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Last Updated: Feb 25th, 2010 - 05:21:48 |
Bishop's Message
Giving God a Bad Name
Giving
God a bad name
Just
yesterday, I was listening to a sermon, preached by a faithful, thoughtful
fellow Christian whom I admire very much. She began the sermon with a moving
story about a woman who decided to sleep in and go to work late at her tall office
complex in Manhattan.
When she awoke at 11 a.m.,
she discovered that all her colleagues
at her WorldTradeCenter
office were dead. It was Sept.
11, 2001. So far, so good.
Then
the preacher talked about how this woman had used this opportunity to change
her life, to do what she was really passionate about and to make a difference
in the world. Still okay. But embedded in the story came the unsettling
statement, made by the preacher, to this woman in the aftermath: “God saved you
because God still had things for you to do.”
No
doubt, this assertion had a motivating influence on its subject, spurring her
on to examine her own life and to seek to serve her fellow men and women in a
new line of work and ministry. But did God choose to make this woman sleep in –
because God had “things” for her to do – while also choosing
to end the lives of 3,000 others?
Try
explaining that to the families of the 3,000 people lost on that fateful day!
Did God not have things
for the other people to do – those who died on 9/11? Did God not want the best
for them too?
Sometimes
we say things about God that at first seem to cast God in a good light, but
then on closer inspection,
actually say something we would not mean if we thought about them. We often say
them in
an effort to comfort people, when we don’t know what else to say – when someone
is suffering a terrible illness, has lost a job, or when a loved one has died.
We are trying to say something comforting, and trying to assert that God really
does have a plan, and that this somehow fits into God’s overall plan. It’s an understandable
effort to push back the reality that life is sometimes, often times, chaotic,
frightening, and unpredictable. We want to assert that life is not random or
purposeless. And so we insist that the terrible thing that has befallen us is
in fact all part of God’s plan. It’s our way of dealing with the famous
question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
Continued...
Feb 25, 2010, 05:16
