Sunday, December 29, 2013
Christmas 1
Matthew 2:13-23
Allyson Robinson
Sermon Audio
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I think I should just come out and say it: I have some issues with God. I have some issues with God and I have some issues with the church and with the Bible and I have for years and they’re going to come out in this sermon and I hope that’s okay with you.
You see, God hurt me. You may not be accustomed to hearing it put that plainly; it may even make you uncomfortable to hear me say it like that, “God hurt me.” But I’ve been thinking about it for some time, thinking through what happened to me, and logically, rationally, there’s really no other way to put it. God hurt me and our relationship has never been the same.
How? Well, I was taught some things by my church, my community of faith, that turned out not to be true. I was lied to in God’s name and on the basis of those lies I tried to become something I wasn’t, something it was actually unhealthy for me to become, something it was ultimately impossible for me to become. And so I spent years running at full tilt into a brick wall, hurting myself over and over and more and more deeply, because I was convinced by my faith community and by my teachers that it was the only way for me to become acceptable to God.
“Ah,” you might say, “then you weren’t hurt by God; you were hurt by the church. You were hurt by people.” I used to think that way too, and I do hold the church responsible and I hold some of my teachers responsible as well. But then one day it occurred to me that if God really is who my spiritual forebears have been saying God is for over 3,500 years – omniscient and omnipotent, all-knowing and all-powerful – then there’s really no way God can escape responsibility here. Because that means that God (a) knew what was happening to me, how I was being hurt, and (b) had the power to stop it, but for some reason didn’t.
Right? I mean, that’s just logic. If God knows everything and God can do anything, God knew how much I was suffering and had the power to stop it. But God chose not to stop it. How can my years of pain be anything but God’s fault?
And, as you may just now be realizing, how can your suffering be anything but God’s fault?
And why don’t we ever talk about this in church? It’s not like it’s not in the Bible. It’s in the legend of Job, the “blameless, upright” man who was always “fearing God and turning away from evil.” It’s in the story of the Benjaminite bachelors, a tale of terrible violence carried out by a priest of God against his wife just to prove a point. And it’s here, right here in the midst of the birth narrative of Jesus, the Christmas story. The name we’ve given to this particular incident screams out how wrong it is: “The Slaughter of the Innocents.” And yet we’ve each built our own practical theology in such a way that at best gives God a pass for stuff like this, and at worst ignores it completely.
But the plain and simple fact is that God chose to allow this to happen. God stepped out of the way and let the people of Bethlehem go through hell on earth. God could have stopped it, knew how it would end, could have said, “Surely they are my people, children who will not deal falsely,” as Isaiah prophesied God someday would in today’s Hebrew text. But instead of stepping in to protect the families of Bethlehem, God just stepped back and let them suffer. God let their children die horrible deaths. God took away their joy in the present and hope for the future. God allowed them to be burned with fire, to have their throats slit by jagged swords and their bellies pierced by the spears of Herod’s soldiers.
God let this happen. I don’t think the story tries to hide that or excuse it or present any other way of understanding it. It doesn’t say, “While God wasn’t looking, Herod sent out his troops.” It doesn’t say, “God tried to stop Herod, but God was weary from holding back evil all across the world and this one time evil got past God.” And it doesn’t say, “God would have stopped it, but didn’t because they were all sinners and they all deserved it.” Because to say any of those things would be to deny the received truth about God’s character: omniscient, omnipotent; all-knowing, all-powerful, always loving, always fair. Instead, the story forces us to come to terms with a God who lets terrible things happen to innocent people because God does. We ask, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” and this story responds, “Well, what if it’s God’s character to allow it to be so? Are you okay with that? Can you handle it?”
And so for five years now I’ve shaken my fists at the heavens and shouted my anger at God for what God has done to me and to others. I mean, what else am I supposed to do with all this hurt? Our texts and our tradition tell us to “recount the gracious deeds of the LORD, the praiseworthy acts of the LORD” (Isa 63:7 para.), but my integrity just won’t allow me to pretend I’ve not had other kinds of experiences with God or to explain them away with justifications that only work if you don’t look at them too hard. I mean, the author of Hebrews at least tries to offer some consolation: “Because [Jesus] himself was tested by the things he suffered, he is able to help those who are being put through trials of their own” – but even Hebrews offers no explanation for why God would try us when God already knows the outcome, and in fact controls the outcome.
But I can’t be like that – I can’t sit in the midst of my pain and say, “I will recount the gracious deeds and the praiseworthy acts,” but ignore everything else. And I can’t give God credit for all the joy and all the blessing and all the salvation – “it was no messenger or angel but God’s presence that saved me” – without asking God to account for the times God didn’t save me. And, in fact, neither could the families of Bethlehem. “A voice was heard there, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they are no more” (Mat 2:18 para.).
No. No longer. If I am going to live as a person of integrity, if I’m going to have a faith that’s more than a fairy tale, one that isn’t delicate or fragile, a faith that truly makes sense of my experience of the world, then I need to work some things out with God. “If you’re really God, then you did this to me, God. And the fact that you did means I can’t go on having the same kind of relationship with you I once did: naive, shallow, unthinking. It’s time for me to grow up in my faith. The fact that you’re a God whose character is such that you don’t stop bad things from happening and who doesn’t feel the need to offer a reason for doing so, well, that changes things for us. It’s time for things to get real between us.”
I’ve said these things to God. And, as I sat in the silence that followed and listened, I think I heard a response. Not the singing of angels, as we tuned our ears to hear during Advent, but a single voice – frank, direct, without sophistry or equivocation.
“I am a mystery. Get over it.
You’ll never fully understand. You’ll never see or know more than a tiny sliver, never get more than an infinitesimal speck. Most of what you think you know you’ll get wrong; most of what you’ll see you’ll misinterpret. That’ just how it is. Deal with it.”
End of message.
This scares the hell out of me and frustrate the hell out of me. I’m kind of outraged by it. I think that’s okay – because what it means is this:
I’ve taken the risk of shaking my fist at the mystery – fired my arrows aflame into the heart of the great black Cloud of Unknowing. Once I let go of my folk theology and started taking God at God’s word and started using the meager faculties God gave me to ponder it all, I could do no other.
I don’t know how or even if they were received, whether they even penetrated. All I know is that they’ve not come flying back at me.
And that is a beautiful thing, a beautiful gift, perhaps the greatest gift of all. For I have a relationship with the great Creator and Sustainer of all things, the Beginning and the End, First and Last, that allows me to doubt, to rage, to question…and I am still here.
May the name of the LORD be praised, and amen.