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10:30 am Worship

Friday, April 26, 2024

Psalm 40: 12-13

¹² You are the Lord; do not withhold your compassion from me;
let your love and your faithfulness keep me safe for ever,
¹³ For innumerable troubles have crowded upon me;
my sins have overtaken me, and I cannot see;
they are more in number than the hairs of my head, and my heart fails me.

Carlo Carretto, a faithful Christian who rose to national prominence in Italy in the 20^th Century, eventually surrendered his prominence and fled to the deserts of North Africa, there to pray, reflect, and write. So far as I know, he never explained it in this precise manner, but I believe he fled the bright light of popularity when he began to realize it was impossible to fully understand God.

He recalled the inexplicable situation Job faced when God allowed one of his heavenly minions to take away Job’s fortune, kill his children, and destroy his health. In the face of such tragedy, Job’s wife wondered why he did not simply curse God and die. Job responded with an inexplicable riddle.

“God gives, and God takes back…” (Job 1-2)

This is, Carretto said, “a hard truth for someone to swallow who has accustomed himself to a sort of lightning-conductor God, a wonder worker who cures personal ills; or to a theology of limited range, largely… concerned with rational explanations… ready to justify a God who might send you to hospital or leave you unemployed.” [In Search of the Beyond, 43.]

“You are the Lord.” This is the great truth. The only truth. Only when we begin to understand that we do not understand can we achieve any real act of faith. Carretto realized he had to embrace the biblical viewpoint. The Bible insists God causes both that which is good and that which is evil. God requires on this earth a cross. Demands a cross. Orders his son onto a cross. And try as we might, we cannot fully comprehend why.

Our faith cannot attain its full measure in a creation where only good exists. Only when faith perseveres in the absence of goodness does it reach into an invisible heaven. We finally reach faith as we cry out in our suffering, not able to understand it, and trust, knowing and believing God is good.

“If there is one prophecy that should be proclaimed loud and clear in the leaden sky of contemporary rationalism,” Carretto wrote, “it is this: ‘Listen, Israel: Yahweh our God is the one Yahweh.’ He is the God of the impossible… Believe in him, place your trust in him.”

Hymn of the day: God on the Mountain. Online at Rossford UMC - Media.

Rev. Lawrence Keeler