“The Whatabouts: Responding to Questions with Faithfulness,” Week Three
As the threats posed by Hurricanes Laura and Sally forced me into adjusting to the threat of a natural disaster I had heretofore very little experience preparing for (Kansas is, after all, not exactly known for being a hurricane hotspot for obvious reasons, and the West Coast only slightly less so), I was receiving a steady stream of saddening, disturbing, even harrowing photos from my friends on the West Coast of what their new normal was under inhuman levels of fire and smoke. Furiously red skies, smoke that obscured churches and houses alike, fires that raged all unabated painted a genuinely and literally hellish portrait. Seeing it all broke my heart for the area of the country that had been my home for almost all of my adult life until now, even as Carrie and I prepared for damage from hurricanes that, at least in here Birmingham, fortunately never materialized--even as they did elsewhere.
We are not so far away from a time when prominent religious leaders would look at such natural disasters, or pandemics like the one we have been experiencing for most of this year, and proclaim them as signs of God’s wrath or disfavor upon a people. Pat Robertson famously proclaimed the catastrophic 2010 Port-au-Prince earthquake a punishment by God for Haiti’s Black founders having had the temerity to revolt against their white European slaveholders. It was not so long ago that some US Christian leaders shamefully preached that HIV/AIDS was a punishment sent by God. And after a hurricane, there is almost inevitably a headline about one religious leader or another interpreting it as divine retribution for something that leader detests, you can practically set your watch to it.
But if we do not count ourselves among such doommongers (and I hope we would not) how do we answer when people asking—whether skeptically or in earnest—us, “What about divine wrath?”
This sermon series is my first as your new minister here at Valley, and I arrived at it after multiple conversations with the search committee about how and why evangelism came to be noted as so important a trait in the congregation’s search and call profile. And specifically what I heard was a need to be equipped to talk to people about faith in a way that could answer their questions—questions to which we may or may not have all the answers, or not feel comfortable answering.
The way I experienced doing evangelism on the West Coast would sometimes come in the form of fielding questions from folks skeptical of the nature of my faith in God as revealed in Jesus Christ, and I came to think of those questions as “the whatabouts,” as in, “Well, what about…?” Being honest in those moments was vital for my own integrity and for my friendship with the person asking me. I crafted this sermon series to tackle many of these questions a way for me to share with you what evangelism has looked to me and in my ministry, by trying to answer those whatabout questions, and as a way to let you into my own theology and faith.
This week’s question is, “What about divine wrath?” And this may be, for you, one of the toughest questions we tackle in this entire series—I know it is for me. I was raised to imagine God as all-loving, perhaps you were as well, and it is very difficult to imagine an all-loving God being wrathful.
It was much less difficult for Ezekiel, though, and once you know a bit about him, it is easy to understand why. Ezekiel was, to use the academic seminary term, a character—he begins chapter three his book by taking a scroll of God’s word, eating it, and declaring it to be as sweet as honey.
Ezekiel was what we would call an exilic prophet—meaning his career overlaps with one of events that most shaped the Tanakh: the exile into Babylon. The exile began in 586 BCE, when Nebuchadnezzar II sacked Jerusalem, but Ezekiel began has career several years earlier, while the kingdom of Judah was still hanging on by a thread as a borderline failed state under the rule of Zedekiah, a puppet king handpicked by Nebuchadnezzar.
Zedekiah’s reign began around 596 BCE, less than fifteen years after the death of Josiah, the last righteous and effective king of Judah. It took only fifteen years for the kingdom of Judah go from being ruled by a faithful and skilled ruler who brought about vast reforms to the kingdom to being weak enough to be functionally taken over by Nebuchadnezzar. That is a precipitous decline, and you can imagine Ezekiel’s indignation at having to witness it in real time.
Ezekiel was not the only prophet to see how terrible things became under Josiah’s successors, primarily Jehoiakim. Jeremiah, who precedes Ezekiel in our Scriptures, laced into Jehoiakim at length, condemning the king as someone who, unlike his father, did not care about the people or their welfare, and cared only about feathering his own proverbial nest. For Jeremiah, much of the ill that befell Judah after the death of Josiah can be attributed to Jehoiakim’s unrighteousness.
Now, back to Ezekiel—he uses more R-rated language than Jeremiah does, but he is essentially making the very same point here in this passage. He uses the destruction of Sodom as an attention-getter—Sodom would have been just as infamous then as it is now, but Ezekiel then interprets that story in a way that pushes against the traditional, harmful interpretation that Sodom was destroyed over homosexuality. To Ezekiel, the real sins of Sodom—the reason why God could not find just ten righteous men and so destroyed it—were pride and the enjoyment of riches while denying help to the poor and needy, and they became haughty. That is the reason for God’s anger towards the city.
That is very different from the story we may have been told by generations of church past, but it is very similar to the story we are told by Jeremiah. In effect, each prophet corroborates the other, that the post-Josiah kings of Judah were emulating the sins of selfishness, greed, haughtiness, and pride.
Seeing others exhibit those sins should upset us—the selfishness, greed, haughtiness, and pride that Ezekiel lists off as Sodom’s real sins are far from victimless. And if such sins upset us, we should not be so surprised that they would upset our creator, even a creator as all-loving as ours.
That does not mean there is not good news to be had in the notion that God is capable of anger. Just last week, we talked about injustice and how it impacts God, because God has to witness it, just like us, and experiences it alongside of us. Injustice is caused by sins like selfishness and greed—the sins of Sodom, Samaria, and, subsequently, Jerusalem. I cannot imagine that such experience would not make God angry; indeed, that evil would upset God ought to be good news to us because a God who is not upset by evil sounds like an awfully apathetic or uncaring deity.
For prophets like Ezekiel and Jeremiah, a God capable of wrath is a source of good news, of reassurance, of potentially even comfort. It means that God is moved by their plight, just as God was moved by the plight of the enslaved Israelites when we talked about the Exodus story last week.
Is there a distinction to be drawn, then, between a wrathful God and a punitive God—a God who punishes excessively or unnecessarily? I don’t think that’s grasping at Biblical straws—I think it is important to acknowledge that God is capable of anger, even if that anger is slow in coming. Which, in turn, should mean that we are slow to say that God is angry at us, rather than reach for it almost reflexively and hurtfully like after an earthquake or a hurricane. Indeed, our near-instantaneous and unsolicited proclamations of what must be a punishment from God is, I think, the real sin here.
For if the anger is slow in coming from God, then so too must be the punishment. For us to say in one breath that God is all-loving and then in the next that God punishes quickly and harshly isn’t virtuous, it’s creating an image of a God who is abusive—who says they love you while punishing you with pain and injury. That is what we cannot, must not do. We may get to say that God is upset by sin; we do not get to be so presumptuous to know how God addresses that sin in this life.
So, what about divine wrath? How do we find the good news in a God capable of it? I think by acknowledging that anger and punishment are two different things, and that anger does not mean we get punished by God unjustly or unnecessarily. If God is upset with something we have done, individually or as a nation, we can take solace in the knowledge that it has been well and truly earned, and we are given the chance to repent accordingly. That's the unearned grace at work. God loves us so much that the grace is always available for us to choose.
And that is no small thing. God may be capable of anger, but God is still fundamentally a God of love. God always has been, and God always will be. And an infinite, ever-present God is surely big enough to leave room for anger at how we harm one another while still loving us precisely because God does not want to see us harm one another. God does not want to see God’s beloveds hurt.
That’s the thing about love: it intrinsically, inherently, eternally means that you do not want to see the object of your affection suffer. We are that object of affection for God, and so when we suffer, that should upset God. When we inflict suffering on others—who are God’s beloveds as well—that should upset God. Yet God still loves us enough, more than enough, to make space for grace amid our transgressions, and for reconciliation amid our trespasses.
That grace was enough for you yesterday, it is enough for you
today, and it will be enough for you tomorrow. The empty tomb made sure of
that. The question for us has been, and will always be, how to live in a way
that we are ruled by the resurrection, not the suffering that made it
necessary. May that resurrection rule us--today and on all days.
May it be so. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson
Birmingham, Alabama
September 27, 2020