The reality of God's goodness

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church

St. Andrew's exists to proclaim the Gospel and to share the love of God in our church and in our community

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November 15, 2020

Psalm 73, John 14: 6-14 Over thirty years ago, I preached my first sermon. It was New Year’s Eve, 1989. I preached the sermon in the basement of the church where my father was senior minister. Six months earlier, the church’s sanctuary hosted my high school graduation ceremony. I spoke as the Class of ‘89’s Valedictorian. Some of you might recall that between June and December 1989, the world changed in previously unimaginable ways. In August, Hungary removed the fence along its border with Austria. Within weeks, thousands of East Germans began crossing the border. In October, thousands of people from the East German city of Leipzig, based at the church of St. Nicholas, started peaceful protests demanding democratic elections and the right to travel. Within a matter of weeks, on 9 November, the communist regime agreed to allow its citizens to cross the border with West Germany. The famous wall dividing the city of Berlin became a meeting place and not a barrier. The same month, within the space of ten days, the communist government of Czechoslovakia collapsed. And then around Christmas, Romanian dictator Nicolai Ceausescu was executed. No one in the Western media, academia, government, had seen this coming. Within a matter of months, the Iron Curtain separating Europe into competing economic and political systems was gone. The world changed remarkably quickly between June and December 1989. Over the next few years, the world seemed to change for the better. Germany reunited, the Soviet Union collapsed, the threat of nuclear war diminished. The great conflicts of the post-war world were over: we had peace and prosperity. Prosperity and peace lasted about a decade. Then really bad things happened. The terrorist attacks in September 2001. The Financial Crash in 2008. And then, Covid 19 in March of this year. Governments and electorates made decisions that polarized publics: the invasion of Iraq in 2003; the admission of a million Muslim migrants into Germany in 2015; and the double whammy in 2016: Brexit and Donald Trump’s election. The world did not, as the UK band Jesus Jones sang in 1991, ‘wake up from history’ with the end of the Cold War. If by ‘history’ you mean political conflict, economic turmoil, culture wars, and social upheaval. Is the world today getting better, or is it getting worse? Asking this question is a bit like asking ‘were the French Wars of Religion really about religion?’ The answer depends a lot on whom you ask, and when you ask them. We can say the same thing about God’s goodness. Do you believe in the goodness of God? Can you believe in God’s goodness when the world today is in the state that it’s in? It depends on whom you ask and when you ask them. When I was asked to preach on New Years’ Eve 1989, I was given the topic ‘the goodness of God’. With some wise advice, I preached on today’s Psalm passage. Psalm 73 shows us that the best place, the best time, to ask the question of God’s goodness is in worship with God’s people. Worship is when and where the question of whether or not the world is getting better or worse yields to the truth and the reality of God’s goodness. Psalm 73 relates a story of faith, doubt, and a re-affirmation of faith. We could also say that the psalm dramatically presents an experiment: there is hypothesis (a theory), the hypothesis is tested by experience (the facts), and in light of the facts, the hypothesis is proved true. But the truth of the theory is proved in the particular context of God’s presence. Psalm 73 begins with a solemn declaration of God’s goodness: Truly God is good to the upright, to those who are pure in heart. But immediately there is doubt. Is it true that God is good to the upright and pure in heart? For what does the psalmist see all around him? The wicked prospering! They are well-off, arrogant, conceited, bold, and even popular! Verse 4: For they have no pain; their bodies are sound and sleek Verse 8: They scoff and speak with malice; loftily they threaten oppression. Verse 12: Such are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches. Verse 10: Therefore the people turn and praise them and find no fault in them. The declaration of verse 1, the theory that God is good to upright people, to those who are pure in heart, is contradicted by the facts all around. It’s the wicked whose lifestyle pays off in prosperity, in superior mating opportunities, in more children. The psalmist’s sole reward for leading a good life was to be ‘plagued’ and ‘punished every morning’; in other words—leading an upright life made him sick. Then, the psalmist stops talking to himself and starts talking to God. The psalmist sees that to talk ‘this way’, about the uselessness of leading an upright life, about the folly of believing God, to talk that way meant betraying the trust of God’s people. Part of the problem was that the psalmist was trying to solve the contradiction between the theory of God’s goodness and the fact that the wicked prosper intellectually. Trying to make sense of the contradiction brought mental exhaustion. The turning point happened in God’s sanctuary. There and then the fate of the wicked became clear. The best place, the best time, to ask the question of God’s goodness is in worship with God’s people. Worship is when and where the question of whether or not the world is getting better or worse yields to the truth and the reality of God’s goodness. 18 Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. 19 How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! 20 They are[d] like a dream when one awakes; on awaking you despise their phantoms. In fact, the prosperity of the wicked is insubstantial. Indeed, the wicked are not real—they are like a dream. If you want a modern parable of these verses, watch the film The Big Short about the US mortgage market and the 2007 – 2008 financial collapse. Why couldn’t the psalmist see that the prosperity of the wicked was an illusion? His heart, his will, was disordered. His heart was disordered by envy. Jealousy of the wicked made the psalmist stupid. Stupidity from envy stopped the psalmist from seeing the truth: that God’s hand was in his. That God was holding his hand the whole time. God was, God is, with the psalmist the whole time, all through the doubt and uncertainty. And this presence does not end. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory As the NIV, more rightly in my view, has the Hebrew translated. By now, the psalmist is so sure, so certain of God’s presence, that even a major health crisis cannot make him doubt God’s goodness. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength[f] of my heart and my portion forever. By the end of the psalm, the speaker can see clearly. Indeed, truly, people who are far from God will not endure. The prosperity, the shalom of the wicked will not last because it is not real. What is real is God’s righteousness, God’s justice, God’s goodness. God’s goodness relativizes the seeming good-life of the wicked. The good-life enjoyed by the wicked isn’t real. What is real, what is good, is God’s presence. By the end, the psalmist can reaffirm his faith in God. God is the psalmist’s refuge. Happiness is not found in prosperity and power and status. Happiness is found by all who take refuge in the Lord (Ps 2.12). Here we have a dramatic transformation: a strong statement of faith (the theory); a profound experience producing radical doubt (the facts); a transformation of perspective—a new way of seeing the facts; and at the end, a renewal of faith. The theory held up after the facts were properly interpreted. It was the transformative experience of worship that changed the speaker’s false perception of the facts—facts about the wicked. 17until I went into the sanctuary of God; then I perceived their end. 18 Truly you set them in slippery places; you make them fall to ruin. 19 How they are destroyed in a moment, swept away utterly by terrors! We can take at least one negative and one positive lesson from the psalmist’s transformative experience of God’s goodness. First, our theories about God, including God’s goodness, do not always match the facts. Indeed, the so-called philosophical problem of evil stems from the apparent contradiction between the radical goodness of God and the radical evil that courses through the world. Why would a good God allow so much pain and suffering to exist? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do the wicked enjoy such a good life? If our theories don’t always match the facts, and if they cause people to doubt God’s goodness, even to doubt God’s existence, we should not be surprized. Doubts and questions are part of our experience—doubting the faith, doubting God is not always wrong. Sometimes doubt emerges from inexplicable suffering and pain. Sometimes doubt, however, emerges from envy. Doubting the goodness of God, doubting the justice of God, sometimes makes sense. But doubting because we don’t have the ‘good things’ we see others enjoying does not make sense. Constant doubt and questioning corrodes relationships. If you always start your interactions from a place of doubt and questioning, you will soon find yourself living a lonely, miserable existence. The prospect of constant doubt leading to radical loneliness relates to the second, the positive lesson, of the psalmist’s transformation. That is, you will not resolve your doubts on your own. You simply can’t think your way out of the break between theory and fact. The psalmist needed an experience in the sanctuary. In the Temple, in the place of worship with God’s people, there and then he saw what was and is real and true: that God is good; that it is good to be near God. In other words, worship is where and when we get the best answer to the question ‘is God good?’ Psalm 73 shows us that the best place, the best time, to ask the question of God’s goodness is in worship with God’s people. Worship is when and where the question of whether or not the world is getting better or worse yields to the truth and the reality of God’s goodness. So here is our paradox—our contradiction. The pandemic is reason to doubt in the goodness of God, and because of the pandemic we are not gathering as God’s people to worship God. Psalm 73 says, I’m afraid, that the slogan much bandied about last March and April that we can be ‘Together, alone’ is in fact a lie, at least in connection with the Church. Psalm 73 says that no, in fact, worshipping online is not as good as worshipping in person. Watching football at home in your living room is not as good as watching it at Mosaic. You can yell at the TV all you want and it will make no difference to the game’s outcome. But, if you’re in the stands, with 30,000 other people, yelling is going to make a big difference to what happens on the field. Worshipping online is not as good as worshipping in person. We are not engaging with the reality of God and God’s goodness to the same extent when we gather separately to watch our worship. Now, I know that there are good reasons for not gathering in person to worship during the pandemic. But we had better remember that Christian worship is what the Christian church has been about for close to 2000 years. And for the first time in the church’s history, this year we did not gather together to celebrate Good Friday, or Easter, or Pentecost; and possibly we will not gather to celebrate Christmas. This has never happened before. And if you are not even slightly troubled by this, if you do not long with all your heart for the time when we can gather together in person in the sanctuary, then you have a problem—then we have a problem. We worship in person because it is in God’s presence with God’s people that we can make sense of what is happening to us and to the world. Psalm 73 shows us that the best place, the best time, to ask the question of God’s goodness is in worship with God’s people. Worship is when and where the question of whether or not the world is getting better or worse yields to the truth and the reality of God’s goodness. Let’s pray for the day when we can experience God’s goodness together.