BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

When I was a student at Duke, my preaching professor was Richard Lischer.  In his most recent book, Open Secrets, he tells the story of his early years as a Lutheran preacher.  I was struck by something he wrote about his mother…”in the context of our family prayers, her stories helped me understand what God can and cannot do.  God cannot stop your mother from dying or your father from being a drunk.  God can help you survive.” 

When I read that, I thought about how different our faith and actions might be if we just realized what God can and cannot do.

Arie Brouer was a Reformed pastor, part of the Reformed Church in America. At one time he was the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches. As a Reformed pastor, he was part of the Calvinist tradition,
and the tradition that has the strongest emphasis on God’s sovereign rule over the whole creation. It was the Calvinists after all who invented predestination to affirm that God is in control of everything. Every single move that we make is controlled by God.

Then Arie Brouer got cancer. A terrible theological problem for any sensitive Christian, but I would think especially so for a Calvinist. His son asked him about it in the most innocent way. “What does faith mean for
you now that you are facing this?”

Arie Brouer responded by saying that he had believed in God all of his life, and because he has cancer is no reason for him to stop believing in God. His son said, “But you and mom have spent a lot of your life trying
to make this a better place for all people. This is a very strange way to be paid back.”

Brouer said to his son, “Steve, I don’t believe that God wants me to have cancer. But what I have come to believe during these days is that God can’t do anything about it. That raises some very fundamental questions for me about what I have been taught and what I have believed over the years about the almightiness of God. Because if God can’t stop this, then I have to come to some new understanding of God’s almightiness, or perhaps reject it altogether. I haven’t had time to think about this because I am
too busy dealing with all sorts of survival questions. But I am going to work on it.”

And he did. He counted the number of times God’s “almightiness” is mentioned in the New Testament. He discovered it is only ten times. Nine of the ten times are in the Book of Revelation, the last book of the
Bible, which contains John’s vision of the end of persecution and the establishment of a new age. He said, “I looked at those texts that talk about God’s almightiness, and I discovered that every one of them has to do with God’s ultimate triumph in history. They say that at the end of history, God’s love, and justice, and peace, will prevail. At the end of history, God will prevail in the struggle, and that now God is with us in the struggle. And I said to myself, ‘Arie, why in the world haven’t you understood this before.’”

Would it make a difference for us to understand that there are some things God cannot do?  I think so.  And I think it would be for the better.

Filed under: Blogging Toward Sunday