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Poole Bay Methodist Circuit worship
Sunday 11th October 2020
Is God fair? - Led by Reverend Tony Cavanagh
Welcome
It is Rev Tony here, and it is good to be with you again this Sunday. I realise that some of you will have returned to church today, and so may be listening on a different day or time, but welcome, it is good to be together. Today we are going to consider a difficult question: Is God Fair? It’s a question that I have heard so many times in recent months, and in so many different contexts, but a difficult question to answer and think upon when are backs are against the wall so to speak. I am mindful that so many are suffering across the Circuit, country and world at the moment, so I humbly offer some thoughts in the hope that in God it will offer words of comfort and challenge to lead us forward on our respective journeys.
So, let’s begin. As we sit quietly for a moment let us listen to and reflect upon the Taizé chant “Jesus, remember me” There is a link for those online:
or the lyrics are below:
Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom,
Jesus, remember me, when you come into your Kingdom.
Prayer Time
As we sit in this moment, we are bound to have brought here with us some of the pressures and busyness of life. Allow God to quieten not just your body but your mind and your spirit too…. Breathe in his peace, breathe out all of the hurry and tension…
Lord, we lay at your feet, all that we are, all that we have been and all that we will become…
Because we can come to you honestly, and because we can trust you never to reject us we have come to confide in you our secret pains and sorrows, our anger, our nagging doubts and regrets, our deepest fears…
So, in this next moment, confide in God, the God who made you, understands you, knows how you feel right now, and loves you. Tell him openly and honestly about those things which weigh heavy on your heart….
The God we worship is also the man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief… He shares in the depth of each personal sorrow, he shares in the deepest darkness of pain, he shares in the anguished face of the tortured, the starving, rejected and oppressed…
So, Lord, in sharing these things with you now, we seek your help…
Think over the amazing power of God, and the capacity of God’s love for you… It is large enough to take the suffering of every person in every generation. Now, lean on that love, and for now, if not forever allow it to sustain and refresh you….
God is not Fair Jonah 3:10-4:11
Our thinking this morning is around the phrase “God isn’t fair”. There is so much pain and suffering around in the world, our country, our churches and indeed our own lives I’ve lost count of the number of times that I have heard that phrase, or one similar to it.
I came across the story of a lady recounting how she was feeling when her dad died in Nigeria at the height of lockdown. It is based on the experience of losing her father and, more particularly, losing her father during this year of all years.
Because of the pandemic, she was not able to be with him when he died. She was stuck over here when her father died in Nigeria and her family were there. Because of the pandemic, she has had to grieve with her family remotely, through computer screens and phones. Because of the pandemic, they have still been unable to bury him properly even months later.
I want to begin my reflection on suffering and the fairness of God by reading a passage from her article:
Messages pour in, and I look at them as through a mist. Who is this message for? “On the loss of your father,” one says. Whose father? My sister forwards a message from her friend, saying that my father was humble despite his accomplishments. My fingers start to tremble, and I push my phone away. He was not. He is.
There is a video of people trooping into our house… to give condolences, and I want to reach in and wrench them away from our living room, where already my mother is settled on the sofa in placid widow pose.
A table is in front of her like a barrier, to maintain social distance. Already friends and relatives are saying that this must be done and that must be done. A condolence register must be placed by the front door, and my sister goes off to buy white lace to cover the table, and my brother buys a hardcover notebook, and already people are bending to write in it. I think, Go home! Why are you coming to our house to write in that alien notebook? How dare you make this thing true? Somehow, these well-wishers have become complicit.
I feel myself breathing air that is bittersweet with my own conspiracies. Needle pricks of resentment flood through me at the thought of people who are more than eighty-eight years old, older than my father and alive and well.
My anger scares me, my fear scares me, and somewhere in there is shame, too—why am I so enraged and so scared? I am afraid of going to bed and of waking up, afraid of tomorrow and all the tomorrows after. I am filled with disbelieving astonishment that the postman comes as usual and people are inviting me to speak somewhere and regular news alerts appear on my phone screen.
How is it that the world keeps going, breathing in and out unchanged, while in my soul there is a permanent scattering?
What a beautifully written and heart-breaking passage! I suspect anyone of us who has lost someone close to us can resonate with her description of the devastation and disorientation that losing someone leaves in its wake.
What also comes through loud and clear in her words is a howl of protest at the unfairness of it all. How can life go on as normal? How can you speak of my father in the past tense already? How can the postman show up with letters for me? How can people older than my dad still be alive while he’s not? It’s not fair!
Even though her dad was in his later years, even though he had a long life full of happy memories, even though the family was close and warm with one another, even though his death wasn’t a long, protracted affair, as so many sadly are, her protest remains. It’s not fair.
No matter whether we claim to believe in God or not, whether we call ourselves “religious” or not, we all have a deep sense that life ought to be fair, no matter how much evidence we see to the contrary.
Wherever you find the complaint, “Life isn’t fair,” you can be sure that “God isn’t fair” isn’t too far behind it. God is, after all, the author of life, isn’t he? Who else would we blame for life’s unfairness?
Many Christians bristle at this suggestion. It seems sacrilegious, somehow. God is good and loving, after all, so God must be fair.
But is God fair? It’s a question worth thinking about.
Even a quick glance at Scripture would seem to yield the conclusion that whatever else God might be, “fair” wouldn’t be at the top of the list.
The book of Job immediately leaps to mind. Job does nothing wrong and yet God allows him to suffer horrendously, which sort of seems unfair.
But one of my favourite stories in all of Scripture about the unfairness of God is the story of Jonah. Let’s hear some of it in todays reading:
Jonah 3:10-4:11
10 When God saw what they did and how they turned from their evil ways, he relented and did not bring on them the destruction he had threatened.
Jonah’s Anger at the Lord’s Compassion
4 But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. 2 He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. 3 Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
4 But the Lord replied, “Is it right for you to be angry?”
5 Jonah had gone out and sat down at a place east of the city. There he made himself a shelter, sat in its shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. 6 Then the Lord God provided a leafy plant and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort, and Jonah was very happy about the plant. 7 But at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the plant so that it withered. 8 When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah’s head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die, and said, “It would be better for me to die than to live.”
9 But God said to Jonah, “Is it right for you to be angry about the plant?”
“It is,” he said. “And I’m so angry I wish I were dead.”
10 But the Lord said, “You have been concerned about this plant, though you did not tend it or make it grow. It sprang up overnight and died overnight. 11 And should I not have concern for the great city of Nineveh, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left—and also many animals?”
In the case of Jonah here, God’s unfairness went in the direction of mercy. Jonah had eagerly desired to have a front-row seat to watch his enemies get exactly what they deserved (in his view), to see the “fairness” of God in action.
But God didn’t act according to the fairness script. Mercy triumphed over judgment. And this annoyed Jonah greatly.
There is a lesson here for us, certainly, for we, too, are often quite eager for justice to be dispensed to those who we think deserve it (usually our enemies).
It’s so easy for us to allow judgment to triumph over mercy, isn’t it? This seems particularly true in our culture where so many people rush to judge and condemn, often based on only part of the story. We are so eager to blame and shame. We are so easily inflamed by a social media machine that is designed to generate and feed off outrage and animosity.
Jonah pouting under his tree could well be a symbol for any of us who take pleasure in the downfall or our enemies and are more preoccupied with our own conceptions of justice and fairness than God’s unfair grace and mercy.
But the problem of life’s unfairness in the other direction remains. It’s one thing to point to a story like Jonah’s and be reminded that for God, mercy is more important than everyone getting precisely what’s fair.
But of course, that does not really address the problem of unfair suffering. We sometimes struggle with unfair mercy, but only when it goes to those who we would prefer it bypass. We are always quite happy to be on the receiving end of this mercy.
But unmerited suffering is quite another thing.
Jesus Christ is, of course, the ultimate example of one who was treated unfairly, who suffered grotesque and violent punishment despite being the very embodiment of peace and righteousness.
If anyone had good cause to protest, “It’s not fair!” it would be Jesus. And yet, that’s not what he says, as he hangs on Calvary’s cross. Instead, his dying words are, “Forgive them. They don’t know what they’re doing.”
This isn’t fairness in action. It’s mercy.
In a mysterious way, unfair suffering puts us in touch with the very heart of God.
I don’t say this casually in any way. I know how deeply painful suffering is. I know that some people have endured unspeakable tragedy and devastating loss even in recent days and in our churches.
But we are here dealing with one of the deepest and most hopeful mysteries of the Christian faith.
We worship a God who, in Christ, suffered as an expression of forgiveness for humanity, and to heal a wounded creation. We worship a God who, in Christ, groans alongside us now as we anticipate the kingdom coming in fullness.
When it comes to suffering and the fairness of God, the Christian message is that no, God is not fair. And we should be thankful for that.
God is, as Jonah complained, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. God is, as Jesus demonstrated, willing to suffer unjustly for love’s sake.
This does not magically make the difficulties of life’s unfairness disappear. Life is still hard. Suffering still hurts. But knowing who God is and how God loves gives us comfort and hope.
It also gives us an example to follow. As imitators of God, we, too, are to be eager to extend undeserved mercy. We, too, are to locate our sufferings within the suffering of Christ.
And we do this in the sure and confident hope that God’s mercy and justice will one day overwhelm, transform, heal, and redeem all of the ugliness and unfairness that our world has ever seen.
This is the Christian hope my friends—not that one day all the mathematical equations will work out, that the scales will be meticulously balanced, and everyone will get the same thing, but that the just and merciful and perfect love of God will have the last word on every human story and the story of the entire universe.
I have come to see that this is our good news, and this is our hope, and I hope that that wherever you are in life’s journey you may know or come to see that too. Please know that whoever you are, whatever you have been through, however you are feeling – even if it is anger at God, or a denial that he exists. He loves you and still supports you. Thanks be to God. Amen.
We are now going to listen to, or sing, Beauty for brokenness sung by the Winton Band:
There is a link if you can listen:
Or the Lyrics:
Beauty for brokenness
Hope for despair
Lord, in the suffering
This is our prayer
Bread for the children
Justice, joy, peace
Sunrise to sunset
Your kingdom increase!
Shelter for fragile lives
Cures for their ills
Work for the craftsman
Trade for their skills
Land for the dispossessed
Rights for the weak
Voices to plead the cause
Of those who can't speak
God of the poor
Friend of the weak
Give us compassion we pray
Melt our cold hearts
Let tears fall like rain
Come, change our love
From a spark to a flame
Refuge from cruel wars
Havens from fear
Cities for sanctuary
Freedoms to share
Peace to the killing-fields
Scorched earth to green
Christ for the bitterness
His cross for the pain
Rest for the ravaged earth
Oceans and streams
Plundered and poisoned
Our future, our dreams
Lord, end our madness
Carelessness, greed
Make us content with
The things that we need
Lighten our darkness
Breathe on this flame
Until your justice
Burns brightly again
Until the nations
Learn of your ways
Seek your salvation
And bring you their praise
Graham Kendrick
Copyright © 1993 Make Way Music,
Prayers:
Recognising our brokenness and that of the world around us, let us pray for peace amidst the turmoil.
Let us pray for those who are full of anger, resentment, and bitterness…
For those who feel burdened with guilt and who long to find freedom and forgiveness…
For those who are desperately lonely and who feel unwanted or unloved…
For those living with physical and mental health conditions…
For those who are crippled with grief at the loss of a loved one…
Lord fill them with your peace.
And, God of peace, flow through us, and use us as Kingdom builders and channels of your peace amidst a broken and fractured world.
Amen
The Lord’s Prayer:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name;
thy kingdom come;
thy will be done;
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation;
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
the power and the glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
Let us draw our worship time to a close with listening to, or singing the hymn Make me a Channel of your peace:
There is a link:
The Lyrics:
Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there is hatred let me bring your love;
Where there is injury your pardon, Lord;
And where there's doubt true faith in you.
Refrain:
Oh, Master grant that I may never seek
So much to be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love with all my soul.
Make me a channel of your peace.
Where there's despair in life let me bring hope;
Where there is darkness, only light;
And where there's sadness, ever joy.
Refrain
Make me a channel of your peace.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
In giving to all men that we receive;
And in dying that we're born to eternal life.
Refrain
A blessing:
May the road rise to meet you,
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face,
May the rains fall soft upon your fields.
And until we meet again,
May God hold you in the palm of his hand.
Amen
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