Where is God When…?

February 10, 2008

Psalm 22

Today’s sermon may be too mature for some of us. Some of us are looking for a God who will always “kiss it and make it alright.” We are looking for a God who is always kind and gentle and pampers and protects us from danger and difficulty. Well, sometimes what we want, we don’t get and I have found the expectation of a pampering God to be missing from my Bible and missing from my spiritual journey. My friends, let me say from the beginning, if today’s coffee is too strong for you to drink, then please set it aside for a time and we will come back another day with a little lighter brew. But today is for the wounded and for the mature and for those who are willing to make the journey to maturity.

There are two scenes in the life of Jesus that return to haunt me every year during the Lenten Season. The first is portrait of Jesus kneeling in the Garden of Gethsemane and saying to God, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” The Bible says that the sweat poured from his head like great drops of blood. And my warped mind wants to say, “The man is having a bad day!”  His disciples have abandoned him. Judas is about to kiss him. The soldiers are about to arrest him. He is about to be tortured and executed. And he prays, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me, nevertheless, not my will but thine be done.” Even though he committed himself into the will of God, I consider this to be one of the great unanswered prayers in all of history. “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” The cup did not pass!

The second scene is spiritually similar to the first. Jesus is hanging on the cross and he lets out a great heart-felt cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  Oh, I know the theology that says that God turned away as Jesus took the sin of the world upon himself but that does not ease the agony of Jesus’ prayer. If anybody ever experienced unanswered prayer, it was Jesus! 

Here, according to the Gospel of Joe, is the miracle of Jesus. Even while his prayers were not being answered, and even though there were some hours that were darker than the darkest midnight of the soul, he still trusted himself into the hands of God and God proved to be trustworthy – but not trustworthy as expected. We call it resurrection.

Have you ever wondered, where in the world is God?  Why isn’t God keeping His part of the deal? Have you ever prayed with the Psalmist and with Jesus himself,

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from saving me,

So far from the words of my groaning?

O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer,

By night, and am not silent. [Psalm 22: 1-2 (NIV)]

Friday afternoon, Peggy and I stood in line in the Atlanta airport to board our plane home. The boarding had started and the line was moving. Just to the right of the line I saw three people. Standing with her face towards the line was a woman who was very pregnant. She was huge. Her face was flushed and her eyes red with tears that she was trying to control. She clearly wanted not to sob out-loud in that place. A little girl, maybe 8 years old, stood near by. And kneeling in front of the woman, with his ear pressed to her womb as though he was trying to hear the beating of that new heart, and his hand gently touching the other side of her large belly, there was a young soldier. His bags were packed and waiting near-by and it was time to go and I wondered, “God, where are you?”

We boarded the plane first and as I was loading my bag and jacket into the overhead bin, he walked by, his eyes still red and his cheeks still flushed. At first I wanted to just stand at attention but then, perhaps at the prompting of God’s Spirit, I whispered toward his ear as he walked by, “God go with you.”  It must have taken a moment or two for him to take in my words because I was nearly seated when the words came from behind, in a clear tenor voice, “thank you.” And I prayed, as I have prayed every day of this war, God, where are you?

During our time together, our friend Mike received word that his father had died—that very morning. The years and Alzheimer had taken their toll and in the cycle of life, it was clearly time for him to go to heaven but the pain in Mike’s eyes and the cry, God where are you?

A couple whom I know waits to conceive their first child. Conception happens and the excitement grows. They are ready to be parents but the new mother knows her own family’s medical history and demands to see a doctor early.  They learn that a ball of cells that should have become the fetus implanted in the uterus, never developed and the dead tissue has to be scraped from her uterus.  Oh, the disappointment - God, where are you?

·                     Disease and injury steal energy and years from the lives of persons who deserve better. God where are you?

·                     Mental illness steals the mind away and a child of God never becomes what he could of have been. God, where are you?

·                     A gentle child is bullied on the school yard.

·                     A promising marriage crashes and burns and children and everybody else are marked for life.

·                     A driver, impaired by substance abuse, takes the life of another.

·                     A child is born with a body that will never work in the ordinary and expected way – it’s a birth defect! God, where are you?

·                     A hard working man or woman crashes against a business cycle and the business fails.

·                     An employee works for a business whose leaders fail to adapt to changing times and he or she finds is unemployed with children to feed.

·                     A company moves to Brazil or India or someplace off-shore and the whole town dies. God where are you?

·                     Hurricanes, tornadoes and floods;

·                     Murder and mayhem in our streets;

·                     And perhaps the worst of all, wars!

God, where are you?  God, where are you when…?

On the cross, Jesus quoted the beginning of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” But Psalm 22 has an ending and we must never forget the ending. And the ending declares that, in the end, God will reign supreme. Read it again for yourself. Verse 28 summarizes the conclusion. “Dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations.” [Psalm 22:28 (NIV)]   

The story has not yet been fully told. There is a lot of time on the game clock.  Most scholars believe that Jesus had both the beginning and the end of Psalm 22 in mind when he said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He was both confessing his emptiness and his faith in God’s ultimate victory. We know that the crucifixion is not the end of the story. The end of the story is resurrection. God finally wins. Jesus is finally raised.

So, where is God in the time of our cries and our crisis? Let’s remember the witness of Holy Scripture.

·                     The Apostle Paul declared “For in him we live and move and have our being” Acts 17:28 (NIV) God is everywhere.

·                     Jesus said “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is near.” Matthew 3:2 (NIV) God’s Kingdom and therefore God himself is really close by. God’s nearness is not dependent upon your senses. God is as close as the air you breathe and the ground upon which you walk.

·                     The angel spoke to Joseph in a dream and quoted the prophet Isaiah, “The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”—which means, “God with us.” [Matthew 1:23 (NIV)] Where is God? Immanuel! Immanuel! God is with us. God has not abandoned us. Immanuel.

·                     Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. [I Corinthians 3:16] Where is God? Living within you.

·                     The church body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. [I Corinthians 6:19]Where is God? Right here in the church fellowship; here where we worship and pray and serve our Lord.

·                     Jesus promised to be wherever 2 or 3 gather together in his name. [Matthew 18:20] Where is God? In your Sunday School class in your home prayer meeting and wherever the disciples of Jesus walk together with him God is here. There are times when you need to be together in order to experience the presence of God.

God, where are you?

The Psalmist said it best, “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for you are with me.” 

That’s the faith that took Jesus through the Garden of Gethsemane.

That is the faith that sustained Jesus on the cross.

I still remember old Anna Feenstra who, some 35 years ago, looked up from her hospital death-bed to say to her very young pastor, “In 70 years, God has not failed me yet. He will not fail me now.”

Everybody gets to walk through the valley. Everybody lives with unanswered prayers. But in the end we say, “I fear no evil for you are with me.”