Facing the Dilemma of Evil

This Sunday I am offering something of a follow up to the series on God I just concluded.  I found that after my sermon on the idea of God being love and that our example as Christians should be that of loving people, I was asked by no fewer than three different people on three different occasions to respond to the horrific actions of ISIS.  The questions usually revolved around the idea of how do we love them or should we even love them?

The answer I offered was yes, we should love them.  However, we also have to move to protect the people that they are threatening because we are to love our neighbors.  ISIS is a neighbor we are to love, but we also have to recognize that there comes a point when there is no conversation, no compromise, no reasoning with them.  At that point, it becomes our duty to our neighbors to protect them from the advancement of such brutality.

This is not to be entered into lightly.  There are always consequences for actions, and actions that necessitate violence are most especially not to be taken quickly or without consideration for their ramifications.  So how does that stack up against the teachings of Jesus?  It doesn't.  Jesus did not teach, use, or advocate violence.  What we have to wrestle with is the ambiguity of life in that there are those times in which we have to take up arms - contrary to the teachings of Christ.

So this week, I will focus on the dilemma of combating evil.  It is a daunting subject, and one that I find is constrained by time.  It merits further discussion, and I hope to provide only a catalyst for thought.

I would encourage you to take time in your private reflections to read some of the writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was arrested by the Nazis for attempting to assassinate Hitler.  Bonhoeffer was ultimately killed by the Nazis, but not before writing some extraordinary observations for Christians to ponder.  In particular I would draw your attention to his works "The Cost of Discipleship" and "Letters and Papers from Prison."

ISIS is an example of a group that seemingly will not be stopped by anything other than violence.  How do we approach that in terms of our Christian witness?  Carefully, to say the least.

Talking About God

Talking about God isn’t something at which Christians are always proficient.  In many ways, we have learned to talk around the subject of God, but not so much about God.  And that is too bad.  I have long believed that the church should be the place where we can voice our thoughts as well as our doubts and questions without fear of reproach or reprisal and therefore it should be the place where we can talk about God freely and openly.

That isn’t always the case.  Again, that is too bad.

This week I begin a series on God.  The overall series, entitled “God of the Ages” is designed to offer some foundational ideas about God.  The reason is that talking about God is difficult.  Part of the problem in talking about God is that our source of information on God, the Bible, isn’t always as clear as we would wish.  In some places God is described as a person walking in a garden.  In other places, God is a pillar of fire, the power that leads us beside still waters or, as the book of Daniel names God, “the Ancient of Days.”

A bit complicated.

Perhaps it is complicated because the nature of God is so vast and beyond description and comprehension that we will struggle with the concept of God by default.  But there are some signposts along the way that can provide a framework in which we can begin to understand the Biblical witness about God.

The first idea is to think of God as light.  While we hear that God creates light in Genesis, we also can think of God as light in that God seeks to be illuminating.

The second idea is that God is boundless.  While that might not sound like much of an idea, we need to recognize that in the Bible, the idea of God as having no boundaries was radical.  God was limited, or so it was believed, to a particular geographic region.  However, by the end of the book of Exodus, the ancient theologians had begun to think of God quite differently: boundless.

The third idea is that God is love.  This idea is perhaps the most easy to comprehend, but the most disturbing and distressing to all involved.  What does it mean to have a God described by the word ‘love’?  We will think about that together.

I hope that you will be with us in our community of faith as we talk about the subject that is so foundational for our existence – God of the Ages.