Tacit?

Tacit

As a thinking, questioning, doubting person, events of life challenge my faith, cause me to examine, revise, correct, mature my faith. Who and what and where is God, and what does God -- do? Or indeed does God: perhaps God limits self to being, I AM. Any number of times at school I heard a teacher or administrator tell the children “God will protect you.” Many would witness that this is a naivete not borne out in life and that a single disaster makes a lie of it. A child is killed in an auto accident. At Bay High School a 16 year old girl is struck and killed by lightning while walking across a grassy courtyard on campus. Why? The why is called theodicy, the question of why evil happens to us if God is loving, omniscient, omnipotent, real. The question turns many people from faith to agnosticism, or to atheism, or to simply walking away from religion.

In Night, his personal survivor witness of the horrors of the German Holocaust, Elie Wiesel tells of he and his fellow concentration camp prisoners being forced to watch the hanging of a young boy. The child was still alive as he filed past the scaffold and heard someone behind him wonder aloud, "Where is God? Where is He?" Wiesel relates that he heard a voice within himself answer: "Where is He? Here He is — He is hanging here on this gallows..." For Wiesel, the unspeakable cruelties he saw being afflicted upon human beings by other human beings destroyed his faith, murdered his God for all eternity.

Faith in God as described by humans necessitates faith in humankind as well, for it is humans who remember and tell the stories in which God abides, loves, protects and saves. Little intelligence and no imagination is required to see that a crisis of faith could come out of any horror in which God can be perceived as not having protected, especially children. Holocaust. Killing Fields. Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Oklahoma City. 9/11. Tucson. Columbine. Aurora. My Lai. ... lightning strikes, car crashes, Kayla Campbell. Ashlea. Father John Claypool and LauraLu. Tsunami. William’s Field. Cain and Abel.

Why? If Psalm 116 can be forced to ask “if God saved the psalmist, why did God save this one and not that one?” at least Psalm 116 (v. 15, GNT) says, “How painful it is to the Lord when one of his people dies,” which is faith in a God who cares. If the psalmist has it right, we love a God who wept with us Friday even if His lightning didn’t strike a murderer set on evil before he could shoot, or even change his mind. We can believe that our God still weeps with us this morning, even weeps forever with those whose weeping will never cease.

TW+

May God weep with those who loved:

Charlotte Bacon, 6

Grace McDonnell, 7                          

Dawn Hochsprung, 47

Daniel Barden, 7                                       

Emilie Parker, 6                               

Rachel Davino, 29

Olivia Engel, 6                                          

Jack Printo, 6                                   

Anna Marie Murphy, 52

Josephine Gay,  7                                       

Noah Pozner, 6                                 

Lauren Russeau, 30

Ana M. Marquez-Green, 6

Caroline Previdi, 6                            

Mary Sherlach, 56

Dylan Hockley, 6                                       

Jessica Rehos, 6                                

Victoria Soto

Madeline F. Hsu, 6                                    

Aville Richman, 6

Catherine V. Hubbard, 6                            

Benjamin Wheeler, 6

Chase Kowalski, 7                                      

Allison Wyatt, 6

Jesse Lewis, 6

James Mattioli, 6