Holy Spirit:  We come to You now as your eager listeners; as children who want to hear a good word for us today.  We pray that, in our eagerness, you will open our ears to be able to hear You anew; that having heard, You would open our minds to be able to understand.  Having heard and understood that You would open our hands that we may go forth from here and do as You have said.  It’s in Jesus Name that we pray, Amen

 

I read a wonderful passage this week from a devotional that I'm going through. I want to share it with you. It reads with these words: “You can never go beyond My Love and Care.  Remember that.  No evil can befall you.  Circumstances I bless and use must be the right ones for you.  But I know always that the first step is to lay your will before Me as an offering, ready that I shall do what is best, sure that, if you trust Me, what I do for you will be best”. (God Calling, June 29).  What wonderful words that these are when chaotic times tempt us to take control rather than wait for the Lord!

 

And the times do present each of us with a good bit of chaos. We look first at the local scene. The recent deaths in our congregation have struck us hard as it dawns on us that a generation dear to us is passing.  With my imminent departure and Dara’s recent move, there’s anxiety over Central’s leadership and future course.  We go outside this congregation and we only have to go about two blocks to realize that we’re paying a lot more for gas which makes decisions about commuting, vacations and visiting friends or loved ones a little bit more complicated than it used to.  And then there’s a larger picture.  The cost of living is on a sharp increase, the ripple effects of now $142 per barrel of oil. Oil prices influence prices at the grocery stores, employment and our ability to support charities and even churches.  We’re in the midst of an expensive war with terrorism and no one knows for certain the results of the changing political landscape.  When we hope for a church to be a source of stability, this week our General Assembly made some significant decisions that will deepen the ideological and theological divisions in our denomination.

 

So, today, when I see the smaller and the larger pictures, I experience a good bit of perplexity.  I say all this because we live in confusing times and as much as I wish it weren’t so, all the wishing in the world isn’t going to make things any less muddled.  So I ask you, as I’ve asked myself several times in the past couple of weeks, what’s a Christian to do in times of chaos?

 

Our new 39-year-old San Francisco pastor-moderator of the denomination may think we’ve evolved beyond traditional faith (I think he’s got a lot of things coming to him when he visits the deep south), but I still cling to the things that have worked for countless Christians who’ve struggled to find the way of peace through times of uncertainty.  One reading put it this way:  “Cling to Me until the life from Me--the Divine Life, by that very contact, flows into your being and revives your fainting spirit.  Become recharged.  When weary, do as I did on earth--sit by the well.  Rest.  Rest and gain power and strength, and the work, too, will come to you as it came to Me.  Rest until every care-thought has gone, and then let the Tide of Love and Joy flow in” (God Calling, June 23 reading).  In other words, when chaotic times muddle our ways, we must find rest in the security and providence of God.

 

My answer stands in the long tradition of theologians who have faced the question of evil and chaos squarely and emerged hopeful.  At the root of chaos stands the genesis of God’s redemption.  While it’s true that chaos is the playground of the Evil One, Barth wrote, “Whatever evil is, God is its Lord”.  Centuries before Barth, Augustine addressed the problem of evil by suggesting that God has decided for the time being to co-exist with evil so that humans can learn to become more Christ-like.  Chaos exists, Augustine would suggest, because we live in a morally unjust world.  The role of Christians is to tell the world of sin that God is good and offer it a way out of the chaos.  Put it in another way, chaos exists to enable Christians like you and me, to offer a lost world redemption and healing by going through that chaos with God ourselves.

 

More recently, C.S. Lewis claimed that unlike our ancestors we’ve replaced notions of sin and evil with injustice.  Today, Lewis said, “God is on trial.” (He wrote a book called “God in the Dock”, an excellent collection of essays.)  It says ‘God is on trial and people presume to be able to correct evil, chaos and even sin, by human means rather than by leaning on God.’

 

Consequently we hear, even in the church, suggestions like these:  ‘if we but put the right person in the White House our hopes for peace will come true’.  ‘If but the government took care of every injustice in society, we’d be a harmonious conglomerate of peace, justice, love, and fairness for all’.  Oh, if only we could correct human injustice with human solutions.  But, the gospel is clear on this point, which sadly, even some Christians, I think, have forgotten.  Humans are incapable of redeeming themselves from sin or removing sin’s effect upon society.

 

On this side of heaven, our condition is to live with chaos and evil.  Nothing--neither time, no amount of self-help books, psychology, and not even social justice--will right this uncorrectable condition.  Our only hope rests in the indisputable fact that God Himself, in the form of Jesus Christ, conquered sin, chaos, and evil.  So our hope can’t rest upon humans, but only upon God!  Rather than trust in the feigned goodness of humanity, we trust in the absolute goodness of God.  But we trust also in this--that because God chooses to live with chaos, and reign over evil while not dissipating it completely for the time being, we can abide with God’s choice even if it means struggling through the chaos to emerge triumphant.

 

Letting God rule, rather than trying to take charge of things ourselves and do it in our own way, is the challenge of chaotic times.  This is the essence of what the Evil One pitched against Jesus after being in the wilderness fasting for forty days.  Notice that the only temptations that are mentioned by name are the ones that Jesus, after Jesus had fasted for 40 days.  It was a time of urgency for Jesus.  After 40 days of fasting, certain things begin to happen to the body.  The body becomes urgent for food.  People who fast this long are compelled by weakness of mind, body and spirit to do anything for food.  This is precisely the time the Evil One came upon Jesus for the full-out assault.   The Evil One uses chaos and urgency as opportunities, and what Jesus teaches us is that it’s in those moments of dire urgency; it’s in those most chaotic moments when everything seems upside down and we would do anything in the world to change our circumstances!  That’s the time to lean on God more than ourselves.  If we focus just on the first temptation, to make bread from stone, what’s the problem?!

 

‘What’s the problem of making bread from stones?  You’re the Son of God, you can do this!  You’re hungry, you can change this!’ The problem with that was that at the root of this temptation was the temptation to fix his own urgency by turning to something other than God.  God had not yet ended the fast and it was not going to be up to Jesus himself to do it.  So, he turns to Scripture and he says, “I need to wait on the Lord”.

 

In each case (we won’t go through the other two)--in each case of the temptations, Satan is using the chaotic moment to get Jesus to change God’s will.  And in each case, Jesus turns to scripture and says, in effect, “Not yet.  Not until God has acted will I act”.  He turns away from the Evil One and he turns toward God through Scripture.  He didn’t reason with the Evil One, He didn’t debate.  He just turned to Scripture.  How foolish we are when we think we can do what even Jesus didn’t do; which is what the Evil One does do!  The Evil One reasons beyond God’s Word.  He muddles things through turning us away from God and asserting that we, like He, can proclaim ourselves masters of our own destinies.  And we, like the sheep that we are, follow his advice and end up in more chaos than when we started.  I’m not suggesting that in times of chaos we become passive.  But folks, there is a Godly way to seek justice and there’s a way that appears to be holy.  I may say something controversial; I may not be saying something controversial here.  But God, believe it or not, is not a citizen of the United States of America.  God does not abide by our constitution and our Declaration of Independence!

 

So often the church gets wrapped up into western notions of what God wants for the world and we apply this often when it comes to things like social acts, social justice or making sure that the right thing is done.  Everybody faces the temptation to correct chaos by our standard of how we think God would want the chaos to be corrected. But God is above it all.  God is a God of the South African; He’s the God of the Asians; He’s the God of the people in Thailand; He’s the God of the people in the United States; He’s a God over all of us. He’s a God over 3,000 years ago; He’s a God over 3,000 years from now.  God is so completely over all of our affairs.  Who are we to define what God must do in a certain time and place?  It’s very humbling to be the Creation, isn’t it?  It’s humbling for Christ to take off his mantle of complete and utter divinity and take on complete and utter humanity and combine the two.  That’s the point of Philippians.  At the heart of Christian formation is the same spirit of humility that characterized Jesus.  That’s what Philippians 2 is about.

 

While Jesus was on earth, he laid aside His sovereignty, not his divinity. He laid aside His sovereignty in order to don the mantle of dependence on the Father that we have.  He came to show us that there is a way out of the chaos of the moment by leaning more on God and less on ourselves.  He came and endured the chaos that faced Him to show us that what is good enough for Him, is good enough for us.  There’s no promise that the urgency of the moment will subside but hope abides that God is using all the chaos that surrounds us to achieve His will for humanity. God doesn’t redeem us from the chaos completely because we are his messengers of hope as people who have their hopes built, not upon the fact that things are going well, but upon Christ alone.

 

So, God won’t remove the high gas prices.  Unfortunately, He won’t change minds about political and theological issues that we find painful, and mysteriously He will not cure every social injustice on this side of heaven.  Nevertheless, we say, with confidence, the same prayer of praise and hope that God’s children have been proclaiming since the dawn of the Church.

 

We say THANK YOU, JESUS THAT YOU ARE THE ROCK SO WE CAN REST ASSURED THAT NO MATTER WHAT HAPPENS AROUND US OR TO US, WE REMAIN YOUR BELOVED AND YOU WILL USE ALL THIS TO YOUR GLORY IF WE BUT REMAIN FAITHFUL.  HELP US LORD, NOT TO TAKE THE REINS OF CONTROL AS MUCH AS TO LEARN TO WAIT ON YOUR PERFECT TIMING, LEAN ON YOUR PERFECT WISDOM AND BE GUIDED BY YOUR PERFECT WORD.

 

HALLELUJAH, AMEN