God is not a vending machine

05Sep
 
Then Job answered:
‘I loathe my life;
  I will give free utterance to my complaint;
  I will speak in the bitterness of my soul.
 I will say to God, Do not condemn me;
  let me know why you contend against me.

 I know that my redeemer[a] lives,
  and that in the end he will stand on the earth. 
And after my skin has been destroyed,
  yet in my flesh I will see God;
I myself will see him
  with my own eyes—I, and not another.
  How my heart yearns within me!
-Job 10:1-2, 19:25-29

Maria and Captain VonTrapp stand facing one another. It is the moment they realize love has warmed between them. 

Maria sings, 

“Perhaps I had a wicked childhood, Perhaps I had a mis'rable youth. But somewhere in my wicked, mis'rable past, there must've been a moment of truth. For here you are, standing there, Loving me. Whether or not you should. [‘cuz I’m almost a nun] So, somewhere in my youth or childhood I must have done something good.” 

The Sound of Music, Rodgers and Hammerstein


The duet sings of God as a vending machine that dispenses Approval, Joy, and Forgiveness only after we have dropped tarnished coins of suffering, guilt, and shame in the pay slot.


I cannot wag my finger at Maria or anyone else for giving-in to our human need for tidy intellectual logic and zero-sum emotional accounting. I have done it; we all have. It is why we gobbled up rabbi Harold Kushner’s book in the 1980’s, When Bad Things Happen to Good People. The book offers his personal answer for the messiness and pain of human existence as we give our faith to a God we believe to be loving, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.


Kushner admits the flawed logic of a loving and omnipotent God who permits innocent children to die of cancer or hunger. His answer makes room for the violence of the Hitlers of history who wantonly slaughter their despised. To bring the logic back into balance, Kushner proposes we let go of a measure of God’s omnipotence. After the powerful gestures of the Creation, God’s job is not curing childhood disease on demand; it is providing comfort and courage to dying children; it is His job to call us to support the parents of dying children and to protect the despised from the human fact of tyrants.


Sorry Rabbi, I am not willing to limit God’s ultimacy to make my human logic compute. For me, the lesson of Job points to a God who is more severe and far more spacious. Job discovers a God who is undiminished by the human need for logic. God is sovereign and not tamed to fit neatly in our homes. Job’s God does not owe me an explanation of Himself. The world contains chaos that God does not immediately choose to still. I bind myself to a God I am incapable of understanding. The relationship is built on my steadfast humility, forthright speech (prayer), even to the point of debate — with the acceptance that we do not debate as equals. 


The promise is not that everything will work out in the end and I will double my herd of cattle; the promise is that in the end I will “see” God with the eyes of my soul because God opened my eyes and invited me in. 

Musical Reflection - I Know That My Redeemer Lives (Arr. by Jonathan Meyers) BYU Vocal Point


God of wildness and mystery, lead me to the place where I accept that You do not do things to us, but rather you do things for us. In that place I will see you. For the joy of that moment, my heart yearns within me. Amen.

Faith

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