Where Is God?

"You give your mouth free rein for evil,

     and your tongue frames deceit.

You sit and speak against your kin;

     you slander your own mother's child.

These things you have done and I have been silent;

     you thought that I was one just like yourself.

But now I rebuke you, and lay the charge before you.

Psalm 50:19-21

Another shooting. We almost expect them these days. When you walk into the room and tell folks the news about the latest, no one says, "Oh, I can't believe it!" They may gasp, but then they look downcast and say, "Not again." 

What are people of faith to say and do at such times? Very often, I wish they would say a lot less, other than an occasional, "Lord, have mercy." Like others at such times, people of faith would like answers, would like things to change, would like some way to fix things. Naturally some mine their faith for answers and solutions, sometimes grasping desperately and ridiculously. Some will declare that the pain and violence in our world are somehow punishments from God. Some will even imagine that the victims somehow "deserved it." 

Other people of faith will react very differently. Such moments bring their faith into question. "How can God allow such things to happen?" This actually strikes me as a much more faithful response. The Psalms are filled with cries of "How long, O LORD?" where the faithful state their case and wonder in anguish why God does not intervene. One of today's morning psalms speaks (or perhaps hopes) of such long delayed intervention. The psalmist insists to the wicked (In this psalm God's judgment is aimed at Israel.), that God will not remain silent and inactive forever.

But where is God now?

I suppose that God might ask the same of us. It is our society and our culture of gun violence after all. We certainly bear responsibility, but I will leave that discussion for another time. For the moment, and especially in light of our obvious ineptitude, why doesn't God do something?

If I were God... Surely most of us have imagined such a scenario, and in it, surely we have done something to fix things. All that power at God's disposal. Either God doesn't really exist, or God doesn't act and react in the least bit as we do.

I saw this on Twitter shortly after I learned of the shootings in San Bernardino. It's a quote from Thomas Merton. I don't know if it was tweeted in response to the shootings or not, but it seems appropriate. “Into this world, this demented inn, where there is absolutely no room for him at all, Christ comes, uninvited.” 

This demented inn... That seems an apt description of our world. And if the Christian story is to be taken with any seriousness, God's response to our demented state is to come to us and live among us in a manner totally at odds with our ways. Jesus hangs out with the wrong folks, loves enemies, serves the last and the least, speaks truth to power, and calls folks to follow him in embodying an entirely different manner of living. It gets him killed, of course, How could it not. But even the certainty of death does not turn Jesus aside from his strange way of confronting the brokenness, sin, and demented nature of our world. And the story insists that even in death, he triumphs.

I have to admit that on some days this is not enough for me. I want God to "do something" more in the manner that I would. But Christ is the heart of faith I proclaim. And it is this faith that at times takes root deeply enough in me to seem more real than the reality of this demented inn we inhabit. And if Christ is indeed alive, and if we in the Church are indeed his body, then we do have some notion of how we are supposed to react to the brokenness, sin, and demented nature of our world.

But for the moment, all I can muster is, "Lord, have mercy; Lord, have mercy."

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