Even
though I’m now retired I regularly use something called the Revised Common
Lectionary for suggestions on scripture passages to look at and write on. A
lectionary is a schedule of Bible readings. There are two Revised Common
Lectionaries, one for every Sunday and other significant days of the Christian
calendar that don’t necessarily or ever fall on a Sunday like Christmas and
Good Friday and one for daily use. Sometimes the lectionary does sort of an odd
thing. It will sometimes leave a verse, or a few verses, out of a reading that
you’d expect to be in it. Take for example the reading from the daily Revised
Common Lectionary for today, Monday, June 1, 2020. One of those readings is
Psalm 104:24-34 and 35b. When I saw that I thought what happened to 35a? Why
did they leave it out? When I looked at those verses I saw a couple of reasons
why the lectionary folks might have left 35a out. Verses 24 to 34 are basically
a hymn of praise to God as creator especially of the seas and the creatures
that live in them. Verse 35b reads “Bless the Lord, O my soul.” That fits well enough with most any psalm.
Here’s 35a: “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no
more.” Perhaps the lectionary people left 35a out of today’s reading because it
doesn’t quite fit with verses 24-34 and 35b. Or maybe they left it out because
they don’t like it. I don’t like. I’m happy enough that they left it out, so
maybe I’m projecting my dislike onto the people who put the lectionary together.
Yet verse 35a raises a significant issue for me, and it’s that issue that I
want to address here.
When
I read verse 35a to see why the lectionary might have left it out I thought: If
all sinners were consumed from the earth there’d be no one left. I’ve heard all
my life that we’re all sinners. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and
myself quoted Paul saying “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 3:23. I know that a lot of people in my liberal progressive United Church
of Christ don’t agree and don’t like being told that they have anything for
which they need to be forgiven. I think they’re wrong about that though I
usually don’t know what a particular person’s particular sin is. See, I’m
ordained in the United Church of Christ, and I came out of the UCC’s
Congregationalist predecessor denomination. Congregationalism arose initially
as a Calvinist movement within the Church of England. Calvinist Christianity
has always stressed that we all need God’s forgiveness. Not that most of us are
all that Calvinist any more, but still. We do all need God’s forgiveness. I and
many of my colleagues believe that God offers us that forgiveness freely and
without condition, but our Calvinist forbears didn’t usually agree with that
belief. Witness the famous Congregationalist preacher Jonathan Edwards.
In
1741 Edwards preached a famous, or infamous, sermon with the title “Sinners in
the Hands of an Angry God.” In that sermon Edwards really let his congregation
have it with powerful if highly problematic hellfire and brimstone preaching.
There are in this congregation, he said, sinners who are in deep, deep trouble
precisely because they are terrible sinners. It isn’t clear from Edwards just
what their sin was other perhaps than relying on themselves rather than on
Jesus Christ for salvation. Never mind. These unidentified members of the
congregation were, in Edwards’ opinion, in great peril. Edwards thundered:
“There is nothing that keeps wicked Men at any one moment, out of Hell, but the
Pleasure of GOD.” Justice, he said, calls for “infinite punishment” of sinners,
and only God’s sovereign will keeps them from being cast into hell this very
minute to receive that infinite punishment. He cited John 3:18: Those who do
not believe are condemned already.
He
described the peril of sinners this way:
The Wrath of God burns against
them, their Damnation don’t (sic) slumber, the Pit is prepared, the Fire is
made ready, the Furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the Flames do now
rage and glow. The glittering Sword is whet, and held over them, and the Pit
hath opened her Mouth under them.
And it’s all because of
our sin. We’ve just got it coming: “There is laid in the very Nature of carnal
Man a Foundation for the Torments of Hell….” It is only the “restraining hand
of God” that keeps sinners from being case into eternal torment.
Edwards
used language we could almost describe as flowery except that he’s hardly
describing anything pleasant:
O Sinner! Consider the fearful
Danger you are in: ‘Tis a great Furnace of Wrath, a wide and bottomless Pit,
full of the Fire of Wrath, that you are held over in the Hand of God, whose
Wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the
Damned in Hell: You hang by a slender Thread, with the Flames of divine Wrath
flashing about it, and ready every Moment to singe it, and burn it asunder.
Yikes! And there’s nothing
you can do about it other perhaps than to run to Jesus for salvation.
Sinners
in the hands of an angry God. Really? Are we all really so bad that we deserve
the eternal torment Edwards describes? Is it really in our physical nature that
that’s what we deserve? Is it really only the sovereign will of God that saves
us from it? Is God really so vicious and vengeful as to damn us with unspeakable
torment for eternity? Jonathan Edwards thought so, and he’s hardly the only
Christian to have thought that way. Hundreds of years before Edwards, Anselm of
Canterbury thought that human sin was so bad that nothing a mere human could do
could atone for it. To him that’s why God became in human in Jesus to pay the
price for our sin that none of us could. Two hundred years before Edwards,
Martin Luther thought his own sin was so bad that nothing he could do could
procure its forgiveness. That’s why he figured out that salvation comes from
God not from anything we do. Were these giants of the Christian tradition
right? Are we really nothing but sinners in the hands of an angry God?
No, I
don’t think so. It’s not that we aren’t sinners. With the bulk of the Christian
tradition I believe that there has ever been only one sinless human being. His
name was Jesus of Nazareth. Paul was right about the rest of us. We do sin and
fall short of the glory of God. Whatever may be true in theory, it simply isn’t
possible for any of us to live sinless lives in practice. Who doesn’t get
unrighteously angry? Who can honestly say they’ve never hated anyone? Not me. I
hate Donald Trump. I know that in theory he is a beloved child of God whom I
should love, but I nearly gag on those words as I write them. Maybe God somehow
can love him, but I can’t. Back when I was a lawyer I’d get self-righteously
angry at other lawyers who had done something I thought was underhanded, and
that happened a lot. I’ve never killed anyone. I’ve never been unfaithful to my
wife, but I sure have coveted a lot of other people’s possessions, especially
really nice cars and boats. And let’s not even mention coveting beautiful
women, although I guess if Jimmy Carter can confess to it I can too. I’ve hardly
done all I could to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, care for the sick,
visited the imprisoned, or house the homeless. I don’t think I’m a particularly
bad person. At least I don’t think I’m worse than most other people, and I like
to think that I’m better than some. Am I a sinner? Yes. Are you? Yes. We all do
things that are wrong. It comes with being human.
So is
God as angry with all of us as Jonathan Edwards said God is? Does God have a
hell of eternal torment all fired up and waiting for us? Is it only God’s
totally autonomous will that keeps us out of it? No. See, the God I know, I
know in and through Jesus Christ. Our misdeeds probably do in some sense hurt
God, but God is far above being angry with us. God is a God of grace. That
means that it is not in God’s nature to be angry, it is in God’s nature to love
and to forgive. Brother Jonathan, we aren’t sinners in the hands of an angry
God. We’re sinners in the hands of a gracious God. We’re sinners in the hands
of a forgiving God. We’re sinners in the hands of a loving God. God holds us
always in divine hands of love. We aren’t threatened there. We are safe there.
If all sinners were consumed from the earth as Psalm 104:35a prays for, we’d
all be gone. The great good news of Jesus Christ includes the assurance that
it’s not in God’s nature to do it. For that great gift let all the people say,
Thanks be to God.
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