Lent
IV
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A
March
2nd, AD 2006
Meadowvale
Lutheran Church, Mississauga Pastor Peter Lisinaki
"THE
GOD WE BELIEVE IN"
(Gospel:
John 931-41)
At
our first of scheduled ENLENTenment forum a couple of weeks ago our guest
speaker, Imam Hamid Slimi, left several copies of the book, "A Brief
Illustrated Guide To Understanding Islam", for our library.
Here's what it says, in part, about belief in Gods
"God
alone is the Almighty, the Creator, the Sovereign, and the Sustainer of
everything in the whole universe....[Nothing] occurs in the whole world except
by his will. Whatever He wills is,
and whatever He does not will is not and will never be..." (1997, p. 45)
The
implication is that God causes everything that happens, the good as well as the
evil. But such a belief is not
unique to Islam; it's also found within Christianity.
Some Christians believe that God's plan for our lives is determined in
advance, and that the purpose of our lives is to discover God's plan through
worship, prayer, Bible reading, or some other spiritual techniques.
Pastor Rick Warren, founder of Saddleback Church in California, puts it
this way in his best-selling book, "The Purpose-Driven Life":
"God...custom-made
your body just the way he wanted it. He
also determined the natural talents you would possess and the uniqueness of your
personality....Because God made you for a reason, he planned the days of your
life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death....Nothing in
your life is arbitrary. It's all
for a purpose." (p. 22-23)
Well
that kind of self-help spirituality may fill some churches nowadays, but as a
parent still recovering from the death of a child, I find no comfort at all in
the idea that God is the source of my grief.
I believe, in fact, that much of what happens in our lives is arbitrary
-- that our lives are vulnerable to the accidental and random events of a world
that is out of order.
And
Jesus seems to believe it, too. In
today's Gospel he responds to a question about whether a man's lifelong
blindness was "custom-made" by God's intelligent design, or, perhaps,
as divine punishment for sin: "Neither,"
says Jesus, "He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in
him." God's work is not to
inflict our pain and suffering, but to overcome life's accidental, random
arbitrariness, to bring order into chaos -- which is the very work God has been
doing since the beginning of creation!
Now,
I suppose God could have chosen to create robots incapable of doing anything
other than God's bidding; but God chose instead to create us in his own divine
image -- that is, with the freedom to choose whether or not to serve as stewards
of God's creation. It was a divine risk, of course.
It meant the possibility of our rejection of God -- the theological word
for which is 'sin'. But it also
meant the possibility of our love of God -- which made it a risk God was willing
to take! And in the cross of Jesus
Christ we see the infinitely heavy price God was willing to pay for the choice
we have made -- and continue to make!
Consequently,
some of life's disasters we have brought upon ourselves; some of life's
disasters are brought upon us by others; and some of life's disasters are
neither our own or anyone else's doing. But
none of life's various disasters are God's doing! They are not part of God's
eternal plan for us. They are not
part of God's divine purpose for creation.
They are the accidental, random effects of life's arbitrariness.
But God's eternal promise is to be with us in our disasters, to save us
from our disasters, and include our disasters in the fulfillment of his eternal
plan and purpose.
One
of my favourite stories tells of a devout believer in prayer, asking God what to
do with the rest of his life. To
which God finally replied, "Oh,
I don't know. Surprise me!" (Paul Bosch, "Church Year Guide", p.
23). The God revealed in the divine
humanity of Jesus Christ has not predetermined either our disasters or our
triumphs, our joys or sorrows, our failures or successes.
Rather, in Jesus Christ we see a God willing to allow our freedom, our
choices, decisions and actions -- the good ones as well as the bad ones -- to
determine not only our own personal destiny, but even to affect God's eternal
destiny! And in the cross of Jesus
Christ we see just how profoundly we have done so!