Hilton Head Island, SC – January 14, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
Jeremiah 20:7-12; Psalm 74:18-23
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text - Arise, O God, plead thy cause; remember how the impious scoff at thee all the day! - Psalm 74:20 (RSV)
Rabbi Lionel Blue wrote a book called To Heaven with Scribes and Pharisees. In it he humorously referred to how different people of different religions react differently to impending disasters. He wrote, "It was announced in Tel Aviv that God was soon to send a tidal wave thirty feet high over the city because of its sins. Muslims went to their mosques and prayed for a speedy translation to the paradise of Muhammad. Christians went to their churches and prayed for the intercession of the saints. [I would note parenthetically that only Roman Catholics would do that, but never mind.] Jews went to their synagogues and prayed, `Lord God, it's going to be very hard living under thirty feet of water.'" When God has a public relations problem, how we react to it is determined by what we believe.
Jews tend to accept what most of us imagine are God's blunders with grudging resignation, while at the same time chastising God for His seeming ineptitude. Christians and Muslims tend to demand that God straighten things out when they are askew. Maybe Jews are like Emo Philips, who said, "I'm not a fatalist. And even if I were, what could I do about it?"
Have you noticed that God's public relations seem to have plummeted lately? For two years the Russians have been mercilessly pounding the Ukrainians, who have done nothing to provoke the Russian invasion, and God does nothing to stop it. In India, with the encouragement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Hindus are making life difficult for Muslims and Sikhs. In Muslim Bangladesh, Muslims are oppressing Muslim Rohingya refugees who have fled there from neighboring Myanmar, formerly Burma, where they were driven out by Burmese Buddhist soldiers. The Rohingya had peacefully lived in Burma for many generations among the Buddhists, but the Bangladeshis don’t want tens of thousands of poor Muslims living in their country as refugees. Does that sound familiar?
In the Holy Land there used to be tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians. Now, because of actual persecutions and barely disguised prejudice from both Israelis and Palestinian Muslims against them, only a few thousand have remained. On the other hand, millions of Israeli Jews and Muslims have been drawn into the raging Israeli/Hamas War, where 1200 Israelis were initially slaughtered last October 7 and 24,000 Gazans have been slaughtered since then. God has done nothing to stop any of this carnage and animosity.
Right here in America, as always, people die slow, agonizing deaths, and the Lord of time and eternity does not lift a finger either to speed or to stop the process. Blacks, Native Americans, Latinos, and Asians are mistreated by white supremacists, and God is silent. Has God no sense of public relations?
In the Hebrew Bible. Israelites often lit into God for what they perceived were His shortcomings in righting wrongs and in punishing evildoers (“Lord God, it’s going to be very hard living under thirty feet of water.”) And just as often the Jewish Bible says that God lashed out against the Jews. To Christians and Muslims, the divine retributions also may seem to be a serious PR problem.
But what exactly is "public relations"? Or, since it sounds plural but isn’t, what are public relations? In the public mind, public relations and advertising may be the same thing, but corporate public relations officials are always quick to point out they are not the same. To oversimplify the matter, corporate advertising departments attempt to portray corporate products in the best light, so that people will go out and purchase these products. Public relations departments attempt to put corporations in the best light. So when the Whizbang Computer Co. of San Jose, California comes out with an advanced smartphone that is the size of a dime, works and operates like a regular smartphone, and can be carried on a keychain, its stock jumps 60 points in a week. The advertisers make the stockholders happy by selling a billion of these devices within a month, and when the Whizbang Foundation funds a successful program in public schools for its outdated but still usable unsold personal computers, the public relations department makes the public believe that Whizbang is the most generous corporation in the history of caveat emptor capitalism.
Conversely, when the Frank N. Stein Pharmaceutical Corporation comes out with a potion to make hair reappear on the tonsorially smoothed craniums of bald men, and it sells like crazy, everyone is delighted. Eight years later, however, when three million of the ten million men who used this stuff now have thick hair all over their bodies and look like bulemic gorillas, the public relations people have the unenviable task of trying to suggest that gorillatude is in, and what an upstanding American company is Frank N. Stein for having been the pacesetter in establishing a new look for hairy-chested-and-everywhere-else American males.
The great Jewish Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer intentionally wrote most of his novels in Yiddish, a tragically dying language. Happily, many of his works were translated into English. In his novella Shosha, he has one of his characters, Aaron Greidinger, say the following: "God tries to do too much in too short an eternity. He has lost both criterion and control and is badly in need of help.... I see Him as a very sick God, so bewildered by His galaxies and the multitude of laws He established that He doesn't know what He aimed for to start with" (Shosha, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1978, p. 34).
That's laying it on the line, isn't it? Singer and Greidinger don't mince words; God has a huge public relations problem, and He refuses to lift a finger to rectify it.
What would it mean in tomorrow Donald Trump did not win in the Iowa caucuses and Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis won? Would it be a fluke of very cold weather, or would it indicate divine intervention by God? And how would it affect the primary in New Hampshire?
The prophet Jeremiah was very pleased to give his fellow Jews holy what-for in the buildup to the Babylonian invasion of Judea in 587 BCE. He also could give holy-ned to God when he thought God had deliberately misled him.
Jeremiah believed it was God who had compelled him to become a prophet and to say what he said. But precisely because Jeremiah was such a naysaying scold, and got into so much trouble with his fellow Jews for being one, Jeremiah blamed God for his troubles. “O Lord, thou hast deceived me, and I was deceived; thou art stronger than I, and thou hast prevailed, I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me. For whenever I speak, I cry out, I shout, ‘Violence and destruction!’ For the word of the Lord has become for me a reproach and derision all the day long” (Jer. 20:7-8).
From his own standpoint, Jeremiah thought he had a legitimate complaint against God. However, if God inspired Jeremiah to warn Judah that its days were numbered and it had not yet happened, had God deceived Jeremiah? Jeremiah thought so. But did God deceive him?
In any case, is it realistic for us always to suppose that God is obligated to right all wrongs and redress all grievances? God created the world, and it and humanity have evolved into what we are, but in that process, whatever gave us the idea that it is up to God to straighten out everything that has gone crooked? If we get Covid, is God at fault? If another unstable young male ends up killing a dozen people with an AR-15 rifle, should God be arrested for allowing it to occur? If China should attack Taiwan, should God legitimately be blamed if He did nothing to prevent it?
On what valid theological basis can anyone imagine that for God to be God, He must negate everything that might bring pain or suffering to anyone or everyone in the human race? Here is how Jeremiah answered hat question: “O Lord of hosts, who triest the righteous, who seest the heart and mind, let me see thy vengeance upon them [Jerremiah’s detractors], for to thee have I committed my cause” (Jer. 20:12).
Christians, on the other hand, expect God to fix up everything without having to accuse Him of being deceitful. We think the divine proboscis might be put out of joint if we told God He had fooled us, but many of the biblical Jews and others since then feel free to give God a piece of their mind if they think God had not behaved as He should.
When things are going badly, and we suspect that either it is God's fault, or that it is God's responsibility to correct the situation even if it isn't His fault, we may become very disillusioned or bitter if He doesn't do what we know He should. Indirectly, Owen Meany had some observations about that in John Irving's outstanding and hilarious novel A Prayer for Owen Meany. The young Owen said, "A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with the church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?” (Ballentine Books, New York, 1988, p. 23)
Uff da; Owen certainly puts that into proper perspective, doesn't he? But what does God do to alter the travesties of worship? What actions does He take on His own behalf so that people will think more highly of Him when anything is askew? And what does He do to make preachers preach more effectively? He does nothing! God can never be counted on to improve His image with us if we think it needs improving! He just goes on being God as He good-and-well pleases!
Years ago Baroness Blatch, the British Education Minister published a paper which clearly stated that Christianity should have a place in British public education. She said, "Schools have a vital role in promoting pupils' spiritual and moral development," and that "proper regard should be paid to the nation's Christian heritage." It sounds as though Baroness Blatch must have been attending school board meetings all across the USA for the past forty years. Many Christian Americans, especially those from the political right, are wanting a deliberate return to “Christian values” in schools such as were taught in seventeenth century Puritan New England. But if God wants that to happen, He hasn't said anything about it. And so God-fearing citizens can do nothing but cry out with Asaph (whoever he was), whi is declared in the superscription of Psalm 74 to be its writer "Arise, O God, plead Thy cause; remember how the impious scoff at Thee all the day!” Or as the evangelicals might say, “The secular humanists are turning this nation into an abomination!"
The United States of America took a public-relations beating during and after the wars in Viet Nam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Nothing we did could ever seem to make any of those three grave miscalculations come out right. The rudder of the ship of state appeared to have been swept away in the bitter storms of those times. God was in His heaven, but all was not right with the world.
What about cancer? Or what about heart disease? Or what about fourteen-year-old boys who are shot to death in drive-by shootings, or Gazan babies who become cannon fodder for Israeli troops? Many believe there is only One who is capable of putting an end to all that, and where is He when we really need Him? Doesn't He understand that His reputation is on the line, that His reputation is always on the line? Isn't He aware of that? Has God no sense of public relations?
Joe Christmas is the central character in William Faulkner's novel Light in August. He is a Southerner in the early part of the last century who does not know if he is white or black, and at that time that was an especially heavy personal burden to bear. Joe felt betrayed by Christianity and the Church, and Faulkner wrote of him, "It seems to him that he has seen it all the while: that which is destroying the Church is not the outward groping of those within it nor the inward groping of those without, but the professionals who control it and who have removed the bells from its steeples. He seems to see them, endless, without order, empty, symbolical, bleak, skypointed not with ecstasy or passion but in adjuration, threat, and doom" (Vintage Books, New York, 1932 [1987], p. 537).
Terrible things happen in God's name, good intentions somehow slide into evil results in God's name, the finest of people nonetheless commit the most grievous of sins in God's name, and God does absolutely nothing to clear His name. Life and an imperfect world and perverse humanity drag God through the mud of earthly existence, and rarely if ever does God prevent it from happening.
Listen very carefully, Christian people: God does not operate on the basis of popularity polls. He goes on being God whatever we may think of Him. But God rarely if ever magically straightens anything out. He doesn’t have an option to do that. To be God is to be cosmically in charge, to exercise universal authority, but it is our responsibility to do whatever we can to improve the world. That is why human beings are in the world. Gazans and Israelis are wanting God to intervene so that their side can win, but it won’t happen. It must literally seem like a hell of a note for the Lord of heaven to be inevitably misunderstood by everyone whom He has loved into being.
As with many sermons, there is really only one essential point to what is being said here, and it is this: God's ways are not our ways, His thoughts are not our thoughts. Remember the words which Isaiah puts into God's mouth in his 55th chapter? "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts" (55:8-9).
The unpredictable behavior of the Almighty may confound us, the unwillingness of the Holy One of Israel to conform to what we think He should do may unstring us, but God goes on being God, despite how we think He should conduct Himself. Sometimes God cannot win for losing, or at least that’s the way we perceive it. Often we are simply incapable of understanding Him because He is God, and we are us. But through it all, He will continue to be God. We may not be able to count on much else, we not be able to comprehend much else, but we can always count on that, even if it is a mystery: God will be God.