God is Good!
Psalm 111
I have often wished that some amount of legal training was included in my litany of seminary class requirements. I never wanted to be a lawyer, (being a lawyer in my house might have strained family relations) but I can appreciate a good debate, especially when I have at least a few facts to bolster my case, facts always help. And much to my surprise, being a pastor has frequently put me in the position of a sort of theological lawyer. I have found that circumstances at parties or even random encounters have demanded that I form some kind of argument in favor of God. I know I am not alone since a whole myriad of books have emerged in this genre with titles like, The Case for a Creator, The Case for Christ, The Case for Faith and on and on. You are probably familiar with the prevailing case against God or more succinctly, the case against church, the argument is always rooted in some form of “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual”. For the most part, I can join this sentiment as I find religion to be more obsessed with itself than with God. And most Americans at least on the surface live life as if there is a God. A study released last year shows that nearly ninety two percent of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit. I find this news enticing at the very least and hopeful at best, but it appears that while most of us believe in some kind of holy energy beyond ourselves, we disagree on how this energy, on how God exists in the world. Recently, my theological arguments have shifted from whether God exists to what kind of character this God has. At the heart of this debate is the question: Is God good?
Maybe it is this dire economic melt down that is unraveling with more bad news every day or maybe it is the multiple wars in which we find ourselves mired or perhaps it is the fragile interdependent world in which we now live, where our finances and safety, security and welfare can no longer be separated from the rest of humanity, whatever it is, these times have called into question the character of God.
It is actually a conversation worth having and it is a discourse that has danced through the ages. This is not the first time this question has been posed and it won’t be the last. Is God really good? I have noticed the theological debate increasing in intensity, the stakes are high and the consequences weigh heavily because for some of us, the answer we offer to this question can be the foundation of a life with God or the beginning of a life without God. Such a question is asked in desperate times, when hearts are breaking and jobs are lost and the fear of what could be waits for us, calls to us and tries to be the only force that can possible influence our days. It is no surprise then, that we find ourselves asking, is God really good?
Alison Furniss argues that, “We have a natural tendency to decide what God is like based on how we feel about what is happening to us. When life is good we are far more likely to sing God’s praises than when we are going through pain and trials. At times when things are difficult it is easy to doubt God. We interpret God’s character through our life experiences.” God’s being, then, becomes a reflection of our lives instead of our lives reflecting God’s being. And God, yet again, becomes about us and about what our moments demand. In this line of thought, we are at the center of the universe and we become the measurement against which goodness can be determined. If God’s goodness can only be as good as ours, then it is no wonder that we ask the question in the first place. Surely God’s very being, surely God’s goodness far exceeds whatever goodness we could muster in a thousand lifetimes. But how do we know, how can we be sure that God not only is, but is good?
Rebecca Bynum says that it is no surprise that we struggle so deeply with this question given the fact that, “our entire culture has been involved in indicting God as immoral for centuries. Our highest understanding of God as Love… is degraded by millennia old concepts concerning the nature of God as wrathful, vengeful and angry… and so we are lost in a jumble of confusion. If God is a mixture of Good and evil, if He directs evil toward man as in the book of Job, then how can we love, venerate or worship Him? How can we trust and have faith in Him? Indeed, how is it possible to avoid placing Him on trial by way of human judgment? For if God is not unified good, how can we not place ourselves and our moral sensibility above His?
And yet our centuries of blame placed on God for plagues and revenge and wrath, for wars in God’s name and murder in God’s name and hate in God’s name, each chapter of tragedy only illumines our very need for goodness and our eternal thirst for God. So, how can we be sure that God not only is, but is good? The truth is that we can’t, at least not in ways that could be found in a text book or deduced from a formula or found on a spreadsheet. And yet I believe that God is good, but not because life will always be good and not because of what we do. God is good because that is one of the reasons why God exists. Goodness is God and if goodness were left to us, it would be hard to get out of our own way. It seems to me, that God by God’s nature is really trying to deliver us from ourselves. With each day, God invites us beyond lives that kill us, decisions that doom us and habits that suffocate us. It seems that when we ask about the goodness of God we forget a most essential truth, which is that we are not God. The God that Jesus points us to is not like us at all. This God doesn’t need revenge, this God doesn’t need time to forgive, this God doesn’t need to punish or pay back, we have done enough of that ourselves.
And when I read blogs or essays or hear televangelists reporting that God wiped out a sinful group with a hurricane or punished a people with a Tsunami, I am reminded of the universal human need for God’s goodness, in part because as much as we pray and hope and live with love we are in need of a kind of goodness only found in God. Our attempts at explaining the pain and suffering in the world by giving credit to God let us off the hook for what we do and fail to do. God is not the author of pain, we design enough of that ourselves, God is that which we could never achieve fully, heart changing, radically abundant, overflowing goodness.
I believe God is good because of what I have seen. I believe God is good because of the stories of beauty I have heard from some of you on your walk of faith. I believe God is good because of sunrises and the fact that without any water or hope or care my amaryllis is popping out with a green blade. I believe that God is love, that God is good. I believe that God does not cause pain, that God is present in disasters and heart aches and brokenness, not as the source of the hurt, but as the balm for even the deepest wounds. Even when the dark hurt of the world seems to reign and shadows loom large, the goodness that is God is persuasive and steady and ever present. I actually think that who we believe God is and how we believe God is present and speaking in the world matters. How can we put our trust and anchor our lives in a God that is anything other than good? With just spots of peace in the world and a recession weighing on us like a heavy fog, I find holy rest knowing that the ground of all life longs to pull us toward something beautiful, something wonderful, and something good. In a time such as this, remember again that God is good. With that, I join the Psalmist singing, “God has gained renown by his wonderful deeds; the Lord is gracious and merciful.” Indeed God is good, all the time! Amen.
God is Good: a sermon by Alison Furniss, Associate Pastor, Christian City Church, Hamilton, NZ.
Is God Good? by Rebecca Bynum (Aug 2006) in the New English Review