The Wax Museum That God Did Not Build

“I choose not to discuss that which I wish to forget.” That’s what my friend Lyniece Talmadge always said when someone she loved disappointed her with bad behavior. Make that very bad behavior. In taking this attitude, she never confronted the loved one, nor drew from a well of anger. These words were never spoken. The confrontation placed neatly in another room.

Basically I’m a lot like Lyniece, who is one of the best friends that I never see that I’ve ever had. I’m particularly like Lyniece when it comes to the Almighty God. Hundreds of thousands die in Haiti, but do I express any righteous indignation about God’s lack of action to prevent or minimize the suffering? No. I don’t want to go there. This would make God seriously bad and probably dissolve all of the evidence of a good God that I’ve seen firsthand.

Given that I don’t like confrontations, especially where God is concerned, in hindsight I think it is strange that I was actually looking forward to hearing Joe’s lectures this weekend: “God on Trial: The Earthquake in Haiti and the Indictment of God.” The Lenten lectures were spread over two days—Friday night at St. Bede’s with supper and Saturday morning at St. Dunstan’s with breakfast. I probably wasn’t looking forward so much to the topic as I was to sitting in Joe’s “class,” which is never anything if it is not thought-provoking.

The first night we looked at the indictments—Haiti, Katrina, Nazi concentration camps, public lynching. We reviewed His acts—Job, Abraham—the terrible behavior of a God who is basically an ego-maniacal control freak. How do you let a Guy like that off the hook? Maybe the answer is you don’t. You give up worship immediately, board up the church and go home and hide behind your door with a shotgun. This is a God to be feared, not worshiped.

Unless, of course, this is not God but a construction of men to keep us all in our places. This God, they say, is responsible for everything, our actions, the weather. This God punishes for our sins or the sins of our children or neighbors. This God sits on a throne, looking on idly as millions are slaughtered in the genocide in Rwanda.

As I thought, it occurred to me that this is probably just not an accurate interpretation of what God is at all. Man, yes. But God, no. For starters I just don’t believe that God is a control freak. If He’d wanted to keep the world and everything in it completely under His thumb—from the way the wind blows to what we crave for breakfast on a late Saturday morning—He could easily have built a wax museum.

But She didn’t. She chose to be with us if we choose to be with Her. She chose to be found if we choose to look for Her. She appears wherever there is humility and whenever we find the courage and strength to face suffering and death. There is evidence of Her in the faces of everyone we meet. She is on earth, of the earth, and She comforts us. It is nearly impossible not to see Her work. The smell of pine needles. The parishioners who build wells for clean drinking water in Haiti. The person who stops on the street to look a homeless person in the eye, and offer a smile and respect, and maybe even a dollar or two.

I’ll say one more thing—or at least I’ll lift something from the service that preceded Joe’s lecture this morning at St. Dunstan’s—a part of the reading from Philippians 2:2-11: “Do nothing from selfish ambition and conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.”

Okay, really the last thing I’m going to say. It’s this. I think my interpretation of God, now that I’ve been forced to think about it by attending Joe’s lectures, is that She is quite easy to find. And I think that if I reflect on the words of the living Jesus, I can pretty much tell you what I think She wants from us: “Whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me.”

Love your neighbor, all of your neighbors. Do Her work, delight in Her will and walk in Her ways.