nothing Profound, just my Rambling
Propers for the Saturday after Ash Wednesday, Year B. Look at the Collect:
Almighty and everlasting God, mercifully look upon our infirmities, and in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth your right hand to help and defend us; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
"... in all our dangers and necessities stretch forth your right hand to help and defend us," is it our existential experience that God in fact does this?
That's the basis of theodicy: if God is all good and all powerful, why is there evil, suffering, pain in the world? And yet, pausing to reflect, I honestly do see it in my life, in my choosing of roads diverging in Robert Frost's yellow wood, my adventures in what has, so far, been a normal, common ordinary human life.
That is to say, the life of a somewhat privileged White American male: did God do this for me? I'm always led down this path of brambles, led bywhat?, by my conscience? led by what Schliermacher asserted as "a sense of the infinite" in each of us? led by common human decency? Does my gracious and generous God not love the children of Gaza?
The theodicy of it shakes my theology when I come across the verse in Isaiah below, "if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness." Its corollary would be "If you do not offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then damn you, you can go to hell."
Surely, the hungry and afflicted do not exist in perpetuity in order to test the godliness of those of us whom the Isaiah passage addresses?
Wandering again, my inclination, but I'm challenged.
Here's a line I came across in googling theodicy: "The Augustinian theodicy asserts that God created the world ex nihilo (out of nothing), but maintains that God did not create evil and is not responsible for its occurrence. Evil is not attributed existence in its own right, but is described as the privation of good – the corruption of God's good creation."
Okay, C S Lewis then. I'm taken to a passage in The Chronicles of Narnia, "The Magician's Nephew" where Polly and Digory escape London with a streetlamp, and Jadis the Witch clutching and hanging on - - escape into a world of darkness where they hear singing. It turns out to be Aslan singing Narnia into existence. A theology would be that Narnia would be perfect except that the humans brought evil into it. It's charming, except that in the Genesis fall story, the serpent stands for evil (you may say that serpents are not evil, but that only shows that you do not see the mindset of whoever first told the Genesis story, where nothing could be more evil than a serpent in the desert), and the story says that nacash the serpent is the most wiley of all the animals that God created. So, Augustine is wrong: evil, or what we experience as evil is indeed part of God's creation.
Which once again leads me back to the question of theodicy: if God is infinitely powerful and infinitely good, why does suffering, pain, evil exist in the world? My answer is that your God is too small and you're starting out with a faulty premise. If you start with a false premise, your entire process of Logic will be rubbish. Theodicy is a theological or philosophical effort to vindicate God, who does not need human vindication. What does observation show? There is pain, suffering, evil in creation (at least here on Earth): what does that tell us about God? That God is not what our needy theological grasping says God is. Is God our creation, or are we God's creation? If we are God's creation, then our Seeking should be to See God based on reality, not on pious wishes about what we think we need God to be.
Rabbi Harold Kushner's book "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" comes out of his life experience of the death of his beloved only son of progeria at age fourteen. Kushner lived the rest of his life with a broken heart; but his book concludes that if he has to choose between an all powerful God and an all loving God, he chooses an all loving God. That's a sound answer to the question of theodicy, even if it doesn't meet our human ideas about what we need God to be for us.
Positing that there is a God, what is God like? A Lenten read through the Book of Joshua could show part of the Jewish experience. This morning's Isaiah reading shows more: what God created us to be versus how we live into that, is a more valid problem than what we imagine God to be.
RSF&PTL
T88&c
Pic: yesterday's breakfast sandwich. On the right side, rye bread, pastrami, and Swiss cheese (melted over the pastrami) from Katz's. Bread smeared with Senf, my German mustard. On the left side, rye bread covered with sauerkraut. Left and Right slammed together to make an incomparable breakfast sandwich.
Old Testament Isaiah 58:9b–14
If you remove the yoke from among you,
the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil,
if you offer your food to the hungry
and satisfy the needs of the afflicted,
then your light shall rise in the darkness
and your gloom be like the noonday.
The Lord will guide you continually,
and satisfy your needs in parched places,
and make your bones strong;
and you shall be like a watered garden,
like a spring of water,
whose waters never fail.
Your ancient ruins shall be rebuilt;
you shall raise up the foundations of many generations;
you shall be called the repairer of the breach,
the restorer of streets to live in.
If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,
from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;
if you call the sabbath a delight
and the holy day of the Lord honorable;
if you honor it, not going your own ways,
serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;
then you shall take delight in the Lord,
and I will make you ride upon the heights of the earth;
I will feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Jacob,
for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.
The Gospel
Luke 5:27–32
After healing the paralyzed man, Jesus went out and saw a tax collector named Levi, sitting at the tax booth; and he said to him, “Follow me.” And he got up, left everything, and followed him.
Then Levi gave a great banquet for him in his house; and there was a large crowd of tax collectors and others sitting at the table with them. The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance.”