Who is God to you?
Text: Matthew 5:21-37
I just got back from spending some time with my spiritual mentor, Jean. Jean is a retired priest who lives in Des Moines, Iowa. She chaired my discernment team for the priesthood and has never stopped helping me discern.
Jean and her husband, Mike, watch a lot of news. While I was there, the earthquake hit the border of Turkey and Syria. We saw the images of a building falling within seconds, of rescues of young children, the death toll rising. I turned to Jean and asked, “Where do you think God is in all of that?” The earthquake itself was completely outside of human control. Not even climate change impacts the movement of the tectonic plates of the earth. According to the insurance industry this would be labeled as an act of God. So where was God?
Jean’s first response was not to try to justify anything. It was to acknowledge the complete helplessness we felt. We didn’t know that an earthquake of that intensity was going to happen at that place at that moment. We couldn’t save people. We want to ask how the situation could have been changed, and that’s an important conversation, but the most important thing to do initially is to aid those affected and give room for grief. We often try to move too quickly away from grief when it’s actually an important process to go through. Centering ourselves in lament, a topic that Jean has studied for decades now, is important for humanity. Through the process of lament, we are broken open, we acknowledge what is wrong, and moving through the pain, we come towards praise of God.
Talking with Jean about the earthquake, I saw more clearly one of the big questions of our lives, one that deeply impacts how we read our Gospel message today: Who is God to you? How do you understand how God moves in the world? If God is wrathful and vengeful in our eyes we will see things one way. If we have an uneasy attachment to God, if we’re not quite sure we’d escape the fires of hell if we drop dead tomorrow, we’ll see things other ways. If we’re grounded in the fact that God loves us, the view changes completely.
Who is God to you? How do you relate to God? How we answer those questions impacts how we read the scriptures. Just like any document, we read tone and intention into the scriptures. We can’t tell what Jesus’ facial expressions were, how he presented himself as he shared this gospel lesson. Did he crack a smile, clearly joking as he talked about chopping off limbs, using humor to make a point, or was he dead pan and serious? We have to choose. The Bible does not tell us. We choose based on how we view God.
With a wrathful view of God, we encounter situations where thousands die in seconds and we ask, “What did they do wrong?” This view assumes that God wants us to live a particular way and if we don't, God will punish us in order to correct us. We look at this gospel text and we judge ourselves for being mad at other people, we question how others dress in order to protect ourselves from plucking out our eyeballs, we blame people for their divorce. We judge ourselves and others and feel ourselves judged. Everything that happens in the world is connected to God's will and God's judgment. There is the promise that God is kind and merciful to those who follow God’s ways, but God is also a disciplinarian, correcting people through adversity.
This view is not without its biblical backing. Some of the Old Testament does indeed express this viewpoint. The logic is that if we are able to obey God’s commandments, but we don’t, then God has to bring adversity in order to move the people back towards praise of God. The thing is: this viewpoint was never the universal standard. That’s why the book of Job exists: to counter this view. And even if this was the common belief, Jesus’ life and message counters this view as well. Jesus, as someone perfectly in tune with God, experienced suffering, adversity, and strife. No one can say that God was trying to correct Jesus through his suffering. That’s not how the cross works. God takes on suffering, not to make it disappear, but to redeem those who suffer.
In uneasy attachments to God, many of these views have softened, there’s a movement away from feeling intense judgment, but there’s also uncertainty about what that all means. Perhaps God spares us, but do we spare ourselves? Shame often lives here. There’s the recognition that we’re not perfect, that only God is perfect, but there’s also the uncertainty about whether or not God will forgive us our trespasses. In the midst of earthquakes, one with an uneasy attachment may not want to say that God caused the earthquake, but there’s confusion about what it means that the earthquake happened.
There are certainly different theologies about how we are to relate to God. There’s nothing wrong with having questions about how God works and being uncertain about what it means that something happened. That’s normal. Questions and doubts are vehicles for growth. Those all live in our headspace and can lead to great exploration and a deepening of our relationship with God.
The problem lies when you’re uncertain in your heartspace. When you’re not certain that God does indeed love you or others, that’s a painful place to be in. Many can’t stay in that space for too long. They either move towards convictions about who God is that create a sense of certainty, either towards the certainty of a wrathful or of loving God, or they move towards atheism or agnosticism, detaching oneself from God. Just as any other relationship in our lives, we can’t stay in nebulous uncertainty about how the other person feels about us. We either seek greater connection or we detach. Living in the in-between hurts too much to stay there.
But what about those who have the deep conviction that God loves them and the world? That God's first and primary motivation is towards the care of people and all creation?
Then things like earthquakes and our Gospel lesson today take on a different flavor. If we know that God loves us and doesn’t punish us severely for our sins, then an earthquake cannot be God’s judgment on a certain community of people. The question is not “What did these people do to deserve this?” The question is, “How can we share God’s love in the midst of their pain?” Because the truth is that the people who died did nothing deserving death. They lived on a fault line. God created a beautiful planet, a ball of molten lava covered by plates that move and change the landscape. God’s designs for a shifting and moving planet, a planet where what once was a singular continent has moved and become seven separate continents, is amazing but it is not without danger. The planet’s movements sometimes conflict with human design. When the shifting of tectonic plates causes mass death and destruction, God grieves with us. Jesus is on the cross with those who suffer great loss. Grief is to be honored and respected as holy and necessary. Things happen outside of people’s control, and the hurt cannot be ignored. In the midst of the grief, then the movement towards praise of God can happen. It happens in humanitarian relief efforts, in people across the globe providing assistance to those in need. It happens in how things are rebuilt, recognizing the earth beneath for what it is and what it is capable of doing. It happens in all the ways we show God’s love and care with each other. God loves us and we share God’s love with each other in praise of our Creator.
Moving towards our Gospel lesson today, what does it look like to see these stringent words in the light of a loving God? First of all, I think it’s important to note that we are missing Jesus’ endpoint, his final commandment that encompasses, summarizes, and completes this section. After commenting on anger, lust, and keeping your integrity, Jesus ends with a call against retribution and a command to love your enemies and to pray for those who persecute you. This entire section is moving towards this command to care for others even if you hate them.
That’s a tall order, and Jesus is not telling us to be doormats or to stay in hurtful marriages. What Jesus is doing is calling us to do is have the hard conversations before we throw in the towel. We need to be able to talk about the hurt that we have caused in our lives, to seek to be honorable and trustworthy in our actions. It’s about understanding what we are doing and why we are doing it. He doesn’t want us to make quick decisions to do big actions out of pain. He wants us to heal a bit before we decide. I should add the caveat that abuse is different, and I’m not talking about that. People who are being abused aren’t being treated as humans. But if both parties agree that the other is human just as they are, then we can have these conversations.
Returning to my friend, Jean, I think her example of essentially divorcing a denomination is a good example of what Christ is asking us to do. Jean was a Roman Catholic liturgist. She knows the movements and the actions of worship backwards and forwards. She spent years working on enacting the reforms of Vatican II in her local congregation. Her husband, Mike, was a Catholic deacon. But Jean was called to the priesthood and that meant that she had to leave what she knew and loved. She spent two years grieving, reconciling with the denomination she had to leave, and preparing her heart to go without anger before being received into The Episcopal Church. The night before she was received, some of her close friends, the Catholic deacons’ wives whom she had been walking the faith with since their husbands were ordained twenty years before, took the chrism from their local Catholic Church. They anointed Jean in solidarity with her journey. They still meet and share that journey together today. Jean had taken the time to grieve, to lament, to ask the big questions and sort things out with her community of support before she became Episcopalian. She needed that space of lament before she could become who God was calling her to be. She had to slow down, to take the time to reflect and examine what was going on before she moved forward. Because she took that time, she is able to be a pastor to others renegotiating relationships and grieving in their own lives. It was out of her careful negotiation of her own divorce process with a denomination that she has lived into her deepest sense of self.
This kind of careful reflection, examining our relationships and recognizing the humanity of all involved, is ultimately what I think Jesus is calling us towards in our Gospel lesson today. Jesus knows that people get angry, that people lust over others, that people get divorced and people break vows. Jesus acknowledges that does happen. But Jesus seeks to foster a reflective, purposeful intentionality towards our relationships with others. We have to be able to acknowledge their humanity, to see the brokenness, to grieve. Through that, new life can happen.
When earthquakes shatter the lives of thousands of people, we are no less called to acknowledge their humanity, to witness to their devastation, to grieve alongside them, to help them out. Then, even in the midst of mass death, slowly new life can spring forth.
That’s what a loving God does. God doesn’t give people a death sentence nor does God seek the destruction of certain groups of people. God seeks healing. God longs for better relationships with each other and our planet. God grieves when we grieve. God stays with us in the confusion and despair. God helps us find healing, even when all seems hopeless. Our job in that process is to open our eyes to each other, to recognize our common humanity, and to be God’s hands and feet in the process. Both on an individual and a global level, God is calling us to reflect, to pray, to seek the path of wholeness, not one where everything is magically better, but the one where we see each other fully and recognize the needs of all. May we do our part in our own journeys today. Amen.
