Evil, Suffering, and A Loving God

The theme of our November conversation will be one about these irreconcilable things that people of faith struggle with all the time. For me, there is no one who has addressed the dilemma more clearly (even if he offers absolutely no satisfactory answer) than Frederick Buechner. From his little book Wishful Thinking:

God is all powerful.
God is all good.
Terrible things happen

You can reconcile any two of these propositions with each other, but you can’t reconcile all three. The problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith.

There are numerous theological and philosophical attempts to solve it, but when it comes down to the reality of evil itself, they are none of them worth very much. When a child is raped and tortured, the parents are not apt to take much comfort from the explanation (better than most) that since God wants us to love him, we must be free to love and thus to rape and murder a child if we take a notion to.

Christian Science solves the problem of evil by saying that it does not exist except as an illusion of mortal mind. Buddhism solves in terms of reincarnation and an inexorable law of cause and effect whereby the raped child is merely reaping the consequences of evil deeds it committed in another life.

Christianity, on the other hand, ultimately offers no theoretical solution at all. It merely points to the cross and says that, practically speaking, there is no evil so dark and so obscene – not even this – but that God can turn it to good.

The Power of Intention

From two popular thinkers/writers...

First. psychologist/spiritual director/NPR-pledge-time-television host Wayne Dyer talks about “the power of intention,” defining intention as something that emanates from God, something that more traditional theology calls “the will of God.”

Second, Peruvian Carlos Castaneda, in the voice of his fictional Yaqui shaman Don Juan, writes:

In the universe there is an immeasurable, indescribable force which the shamans call intent[ion], and absolutely everything that exists in the entire cosmos is attached to inten[ion] by a connecting link.

I wonder if it is safe for us to assume that we are living a life in consonance, in sync, with “intention” when we find ourselves embracing and visualizing creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness.

If that’s the case, then “sin” might well be described as being “closed off,” separated, quarantined, and isolated from creativity and kindness and love and beauty and growth and plenty and openness to newness, reminiscent of how Martin Luther described the essence of sin: "das Herz drehte ganz sich innen auf sich” – "the heart all curved in on itself.”.

Rather than looking at faithfulness as following a list of inviolable rules, the suggestion is that a life that follows Jesus not because it has to but because it wants to will be one that turns its attention and its intention, away from itself and toward others. That life will be the life that is most rewarding and most “in rhythm” with the “intention,” or the “will” of God.

It seems to me that so much of the stories of Jesus in the Gospels are all about two affirmations about the “power of intention” that are peculiar to Jesus and his followers. The first is that even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, God, has very lofty expectations for those of us who want to follow him. One of those lofty expectations is that we will live not solely or even primarily for our own good, but also and most of all for others. Another is that, even though Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, forgives us and loves us, Jesus, and if Jesus, then God, holds us accountable, and that there are consequences for our behavior.

But maybe not at all like Dante’s Inferno or eternal punishment or anything of the sort, but consequences here and now. The consequences of being “all turned in on ourselves,” and away from “the power of intention,” – our callousness toward the needs of others, our insensitivity to the most vulnerable among us, our automatic embrace of officially sanctioned violence as the best tool for solving disputes among groups of people, tribes, nations, our inability to let go of “the fears that long have bound us,” our continuing insistence that there are different “kinds” of people and some are better and some are worse and some are loved more by God and some are despised – all of that is its own punishment. The bottom line is that when we insist on being “all turned in ourselves” it is impossible for us to approach what God intends for us. Turned inward, toward isolation, our lives are diminished, our relationship with God becomes nostalgic and imaginary and non-existent, and we deny the unity that the power of intention assumes.

God and Dog, by Wendy Francisco

Think Luke 15.

Oh, go ahead, look it up, and read those three parables, especially the last one.

No, no one is saying that God is a dog (go to http://www.godanddog.org/ and look in the left hand frame for the link "The thought behind the God and dog lyrics). It's just another parable. And while it's not likely to be a staple of some divinity school curriculum, I like it any way, particularly the lines:

"They would stay with me all day, I'm the one who walks away.
But both of them just wait for me, And dance at my return with glee."

and

"And in my human frailty, I can't match their love for me."

Agape, Jesus, and Church

It is pretty clear, at least to me. that Jesus never imagines anything that resembles at all what today we call “church.” Except for three quick “bleeps,” Jesus never even says “church,” and when he does, he probably only means something like “your neighbors.” That’s what the Greek word the New Testament uses for “church,” “ecclesia,” means when it shows up in places other than the New Testament, and it shows up in the Gospels only in Matthew when Jesus tells Peter that he’s the “Rock” on which he’ll build his “ecclesia” and when Jesus tells his followers that when there’s a dispute among them to take it to the “ecclesia.”

But Jesus in the Gospels says nothing about church. No institutional guidebook. No “best practices” handbook. Nothing about structure or discipline or clergy or lay or fund-raising or ministry or pastoral care or youth or outreach or denominations. Jesus never files an annual report, officiates at a funeral, performs a wedding, makes a hospital visit, intuitively responds to some unreported need, or brings covered dishes for a potluck. Jesus never envisions a Sunday School, a Woman’s Fellowship, a church bowling league, a church choir, a capital fund drive, or an entire academic discipline called “church architecture.” Jesus never sits on a committee, creates a budget, fills out a pledge card, or leads a stewardship drive.

In the Gospels Jesus tells us nothing at all about “church,” and people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches need to lighten up a little bit about our notions that we are most closely in line with God’s plan for church. The truth is that we people struggling to be faithful to what Jesus teaches have been making this whole church thing up out of whole cloth ever since the first Monday after the first Easter.

Except for one thing. Though Jesus tells us nothing about church, Jesus models a faithful life of agape, a life that always finds itself giving itself away. Jesus invites his disciples and all within earshot and, across the ages, he invites you and me to join him in living this agape life. What Jesus imagines and models is an agape community, gathered not so much to meet its own needs, but to find ever more creative ways to give it self, to give ourselves, away.

And that’s it. That’s all Jesus gives us about church. No rules, guidelines or “if you’re going to be a church, then you’re going to have to do thus and so.” Just the imagination and modeling of an agape life, of a community formed so that it can gratefully give itself away.

Is God Love?

Spoiler alert! The Gospel text for this Sunday is the story of the rich young man who comes to Jesus asking what he needs for eternal life. Before Jesus delivers the punchline that is clearly both truthful and at the same time emotionally devastating to the young man, Mark says this simple, and simply profound, thing about Jesus: "Jesus, looking at him, loved him."

Near the end of his fascinating survey titled The Evolution of God, Robert Wright talks about the nature of this love, and suggests a simple mental exercise when trying to answer the question "Is God Love?

Love, you might say is, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other.

Sometimes love, in the course of leading to this moral truth, fosters more mundane truths. Suppose you are a parent and you (a) watch someone else's toddler misbehave, and then (b) watch your own toddler do the same. Your predicted reactions, respectively, are (a) "what a brat!" and (b) "That's what happens when she skips her nap." Now (b) is often a correct explanation whereas (a) -- the "brat reaction -- isn't even an explanation. So, in this case, love leads toward truth. So too when a parent sees her child show off and concludes that the grandstanding is grounded in insecurity....Love at its best brings a truer apprehension of the other, an empathetic understanding that converges on the moral truth of respect, even reverence, for the other...

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat at physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love. And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love's organic association with truth -- by the fact, indeed that at times these two properties almost blend into one. You might say that love and truth are two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that. The point is that you wouldn't have to be crazy to say it.
(from Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, 2009)