Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 27, 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.

You’ve heard me say before what I’m about to say again. Today I’m preaching on a subject that is, for me, at the very core of my faith. I feel very passionately about it, so I hope I don’t come on too strong this morning. As always, you are free to disagree with me, and I suspect some of you will. That’s fine. We don’t have to agree on everything. That being said, however, I am convinced that my message this morning, which isn’t really my message at all but is the message of the Good News of Jesus Christ, is really important. That message is about nothing less than an understanding of the nature and function of faith and the nature and function of God. It is about what I am convinced is a widely held but ultimately faulty theology, a theology that, I believe, has destroyed the faith of more people than any other Christian belief. It is about a theology that, if I hadn’t by then developed a better understanding, at one time in my life would have destroyed mine. It is a theology that leads us to misunderstand the promises of scripture and the saving work of Jesus Christ. The message this morning is about the understanding that says that God protects the faithful and means by that assertion that God prevents bad things from happening to people of faith and their loved ones.

I’m sure you’ve all heard it. You may at some point have believed it. Maybe you still do. So in case you do let me assure you that my purpose in criticizing that belief is not to take away your hope. My purpose is rather to give you a different hope, one that cannot fail you, as I am convinced that the belief that God keeps bad things from happening to us eventually and invariably will. My purpose is to call us to a transformation, a transformation of nothing less than our understanding of what it means to be safe. And I will start by looking at our Psalm reading this morning.

Psalm 27 begins with a powerful affirmation of the fruit of faith: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” Psalm 27:1 NRSV These questions are, of course, rhetorical. The implied answer is “no one.” With God I need fear—no one. With God I need fear—nothing. Verse 1 of the Psalm makes that bold, unequivocal assertion, and that assertion is absolutely correct.

It is correct, that is, if we understand it correctly. The problem that we quickly run into, however, is, that as Psalm 27 goes on to develop what it means by its bold assertion that with God we need fear nothing and no one, it creates, in my a grave danger of misunderstanding. The Psalm goes on to say that God “will hide me in his shelter in the day of trouble; he will conceal me under the cover of his tent; he will set me on a high rock. Now my head is lifted up above my enemies all around me.” Psalm 27:5-6a NRSV The danger that Psalm 27 creates is that we will take these assertions literally. We will take them to mean that God will literally protect us from all the bad things that can happen to us and our loved ones. We’re tempted to think: God will protect me from every day of trouble, whatever the trouble is. These verses reinforce a belief that God will keep us from illness, or the death of a loved one, or the loss of job, or from any other sort of trouble that might otherwise befall us. When we hear Psalm 27, I suspect that we tend to hear a promise that with God those and other bad things will not happen to us. That, at any rate, is what at first blush I hear this Psalm saying.

And I know it isn’t true. You know it isn’t true too. Let me ask you a couple of questions to make the point. How many of you can say that nothing bad has ever happened to you or to one of your loved ones? How many of you have lost a spouse to death too soon, or worse, a child? I know that some of you, like me, have. How many of you, or how many of your loved ones, have had a serious, even life-threatening illness? I know that many of you have. How many of you have suffered depression or other mental illness? I have, and I know that some of you have too. How many of you have had marriages or other primary relations break up, leaving disappointment and regret or even anger and recriminations in their wake? My list could go on and on. You know what the tragedies of your life have been, but let me end with just one more question. How many of you are going to die some day? No matter how strong your faith is, will God protect you from that one, if what we mean by protect is stop it from happening? Obviously not. If we look at faith and life honestly, we know that the promise that through our faith God will keep bad things from happening to us and our loved ones simply isn’t true. Faith doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t work that way. If you think it does, tell it to those who suffer; but don’t be surprised if you get a pretty hostile reaction from them. Your assertion that God keeps bad things from happening to people will ring pretty hollow with them.

Yet I said a minute ago that Psalm 27 speaks truth when it says that with God we need fear nothing and no one. It does speak truth; but, as I also said, it speaks truth only if we understand it properly. Which brings us to our other Bible reading this morning from 1 Corinthians. In particular it brings us to the last verse of that reading. 1 Corinthians 1:18, which reads: “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” NRSV Now I grant you that the connection between that verse and a proper understanding of Psalm 27 probably isn’t obvious, so let me try to explain.

What Paul here calls “the message about the cross” is the heart of Christianity. We follow a crucified Savior. Our crucified Savior is the thing that more than anything else distinguishes us from other great religions. The cross is absolutely central to our faith. There could be no Christianity remotely like the Christianity we know without it. Yet like nearly everything else in the faith, the cross is most commonly badly misunderstood by Christians, even very devout, serious, and intelligent Christians. It continues to astound me how a faith that says that the Son of God Incarnate was unjustly convicted as common political prisoner by an oppressive world empire, that he was executed by one of the cruelest means the hateful heart of humanity has ever invented, that he truly suffered extreme physical and mental pain, and that he died an unjust death at far too young an age—it astounds me how a faith that says all that, and ours does, can then turn around and say that God prevents bad things from happening to us if we have enough faith. Not one of us has one tenth of the faith that Jesus had, and God didn’t prevent about the worst thing that can happen to a human being from happening to him. God did not prevent about the worst thing that can happen to a person from happening even to God become a person. That truth is the core of our faith. It is the truth upon which our faith is built; and, when we understand it properly, it has profound consequences for how we understand the nature and function of faith and of God.

You see, in the cross of Christ we see fully revealed exactly how God relates to God’s people, all of God’s people. Clearly, God does not prevent bad things from happening to them; but in the cross of Christ we know that God does abandon us to bad things either. Rather, on the cross of Christ we see God entering into the bad things with us. We see God suffering them with us. We see God sustaining us in them. And after the cross, in Christ’s glorious Resurrection, which is simply a continuation of the story of the cross, we see God drawing new life out of them, drawing life even out of death. God enters the tomb with us; and in ways we can’t really understand but in which we can hope and trust, God brings us back out beyond the tomb. In the cross of Christ we see that God gets us through whatever happens to us. God gets us through our tragedies. God gets us through our suffering. God even gets us through death; and we know that we are safe in whatever lies beyond death because it is our gracious and loving God who takes us there.

And that is why we are safe with God. That is how we can say with the Psalmist of Psalm 27 “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” This is the transformation of our understanding of what it means to be safe to which the cross of Christ calls us. We are safe not because bad things won’t happen but because in whatever happens God is with us, holding us always in God’s unfailing arms of love and grace. We will walk through the valley of the shadow of death as Psalm 23, but in the cross of Christ we know that we will never walk there or anywhere else alone.

So let us tell that to those who suffer. Let us of course do everything we can to alleviate as much suffering as we can, our own and that of other people. But let us also realize that some amount of suffering comes with the human condition. And let us realize that God is with us in that human condition, that God took that human condition upon Godself in Christ Jesus, sanctified it, and showed us that God is with us in it, whatever it may bring. Let us tell that to those who suffer. It is the best news they, or we, will ever hear. Amen.