January 20, 1980

"... in everything God works for good with those who love him.... "God so loved the world that he gave his only son. "God is love." "Death is swallowed up in victory...in the Lord your labor is not in vain. These affirmations are like golden threads which are interwoven throughout the fabric of the Bible. The question, however, is: are they true? Or are they a lie? Indeed, dare we say it, is God a lie? 

When I waited with a young mother and father while doctors tried to remove a malignant tumor from the two year old chest of their little girl, it was not apparent that all things were working for good. Tell the people starving and eating one another in Cambodia that God is working in all things for good. For then, the craziness of the statement would probably be exceeded only by its cruelty. Try to convince the lonely widow or widower things are coming up roses because in all things... My guess is that you have your own reasons for wondering if all this God business is just a big lie. 

ls God a lie? There are two ways to understand the question. First, maybe the whole idea of a God who is powerful and loving is a human lie. Not a malicious lie to be sure. But just the desperate attempt of humans to convince themselves that somehow, some way there is a caring power in the universe who they can trust with their living and dying. Perhaps, as Freud said, God is a wish fulfillment, a product of human imagination and projection, because we cannot face the truth that we live in a dark, cold, pointless, and cruel space we presumptuously call a universe. Sometimes we wonder if our notions about God are nothing more than our attempt to whistle in the dark in order to get our mind off the nauseating terror that we are alone. 

Is God a lie? Secondly, even if he is not a human lie and he really exists, there is another way we have to ask the question. He may be a divine lie. Perhaps, there really is that powerful force coursing through the universe bringing things into being and sustaining the processes of the worlds within the atoms and the worlds within the universe. He may be real alright. It may just 

be that he really doesn't quite care as much as we have been led to believe by him. Do you remember playing with those slimy, crawly things called snails or slugs when you were little? You poked at them and then put salt on them just to see them sizzle and disintegrate. Some fun. Is that what God does with us? Does he amuse himself by watching us sizzle and disintegrate? 

Some years ago, Peter Devries wrote a novel entitled THE BLOOD OF THE LAMB. It is the story of Don Wanderhope, a man whose life is racked by the question: if God exists and he loves us, then why does he let the painful, tragic things that happen in the world go on? Don idolized his older brother who contracted and died of pneumonia while in medical school. Tortured by guilt and mental illness, Wanderhope's wife took her own life. The only good and wonderful thing in Don's life was his daughter Carol. Carol is Don's joy: she is pretty, witty, and loving. But at age eleven, she is stricken with leukemia. A year of savage attacks with only brief reprieves of remission ensues. The question of Wanderhope's life is brought to a piercing head in the suffering of his cherished lamb, Carol. If God is real and he cares, then why all the pain? 

There is a church, the Church of Saint Catherine, near Carol's hospital. Don has a love-hate, attraction-revulsion feeling for the church. Some days he is drawn to go inside and pray for his daughter. On other days he goes in to curse and lash out at God for the pain of his child. On Carol's birthday, Wanderhope arrives at the hospital with a birthday cake only to be informed that she has taken a turn for the worse in the night. By early afternoon, the malignant blood cells of Wanderhope's lamb have killed her. In a fit of hurt, anger, and confusion, Don makes his way to St. Catherine's. Before he realizes what he is doing, he hurls the cake into the face of a statue of Jesus on the cross. Yet, he realizes something. In all of his questioning, he is driven not in front of the barrel of a suicidal gun, he finds himself at the foot of the cross. 

For Christian people, the crucifixion of Jesus strangely reveals what God is like, what humans are like, and what they should be like. The renowned theologian H. Richard Niebuhr  – whose every book and article I read in seminary once wrote about revelation, the ways God reveals his reality and nature. Niebuhr says that God has revealed himself to humans through special historical human events. Certain events become clues that shed light on all of the events of your life and my life. The cross of Jesus is a revealing event in history that tells us some truth about ourselves and the one we call God. The suffering and pain of Jesus on the cross reveals some of the meaning of hurt and pain wherever it happens in life: to you, to me, or to others. Not forgetting the Wanderhope in you and me standing before the cake dripping Christ on the cross, let us look at what it reveals about whether a loving God is a lie or not. 

First, the cross of Jesus reveals not so much God's cruelty as the grimmess of human evil. God did not drive the nails into Jesus' hands and body; men did. When we humans have so much at stake in what is wrong in the world, when we profit from it, we will go to bloody ends to shut the mouths of those who nag us about what is right. Our evil crucifies and hurts people every day. We hurt each other well enough without God getting into the punishing act.

The crucifying pain of war and dread disease are probably the most often presented facts of life which make belief in a God who cares difficult. How can there be a God when such pain and evil run rampant in the world, when such pain runs rampant through you, me, and people we love. It makes us want to shake our fist at high heaven like Job. But stop and think about whose responsibility war and even disease are. They are more connected than you think. 

This chunk of cosmic stuff called earth spends approximately three hundred billion dollars a year on instruments of war and destruction. The United States is responsible for a third – one hundred billion – of the bomb pie. Take 2 or 3% of that figure and you will come up with a liberal estimate of how much we spend on cancer research. Before we curse God for the presence of war and the absence of the cancer cures, look at where our monetary and talent resources are invested on earth. We can make a priority of building hospitals or building bombs. We can sink our best into research to take lives or research to save lives. Technology can be applied to destroying land and fields or to developing seeds for food. We can spend our money on junk food that fattens but does not nourish. Or we can eat well and help others do the same. 

I want to read you a quotation before I tell you who said it. "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." The "left wing, radical source" of that statement was Dwight D. Eisenhower. Now, I know what a scary position our world is in today. I am not naive about national defense. I, as well as you, live in a city made prosperous by war expense; even our church, your family, and my family directly or indirectly prosper because of government expenditures for instruments that may eventually kill others while they kill us. It is hard to separate our Christianity, patriotism and economics in this matter. Still, the point remains, before we shake our fist at the old man in the sky because of war and disease, we might better shake our fist at the old men in Washington, Loscow, and Peking, all who have been around longer than the ayatollahs. But we haven't gone the distance until we have shaken our fist at the person we see each day when we shave or comb our hair. In this nation there is some connection between what men do in Washington and the way you and I vote and make ourselves heard. 

Someone might say that if there is a God and he cares about us, then why did he not make us so we wouldn't do such evil things to each other. Here enters that complex thing called human freedom. God did not make us to be puppets dancing on a string pulled by him, even a string that makes us do only good things without choice to do bad. God took a risk making us like him, free with the power to create, because being free to create means being free also to destroy. We can be like Adolph Hitler or Albert Schweitzer. Human life wouldn't be quite human without the choice. Someone recently put it this way. If a husband and wife were stranded alone on a desert island for a year, no one would give them any reward for being faithful to each other. But if man and woman who are married to someone else are stranded together on a desert island for a year and stay faithful, then something significant has happened. (Some might say a miracle.) There was choice. Good was done when bad was an easy alternative. God or whoever made us free. And even with the pain of freedom, life wouldn't be quite worth it without it. 

Second, in addition to telling us something about the evil of misused human freedom, the cross of Jesus reveals the sheer wonder of being alive. You see, the capital punishment murder of Jesus is so tragic because it was preceded by such a beautiful life. The miracle of Jesus' life came before his pain and death. We only know how awful suffering and death are because we know first how good it feels to be alive. We can lash out and lament because life hurts more than we want it to and because it is shorter than we want it to be – all that is true – but don't ignore the magic, miracle, and mystery of the gift of life in the first place. Where did it come from? You nor I have the power to ultimately give or take life. It is in the hands of something or someone other than you and me. Maybe it comes from one who loves us and is working with us, for good even when we inflict and endure pain. The backdrop behind human tragedies and crosses is always the good experience of life they interrupt. 

Do some quick math with me. In each human body at any given time there is an estimated one hundred trillion cells. There are around 4 billion people on earth. Because I haven't even mastered checkbook math, I asked Lee Cook, our choir member and chairman of the math 

department at UAH, to tell me what the product of 4 billion times 100 trillion is. The answer is something like 4 with twenty three zeroes behind it: 400 sextillion, I think. Because of the encoded genetic material in those cells, each day liver cells know to duplicate and replicate into more liver cells and not toenail cells in the liver. 99.999% of the time these cells do their growth and replacement works beautifully. Perhaps a thousandth of one per cent grow wrong and malignant. And when it is cells in your body or the body of someone you love which grow malignant it hurts. It is a tragedy. That cannot be denied. Still, before we curse God for the cells that go wrong, we have to thank him for the calls who grow rightly year in and year cut for 70 or more years for the average person. 

When the cells went wrong in my father's body, it was initially hard for me to believe that God works in all things for good. What's good about a man dying in the middle of his life with children to raise? I don't have the answer. But I have to thank the lifegiver for my father's 48 years before I curse him for being the lifetaker. 

The atheist and agnostic can say there can't be a God or one we can know about and let such pain happen in the world and in bodies. Then those of us who believe and want to believe are hard pressed to answer. It is more complicated because the war between the atheist and the believer even goes on inside me between the doubting parts and believing parts. The atheist out there or inside is the burden of explaining the mystery and beauty of life without a God who has power and love. The believer has to face the hard questions of how there can be a God who cares and evil to be sure. But the atheist has to explain why there is so much good in life without a God. That's what we are trying to do today. Cosmic flukes and accidents don't sound very convincing.

First, the cross is a revealing of human evil and a demonstration of freedom used wrongly. Second, the cross' ugliness calls attention to the beauty, mystery, and wonder of life in the first place. Third, the cross reveals God as he is really, not as we say or think he should be: Moses wanted to know God's name. In other words, he wanted a definition of God so he could size him up and know what to expect from him. But God isn't that easy. He says: "I am who I am" or some translate it: "I will be who I will be." What this says is that God does not necessarily conform to human expectations, definitions, logic, or manipulation. Just because we say God ought to do this or that does not make it so. All we can do is try to understand who, where, and how he is. 

Scientific study has helped me understand the way the lifegiver God works and really has helped me better understand how the Bible actually teaches his works. Scientific speculation about the formation of the universe and the rise of life reveals that hundreds of independent variables had to be just right for there to have been life at all. Any one of a thousand things could have gone differently, and there would not have been life as we know it. If the sun's radiation were not just so then the formation and activity of nucleic acids, amino acids, and DNA could not have given rise to life that reproduces, relicates, and develops. If the earth were just a few degrees closer or further away from the sun, then we would either fry or freeze. We wouldn't have liquid water which is absolutely essential for photosynthesis processes which give us air and food. Were the universe not the size and age it is, 8 billion years old by 8 billion light years in dimension, then scientists speculate the contractions and expansions, implosions and explosions necessary for the generation of the atoms of life (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorous) would not have happened. Just accidents? No. The lifegiver we call God has been working and struggling for millions of years to give you and me the good gift of life. Maybe he is in all things working. And the cross with the life of Jesus in the middle bespeaks of all the painful obstacles God works against to give us life and love. 

We can say that God ought to be able to snap his cosmic fingers and do this or that but he is not who we say he is; he is who he is. It has taken him, even him, a long struggle to bring us life. It isn't easy to keep 400 sextillion cells growing healthily. It isn't easy to get 4 billion humans on earth to feed and love each other instead of being hell bent to hate and bomb each other. To give us life and a moral life is not easy.

Yet Paul's wonderful and troubling statement comes back here as we think about what science tells us about the life force. The emphasis is on the preposition with. "In all things God works for good WITH those who love him...." God doesn't say to Moses: "I will go FOR you, but WITH you. Even God cannot enable us to jump over problems the way superman jumped over buildings. Even Jesus suffered life's disappointments and pains. The cross points to a 

God who is with us not just when we are winning trophies but also when we are in the pits. God was in Christ and with him on the cross, even there trying to bring the world to its senses, even there showing us what lengths God will go to get his love into our thick heads, tough hearts, and clenched fists, God is Immanuel: he is with us. 

During this Christian season of Epiphany – epiphany means appearance of God – we look for the ways God appears in life. If God shows his face in the world as an aloof deity who stays somewhere off on the riviera of the universe taking it easy and toying with us like 

slimy snails, then he is no God but a demon. If he could snap his fingers and rid the world of war and leukemic children and doesn't, then I want no part of him. But both the Bible and science bespeak of a power, we call God, who is in the mix and mess of life with us, and struggling for his life and love to conquer the hate and death. Paul says that God is with us groaning and struggling to bring life over death, love over hate, good over evil, and light over darkness. In our passage from Romans, Paul says that God is with us groaning and struggling to bring life over death, love over hate, good over evil, and light over darkness. All of us together in creation with God groan like a woman in labor, says Paul, trying to give birth to a better world.

As many of you know, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Christian and pastor who was arrested by the Nazis for taking part in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow Hitler. While he was in prison and before the Nazis hung him, he thought about the way God is with us in the world. He wrote: "God allows himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, he can be with us and help us." God is not some demon-god standing aloof from us when we are sick, hurting, and afraid. He is with us – hurting, suffering, and struggling to overcome. He has been in the world a long time trying to make life the way he wants it to be for us. Science reveals what a struggle it is to give us life at all. The Bible and its cross reveals how hard it is for God to give us love and joy in that raw hard gift of life.

The resurrection of Jesus is for Christians a signal that tells us which way this struggling process of life is moving. Sooner or later God's life, love, and good are going to win over the death and evil of the world's wars, starvation, and cemeteries. If God is not a lie and he has given us first the perilous gift of freedom to create or destroy, feed or bomb; if he has given us that gift of life in the first place, and if he is not aloof but struggling with us, then you and I have to make a decision. Are you going to give your life for causes that win for a while but will ultimately lose? These causes are your own money and pride at the expense of other human beings who don't eat because you and I can’t spend too much. Or, are you going to give your life to God's cause which looks like a loser by world standards but will ultimately win? His cause has to do with worrying about other people's security and necks along with your own, even when your own neck isn't so secure.

"In all things God works for good with those who love him...." It is not a lie. The way you and I who call ourselves Christians live sometimes just make it look like a lie. Amen.