Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
August 19, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Merle once objected to my being asked to read a story at a summer children’s activity here because, she said, “he’d just give them a history lesson.” Well, this morning’s sermon starts with a history lesson, so Merle, deal with it.

When you read Hebrew Scripture, especially the history books and the Prophets, one of the principal dynamics, or as the great UCC Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann calls them, trajectories, that you discover is the political history of the Hebrew people from the creation of the kingdom by David around the year 1000 BCE through and beyond the Babylonian exile that began around 586 BCE. Very briefly, the Bible tells us that with God’s blessing and assistance David built a large and prosperous kingdom. Under his son Solomon the kingdom expanded and prospered even more. After Solomon’s death in the mid 10th century BCE the kingdom split in two, into the kingdom of Israel in the north and the kingdom of Judah in the south. As time went by, the people of these two kingdoms sometimes began to worship other gods than their God Yahweh. And the societies and governments became corrupt. The wealthy ruling elites exploited and oppressed the poor and neglected the needy and the vulnerable, as wealthy ruling elites everywhere generally do. God sent prophets—Isaiah, Micah, Amos, and Hosea among others—to speak God’s word of justice to the leaders and to warn that because of their injustice God would deliver the kingdoms up to foreign invaders, who would destroy them. When the people in power did not heed the words of God’s prophets and repent of their unjust ways, God withdrew divine protection from them. In 722 BCE the mighty Assyrian empire from Mesopotamia to the east conquered and destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel. In 586 BCE the even mightier Babylonian Empire, having conquered the Assyrians, conquered and destroyed the southern kingdom of Judah. Eventually, the Bible tells us, God had mercy and raised up another mighty empire from the east, this time the Persians, who, under their king Cyrus, whom the Book of Isaiah calls God’s Messiah, conquered the Babylonians and restored the southern kingdom of Judah, albeit as a Persian vassal state.

That’s the history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms as the Bible tells it. Our readings this morning from Chapter 5 of Isaiah and Psalm 80 are part of that story, and please notice one very important thing. In that story as the Bible tells it God is responsible for all of the political and military developments that the story recounts. Thus, in our passage from Isaiah, God announces what God will do to Israel, here imaged as God’s vineyard, because of its injustice and violence: “And now I [God] will tell you what I will do to my vineyard.” Isaiah 5:5 NRSV Basically God says here that God will destroy it, and it was in fact destroyed.

In the Hebrew Bible things happen to God’s people, they prosper or they fall, because of the will and the actions of God. The people of that time understood God’s relationship to them and to the world to be one of control. Everything that happened on earth was a reflection of events in heaven, or of the divine will of Yahweh, God. So for them, when the kingdom of David flourished it was because of God’s favor. And when foreign empires arose to threaten and eventually to destroy the kingdoms of God’s chosen people, it had to be because of God’s disfavor. And so the prophets explained the catastrophes as God’s punishment for the people’s faithlessness and injustice. That Biblical explanation of events is grounded in an ancient understanding of God, and it is an understanding that simply will not withstand critical scrutiny.

You see, divine intervention is not at all needed to explain the political history of the ancient Jewish kingdoms. The rise of the kingdom of David and Solomon, its split into two kingdoms after the death of Solomon, and the eventual destruction of both of those kingdoms by powerful empires from the east can be perfectly well explained by geopolitical factors of the time with no divine component at all. The kingdom of David and Solomon arose and flourished when it did because there was a power vacuum in the area at the time. Later, much larger and more powerful states arose in Mesopotamia (Iraq to us). As empires do, they expanded. Little Israel and Judah didn’t have a chance. They had neither the resources nor the population to resist their much larger, expansionist neighbors. They could have been the most devout and the most just nations the world has ever seen, and Assyria would still have conquered Israel, and Babylon would still have conquered Judah.

And all of that is ancient history. People three thousand to twenty-five hundred years ago thought that God controlled events on earth. So what? What does that have to do with us? What it has to do with us, I submit, is that that ancient view of God’s relationship to creation is still very much alive and with us today. Popular Christianity today is permeated with the notion that God controls what happens. We hear it in statements like “God has a plan for my life.” And “when God closes a door, he [always he in this kind of thinking] opens another.” And “my loved one died because God (or Jesus) took him home to heaven.” And I submit to you that this kind of thinking about God’s relationship to us and to creation is no more tenable today than it was when it was applied to the great events of history so many centuries ago. In our post-Holocaust and post-Hiroshima world, it simply is not possible for us to believe that God controls events on earth. Insisting that God does creates insurmountable theological problems. If God is in control, why is there so much evil, injustice and suffering in the world? If God is in control, how could the Holocaust happen? Those questions are so difficult, they are in fact so impossible to answer, that a great many people today have pushed God out of the world altogether. If God lets things like Auschwitz happen, then I want no part of God, they say. Or they deny the reality of God altogether, because if there were a God things like that would not happen, a contention that depends of course on the understanding that if God is God, God is in control.

Yet if we will just open our eyes to see what is there to see, it will be obvious to us that God is not in control of events on earth. So we have to ask? If God is not in control, is there any role for God in the world at all? Indeed, if God is not in control, is God a reality of any kind in our lives and in the life of the world? Or do we have to give in to atheistic despair, like so many of our fellow humans do these days? Not surprisingly, I suppose, my answer is that yes, there is a role for God in the world, God is indeed a reality in the world and in our lives, and we need not give in to atheistic despair. Moreover, it will come as no surprise to those of you who have been here for a while that my word for that role, the word that I substitute for control, is solidarity. God does not control events on earth or in our lives. I find it simply impossible to believe that God does that. God does not take our loved ones away. God does not cause illness. God does not cause suffering. God does not send people to war. Of course, the question of why if God is God, God is not in control is an immense one. I won’t try to answer it fully here. I will only suggest that God retaining control over creation is inconsistent with the very notion of creation, as any of us who have begotten and raised children only to let them go to live their own lives, for better or for worse, will easily understand.

Rather than get hung up on why God is not in control, however, I want to focus instead on that concept solidarity. I believe that is the central concept for liberated Christianity today. In Jesus Christ we seen God being present in creation in complete solidarity with God’s people, indeed with all of God’s world. In Jesus we see God entering into all the evil and injustice in the world in complete solidarity with the world, spreading God’s healing word of love to those who need so badly to hear it. In Jesus we see God entering into unjust suffering and even into human death, showing that God is present with us, holding us in love when we endure those things, as endure them we all certainly will one day. In Jesus we see God acting in complete solidarity with God’s people, teaching and inspiring people to do God’s sacred work of healing and striving for peace and justice in God’s world. In Jesus we see that God does not control events, not even when those events lead to the unjust suffering and death of God the Son Incarnate. Rather, God is present with us in those events in complete solidarity with us, sharing our suffering, sharing our deaths, and working through us always to bring about God’s reign of peace and justice that we call the Kingdom of God. That’s how God relates to God’s creation, not through control but in solidarity with God’s creatures.

So, when we read the history of ancient Israel, of the rise and fall of kingdoms, and we read the Bible attributing it all to God, we have to0 ask: Did God really do it? And we answer no. God did not destroy Israel and Judah, the Assyrians and Babylonians did. God does not control events in our time either. God did not start a war in Iraq, the United States did. God did not take the life of my first wife Francie, cancer did. God did not take the lives of the loved ones you have lost. Disease or accident or human violence did. God did not cause any of those things, but God is not absent from any of them either. Rather, God is present in them, standing in complete solidarity with suffering, dying humanity, holding every sacred human life of whatever nation or creed in God’s unfailing arms of grace. God stands in complete solidarity with each one of you, and with me, as we face the things that life brings us, the good and the bad, the joyful and the tragic, the beginnings and the endings. Through it all God’s love never fails us. Through it all God never leaves us. In it all and through it all God is there, never controlling, always saving. And that my friends is the best news there ever was or ever could be. Thanks be to God. Amen.