First Parish Church-Wintle Sermon Is God Fair

IS GOD FAIR?

A sermon delivered by the Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle

at The First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts, on January 11, 2009.

The scripture readings were Isaiah 55:2-9 and Mark 6:30-44.

“But Jesus answered them, saying ‘You give them something to eat” (Mark 6:37)

Our worship theme for January is Justice. Last Sunday I proposed that a Christian definition of justice is “fairness modulated by love.” I asked if WE ourselves are just, fair, righteous people, and suggested many of us could do better. Be a mensch, I concluded.

This Sunday I am asking “Is God just? Does God play fair?” Now if I asked you “is life fair?,” many would say “no,” life is not fair, life just is the way it is, neither fair nor unfair, and what counts is how we respond to the world as it is, how we play the hand we are dealt.

But when I ask “is God fair?,” we hope for a better, happier, more hopeful answer. We want a just and fair God; God, we say, is love. But then we immediately have the problem: if God is just, why is there so much suffering in the world, especially of the innocent, so much injustice?

This is the ancient theological problem of theodicy, how do we reconcile belief in a good God with so much contrary evidence. I want to suggest that there are only three ways to answer, and the way you answer pretty much determines what kind of life you will lead in this world.

The problem of theodicy can be summarized by the line “If God is good, he is not great; if God is great, he is not good.” Those are the first two answers to the problem of theodicy.

What do they mean? The first answer: If God is good, he is not great. If God is truly good and just and fair, then he must not be great, not powerful enough, to prevent all the bad things from happening. Many people believe that life is a continual battle between the forces of good and evil, or between creation and chaos. This view sees God like the Creator in Genesis where he is pushing back the darkness, giving order to the chaos, and that chaos always threatens to flood back in upon us. God is the good guy, fighting the good fight, and he knows he may not win every time. There are the Good Fridays of life, the crucifixions, when the good guys lose. But because God is good, he will come back to renew the fight.

Another version of this is the idea that God is good, but he is not involved in every daily struggle of our lives; he has bigger, more important things to do in running the universe, than to protect you and me from all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

That’s the first answer: God is the good guy, fighting the good fight against the chaos that threatens us. We have faith that God is good.

The second answer: If God is great, he is not good. This actually is the view that most people have taken throughout human history. God is the all-powerful ruler of the universe, and it’s not his job to change things to meet our desires, but rather we had better accommodate our ways to his ways. In ancient times there were those who offered sacrifices to satisfy God’s anger, think of Pacific islanders giving the maiden to the volcano. In Old Testament times the prophets cried that a righteous God could be a god of great wrath. “We are all,” said Jonathan Edwards not too long ago and not too far away (in Northampton, Mass.), “sinners in the hands of an angry God.”

To be sure, Edwards believed God is good, but good on God’s terms, not always on ours.

All that is not especially attractive to most of us today. Our modern society, if it wants a god at all, wants a nice god, we might even say a domesticated god. “If God is great, he is not good” is hard for most of us to swallow.

But you know, the older I get, the more I find myself thinking that we just don’t see enough of the big picture to understand what God is doing; we focus on our concerns, but maybe in the great course of events, even what seem to be disasters may turn out to have been OK, even salvations. That is really the second answer to the question of theodicy: we just don’t understand what God is really doing. “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord” to Isaiah, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8f). We have faith that God is great.

I said there was a third way of answering the theodicy question. This is where I’m going to ask David Fuller to help. The third way is the answer suggested by this morning’s gospel reading about the feeding of the five thousand. When the disciples wanted to send the crowd away to find their own food, Jesus said, “no, you give them something to eat.” You give them something to eat. There are four meanings of this story. First, it’s a miracle story about Jesus feeding 5000 people with five loaves and two fish. Second, I remember reading a Quaker interpretation of this story for children: when the disciples shared from the meager supplies they had, others began to follow their example. We should too. Third, it’s a model for the Eucharist, the communion: “he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to his disciples to set before the people” (6:41). This is what the Church, the Body of Christ, does: we feed one another, in body and soul.

But fourth, and most importantly: YOU give them something to eat. The third answer to theodicy is that God doesn’t do everything for us, but we need to embody God’s justice and take it to our world. That’s what incarnation means: God’s love became real in Jesus Christ, and seeks to become real in us, and through us to the world.

Now here, my friends, is where David Fuller is going to help me. I needed an illustration of justice-seeking, in practical and accessible ways, and just then Sheila Burkus called and suggested I invite the man who has been the director of the Weston METCO program for the last 24 years to speak. And here he is, in the flesh! Welcome David.

[David Fuller then spoke about the METCO program, which brings inner city Boston kids to school in Weston]