Making It Real

In this series of messages, we continue to talk about hope. Two weeks ago, I urged you to choose hope as an attitude of life. Last Sunday I urged you to be a carrier of hope to others. Today, I want to look at your role in making hope a living reality.

Before we go there, I want to explain again that I have borrowed the theme and broad outline for these messages from the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, which kindly offered them to other churches right after Easter. I doubt that many of you have been comparing my messages with the ones Adam Hamilton has been delivering, but if you have, you may have noticed at least two things.

First, I’m a week behind Adam. That’s because I already had something else planned for the week Adam began the series. Second, our messages are very different. That’s because we are very different pastors addressing very different churches. At the same time, of course, our messages are quite similar, not only because we’re using the same rough outline, but more importantly because we’re preaching the same essential message: the hope we have in Jesus Christ.

I mention that primarily because I want to start off with something Adam said last Sunday that I found to be strikingly true.

He said that for his first message, he searched the Psalms for words of hope. For his second message, he searched the Old Testament prophets for words of hope. For his third message, he wanted to focus on the gospels, so he searched Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for words of hope.

Do you know how many passages he found? In the King James Version, he found one mention of the word “hope” in the gospels. One.

In other translations, he found two or three mentions, but none of these passages offered hope in themselves; they were simply passing references to hope.

You may wonder, how can that be? How can the gospels appear so little concerned with hope? When you think about it, you know why, of course. The gospels don’t have to talk about hope because they are focused on Jesus.

Jesus is hope. Jesus is the embodiment of hope. Jesus is the incarnation of hope. Jesus is hope brought to us up close and personal – nose to nose, if you will, despite our current concerns for social distancing.

Hope comes from God, and Jesus says that if you’ve seen him you’ve seen the Father (John 14:9), so hope comes from Jesus. Reading the gospels, you won’t hear Jesus talk about it, but he provides hope wherever he goes.

First, he announces the coming of God’s kingdom to change the world. “Here it comes!” he says (Matthew 4:17 CEB). Then, he shows what the coming of the kingdom means. People approach him seeking new lives, and he gives them hope. He cures them of diseases. He forgives their sins. He casts out demons that have misshapen them physically and mentally.

He gives all who come to him a renewed sense of worth. He treats everyone as a valuable human being. Whatever bad decision or bad break or adversity or calamity has befallen them, he assures them that God loves them, and he gives them a new confidence that things will go better for them. He gives them hope.

He does not solve all their problems, but he solves the main problem that is blocking them from receiving God’s hope. They have to take it from there. The hope he gives can be realized only if the person fully invests in it, as when he gives sight to someone who is blind or the ability to walk to someone whose legs just won’t work. What are they going to do with their sight? Where are they going to walk? It’s up to each of them how they realize their hope.

Hope frees us to believe that better days are ahead, but it also demands that we live into that hope, that we grasp the ramifications of it and seize the moment and live it out to the fullest.

Hope is empowering. It gives us energy and stamina. But it has to be engaged. It has to be used. You’ve got to grab onto the power that hope gives you and use that power to make things better.

I invite you to look again at the opening sentence of Psalm 40. Most translations of it say, “I waited patiently for the Lord.” But the Common English Bible says, “I put all my hope in the Lord.” There’s one key word in there that you can translate as hoping or waiting because hoping and waiting are related in Hebrew, and we know that hope always involves waiting.

But it has to be more than mere waiting. It has to be active waiting. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, was disturbed by the trend he saw in his time toward quietism. Quietism is the thought that we should just sit patiently and wait for God to act and do nothing to help make our hope a reality. Let God do it all, quietists say.

One problem with quietism is that so often your hope dies with you without ever being realized. You waited and you waited, and it never happened. You kept hoping, but that’s all you ever did. You never got out of your rocker to help make it happen, and it died with you.

But true Christian hope is always proleptic. “Proleptic” is one of those five-dollar academic words I thought I’d never use in polite conversation, but here I am using it. To speak proleptically is to speak of the future as if it were already here. To hope is to live proleptically. To hope is to live so confidently it’s as if your hope has already come true. It’s acting as if the better future that you anticipate is already here, and living into that as much as you can, praising God for it, even though it’s not yet fully here.

Hope is an active verb. It’s not sitting in your rocker watching the cobwebs gather. It’s actively anticipating and working toward the better future you hope for. If you don’t live in anticipation of a better future, I can almost guarantee you that it will never happen.

To live hopefully is to seize hope and run with it. God gives us hope, so let’s run with it.

Well, that’s easy for me to say, isn’t it? Sheltering in place is darn inconvenient, but the biggest harm I’ve suffered in recent weeks is that I really need a haircut. But I haven’t lost income. I haven’t lost a loved one to the virus. I haven’t suffered.

Still, I know that the reality of hope isn’t just “pie in the sky” stuff. It is as real as we make it. Some people think that we’re not being faithful to God when we hope for material things that we need but lack. I don’t think that’s the case at all. When you hope for the things you need, what you’re doing is giving yourself to God’s keeping.

It’s understandable that you feel nervous when you don’t know how you’ll feed your family in the next week; and you don’t know how you can afford to repair the car you need to get to work; and you don’t know when you’ll be able to go back to work; if it’s safe to go back; if there’s still a job for you; if your employer doesn’t go broke; if so many other things that are out of your control, leaving you feeling powerless and, yes, on the verge of hopeless.

We all know what Jesus says. “Don’t worry,” he says. “Your heavenly father knows your needs. So seek first God’s kingdom, and all these things will be given to you as well” (Matthew 6.31-33).

It’s not automatic. God is not a cosmic vending machine dispensing goodies to the faithful. When you’re at the end of your rope and there’s nothing more you can do, that’s when you most need to hope in the Lord. There’s no other place you can go, no one else you can turn to.

And that’s when you discover, as the Apostle Paul says, that God’s power is made perfect in your weakness, and Christ’s power comes to you most directly when you recognize and accept your own powerlessness (2 Corinthians 12:9).

Whatever your financial situation at the moment, scripture advises us not to place hope in our finances, which are always uncertain. Instead, we should hope in God, who richly provides all we need for enjoyment (1 Timothy 6:17 CEB).

Our ultimate hope is that the God who made the world has come into the world to set things right and to heal our brokenness. From that hope springs another hope – that not only does history have a direction set by God, but each of our lives has a direction set by God.

Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice.” We also believe that though the arc of our lives may be hard to see, especially in hard times, the trend of events does bend toward our good, and that God is with us even when we cannot sense God’s presence – maybe especially when we cannot sense God’s presence.

Or as Paul says, in his letter to the church at Rome: “God works in all things for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).

Even in this pandemic, which has turned so many lives upside down, God is working for our good so that we who are called according to his purpose will continue to live according to his purpose and by our lives and our love draw others to him.

So we continue to hope in the Lord, waiting for our hope to be realized, working to make it a reality, sharing our faith and our hope day by day.

Next Sunday we’ll talk more about how to give hope some feet. We’ll conclude this series the week after by talking about what hope we have for the end of things – not the “end” as in the termination of things but as in what end God is pursuing, God’s purpose for all things.

Amen.

A message delivered online May 10, 2020, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, for Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas.

Carriers of Hope

We’re talking about “Hope” again. Last week, I urged you to choose hope as an attitude of life. Today I’m urging you to be a carrier of hope to others.

As we continue to fight the spread of a deadly virus, it seems odd for me to be urging you to be a “carrier” of anything. But our vocation as Christians is to be a carrier of the gospel, and to be a carrier of the gospel is to be a carrier of hope. We’ll return to that thought in a moment.

Some restrictions are being eased, but we are entering the seventh week of our anti-virus shutdown. Some people keep talking about it being a “new normal.” Others speak of a “new abnormal.”

Their point is that nothing about this crisis is normal, and neither is our response to it. It will take months, if not years, to neutralize the threat of this virus. In the meantime we will continue to improvise solutions to new problems as they arise. Chances are, we will need to solve some of the same problems repeatedly, as we are forced into new lockdowns and re-openings to match the ebb and flow of the virus.

Nothing about this is normal. There is no new normal. Everything is abnormal, and will be for a long time. That is not cheerful news, I know – especially when so many of us are yearning to “return to normal.”

But what “normal” would that be? As happy as we all will be to see this crisis over, we should remember that what was “normal” for many people was a life of misery and want.

For example, we have learned that you are especially vulnerable to this virus if you are 65 and older, live in a nursing home or long-term care facility, have an underlying medical condition – or are poor or black.

You’re especially vulnerable if you’re poor or black because of where you live and lack of medical care. That’s the “old normal.” How is it remotely moral for us as a society to accept that as our “new normal”?

Remember what else was “normal” only a few weeks ago? Ugly partisan rancor in politics; dysfunctional government at almost all levels; policies designed to fleece the poor and enrich the wealthy, while denying the ballot to those who might vote against such atrocities… None of these things is a sign of a healthy society. Do we really want to return to that “normal”?

I’ve heard it said that this coronavirus is the not a disease but a symptom. The disease is the thoroughly sinful way we humans treat one another and the earth we inhabit together. To survive, we have to treat the underling disease as well as any symptoms that may arise from it. To survive, we have to treat not only the coronavirus but also the disease called human nature.

We in the churches can offer a cure for the disease. So what’s our next step? Yes, we greatly desire to worship together in person. That always means expressing our love and care for each other through physical contact, and the days when we can safely do that cannot come soon enough.

But is it enough to return to where we were before? Rather than simply reopen the doors and do exactly what we did before exactly as we have always done it before, can’t we do something better? Can’t we do a rethink, reset, reboot, or relaunch so that our worship and our outreach and every other aspect of our communal lives are actually better than they were before?

Crisis always forces change. In a crisis, we have an opportunity to change for the better, or we can allow the experience to change us for the worse.

Biblically speaking, there are two kinds of time. First is chronos time, the kind of time you measure with a watch or a calendar. Second is kairos time, which is God’s time, when the time is right for significant change.

When Jesus said, “The time is fulfilled, the kingdom of God is here,” he didn’t mean chronos time. He meant kairos time. Jesus came at the right time, which is God’s time.

Here’s the question we face: Is this chronos time for us? Or is it kairos time?

Our answer depends in large part on our sense of hope. If we feel the old clock just ticking away as it always has, chances are we aren’t feeling much real hope for the future. But if we feel the possibility of something good happening in God’s kairos time, we can live with renewed hope.

Knowing Christ offers us hope, the Apostle Paul says. Writing to the church at Ephesus, Paul reminds the folks in that church that they had no hope before they knew Christ. He says: “You were aliens rather than citizens of Israel, and strangers to the covenants of God’s promise. In this world you had no hope and no God” (Ephesians 2:12 CEB).

Coming to know Jesus gave them hope. “Now you are no longer strangers and aliens,” Paul says. Now “you belong to God’s household” (Ephesians 2:19 CEB).

Living under lockdown for more than six weeks, we’ve all begun to feel somewhat like strangers and aliens, haven’t we? We’ve begun to feel like exiles from the places we love. We also need to turn to God for hope.

Long ago, God gave this message to the prophet Jeremiah to convey to God’s people who were living in exile from their homeland. “Surely I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for your welfare and not for harm, to give you a future with hope” (Jeremiah 29:11 NRSV).

It’s not that God has a blueprint for each of our lives that we have to live out to the letter. God does not micromanage our lives. God gives us freedom. That’s both exciting and scary. It’s exciting because so much is up to us. It’s scary because so much is up to us.

In exile, it’s natural to lose hope. We’ve lived in exile longer than the standard quarantine. That word – quarantine – is Italian for 40 days. It refers to a 40-day period of waiting that was imposed on arriving ships that were suspected of carrying disease.

In the Bible, 40 is represents a symbolic period of testing for such figures as Moses and Elijah and Jonah and Jesus himself. It’s a period of testing for us as well. As we wait for the quarantine to be lifted, where do we draw the strength to go on?

I have a favorite passage from the Prophet Isaiah that I share at every funeral or memorial service I do. Let me share it with you now, because we all need to hear its message of hope to lift us from the pit of grief and despair. Isaiah writes:

“Have you not known? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He does not faint or grow weary; his understanding is unsearchable. He gives power to the faint, and strengthens the powerless. Even youths will faint and be weary, and the young will fall exhausted. But those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength. They shall mount up with wings like eagles. They shall run and not be weary. They shall walk and not faint (Isaiah 40:28-31 NRSV).

Remember what we said last week? In Hebrew, the words for “wait” and “hope” are similar. So we can hear Isaiah saying that “those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength.” And also saying, “those who hope in the Lord shall renew their strength.”

That’s a promise we all need to take to heart so we can get through this thing together and come out stronger on the other side. It’s good that each of us individually is encouraged by this promise. It’s better when we encourage one another with this promise.

I cannot say who it is, but I am sure that someone you know and love is hurting today.

Someone you know and love needs to hear a message of hope today.

Someone you know and love needs to hear a word of encouragement from you.

Someone you know and love needs you to call or text or email and write or stop by their house today, if only to honk and wave and shout, “Love you! We’ll get together soon!”

I’m inviting you to be a carrier of hope to someone, a deliverer of God’s message of love.

The Psalmist says: “Hope in the Lord! Be strong! Let your heart take courage! Hope in the Lord!” (Psalm 27:14 CEB). Can you convey that message to someone today, or tomorrow or sometime this week?

And can you also think – somewhere in the back of your head, where you do your best thinking – what can we do as a church to be a more effective carrier of hope to the world when this crisis is over? We’ll share more thoughts on that later.

Amen.

This message was delivered via Facebook and YouTube for Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas, on May 3, 2020, the fourth Sunday of the Easter season.

Choose Hope

Our scripture reading is 1 Peter 1:3-7.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!

By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.

You have a pure and enduring inheritance that cannot perish that is presently kept safe for you in heaven.

Through his faithfulness, you are guarded by God’s power so that you can receive the salvation he is ready to reveal in the last time.

You rejoice in this hope now, even though you are distressed for a short time by various trials.

Just as the purity of gold is tested by fire, these trials are necessary to prove the value of your faith and will bring praise and glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.

* * * *

The story of Easter and the story of Jesus and the whole story of Christianity is a story of hope. It’s a story of hope born from despair and from the death of hope.

Jesus’ disciples “had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21, CEB). Their hope died when he was nailed to a Roman cross.

Two days later, the women went to his tomb expecting to anoint a corpse. They had seen Jesus die, and with his last breath their hope died, too.

The last thing they expected was to be told: “He is not here. He is risen.” The last thing anyone expected was to see him alive again. His Resurrection gave birth to a new hope, born of a renewed faith. It is hope reborn.

It’s that hope and that faith that I want to talk about this morning and over the next few weeks in a new series of messages titled “Hope.”

It’s inspired by a series now unfolding at Church of the Resurrection. I appreciate them sharing the series outline and supporting material. And I appreciate the wisdom of focusing on hope at this time in our lives.

Because we sure do need some hope right now, don’t we?

Last week we marked the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day. I wanted to say that we “celebrated” the 50th anniversary, but there is little to celebrate right now. The current administration in Washington is systematically rolling back every environmental safeguard erected since 1970. Soon we’ll be back to the good old days when a haze of smog covered the sun in cities like Denver and Los Angeles, and rivers were so polluted that they caught on fire.

Soon we’ll be wearing masks to protect us not from a virus but from air pollution. If the pollution doesn’t kill us, the cascading effects of global warming might. Rising ocean levels will drive us away from the coasts, but many places inland won’t be habitable. Those amber waves of grain will be a distant memory. The fruited plain will be a baked desert. O for spacious skies clear enough that we can see those purple mountain majesties!

That’s the distant future – maybe not even 20 years distant, if we don’t do something fast. But it’s far enough away that the current crisis absorbs all our attention today. If you’re not tired of cocooning at home, you are probably worried sick about your immediate future because you’ve lost your job or enough income that you’re anxious about tomorrow – even though, as Jesus said, today has enough troubles of its own (Matthew 6:34).

We sure do need a little hope right now, don’t we?

The feckless leadership we’ve gotten from Washington won’t get us very far in fighting the coronavirus, or much of anything else. Don’t put your hope in states or municipalities, either. Some will relax their shelter-in-place orders too soon, and the epidemic will likely come roaring in to fill the vacuum, killing thousands more. Other states will wait longer and suffer from the civil unrest that’s being orchestrated by rich right-wingers.

Some religious leaders still claim it’s all a hoax. Some seem to think that the Holy Spirit makes them immune from germs. The rest of us – I hope most of us – cling to the genuine promises of God conveyed to us in Scripture and confirmed by the voices of tradition, experience, and reason.

Those promises anchor the hope we proclaim today. The Psalmist tells us, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7 NIV).

There’s nothing magic here. Hope based on trust in the Lord is more than Pollyanish optimism. Hope is not born from wishful thinking. Rather, hope is born from the depths of the pit of despair. Hope is born from the death of hope. Hope comes to us from above.

We don’t often read from the book of Lamentations. It’s a small book you’ll find nestled between Jeremiah and Ezekiel in the heart of the prophetic books of the Old Testament. Some think Jeremiah is the author. Whoever wrote it vividly expresses the desolation the people of Israel felt after the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Babylonians in 587 B.C.

“I remember my affliction and my wandering,” the writer says, “and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning. Great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:19-23 NIV).

If we were together physically today, we would sing that old hymn inspired by this passage. “Great is thy faithfulness! Morning by morning, new mercies I see. All I have needed thy hand hath provided. Great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me.”

We might sing a couple of other songs as well, such as “Only Trust Him” and “Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus.” That one ends with those haunting words, “O for grace to trust him more.”

The music and some of the lyrics to these hymns are just a little too syrupy for my taste, and yet I can’t keep them out of my head. They are part of that storehouse of remembered grace that keeps me counting on still more grace.

Just as the author of Lamentations could remember God’s great love in the face of previously unthinkable destruction, so we today can call to mind all the good things we have received from God throughout our lives, and we can find hope for tomorrow.

The speed with which the coronavirus has utterly changed our lives is simply amazing. How quickly it showed us just how fragile our lives are, just how tenuous our social connections are, and just how childish our partisan bickering really is – especially when it endangers lives.

When we’re isolated at home by shelter-in-place orders, it’s easy to become disoriented – that is, to lose focus on what we should be about, and to lose our sense of purpose. Who am I? Why am I here? We need constant reinforcement of our identity from others and from God as well, because when we forget who we are in Christ, we lose all sense of location in the world.

Ironically, it appears that we do not develop a sense of identity and hope in good times but rather in bad times.

We “boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God,” the Apostle Paul tells the churches in Rome. “Not only that, he says, “but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. (Romans 5:2-5 NRSV).”

Bad times can lead us to hope, Paul says, and hope does not disappoint because it comes from God. It’s a sign that God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Yes, hope is a sign from God.

We may be distressed by the trials of life, the Apostle Peter says in the letter we read earlier. But we can rejoice now in the hope we have through the Resurrection of Jesus. Whatever trials we face now, the Resurrection gives us a new birth into a living hope.

It’s truly a living and active hope that is anchored in trust in God. In Psalm 40, David testifies: “I put all my hope in the Lord. He leaned down to me. He listened to my cry for help. He lifted me out of the pit of death, out of the mud and filth, and set my feet on solid rock. He steadied my legs. He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise for our God” (Psalm 40.1-3a CEB).

Commenting on this passage, Adam Hamilton notes an interesting difference in the ways this verse is translated. Most translations say, “I waited patiently for the Lord,” but the Common English Bible words it, “I put all my hope in the Lord.”

Waiting and hoping are related in the Hebrew language and in our theology and our experience as well. Trust in the Lord is commonly born of waiting.

Sometimes we wait patiently, as we try to do now while sheltering in place, not knowing what else we can do. Sometimes, following the example of the prophets and many of the psalm writers, we cry out to the Lord in our pain. We impatiently demand that God come to our aid in concrete ways that we can see and feel and touch, and that God does it now.

And sometimes we spring into action to help make our hope a reality. Hope is not only trusting that God is working to fashion a better day for us. Hope also is working to make that better day a reality.

Hope also is being the hands and feet of Christ for others and in our loving actions proclaiming the good news that Christ is alive in the world. Christ is alive in us because God’s love is poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, giving us a living hope that we just have to share with others.

Be the change you want to see, Gandhi said. Be the hope you want to live and share. Whatever hopes have been dashed in your life, the Resurrection of Jesus and the promises of God offer newness of life and hope for your future. Remember, our hope is a hope born from despair. It’s a hope reborn through the grace of God and the Resurrection of Jesus.

In the next week and for the rest of your life, embrace that hope! Count on it! In all you do, choose hope!

Amen!

This message was delivered via Facebook and YouTube on April 26, 2020, for Edgerton United Methodist Church.

A Critical Moment

People are starting to go stir crazy, and it’s more serious than really wanting to run out for a chocolate malt. Enough is enough, some say. We’ve had enough of social distancing. It’s time to open up the country again. Freedom demands it.

There are dangers here. If we try to “get back to normal” too soon, we’ll only inflame the situation. We may have “flattened the curve” of the coronavirus outbreak, but it’s not trending downward yet. Act too soon, and we could incite an even worse epidemic.

Still, some say we must “return to normal” as soon as possible. “The cure can’t be worse than the disease,” says one White House official. “The economic cost to individuals is just too great.”

If you’ve lost income or your livelihood because of anti-viral sanctions, you must yearn for better days. They can’t come soon enough. You fear that the damage to your finances is so great that you may not recover. We need to hear and act on those concerns.

But the way some politicians are phrasing it is simply ghastly. Sure, we take a chance in opening up too soon, they say, but that’s “the lesser of two evils.” Is it really?

In effect, some are saying: “Somebody has to take a bullet here. I nominate you.” Which of your family or friends are you willing to sacrifice? Are you ready to die to save the economy?

As for those already pushing back against the sanctions, I ask: Who among us has the right to endanger others by our behavior? Is it acceptable to go around without a face mask? Is it OK to sneeze on produce in the supermarket? What are the limits of personal freedom? And to the churches playing the martyr game: By staying open, how many people will you kill in the name of Jesus?

For some people, the attitude seems to be, “The parachute has slowed our descent. We can take it off now.” Is it really expedient to kill some so we can spare others hardship? Or have we failed to think this through?

New federal guidelines announced Thursday change nothing. It will be weeks before there is significant thawing of social distancing rules. Yes, our “new normal” stinks. But carefully consider the alternatives.

Whatever the secular debate, there is always a deeper religious dimension. Let’s change the terms of the discussion. What are the loving things to do now? WWJD?

This message also will appear on the Facebook and YouTube pages of Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas.

This is not God’s Will

The usual bunch of clowns are saying that the coronavirus is God’s will. They say this kind of thing anytime something bad happens. It’s always God punishing somebody for something, and it’s always something that they’re against – homosexuality, abortion, vaccinations, you name it.

It’s truly amazing how God shares the same prejudices they do. (What, me bigoted? No, I just hate the things God hates.) You might think that this kind of theological malpractice was passé, but a lot of people lap it up because, sadly, it confirms their prejudices, too.

When I encounter these folks, I often say: “I don’t think God is half the jerk you think he is.” (Normally, I use inclusive language for God, but the sort of deity we’re dealing with here is always male. And, for shock value, I use a more colorful word than “jerk.”)

In reality, of course, God is not a jerk at all. God is not the cause of this pandemic. It is not God’s will. Those who say it is God’s will are liars, and I’m tired of them giving God a bad name by blaming God for all the bad stuff that happens in our world.

Inevitably, they’ll defend themselves by pointing to some verse in the Old Testament. Especially when quoted out of context, the Old Testament is a gold mine for violent and hateful ideas about God. But Jesus is the full revelation of God, and the testimony of Jesus is that God does not hurt people because they’ve broken some rule.

God does not toss thunderbolts at miscreants. (That’s Zeus, don’t you know.) If God did try to fry people with thunderbolts (or tornadoes or hurricanes or whatever), you’d think God would have better aim and there would be much less collateral damage.

Want to know more? Read chapter 9 of the gospel of John. In Jesus’ day, as in ours, it was commonly believed that if something bad happened to you, God must be punishing you for some sin. Not so, Jesus says.

Here’s an example. What about all those people who died in tornadoes in the South on Easter? Were they more sinful than folks in Oklahoma or Delaware or Oregon, or is God just sloppy in handing out justice? The whole notion is garbage.

A lot of things happen in this world that are not God’s will. That’s why we pray, “Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” If God got God’s way, ours would be a much different world! And someday it will be! Meantime, take comfort in knowing that God does not want this virus to kill you, and that God is with you in all things good and bad.

This message also appeared in a “Midweek Update” from Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas, and will appear on Facebook and YouTube as a “Midweek Message.”