Think Better of God

Propers: Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 17), A.D. 2019 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for you know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Do not be afraid to think better of God. If something seems unjust to you, unrighteous, cruel, do not let God off the hook. Cling to the promise of who He is, even in the face of manifest evil. For God is always better than we imagine Him to be.

As monotheists, Christians believe that God is All-Good—not simply that He happens to be the best thing in Creation, but that He is Himself Goodness and Truth and Beauty, and all instances of goodness and truth and beauty that we know here below are but pale reflections of the Goodness and Truth and Beauty that is God. And so by definition, God cannot be evil, cannot be false, cannot be cruel. If He could, then He wouldn’t be God.

Now this doesn’t mean that God is all roses and sweet cream and rainbows in the garden. Truth and Goodness can be very hard and very harsh to those of us who are used to being so ugly and so false. Imagine the light of the sun penetrating into the depths of a cave or the caverns of the deep. The creatures down there, with their gigantic, milky-white eyes would be utterly blinded, utterly burned up by daylight, were they not given the chance to adapt, a period to remake and reform and evolve themselves for the unfettered light of the sun.

That’s what it’s like when we, as sinners, come fully and directly into the presence of God. It’s not that He’s harsh or cruel or fickle or wicked. It’s that we are. And because of that, we have a hard time standing, a hard time stomaching, the sheer, raw deluge of God’s Goodness and Beauty and Truth. It’s like a blazing furnace that never dies, a fire both of unquenchable love and unrelenting purification.

And we can flee into the darkness for a time, shielding ourselves from the light, but not forever. Sooner or later that brilliance will creep in, and then we shall have to face the full and fiery light of God’s eternally bright new day. It will be terrible and wonderful and unspeakably gorgeous. It will be death and resurrection for the world. For then, at long last, when Christ comes again, we shall finally see each other face-to-face for the very first time. And having reconciled all things to Himself, God at the last shall be All in All.

This is the promise to which we cling when the world seems irredeemably cruel. We must cleave to Christ. We must not let God go, not let God off the hook, even in the face of manifest evil. We must hope in hopeless times. We must proclaim the Good News that the End has been written, even as the fullness of the story has yet to unfold. The Resurrection begun in Jerusalem shall encompass the whole of the world.

In our reading from Genesis this morning, God sends forth his angels in response to cries of agony from the human community. All the peoples who live in the region of Sodom and Gomorrah—cities as notorious 4,000 years ago as they remain today—have called out to Heaven for justice, for deliverance, for punishment against the wicked.

And you couldn’t ask for a more wretched hive of scum and villainy, a more worthy target for destruction and wrath. Sodom and Gomorrah are a predatory people. They rape and murder and rob and steal. They victimize the stranger, the sojourner, the alien in the land. They abuse the weak, the vulnerable, the helpless far from home.

And God has come down from Heaven, in the manifestation of these angels—who are vast celestial powers, mind you, in their own right—to see what they will do to Him. If God sends forth His servants, His powers, will they find welcome? Will they find hospitality? Or will their violated corpses be cast into the desert to rot? Abraham clearly knows the answer already, for he can see that this divine visitation will result in the destruction of these cities, just as surely as sunrise banishes shadows and mists. We might imagine it as an airstrike on ISIS: purging nests of murderers with fire from above.

But Abraham says, “Lord, will You indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are 50 righteous in the city; will You then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the 50 righteous who are in it? Far be it from You to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from You! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”

This guy’s got some stones. What king, what god, what potentate would take kindly to having his righteousness challenged, his power called to account? Certainly not an arrogant or a corrupt or a cruel one. Such would burn Abraham up with the rest. But the God of Abraham is none of those things. The God of Abraham is just. He is Good and True and Beautiful. And so Abraham is made bold to cling to who God is and what that means: “You can’t be unjust. That’s not who You are. That’s not God.”

And God says, simply, “You are right. For the sake of 50, I will spare them all.”

Well, having established that his proposal is sound in principle, Abraham now haggles with God over price: “But what if there are only 45 innocent in the cities, Lord? What then? Or 40? Or 20? Or—don’t get mad now—even just 10?” It’s hard to quantify righteousness, after all, and even one unjust death is still unjust. “For the sake of 10,” sayeth the Lord, “I will spare them all.”

In point of fact, there are not 10 innocent people in all of Sodom and Gomorrah. There are a grand total of four, and even their righteousness is questionable. But the angels of the Lord go to great lengths to insure that those four righteous souls—three of them women—escape from the cities and the coming wrath of God. Thus God punishes Sodom and Gomorrah, not out of cruelty or retribution, but to deliver His people, to save His people—the vulnerable, the helpless, the alien, the traveler—who rejoice at the destruction of their oppressors, their murderers, their abusers. Justice is done. Liberation is proclaimed.

Yet what of those who died? What of those so irredeemably wicked that they tried to rape angels, and were wiped from the face of the earth when confronted with the infinite Goodness and Beauty and Truth of Heaven, burning their filth away? Well, according to Christ, even they have a future. Even they will rise again on the last day. And yes, their sins will be laid bare. And yes, there will be shame and punishment for what they have done.

But it is the punishment of truth and of love, punishment with a purpose: to correct us, to redeem us, to bring us home and give us new life. It is the chastisement of a loving Father for His wicked wayward children. God cannot be petty or cruel or false or failed. He never does anything except for our good. Even when God must be against us, He is always for us.

Eventually the light gets in. Eventually there will be no place left to hide, no more shadows, no more lies. Death and Hades will die, and God will be All in All. And all the wrongs we have done, all the sins, all the horrors, all the injustices and oppressions and cruelties, will be swallowed up in the ocean of God’s mercy poured out for us from the Cross. And somehow it will all be set right.

So cling to God. Pray without ceasing. Ask, and it will be given; seek, and ye shall find, knock, and the door will be opened unto you. Not because God is a genie. Not because He grants wishes at our beck and call. But because God is Good and Just and Beautiful And True. That’s just who He is. And so there is nothing left to fear, nothing to prevent us from persevering in our faith.

You can challenge God. You can cling to Him. You can trust in Him. He will fulfill every promise that He has ever made to humankind, and infinitely more. Do not be afraid to think better of God, for no matter how good we might imagine Him to be, He is always and infinitely better than we could ever know.

For the sake of the One, He will spare us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.