God gets a bum rap sometimes. God tends to get blamed for everything that goes bad. Sometimes the blame is expressed in pious terms, such as "I must have done something bad for God to be punishing me like this," or even "God never gives us more than we can handle." But in the end, it's still God getting the blame. And, well, I have a problem with that.
One of my personal sayings is "It's a good thing you can't sue God," often accompanied by a sad shake of the head. So often people look for someone else to blame, someone else to "pay" for what happened to them.
Not that God needs me to defend him, or her (God deliver me from writing words like Godself in this blog in an effort to avoid gender-based pronouns). God is big enough to deal with any slings and arrows we puny humans may toss in the Almighty's direction.
This week in our Wednesday Bible study my least-favorite verse came up. (I know people always ask the minister, "What's your favorite verse in the Bible?" but you seldom hear anyone ask "What's your least favorite?") It's 1 Samuel 16:14: "Now the Spirit of the LORD departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the LORD tormented him." [NRSV] The first time I came up eyeball to page with that verse, I stopped and said, "Wait a minute! When did the the Lord start sending evil spirits on people?" (BTW, whenever you see the word LORD in caps and lower case in a Bible, it means the underlying Hebrew word is the divine name which is not supposed to be uttered, but which we Gentile yahoos blithely call Yahweh, or YHWH.)
I have had this verse explained to me in a number of ways, including the suggestion that the evil spirit was some sort of mental illness, possibly bipolar disorder. (Think of the descriptions in the Gospels of Jesus casting out demons from people; some of those demonic episodes sound a lot like epilepsy.)
But the notion that God sends out evil spirits really troubled me. One teacher suggested that in the worldview of the writer(s) of that time, everything came from God, both good and evil, so God was perfectly free to send an evil spirit on Saul if he wanted to.
One of my seminary professors brought to my attention a terrific book on this subject called Creation and the Persistence of Evil: The Jewish Drama of Divine Ominpotence, by Jon D. Levenson [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988, 182 pp.]. On the subject of this verse about Saul, Levenson says, "To be sure, Saul, like Pharaoh, is not an innocent man, and the 'evil spirit' that YHWH inflicts on him is at least partially punishment for disobedience...Here we confront the insidiousness of the Evil Impulse...the element in humanness that frustrates obedience to God and casts a shadow of doubt upon the purity of God's benevolence in the act of creation." [pp. 45-46]
Now, I am talking here about a theological issue that the theologians have been wrestling over since, well, since theologians were invented: if God created everything, and if God's creation was good, then where did evil come from? Like, y'know, that serpent in the garden of Eden, like, where did it come from? Where did this "evil spirit from the LORD" come from?
Well, far be it from me to say, being just a humble M.Div. and all, not even a PhD, and certainly without a string of academic publishing credentials to my name. But when God created human beings, s/he didn't create us perfect. And somewhere in that imperfection the Evil Impulse turns up. And God didn't create us with perfect bodies, either, no matter how hard we work out at the gym. Sooner or later, all our bodies give out on us, either by natural (old age) or unnatural (accidents, murder, etc.) means.
And God didn't create us with perfect knowledge. We don't make perfect decisions, and we don't know what the future is (thank you, God, for that one, in spite of how handy it would be in picking winning lottery numbers). So we build our houses in a spot where the earthquake or the hurricane or the tsunami will strike 15 years from now. If we knew it was coming, we wouldn't have done so. But we didn't know. And so when it does come to pass, we say, "How could God let this happen?"
Levenson also says, "The world is not inherently safe; it is inherently unsafe." [p. 17] Yeah. What he said. God's creation is good, but that doesn't make it safe. Somehow we have confused the two.
So, today you came here looking for a blog, perhaps some ramble about a tv show or a book, and this time you got a sermon. Well, that's why they call me Pastor Kathy. Warning to my congregation: you may end up hearing more on this subject some Sunday from the pulpit. Maybe even this Sunday. Stay tuned.
Pastor Kathy
2 comments:
I get the impression that theologians' ideas about the degree to which God intervenes in its creation range from God1 (the clockmaker who made the universe and then stepped aside) to God10 (all is under God's moment-to-moment control; indeed, all is foredained because of God's position outside of time in a place of simultaneity, as it were). The interesting God would be the one down around 2 or 3, who only changes the flow of things only under special circumstances for ... For what? It is a puzzle, particularly because, as my old granny used to say, "God answers prayer. Sometimes he says no." But I'm not a theist, and I won't pretend to be one.
The theologians have a couple of nice fifty-cent terms for the God01 to God10: the "immanence" and the "transcendence" of God. In the simplest of terms, immanence (hope I've spelled that right) is God-right-there with us, in the middle of creation. "Transcendence" is God-over-all, the creator of all things, distant and way up there. The tension is in trying to deal with the concept of both existing at the same time: the God who created quasars and quarks and black holes and gravity also created sparrows and cats and human beings and cares about their lives too. After a theologian writes about a thousand pages on this subject, he or she generally throws up his hands and calls it a "divine mystery." So it goes.
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