Our Hope and our Help
Psalm 146[1]
Last week we discussed the fact
that the Psalmist calls us all to find joy in the promise that the God who
reigns over all things will one day right every wrong, heal all that is broken,
and wipe away every tear. It is the very foundation of the hope that we
cherish: the promise that God will be faithful to us no matter what. But,
unfortunately, when you look at the way life actually works, it can sometimes
be hard to believe that our hope does us any good. Those who have no lack of
faith in God often suffer in ways that seem incredibly unfair. If we’re honest
with ourselves, we have to wonder about the promise that God will set things
right.
I think that may be one of the
great challenges to our faith. When the suffering of this world seems so
unjust, the question whether our hope in God does us any good has to come up,
whether we want to acknowledge it or not.
For many of us, “natural” tragedies like tornadoes, hurricanes, and
floods provoke us to ask this question.
There’s a separate subject in the study of religion for it: it’s called
“Theodicy,” which means “justifying God.”
The basic problem it tries to explain is this: if God is both loving and
all-powerful, then the massive suffering we see in our world should never
happen.[2] So some conclude that God must be
all-powerful but not loving.[3] Others conclude that God must be loving but
not all-powerful.[4]
Either way, God may be our hope, but he’s not much help.
Our lesson from the Psalms for
today addresses this question by insisting that God is indeed both all-powerful
and loving. The psalmist begins by affirming that God is all-powerful. And his
evidence for this is the world around us. God is the one who “made heaven and
earth, the sea and all that is in them” (Ps. 146:6).[5]
Already in that day, there was a sense that the created order is amazingly
vast. And yet in our day we know so much more about how vast creation is. A
cubic foot of soil can be a vast microcosm of life, from microscopic organisms
to insects to plants. The ecosystem that supports our world is incredible
complex. And beyond that, there are countless galaxies of stars that are only
visible to extended exposure photography from the Hubble telescope. The
Psalmist insists with the rest of Scripture that the one who created all of
this is indeed all-powerful.
But at the same time the Psalmist
insists that this all-powerful God is not just “a God who doesn’t care, who
lives away out there.” Rather, this all-powerful God is also the God whose very
character is defined by love. God is not only the one who created all things,
he is also the one who “keeps faith forever” (Ps. 146:6). God is the one who
remains faithful, and this means that he is actively involved in relationship
with us all. If you want to know what that looks like in specific terms, the
Psalmist spells it out. It means that
God feeds the hungry, he sets the prisoners free, he restores sight to the
blind, he lifts up those who are bowed down, he watches over the “strangers” or
resident immigrants, and he upholds the widows and orphans (Ps. 146:7-9).[6]
God is both all-powerful and completely loving, and he demonstrates his love in
the very real circumstances of our lives.
This affirmation is the
foundation of our faith: that God is not only our hope but also God acts in
specific ways to help us with the burdens of life. And yet, I would think we
can all call to mind instances where the hungry didn’t get fed, those who were
bowed down were crushed by their hardships, and those who were suffering found
no relief, no matter how hard they prayed or how fervently they believed. It is
a fact of life that calls into question the faith that our Scripture lesson
affirms. And the question we face in those situations is whether we can
continue to believe in a God who is not only our hope but also our help.
It may come as a surprise to you,
but this question is one that the Scriptures ask repeatedly. The Psalmists ask
God if he has forgotten to be loving (Ps. 77:8-9) and if he has fallen asleep
instead of coming to help his people in their time of need (Ps. 44:23). When we
do all that we can to stay on the right path, and we muster all the faith we
can manage, and still our lives fall apart, it can seem like God has abandoned
us. That’s when the burden of suffering can make it seem impossible to trust
the promise that God loves us enough to actually do something about what we’re
going through. It can be enough to shake
our faith so intensely that we may feel like the ground has given way beneath
us. It would seem that the facts of our lives simply cannot be reconciled with
the assurances of Scripture.
Our confession of faith today
affirms that there is nothing that can happen to us that “God does not bend
finally to the good.”[7]
I would imagine that plenty of us have been through experiences that make that
hard to swallow, let alone believe. When that happens, I think we need more
than just “God knows what’s best for us.”[8] If God truly is the one who “keeps faith
forever,” then we need something to reassure us those words mean something real
when it feels like he’s broken his promise. In my mind, that’s where the cross
comes in. I believe that one of the most important reasons for the cross was to
demonstrate once and for all that God doesn’t abandon us.[9]
God didn’t abandon Jesus on the cross, and God will never abandon you or me or
anyone in this world, especially in the midst of suffering. I believe that the
cross stands as a reminder that God is not only our hope, but also, even when
it seems all but impossible to believe, he is our help.
[1]
©2016 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 6/5/2016 at
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
[2] The
seriousness of this question is pointedly expressed in connection with the
Holocaust by Frederick
Buechner, Whistling in the Dark,
61-62: “Anyone who claims to believe in an all-powerful, all-loving God without
taking into account this devastating evidence [i.e. the Holocaust] either that
God is indifferent or powerless, or that there is no God at all, is playing
games. … If Love itself is really at the heart of it all, how can such things
happen? What do such things mean?” Cf. similarly, Shirley C. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 182, where he says
that the level of suffering in our world can make us wonder whether “all talk
about a loving and just God” is just empty talk “by people who are not
courageous enough to face up to the fact that we live in a godless and
godforsaken world.”
[3]
One contemporary example of this point of view is Sam Harris. In a post on
Twitter dated Aug. 5, 2015, he said, “God visits suffering on innocent people
on a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath.”
[4] A
contemporary example of this point of view would be Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.
Rabbi Kushner concludes that God is loving, but is incapable of doing anything
about our suffering.
[5]
Cf. James L. Mays, Psalms, 441: “Hope
attached to [God’s] reign is founded on a reality that does not pass away. The God
of Israel is king of the universe; ‘maker of heaven and earth’ is a title of
the God who rules all.” Cf. also ibid., 391, where he says that the formula “maker
of heaven and earth” occurs in the Psalms either to reinforce God’s help or God’s
blessing: “It identifies the LORD as the one whose power in help and in
blessing is unlimited by anything that is.”
[6]
Cf. J.
Clinton Mccann, Jr, “The Book Of Psalms,” New
Interpreters Bible, IV:1264. He says that these verses portray “a God who cares
about human hurt and who acts on behalf of the afflicted and the
oppressed.” He adds that they constitute
“a policy statement for the kingdom
of God
[7] The Study Catechism, question 22: “God not
only preserves the world, but also continually attends to it, ruling and
sustaining it with wise and benevolent care. … God provides for the world by bringing
good out of evil, so that nothing evil is permitted to occur that God does not
bend finally to the good.” Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 171, where he says that what we can do in the
face of suffering is “remind ourselves and others of the light that shines in
the darkness: the light of a loving God who understands and shares the depths
of our suffering and dying; the light of a powerful God whose will for our good
will not be defeated, who is stronger than death itself, who makes the dead
live again.”
[8]
Cf. Guthrie, Christian Doctrine, 171,
where he insists that we simply cannot explain why some things happen: “in the
last analysis we just do not know, should not pretend that we do, and do not
have to feel guilty because we don’t. We can do what we can to relieve our own
and others’ suffering. We can stand by one another to share one another’s
suffering and grief to make it a little easier. But the one thing we cannot do
and should not try to do is explain why—especially with glib talk about the ‘will
of God’ or speculation about what people do or do not deserve.”
[9]
Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Church in the
Power of the Spirit, 95: “There is no remoteness from God which the Son in
his forsakenness did not suffer, or into which his self-giving did not reach.”
Cf. further, Jürgen Moltmann, The
Crucified God, 245-48. While he speaks of Jesus taking on the
“God-forsakenness” of human experience, he also makes it clear that act was an
action of God himself, suffering with Jesus on the cross, taking all human
suffering into God’s very own self in order to convey to us all his life. Cf.
also Jürgen Moltmann, The Way of Jesus
Christ, 173, where he says that, far from abandoning
his Son, “in the surrender of the Son the Father surrenders himself too.” Cf.
also cf. René
Girard, “Job and the God of Victims,” in L. G. Perdue and W. C. Gilpin, ed., The Voice from the Whirlwind: Interpreting
the Book of Job, 226: “The Jesus of the Gospels becomes, for the Christian
tradition, the decisive event revealing the reality and meaning of the God of
victims, of the God, …, by which the world is created and constituted and who
takes the side of the poor, the needy, the oppressed.
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