Hilton Head Island, SC – July 12, 2020
The Chapel Without Walls
Exodus 14:21-29; Matthew 26:36-46
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And going a little farther, Jesus fell on his face and prayed, “”My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” – Matthew 26:39 (RSV)
In late May, 1940, the British Army was surrounded by the German Army on the beaches of Dunkirk, France. The German commander wanted to close the pincers movement and capture the entire British force. Hitler hesitated too long before approving the order. Hundreds of British Navy ships and private boats crossed the English Channel, and the British Expeditionary Force was saved. Did God respond affirmatively to the prayers of the British soldiers while ignoring the prayers of the Germans?
In 1942 Hitler broke the Nonaggression Pact he had made with Stalin a few years earlier. A large invasion force of the German Army swept into the Russian heartland. That decision may well have been the factor that initiated the beginning of the end of the Thousand Year Reich. It was a disastrous miscalculation. Was it God who intervened to make Hitler decide that?
Since late 2019 countless millions of prayers have been directed to God individually to prevent people from getting the COVID-19 virus and collectively to make it go away altogether. It is still here, and over twelve million people worldwide have been afflicted, with almost 600,000 deaths. It would appear that God has not intervened. How should we understand this non-intervention?
I do not expect everyone to agree with the thesis I am proposing in this sermon. I readily admit it is unorthodox. But I want to propose it anyway in case it helps any of you who have prayed many prayers that seem to have gone unanswered. My thesis, strange as it may sound, is this: God never intervenes directly in the lives of human beings. Here is the first corollary to the thesis: Frequently we interpret certain events as divine intervention, when in fact they are not.
In light of the three illustrations at the beginning of the sermon, Hitler did make two huge errors of judgment at Dunkirk and in the deliberate establishment of an eastern front via the invasion of the Soviet Union. God did not intervene to cause him to make those miscalculations. It was Hitler himself who made those foolish mistakes. As for the coronavirus, it is solely human effort that shall overcome it, whenever it shall be defeated. What our leaders, the medical experts, and we ourselves do shall largely determine how this turns out. God will not intervene to stop it.
A second corollary to the thesis is this: God does not intervene directly in the lives of human beings because He cannot do so and be true to His own nature. Here is why I believe that is so. If God ever intervened on behalf of anyone, He would be ethically obligated to intervene on behalf of everyone. Let us consider why this is true. Suppose a mother prays that God will prevent her child from dying of a fatal condition. If God does that for her child, is He not obligated to do it for every child with that particular condition? If so, that condition would not exist, would it?
Suppose someone who needs a heart transplant prays that the proper transplant in the proper very recently deceased donor becomes available. Did God intervene to make that happen? If so, why did He make that donor die rather than some other donor? And why doesn’t He intervene for everyone who needs a transplant? At any given moment there are thousands of people worldwide who need transplants, and most of them are not going to get them. God cannot ever intervene if that requires that He must always intervene. It seems to me it violates God’s essential nature if He steps in to eliminate anyone’s problems if He does not do the same for everyone else. That would demonstrate divine unfairness or injustice or inequity. We are part of the natural world, and nature does whatever it does. God doesn’t determine nature; nature determines nature.
The crossing of the Red Sea by Moses and the Israelites is one of the Bible’s most powerful and memorable stories. According to the Book of Exodus, as you heard earlier today, there is no question that it was God who saved the Israelites and destroyed the Egyptians. Cecil B. DeMille and Charlton Heston spectacularly added to the drama via The Ten Commandments.
Did that purported incident actually happen? No one can verify it for certain. Many biblical scholars doubt that it happened, many insist it did happen, and others, citing a known natural occurrence in the seventeenth century BCE, say it could have happened. I presume some of you have been to the Greek island of Santorini, which in biblical times was known as Thera. In 1613 BCE there was an enormous volcanic eruption on Thera which blew away much of the island in a few hours. The explosion was so powerful that it created a huge tidal wave that swept throughout the eastern Mediterranean region, including the Nile Delta. The wave was so high that it raced inland for many miles, washing away everything in its path.
Some scholars say that the incident described in Exodus 26 may be a Hebrew recollection of that tidal wave. They point out that the Hebrew text does not call it the Red Sea, but rather the Reed Sea. There is an area east of the Suez Canal along the Mediterranean coast of Egypt that is low-lying and marshy, much like the marshy coast in Beaufort County, South Carolina. When the tidal wave washed over that area, they speculate, it drove all the water in the shallow marshes far to the south, until the wave dissipated, and the waters flowed back into the marshes once again.
Is that how Moses and the children of Israel crossed the Reed Sea on dry land? I have my own thoughts about that, and now you might have your own thoughts too. It is claimed that much of the Hebrew Bible was put together during the Babylonian Captivity in the sixth century BCE. A group of Jewish sages collected written and oral sources which had existed for several centuries, and that was the beginning of the establishment of the Hebrew scriptures. They interpreted numerous stories which had been circulating for a long time as illustrating God’s intervention in the lives of His people Israel. These socially preserved stories were kept alive because they explained how God was involved with what they thought was His specially chosen people. It helped them to get through the numerous challenges they faced over the centuries.
When he was a very young man, Martin Luther was struck by lightning. When he recovered from his literal great shock, the first thing he said was “I shall become a monk!” He assumed it was God who had hurled the lightning bolt at him. Was it?
Otto von Bismarck was the so-called “Iron Chancellor” of Germany at the time of Germany’s unification in 1871. He once described statecraft essentially as “listening for the footsteps of God and then grabbing hold of His garment as He goes by.” Is that a usable political policy?
I was talking to a high school and college friend a few days ago. He was lamenting the fact that three of his close friends from high school and college plus a fellow lawyer all are having serious health problems. He wondered why that was happening. Is it because of – or despite – God?
If it is true that God intervenes in the world only indirectly through human beings, how does He do that? Among my many glaring unorthodoxies is a theological aversion to the notion of the Trinity. I believe that God is God, that Jesus was and is Jesus, and that there is no Holy Spirit as such. However, I think that God constantly seeks to move within all us by means of His holy spirit – lower-case “holy” and lower-case “spirit.” I think the Tripartite concept of God that developed from the first through third centuries CE was a consciously chosen means for the early Christians to distance themselves from every other religion then existing, but especially from Judaism, from which unfortunately it broke away after it became clear they could not reform it.
Whether any of that is valid or not, I want to reiterate that I am convinced God has instituted innumerable improvements in the evolution of world history, but He has done so via His effect on humans and not by any direct divine intervention. We are the only ones who directly can make the world better, but God is continuously is trying to inspire us to do exactly that.
But what happens when we can’t seem to overcome major obstacles, and things seem to be getting worse? That is the feeling many people have at present because of COVID-19 as it runs its lethal race around the world. Peter Marty is the editor and publisher of The Christian Century. He addressed this issue in a recent editorial about the coronavirus, part of which is quoted on today’s bulletin cover. He wrote this: “Members of the ‘everything happens for a reason’ crowd, who believe that God has a purpose behind even our most unwelcome suffering, like to know that someone is in charge. When we feel powerless because we can’t control what we wish we could, God becomes the go-to party of responsibility. Plenty of believers subscribe to this idea that when inexplicable bad things happen it’s better to have an incomprehensible God who may hurt us, but who is at least in charge. This sort of divine malevolence brings no comfort to me,” says Peter Marty, “but I see the coping value such conviction can bring to those who struggle profoundly with crisis or uncertainty.”
Dr. Michael Osterholm is one of the epidemiologists who most frequently appears on television news programs regarding COVID-19. In his 2016 book Deadliest Enemy, he said, “There are more microbes in the human gut than there are cells in the entire body, and there are microbes everywhere within us. Yet our personal microbiome accounts for just about three pounds of our total body weight.” Microbes are almost so infinitely tiny that I am amazed we have as many as three pounds of them swimming around in our innards. Because that is true, I am also amazed any of us lives past one or two months. But it just goes to show what a huge task researchers have in trying to figure out what every one of those little critturs is doing, and to contain and control it.
Life expectancy has greatly increased in the last century because of medical research and much better medical care. God did not intervene to make that happen, but He used the intelligence, intuition, and inventiveness of researchers and doctors to make it happen. It is far better to light a candle by which everyone’s condition becomes visible than it is to curse the darkness of medical ignorance.
So what are to conclude from such observations? If anyone believes that God intervenes in our lives, then for that person He definitely does intervene. If anyone doesn’t believe God intervenes, that for that person He doesn’t. However, if anyone believes that God intervenes, then that person is more likely to “see” His interventions.
In the Bible, it says that God stepped in to prevent Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac, which is what Abraham thought God wanted him to do (Gen. 22). In the Sinai Desert, God gave the children of Israel manna from heaven when they had nothing to eat. They got tired of eating manna, so God sent them only quail, and they got tired of eating quail. Neither God nor the Israelites seemed to be pleased with this gustatory impasse (Numbers 10-11).
If anyone believes that God doesn’t intervene, then for that person God doesn’t intervene. On the last night of his life, apparently Jesus was such a person. In the Garden of Gethsemane, sensing that he was about to be arrested by the Romans, Jesus prayed to God, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will but as thou wilt” (Mt. 26:39).
There are two major problems in that one verse. First, God did not intervene to prevent the crucifixion. That suggests that at the very least, in that instance God did not step in to save Jesus from the agonizing death the Romans had conspired for Jesus. And if God didn’t intervene in such an enormous travesty, can we expect Him directly to intervene in other human dilemmas, which may not be nearly as huge but may be very huge to us?
The second problem is this, and in a way it is an even larger issue. Jesus said to God regarding the crucifixion, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” This suggests what has been the orthodox position for many Christians ever since about the crucifixion, namely, that God intended Jesus to die on the cross to achieve the salvation of a fallen and sinful humanity. Since I seem to be enumerating several orthodox dogmas to which I do not ascribe, that is yet another one. It seems to me it is incomprehensible theology to imagine that God would want Jesus to die on a cross, which is surely one of the most horrible deaths anyone can imagine. Nonetheless, because of that one verse, and others similar to it in the Gospels and especially in the writings of Paul, that is what many Christians believe. It is the standard position, but I confess that I cannot accept it.
Is it a sin to deny divine intervention? I do not believe it is, but I also recognize that many fellow Christians would vehemently disagree with me. Is it a virtue to affirm divine intervention? No, although I recognize that for some fellow Christians it is one of the greatest of Christian virtues. What I am attempting to say is that we are all seekers of truth in a world in which truth is very hard successfully to pin down. We need to struggle as best we can with conundrums that defy easy answers, especially when our tendency might be to refrain from thinking about it all.
Then, to return to a matter that was raised early in this sermon, why pray at all? It is often said that there are no atheists in the foxholes. That may be true, but there are always plenty of former atheists who find themselves in the foxholes, and not all atheists ever end up in foxholes. If God never intervenes, why should we even address Him in prayer? We do so because prayer is good for us! It strengthens and encourages and provides support to us! God doesn’t need to hear our prayers, because He already knows what we are going to say even before we say it. But prayer draws us closer to God, and nothing is more important for us than to be in a permanent close relationship with the One who created us, who sustains us, and who redeems us. In this life we shall likely never directly see God, but we can constantly experience Him through other human beings. Humans are the hands and heart and spirit of God in the world. When we see the action of God in others, we are seeing God Himself.
When you look around you, don’t merely glance. Peer. Ponder. Postulate. Think about what is really going on. Divine and heavenly action occurs through human and earthly means. I could certainly be mistaken, but I believe it has always been thus.