God’s Wrath (And Other Inconveniences)

I’m excited about starting a new sermon series this Sunday.

Does God Have a Temper Problem? from Dave Barnhart on Vimeo.

I don’t think Christians wrestle with this issue enough, honestly. Plenty of atheists are happy to point out that although we say “God is love,” it seems that kind of love is often smiting people rather indiscriminately, slaughtering entire towns, including children. Christians—people I consider my friends, even educated clergy colleagues—will often float the argument that the genocide detailed in the book of Joshua was necessary. You know, because of the corrupting influence of the surrounding cultures.

……o-kay. That’s more or less always the reason for genocide, right? Corrupting influences and the purity of the race?

One good reason for leaving literalism-which-isn’t-really-literalism behind is that it leads us to this kind of thinking: that God is the kind of God who kills kids, giving our Lord and Savior the same moral character as school shooters.

Yet historians and archeologists cast doubt on whether this kind of large-scale invasion ever happened, which points us, I believe, toward a better way of thinking about these stories. What were the original authors of these stories trying to tell their audiences? What was their lived experience of siege warfare, cultural assimilation, and persecution?

In the Noah story, I believe the author is raising critical questions about the violence we attribute to God. I think the same is true in the story of Jonah, and Tamar, and Job, and in prophets like Isaiah.

I think Jesus expresses a Jewish tradition that is highly critical (and self critical) of violence and its users. We understand the wrath of God not in plagues, floods, or invading armies that hurt our enemies, but in the cross, where we see our complicity in the injustice and ugliness of the world.

Sinners, Saints, and Skeptics

The vision of Saint Junia UMC is to become a diverse community of sinners, saints, and skeptics who join God in the renewal of all things. Here are some reflections on the middle part of that statement.

Sinners

Few of us live up to our own ideals and expectations, much less the expectations of an all-powerful, all-good Supreme Being. It’s no wonder that so many people feel negatively about religion when their primary experience of it is disapproval. It’s also no wonder that so many of us claim that identity and wink about being bad boys and girls.

But Jesus reveals a different way of thinking about God. Jesus spent much more time with sinners than with religious leaders, and he was quick to remind religious experts that they were merely sinners, like everyone else. The fastest way to get on Jesus’ wrong side was to pretend to be something other than a sinner.

Saints

It has often been said that every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. We are made into saints, holy people, not because of good things we’ve done, but because of what God has done for us in Jesus. Jesus invites us to participate in God’s activity—this is what makes us “saints.”

John Wesley enjoyed talking about how God was at work “perfecting” us in love. Being a saint doesn’t mean being perfect—it means being aware that God is at work in us, making us into something new, “perfecting” us the way a master craftsman would create a beautiful work of art from imperfect material.

Skeptics

Some people have a hard time with the virgin birth, or with miracles and resurrection, or with the idea of life in eternity. Some people have questions about stories in the Bible, or about their own spiritual experience. Doubt is not a sin. What would be a mistake is to be skeptical without having the guts to try it out—to put Jesus’s own words to the test and see what happens when we pray, or give, or live the kind of God-inspired life he invites us to live, putting our trust in grace instead of violence, love instead of contempt, forgiveness instead of revenge.

Jesus’s invitation to us is to join God in what God is already doing: renewing all things. Whether we are sinners, saints, skeptics, or all three, the invitation stands: “Follow me.”