lenten blog | March 5, 2024

Faith doesn't work that way

Throughout the year, the Southern New England Conference of the United Church of Christ reproduces the Daily Lectionary for use by churches.  These are the suggested readings for March 5th:  2 Chronicles 29:1-11, 16-19; Psalm 84; and Hebrews 9:23-28.  I would encourage you to read these short selections as part of your Lenten practice.

Lent is a season of repentance, a time to focus on God in our lives.  If that relationship has broken completely, Lent is the invitation to restore it.  Take the example of Judah’s King Hezekiah in today’s first reading.  His father King Ahaz was judged unfaithful to Yahweh.  He broke with Temple traditions and brought in innovations from foreign lands where foreign gods were worshipped.  The Temple was profaned in this way.  When Ahaz’s son Hezekiah assumed the throne upon his father’s death, immediately he rescinded his father’s policies and turned back to God.  He ordered the priests and Levites to cleanse the Temple so that Israel could return to a proper pattern of worship. 

Hezekiah believed there was a direct causal link between the faith or faithlessness of Judah and God’s protection or harassment of the nation.  He says so much in today’s passage:  “‘Therefore the wrath of the Lord came upon Judah and Jerusalem, and he has made them an object of horror, of astonishment, and of hissing, as you see with your own eyes. Our fathers have fallen by the sword and our sons and our daughters and our wives are in captivity for this. Now it is in my heart to make a covenant with the Lord, the God of Israel, so that his fierce anger may turn away from us.’”  Judah’s fortunes soured because they ceased to worship Yahweh properly and Hezekiah hoped to reverse this trend by restoring Temple worship.

While many people hold on to this transactional understanding of faith – God blesses the faithful and curses the faithless, many more have distanced themselves from it.  The most obvious weakness of this type of theology is all the evidence that is contrary.  There are many very evil people in the world who do just fine, and there are so many good people who suffer terribly. 

Maybe you have heard of Rabbi Harold Kushner’s book When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  The good Rabbi felt compelled to write this book as he dealt with his own struggles of faith.  His three-year-old son suffered from a degenerative disease that would eventually steal his life away in his early teens.  Was the Rabbi somehow responsible?  Was some moral fault of his the cause of his son’s punishment by God?  Did the child of three do something so heinous as to deserve this disease? 

Rabbi Kushner worked through such questions in his book and he concluded that the good God does all that is possible to comfort, but God does not will everything that happens in life.  God allows for our freedom and this in turn allows for chance.  Everything that happens in life and in history cannot be reduced to questions of whether deserve has anything to do with it.  Accidents, diseases and tragedies are not willed by God, but they must be allowed by God if life is to be free and meaningful.

Hezekiah’s story testifies to the vagaries of life.  Good and bad populate his story.  His own example stands against the notion of a transactional faith.  What his story does convey, however, is the power of a relational faith.  In good and bad, Hezekiah knew that God was there.  Lent’s repentance is not to promise rewards as payback.  We turn toward God, we seek out Jesus, to share in the blessings of their presence with us.  Lent stares at a suffering Messiah.  Faith’s power is not defined by protection from everything that hurts or harms, and Jesus’ cross makes this abundantly clear.  But that cross is Jesus’ testimony that God loves us enough even to suffer and die so that when “bad things happen” we can lean on our faith in a suffering Messiah who knows what it is to be us.
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If you’d like, here is the link to the Southern New England Conference’s daily reading schedule:  www.sneucc.org/lectionary.