a pastor and professor at Bethel Theological Seminary in St. Paul, Minnesota, reported his encounter with a young woman nearing the end of the stage of life when women usually give birth. She carried a child to term, in good health, only to have it die as she gave birth. It was strangled by the umbilical cord.
Her sense of loss devastated her. She had been a marathon runner. She stopped running and became a blimp. She had enjoyed an intense loving relationship with her husband. It became as though she didn’t know him. She was an avid church-goer, apparently like you “church ladies,” a participant in everything going on, one of those cheerful souls all of us love to have around. She lost all interest in church. Her pastor trotted out words that sounded hollow to her. “There are no accidents in God’s providence. The hand that smites is the hand that heals. Trust in God.” Every pastoral word felt like a slap in the face.
It wasn’t until Gregory Boyd wept with her that healing started to come.
The problem of personal suffering is often intensified when people pull away, not knowing what to say. When our pain is accentuated with loneliness, with questions about guilt hounding us—there was something I did that caused what happened—questions that hear no reassurance, then is when we feel abandoned by God. There is always a link in our hearts between how people respond and how we think God responds. Having been abandoned by people, we feel abandoned by God.
By contrast, if those who love us come and share our grief, the sense of God’s presence emerges. Heart speaks to heart what lips can never say to the ear.
Scripture itself makes plain that it should be this way. Jesus said to His disciples when He sent them out, “Announce that the Kingdom of God has drawn near.” Where they were God was present—to do what needed doing. To His disciples again Jesus said, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I in their midst.” Where can I come to Jesus? Come where those who have trusted in Him are together? Paul told us we are “ambassadors of Christ.” Christ does not merely ask us to draw people to the church; He sends us out to them as ambassadors.
God appeals to the world through us, “You can be reconciled to God.” Who am I to say that?! Well, I am God’s ambassador, speaking for the Fatherland, the Kingdom of God. Where you are, the Kingdom of God is present.
There is an intentional entanglement between us and God when we come to the deepest things of life. Our tendency is to want to keep God’s domain separate from ours. We’ll do the people things as good Christians, and leave to God what is His to do.
But we need other people to feel the compassionate heart of God and they can feel His heart when it is exhibited in the beating of our hearts. One of the primary reasons why you and I should be thoroughly involved with one another in the church is that we represent God’s principle agency of healing sorrow. The local church may seem like an irrelevant society or like the most relevant of all societies. You and I are God’s first level of care for the kind of problem that is most severe. Sorrow mixed with loneliness in times of suffering makes us feel abandoned by God. Only communication to the heart can persuade us otherwise.
I have been told any number of times that our son, Stuart II resembles me very much. We share mannerisms. We speak with a similar tone of voice. You call our house and he answers you think it’s the old pastor. We have many similar instincts. This genetic connection also exists between us and our Creator-- if we will only let it develop. All that we want God to be in meeting our hearts’ needs we can provide for each other. The love of God pours out of our hearts or His love does not pour out at all—so far as we can tell. “We love because He first loved us.” Here is God’s principle resource for personal suffering. You and I are Divine agents.
I believe nobody is really surprised that pain comes to us in life. Something grim happened a long time ago that affected all of life, introducing suffering. Clearly we were made so as to hope there would be no suffering. But here it is. So how does God care for this problem? In the fourteenth century, St. Teresa of Avila, reminded her fellow Christians that WE are God's provision for this defect in creation.
"God has no hands but our hands to do his work today;
God has no feet but our feet to lead others in his way;
God has no voice but our voice to tell others how he died; _and,
God has no help but our help to lead them to his side."
This is not a truism. It is true.
The second sphere of suffering in nature, and from people against people has a similar supply of comfort from God. The terrors of the earthquake that recently hit Pakistan were accentuated in the places where no relief effort was able to come. By contrast, when people worked furiously, night and day, to dig from the rubble survivors, and when nations far and near poured in supplies, food, medicine, shelter and clothing, the misery of the earthquake was surprisingly mitigated. And people found themselves thinking not of the fearful earthquake quite so much as they thought of the wonders of their rescue and care.
The work of Jimmy Carter now in trying to eradicate diseases that are the scourge of humanity is the work of God. The efforts of Mother Theresa that caught the attention of the world drew much more attention than the suffering she tried to alleviate. People got used to seeing the desperately poor in Calcutta’s slums die in the streets. But they never got used to seeing Mother Theresa’s nuns picking them up and caring for them. The work of LUM, of Love, Inc., what you do at Jubilee Christmas, is God at work.
Paul wrote, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, and has given to us the ministry of reconciliation.” Do you see how this is supposed to work? Jesus began the work of reconciliation—a work that included not only His death on the cross to care for the problem of sin, but also healing the ill and feeding the hungry—and told His disciples, “Keep it up. You’ll do more than I can.”
I was reminded this past week by Bishop Higgi that Jesus’ final commands to His disciples included nothing churchy. He didn’t say, “Be sure you’re always in church.” He didn’t say, “Make sure you take the Sacrament often.” He said, “Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned and the ill.” He said this so emphatically. “When you’re caring for them, you’re caring for me. And if you don’t, depart for the place reserved for the devil and his angels.”
It is hard to overstate how much people like you and me offer the convincing answer to the heart that the heart can understand—about the problem of suffering. Our smallest gesture can have effects beyond imagination—not only on bringing comfort to the suffering, but changing the conditions that cause suffering.
This past week as we watched on C-Span the memorial services for Rosa Parks perhaps you were reminded not only of how eloquent those African American preachers were, but of the immense consequences of that little 42 year old woman’s solitary act that day in fighting her fear at the reprisals she knew would come. God used her small act to start to undo one of nature’s grievous evils at work in our country—racial discrimination. This is a terrible problem that exists in the barnyard as in the churchyard.
It occurred to me as I listened to preachers I wished I might emulate, that God has provided in every one of us an antidote to suffering as well as the beginnings of a solution to the problem of evil. The connectedness of things is far beyond our imagination to conceive. When, in the name of Jesus, because you have chosen to make your life “an instrument of God’s peace,” as we like to sing here, you respond to human suffering, or devote your life to the correction of some problem you see, you are a channel of the restoration work of God.
I have no illusions that we can stop earthquakes or hurricanes, but there is within the capacity of the Church an incalculable resource for undoing suffering that will touch not only the physical lives of people, but will reach their hearts as well. When we are indifferent to suffering, how distant God seems. When we respond to suffering with compassion, how near God seems. How near God is. Indeed, we can see the effects of God’s presence in the changed conditions of life.
I look out on this congregation and see God’s answer to many peoples’ questions about the problem of evil. I see the source of the compassion that will heal wounded hearts. I see arms, hands, intellects, and pocket books that can bring change to conditions that spawn suffering. Jesus said, “In this is my Father glorified that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” Here is the kind of answer that touches the heart as well as the problems that cause suffering. We are bearing fruit when we act in Jesus’ name.
You and I spend a fair amount of time and money doing a lot of things that don’t really mean all that much to us. They bring no lasting joy. They relieve some boredom. They bring a moment or two of fun. But what really brings satisfaction is realizing we have been God’s hands and feet and have helped others come to see that God really is good and strong.
But, you and I are not God. We grow weary. We become disappointed in God and in each other. We need relief from our suffering too. So our care must overlap with receiving care. We are like an incoming and out-going tide. We receive and we give comfort. We are persuaded by others as we persuade others that God is good; God is loving; God is even now overcoming evil with good. And through us God can even bring healing to nature itself.
As you take the Lord’s Supper this morning, which reminds us that for our sakes God did a whole lot about the problem of our suffering, ponder why God made you, and what effect there might be in deliberately making yourself available to others in the name of God—who loves us and wills our good.
Let us pray: O Lord, we have tried to think of matters far above our understanding. But in our hearts we know that you are good, and that your goodness overflows through us when we are yours to use. So use us, and grant us the joy of being your persuasion of your love, and agents of your relief and blessing. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson, Pastor
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, IN 47906
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)