Telling the good news
Dear First Pres SLO Family,
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus the Messiah, the one who came and offered us strength for our journeys, and rest for our weariness.
I definitely feel that weariness right now.
All this year I’ve been praying for peace and unity in our political life as we move through this election year. It’s such a hard time of division and friction and disappointment—never was that more true than last Saturday, when a troubled young man tried to kill a former president of the United States. Another man—a husband and father of two—was killed in the crossfire, adding to our feelings of sadness and confusion.
I definitely feel that weariness right now. How about you?
There isn’t any magic solution to all of this. The life of faith isn’t about quick and easy answers—there are no words that will make these feelings disappear. The events on Saturday make us swim in the deep end of reflection on our shared faith. Where was God in all of this?
It’s wrong to proclaim that the failure of the assassination attempt was some kind of miracle. If that were true, what good news would we have to share with the family who lost a devoted husband and father? No, the hard lesson here is that awful things happen sometimes, and that the same God who calls us to live in faith and obedience, remains with us when everything seems to be going wrong. The same freedom that allows us to live and love and serve God, also allows for our brokenness to interrupt God’s good purposes. In the midst of those interruptions, we’re still called to represent the God we know wants the best for all people.
Telling the good news of who God is, even when we suffer, is called theodicy. Literally, theodicy is speaking for God—remembering and sharing the love of God in a broken and wounded world. David Bentley Hart is a theologian who writes about these things. There is honest comfort in these hard words he wrote in the aftermath of a different disaster:
“Ours is, after all, a religion of salvation. Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue his creation from the absurdity of sin, the emptiness and waste of death, the forces—whether calculating malevolence or imbecile chance—that shatter living souls; and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.”
We’re allowed to hate the forces that “shatter living souls”—the crimes and disasters and accidents that steal lives from their place in the world, and from the people who love them. Those forces—not the people who are controlled by them—those forces are the enemies of the life that God wants for every single person. It is our calling to get in front of those enemies and prevent them from stealing more of the preciousness that God has made.
This is a time for all of us, not just the specialists, to open our hearts and represent the real God as we have come to know him through Jesus. As Jen said in her message on Sunday, all of us have a part to play in the living and sharing of God’s love. All of us have that much calling on our lives, and all of us are needed to stand against the forces of hate and oppression and death.
Join me in praying for our country and its leaders, for our church and its place in this community, and for each precious individual person. Life is hard, but it’s not pointless. It’s up to the people of God to remember that, and to share it with a weary world.
Blessings to you,
Pastor John