Pastor's Page: March 17, 2009

Anger With God

When my father passed away suddenly my mother was asked if she was angry with God, and she said no. She wasn't denying her inner feelings, or giving some pious answer for fear of being thought wicked. She was simply stating a fact. Though distraught and grief-stricken and inconsolable, she wasn't angry. Sadness is not anger.

I can't remember her words - this was 29 years ago - but I do remember the gist of her reply concerning those who thought she was "holding something back," that it would be healthier if she "let it out" and told God what she thought about what he had done to her. She explained, "Billions of women have been widowed, many tragically. Who am I to say it should never happen to me? Everyone dies. How dare I celebrate God's goodness while others suffer, but challenge him as soon as it's my turn?"

Somehow, over the years, it became "authentic" to rail against God - like when the preacher played by Robert Duvall in The Apostle shouted, "I love you Lord, I love you, but I'm mad at you!" If you type "angry with God" into a search engine you will find advice like this: "We can be completely honest toward God with our thoughts and feelings. And God is big enough to take it all. God won't punish us for being hurt and angry, even hurt and angry at God." I found a pastor graciously trying to answer a letter that read: "Back in April I got a little basset hound pup, that pup became my life, my only friend. He got sick June the fifth and died June the twelfth. Night and day I prayed and prayed believing and knowing that Christ could have saved him, but he didn't...I tried to make the death a sweet smell to the Lord, but as the hours pass I grow more and more angry. I feel horrible saying this, but I am angry at God." The pastor did not respond (nor would I, though I'd be tempted): "You jackass. Repent. Have you never contemplated other people's grief? Between April when you got your puppy and June when it passed away, do you know how many children died of starvation and cancer? Your grief over your loss is perfectly understandable; your anger is not. How is it that you were perfectly ok with God while all those children were dying, but now that your puppy is gone, you think you got a raw deal? Oh - you say you never thought of that. Well think about it, you self-absorbed wretch."

Anger with God often results from frustrated expectations - expectations we never had a right to cherish in the first place. We thought (assumed? demanded?) that our children would not die before us, that our spouses would remain faithful, that we would not succumb to degenerative disease, that God would certainly not plant some desire in our heart (say, to have children, or make homosexual love, or grow a church) and then actively frustrate it through infertility, his law, or life's contrary circumstances. In the play Amadeus, Antonio Salieri explains to a priest how he came to rage against the Almighty: "All I wanted was to sing to God. He gave me that longing - and then made me mute! Why? Tell me that. If he didn't want me to praise him with music, why implant the desire (like a lust in my body!), and then deny me the talent?"

I do not claim to be able to answer that, but I do know enough to say that anger with God is always senseless and wrong. It is senseless because, whenever I am inclined to think that God has been unfair, I always come back to the question, "Where did I get this idea of fairness? Who taught my mind to distinguish between fair and unfair?" The answer is God himself - through the means of conscience and tradition and law. In railing against him I'd be railing against the very source of the moral instinct within me that despises injustice! I'd be sawing away at the trunk of the branch I'm sitting on. Even if we think of the issue merely in organic terms, a complaint against God can only be formulated by using the brain cells he gives us, with the lungs and larynx and tongue he provides, through the air he supplies for breath. We are not independent of him. He made us and everything else. Therefore, the only thing with which we could strike at him would be a weapon that he himself placed in our hands. And he made the hands!

So anger with God seems senseless to me for philosophical reasons; it is also morally wrong for reasons articulated by John Piper: "Anger at a person always implies strong disapproval. If you are angry at me, you think I have done something I should not have done. This is why being angry at God is never right. It is wrong - always wrong - to disapprove of God for what he does and permits...We may weep over the pain. We may be angry at sin and Satan. But God does only what is right." Correct. Just as the truly Honorable must never provoke our contempt, and the truly Pure must never provoke our disdain, so also the truly Good must never call forth our wrath. It isn't right.

Pastor's Page: March 10, 2009

In Praise Of Duty

The other day I was listening to a radio program that played hits from the 30s and 40s, and heard an interesting song where "Jazz Singer" Al Jolson extolled his beloved's good looks. At one point he croons,

If...I'm faithful to you 
It's not through a sense of duty 
You are too beautiful 
And I am too drunk on beauty

I told my son Ben, "Listen to this! He thinks he's paying her a compliment by telling her it's her beauty that inspires his faithfulness. He's not being true to her because he has to, because it's his duty, because there is something inside him that forces him to be faithful no matter who she is or how she behaves or what she looks like - but because she's so beautiful!" And Ben answered, smartly of course, "What happens then when she is no longer beautiful?" Exactly. Maybe then she would appreciate it if his motivation had been duty all along.

Duty is a good thing, and there is no shame in being motivated by it. Duty stands strong when other motivations weaken and fall. But there are reasons why we are suspicious of it and would prefer not to reveal that it is the efficient cause of our behavior. It seems so prosaic and unromantic. We even feel insulted (certainly not complimented!) when we learn that someone did right by us not because we inspired it but because he was simply "doing his job". He would have done the same even if we weren't worthy or handsome or smart or kind. "Oh. I thought I was special. I guess whether I am or not is beside the point - that's just the kind of man he is."

About six weeks ago (see the January 27 essay, "Wait, Seriously?") I argued with a respondent who seemed to object to the holy status I gave to duty. He (She?) wrote that while many of us are tempted to promiscuity, "we choose not to pursue that not out of some religiously ascetic sense of self-denial, but because we've found something better." I find danger lurking in those innocuous words. If we can give to "duty" the pejorative label "religiously ascetic sense of self-denial", and persuade ourselves that there is a higher motive to be embraced while this lower one is dismissed, we may find that that exalted "something better" (say a warm, loving, mutually respectful give-and-take relationship) is quite unable to sustain a man's ability to care for his wife when she is suffering from early-onset Alzheimer's.

Monday I heard a WMBI preacher tell us, "'The Word of the Lord is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword' - but be honest, is it like that for you when you read it? Don't you sometimes just read it out of duty? Well today we'll tell you how to change that..." and I started shouting at the radio "No! No! Not that stupid line of rhetoric again! Stop it!" Never make people feel sheepish or guilty or inadequate about submitting to the call of duty. Without it, lots of Christians would never read their Bibles at all. Duty is a good thing. Like the weird guy on that viral internet video who lamented the public abuse of poor Brittany Spears, I say, "LEAVE DUTY ALONE!"

Pastor's Page: March 3, 2009

Now It Means Something To Me

My son Ben once asked me if I had ever changed my mind about anything big. He knew I was mystified by people who managed to dismiss convictions they once held dear even though they could not be bothered to articulate reasons for the change. I think he also perceived me as one who did not move easily from one spot to another.
But I have changed, everyone has, and though I had no good answer for him then I have been able to think of one now. Over the years I have done a U-turn on the value of participating in the Lord's Supper. Once it meant nothing to me; now it has become the centerpiece for my worship of God.
When I was very young, Communion annoyed me. In the church our family attended we celebrated it once a month after the service. When the sermon ended, I just wanted to go home and eat lunch and watch a game on TV. Communion stretched out the time spent sitting in that pew a whole 15 minutes as we waited for the plates to be passed: "Come on, let's chew the cracker and drink the thimble of grape juice so we can go already." Then we moved to a church where Communion was served just four times a year, and that seemed like an improvement.
But then in college I was blessed to attend a Brethren fellowship where we partook of the bread and the cup every Sunday. Communion there was not "tacked on" to the worship hour: it was part of a separate 45-minute service before Sunday School. We prayed quietly, sang a few hymns a cappella, listened to Scripture, confessed our faults, contemplated Christ, and ate and drank the symbols of him.
That was the start of my change in attitude. Now more than 25 years later I'm positively thankful for regular opportunities to partake of the Lord's Supper. Some reasons:
(1) It is an act of obedience that I can actually do without too much difficulty. I am one who finds the Christian life hard, who wishes it were easier to submit to God, whose conscience rightly reprimands both active iniquities and countless sins of omission. It is a relief for someone like me to see a commandment like "Do this in remembrance of me" and realize that it is an absolute piece of cake, a walk in the park, a fat pitch down the middle. Even I can obey this one! All I have to do is show up on Sunday and thank Jesus as I take the bread and drink the cup. Given that so many commandments are hard, isn't it a joy to have one that's a gimme, a two-inch putt?
(2) The Lord's Supper is a time when I am compelled to think of Jesus and honor him and thank him. Do I do that with appropriate regularity and discipline on my own? Probably not. Every day my head fills with thoughts that I know are vapid, mundane and insignificant. But by regularly participating in the Lord's Supper I guarantee that, at least once a month, a worthy thought will hold my attention: "Jesus Christ, righteous Son of God, died for me, unrighteous sinner. Praise be to him."
(3) It connects me to other believers like nothing else. Perhaps the most meaningful times of Communion I ever celebrated were in the home of an elderly Rumanian couple. The wife was blind, wheelchair-bound, diseased and soon to die. But how her face lit up when she heard my voice! And what an honor to share with her and her husband the tangible reminders of Christ! Outside of Christ it is hard to see how we would ever meet or have any connection at all. But in Holy Communion, when we directed our hearts not toward each other but toward Jesus, we found the Lord creating between us a mystic bond of fellowship that no earthly tie could mimic. I have also been privileged to find and revel in that same oneness of spirit in larger settings ranging from "High Church" Episcopal to "Low Church" Brethren to "Loud Church" Pentecostal.
If you are a Christian believer but somehow lack (as I once did) a "taste" for the Lord's Supper, then work to acquire it. May the Lord grant you grace to know the joy of remembering him in the bread and the cup.