God Will Take Care of You

 

God Will Take Care of You

September 20, 2020

 

It’s odd how sometimes a couple of different things converge and tell you that there’s something you need to do. That happened to me today. The online worship of the church to which I belong included a hymn this morning with the title “God Will Take Care of You.” It has a catchy tune in 6/8 time. It assures us that whatever happens in life God will take care of us. The line “God will take care of you” recurs numerous times throughout the song. You can easily find recordings of it on the internet if you like. I listened to it on YouTube as I was writing this essay. Then later in the day I was looking at some daily lectionary readings for tomorrow, September 21, 2020. They included Psalm 57, which begins, “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me, for in you my soul takes refuge; in the shadow of your wings I will take refuge, until the destroying storms pass by.” Psalm 57:1. That song and that psalm together told me that I had to write a piece on just what it means and doesn’t mean to say God will take care of us. So here goes.

The line “God will take care of you” that occurs so often in the hymn with that title was a red flag for me this morning. It raised an issue for me that I’ve written and preached on before, but it is so important that I’m going to write on it again here. My church’s online worship is done through Facebook, and the people watching the video can write comments like we can on any Facebook post. I was sufficiently concerned by that lyric “God will take care of you” that I wrote the comment, “God will take of us, but we need to understand what that means and what it doesn’t.” Here’s what I meant by that comment.

In my life, especially in my life as an ordained Christian minister, I have heard people say over and over again that if we pray hard enough and if our faith is strong enough nothing bad will happen to us or to our loved ones. I assume that the people who believe that contention didn’t make it up on their own. I assume that they heard it from some Christian preacher sometime earlier in their life. I’ve heard horror stories of some pastor saying to someone who is grieving the death of a loved one that if the person in grief had prayed harder and believed more strongly their loved one would not have died. My concern this morning was that people could take the line “God will take care of you” to mean precisely that. To mean that God will stop bad things from happening to them or their loved ones.

I was concerned because that contention just isn’t true. Bad things happen to everyone no matter how hard the person prays or how strongly the person believes. Let’s start with the obvious example of that contention’s falsehood. We are all mortal. We are all going to die. All of our loved ones are going to die. Most of us have experienced loved ones dying, or if we haven’t we will. That’s just how it is with us humans. We are creatures not gods. God did not create our bodies to live forever. God just didn’t. Most of the time most of us don’t think much about our mortality, especially in our American culture that so worships youth and avoids ever considering death. Yet except perhaps for very young children we all know that someday we will die. Pray as you might. Believe as you might. You can’t avoid it.

In addition to being mortal, we are all subject to physical and emotional pain, sometimes excruciating. I have suffered both kinds of pain so severe that I hadn’t known I could hurt that much until it happened. Unless you’re very young (and maybe even then) you probably have too. Prayer won’t prevent it. Faith won’t prevent it. Pain is part of our status as creatures not gods. Perhaps some people can go through their lives denying that truth. Most of us can’t. None of us should.

So is that song just wrong when it says God will take care of you? Actually no, the song isn’t wrong. It’s just that we need to reconsider what it means to say that God takes care of us. We can see what it actually means in that first verse of Psalm 57 that I quoted above. The psalmist of that psalm begins by saying, “Be merciful to me, O God, be merciful to me.” Psalm 57:1a. He immediately turns to what he thinks God’s mercy is or what it is that he seeks from God. He writes, “for in you my soul takes refuge….” Psalm 57:1b. The ancient poet of Psalm 57 (which is attributed to King David but surely wasn’t written by him) knew that God provides shelter for our souls. He may also have believed that God will protect our bodies too, but it is his emphasis on the spiritual shelter God provides that best speaks the truth. God does not intervene in human life to keep us from physical harm. I suppose God could do that, but God knows that suffering and death are part of what it is for us to be creatures not gods. God’s being may be perfect. Our creaturely being can’t be and isn’t. God always respects our status as creatures. Divine intervention to prevent suffering or death would violate that status, so God doesn’t do it.

Sometimes people have an experience of avoiding physical suffering, emotional injury, or death, that could well have occurred, and sometimes they think that God has delivered them from those very human things. Whenever I’m tempted to think that God has delivered me from such things I ask myself: What about all the times when God doesn’t do that for people? God has no reason whatsoever to favor me over them. God has no reason whatsoever to choose to protect me from those things sometimes and not at other times. That God protects God’s people from physical, emotional, or spiritual pain and death just doesn’t make sense. God didn’t prevent the Holocaust. God didn’t prevent the crucifixion of Jesus. God just doesn’t do those things.

There is however an even bigger problem with a theology that says that God does protect us from those things than that. Theology that says we can induce God to do it may have destroyed more people’s faith in God than any other theological contention. The belief that God will save us from pain and death will always, inevitably fail the person who holds it. It must fail those people because it simply isn’t true. It’s not how God works. Far too often when the truth that God doesn’t work that way breaks through the belief someone holds that God does, that person loses faith in God altogether because God didn’t do what the person wanted God to do. So let me give you two examples from my own life that demonstrate just how God does care for us when we’re in pain or facing death. I’ve written about them before, so if you’re read them before please excuse me. I keep coming back to them because they so perfectly illustrate just how God does care for us.

A number of years ago my twin brother had a severe stroke. At first the doctors thought he wouldn’t survive it, though in the end he did albeit completely paralyzed on his left side. I went to the hospital where my brother was in intensive care. I didn’t know that hospital. My brother and I didn’t live in the same cities. He was bound to a bed with a breathing tube stuffed down his throat when I first saw him. As he started to come to he was understandably confused and distressed. He was suffering. His wife was suffering. I was suffering. Not as much as my brother and his wife were, but I was grieving what had happened to my twin brother. One day I sat in the family room just outside the ICU where my brother was being cared for. My soul ached. I may have been crying. Then I looked up and saw a crucifix on the wall, a cross with the body of Christ on it. I remember the hospital being Catholic, so I wasn’t surprised to see a crucifix on the wall, although my sister-in-law had told me since that it was a public hospital. If it was it shouldn’t and probably didn’t really have a crucifix on one of its walls. Did God give me a vision of a crucifix that wasn’t there? I don’t know. I just know that I looked up and saw a crucifix on that wall in the ICU family room. As I looked at it I thought, “O yeah. You get it. You’ve been here, and worse.” It helped. Being reminded that God knew my pain, my sister-in-law’s pain, and my brother’s pain, and knowing that God was holding all three of us in that pain helped. It eased my emotional anguish. That’s how God takes care of us.

A second example: In 2002 my first wife died of metastatic breast cancer. During her last hospitalization she was having one very bad day. The medical staff tried to make her more comfortable but ended up only making things worse. It was in the midst of that horrible time that she had the vision. She told me that she had seen both herself and me held in God’s hands and that she knew that we were safe there. After she died a few weeks later our children and I put on her grave marker the words “Safe in God’s Hands.” She was, and she is. I always find this true story to be a powerful example of how God really does take care of us.

God will and does take care of us, but as I said in my Facebook comment this morning we must understand what that means and what it does not mean. The care God gives us is not deliverance from suffering and death. The care God gives us is God’s unfailing, totally reliable spiritual presence with us and our loved ones in absolutely everything that happens in our lives. In the good things yes, but much more importantly in the bad things. In Jesus on the cross we see fully demonstrated God entering in God’s own person into the worst that can happen to a human being. In Jesus on the cross God the Father experiences the suffering and death of God’s own Son. God knows what it is to be human because God became human in Christ Jesus. When we really know that most miraculous and sacred of all truths deep in our souls we can face and bear whatever we must face and bear in this life. That’s how God takes care of us. Thanks be to God! Amen.