Elie Wiesel was a teenager when he was taken from his home to the Auschwitz concentration camp. He asked one man there why he prayed and the man replied, "I pray to the God within me that I will be given the strength to ask God the right questions."
We are part of a denomination that celebrates questions. We approve of them, we encourage them, we hope that our members think for themselves. This is an approach to the mission of sharing the gospel in the world, our approach, and the hope that is in it is not that everyone will think differently, but that everyone will come to the obedience of faith through their own authentic journey.
But the story from the prison camp is instructive. There are questions and then there are questions. Some questions are really about avoiding full commitment. We know if we ask certain unanswerable questions, we then have an excuse for holding back. "I would give myself entirely to discipleship, except I haven't gotten answers to the important questions yet."
Other questions are motivated by a desire to move closer to God, to deepen one's commitment, to have a greater understanding and appreciation of God's person and will. These, as Wiesel's fellow prisoner might say, are the right questions.
The great promise of the gospel is really serenity. The word "happy" we have in our psalm today is not the best translation. The Hebrew word translated "happy" might better be translated "serene." The psalm is about deep contentedness, freedom from anxiety, impartial graciousness. It is about the gift of God's Spirit to those who walk in God's ways. Impartial versus partial, whole versus incomplete, loving and gracious and generous to all without exception. This is God's nature, and God shares God's nature with those who walk in God's ways.
Many loving and spiritual people have a problem with the kind of biblical language that condemns. We like to think that God doesn't condemn anyone. We perhaps are thinking of the kind of bigoted Christian who assigned all those good people of other religions to hellfire. The scriptures, to my way of thinking, don't condemn such people. Nor, in the end, do they authorize our condemnation of anyone. They certainly do not authorize violence against anyone, including those whom the bible might declare wicked.
Elie Wiesel's fellow prisoner could have asked "Why do the Nazis prosper? Why do they have the victory?" But the God within him, the Spirit of God, knew that this was not the right question. He might have asked "How do I achieve victory over this powerful enemy?" But the God within him knew that was also the wrong question. Or he might have asked "How will you destroy these evil people?" Again, wrong question.
Certainly the Nazis are a good example of the kind of religion the bible condemns. False religion and evil from a biblical point of view has nothing to do with authentic alternative religions that lead people to loving and ethical lives. The bible regards as false religion and evil those religious and philosophical principles that lead people to oppress other people, to mistreat the planet, to execute people or to go to war. Now I know the Old Testament speaks of war and violence, but in the end, in understanding both Old and New Testaments, the final practice of those who seek the one living and true God is the practice of peace.
So there are persons whom God condemns, sad to say. There are persons God has no use for, as upsetting as that may be. Certainly, God does not expect, nor does he plan, for everyone on earth to become Christian; God is delighted by those who receive God's Spirit in whatever way they find it. But God does condemn the violent, the oppressive, the powerful ones who put on a show of religion but who do not seek justice for the powerless and who are not generous as God is generous. I don't believe God has in mind eternal torment for anyone. I do believe however that many of these useless lives simply snuff out and disappear, while the lives of those who are filled with God's Spirit never truly leave the living world.
God offers us a set of practices, religious and ethical, that in the end are not rational, not even very sensible. But these practices lead us to an openness to God's Spirit, and it's God's Spirit that is the light in the spiritual darkness of the world. Without God's Spirit, the scriptures will not finally make any sense. With it, they glow with holy light.
The fullness of human life, the completeness, the wholeness, and therefore true serenity, lies in the indwelling of God's Spirit. Without it, we are never at peace. Without it, we are not much use to God. Our lives are simply brief flickers that make almost no difference. The missing line in today's psalm has to do with the onlooking wicked person, who sees the one illumined by God's Spirit, was omitted, probably because of how disturbing it is:
The wicked will see it and be grieved;
He will gnash his teeth and melt away;
The desire of the wicked shall perish.
The translation of the Hebrew in the psalm in line four should read more like "there is a light in the darkness for the upright." This is the light of God's Spirit, God's personality, God's perspective. God's nature, God's Spirit, is like water that quenches thirst forever, or food that feeds once and for all. It is like light in a great darkness, and it is like salt in tasteless or bad tasting food.
We sometimes have good reason to get lost in our anxiety or grief. Wiesel's anonymous fellow prisoner certainly had reason to be deeply afraid, didn't he? Of course, our reasons for giving into anger or fear are often much, much less than his.
Nevertheless, there are often times when something truly is being taken from us, or something we need is being kept from us. These are real situations, situations when we are being hurt in one way or another. At such times, we are in profound danger of slipping into the eternal and meaningless nothingness, the spiritual darkness that encompasses much of humanity.
But we have the assurance that the light shines in the darkness and the darkness shall not overcome it. Jesus invites us to accept a majestic and terribly demanding mantle, the mantle of the fullness of our humanity. We are to be a tiny and by most worldly measures an inconsequential light, a bit of crystalline spice, small things that are nevertheless remarkably powerful. And we are to have the courage of being whole despite the great darkness that demands that we cut off pieces of ourselves, that we live incomplete lives, blind, deaf, mute, lame. We are to be uncompromising in our obedience to God in the midst of a world that demands compromise. And we are to trust that the light cannot in the end be overcome, no matter what victories the darkness might seem to accomplish.
This is why Jesus teaches us not to hide God's light. He knows that the darkness will try to overcome it, and that we might in our fear therefore hide it away for safety. But we mustn't hide it. No matter how desperately the world wants to put it out, we mustn't hide it.
There's the story about the cave and the sun. The sun invited the cave to come up and see it's light, but the cave said, "All I see is darkness." But the sun invited the cave to come up again and finally the cave came up and saw the light of the sun. So then the cave said, "come down and see my darkness." But when the sun went down into the cave, the darkness was gone.
Amen.
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