Good Is God
Good for me to be afflicted?!
This is the first Sunday in the Season of Lent. Lent is the Season that reminds the Church that the Story of God does not make sense if it is not centered in the Risen One - Jesus, who endured the Cross suffering its shame and yet God raised Him from the dead, vindicating His Way.
Thus, we are always tempted to forget that all history is understood looking back from there and looking forward from there.
And with the Children of Israel and their adults, we hear, trust, and learn that Good is God.
Pastoral Prayer: Almighty Father, ancient influences tell us that if we would choose virtue over violence and learn to reason well, we could expect a good life. It is tempting. And yet, our experience tells us that trouble seems to lurk around every corner. We celebrate with the Psalter that You are Good and that rather than give us explanations for affliction, you give us Your Way through it all. Even more, You give Yourself to us and for us in Jesus who more than any who has ever lived was despised and rejected - afflicted - and yet heals us by his wounds, still. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all our hearts be pleasing in Your sight O Lord, our Rock and our Redeemer. And all God’s people say, Amen.
I just wanted to tell you thank you for everything you and the church have done for my Mom and I. I really don’t know where we would be if not for you. I am having a really hard time since my Mom’s passing. It’s all so overwhelming with the heartache, pain, and now anxiety attacks. I do a lot of praying.
God does not give us explanations for suffering, for afflictions. Instead, he gives us a people who suffer with us. He gives us people whose eyes are given to see the pain in another and offer a shoulder, a word, a prayer, a presence to be with us. And often that community provides something material to help make the Way better.
Aristotle lived several hundred years before Jesus. He is considered one of the first ancient philosophers that sought to answer the question, “What is the good life?” His suggestion seemed reasonable, even today. Choose virtue over vice, focus on what is true, beautiful and good. Take actions befitting those virtues. Who could argue with such a strategy? However, given the condition of the world, the diligence required to ensure the living of that good life ends up putting quite a load on human beings after all, we would need to know from where afflictions come and discern if we have what it takes to overcome them.
Put another way, the ancient instructions would become a burdensome law that offers no answer for life where trouble has often left us referring to life as the School of Hard Knocks. Experiences where vice seems always winning over virtue. A way of seeing that sometimes leaves us wondering if there is any good, anything true, and the recognition that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
That is what we call Law.
The phone rang Thursday evening. I recognized the name on the caller ID. Expecting Beth’s voice it was a man’s. Not her husband. Corey identified himself and my anticipation of the news he would share left me not just a little concerned.
“Jerry died this evening,” he said. “You were on the call list.”
I woke Friday morning with a text from Beth’s daughter,
Mom wanting to know if you would officiate dad’s funeral?
We met Jerry and Beth 37 years ago last month. The relentless humorist stood head and shoulders over most with a farmer’s build you knew came from tossing hundred pound hay bales with ease. They were the first family we knew as neighbors in our first pastorate.
There was not just a little glee and glimmer in his eye when he heard that I wanted to learn about farming and ranching. We would embark on some task related to hard work - chopping cotton, tossing hay bales, stacking those hay bales in a barn and more. We would finish and he would look at me and say, with a wry grin and widened eyes, It’s hard on a preacher to sweat.
They were members of a church south of town. Still. The dwindling population never has deterred that congregation from being for one another what is always needed. When we arrive later today we fully expect we will find what we knew and know to be true. God has not provided an explanation for Jerry’s sudden death at 67 but, he has given his wife a community who will be with her and for her.
We have had our own moments. Here at Snow Hill. Some of you sitting here have faced life’s troubles, affliction. We have sat in silence together. Sometimes we break that silence hoping for an enlightened reason for the trouble. We have attempted platitudes that are as empty as our coffee pots after Sunday morning. We have realized that God does not give us explanations, he gives us a community. Each other.
Imagine learning your alphabet all over again. Letters mean little when not included in words. We don’t live life in outlines but in a world of words. Ancient Israel was no different. And when they learned the letter T, Teth, while reading and learning about their God in Psalm 119, what the children learned and the adults repeated is Good is God.
How they learned that good is God was not by hearing a principle, a truth. They did not learn good is God just because someone told them that is what they should believe. They did not learn that good is God so that when they finished learning their alphabet they could pass a test that would gain them entrance into religious life. They learned that good is God through the stories that told of God’s goodness. And, often they learned from those who had experienced the goodness of God in the life of their community amidst affliction.
When the Songwriter, the prayerbook warrior, gave Israel this long acrostic prayer, the word that stood out is the Hebrew word tov, good. Five of the eight verses in this passage begin with the word good, tov, in the Hebrew Old Testament.
Good you have done, begins verse 65.
Good discernment, knowledge, teach me, begins verse 66.
Good you are and doing good, begins verse 68.
Good for me to be afflicted, begins verse 71.
Good to me is the law from your lips, begins verse 72
Good in each of these verses describe the Good that is God. Good God has done. Good has God taught. Good is God and Good is God doing. Good for me to be afflicted. Good to me is the law from your lips.
Good for me to be afflicted.
Who says that?!
Maybe you recall that bratty kid who seemed to be Daddy’s favorite. It was bad enough that his brothers sensed it. His Dad gave him a stylish new coat as if to put it front and center at every meal. As you imagine, any hint of favoritism may be overplayed by the favorite. It was.
Add that a dream interpretation set out the prospect that everyone including Dad would bow down to the snotty one somewhere in the future and his brothers had enough. Even Dad wondered if he had gone too far. Joseph ended up avoiding death by the intervention of one of the brothers. Rather than die he ends up sold into slavery, winds up in Egypt among foreigners, gets a well paying job for a slave, only to be falsely accused and imprisoned.
Good for me to be afflicted.
Who says that?!
Good is God. Joseph does not receive clemency for good behavior, but for the way the good discernment, knowledge and teaching by God helped him interpret dreams. Shortening the story, Joseph becomes the second in command and by the wisdom of God he charts a course to weather the famine. Joseph’s family arrives in Egypt fearful of the man they do not recognize but seems bent to afflict them.
When Joseph reveals himself to his family, they cower, fearful of retribution. Instead, Joseph tells him good is and that what they meant for harm - his afflictions that began when they sold him into slavery - God worked in those afflictions to bring about their salvation.
Maybe as Joseph sat in prison, wrongly accused, the LORD led him to see that while his Dad indeed loved him, that love was rooted in his father’s love for his mother. That is, he was loved as he was apart from anything he had ever done to deserve it. Through his trouble, his afflictions, he witnessed the hand of the LORD and was ready to testify,
Good for me to be afflicted,
so that I could learn your statutes.
Jospeh learned the Way of grace upon realizing the love he received was not because he had done anything to merit it but that he was loved as an expression of love determined beforehand. Good is God!
This is Gospel. Good News!
Joseph also learned that stripped of all he had, going into Egypt as a slave boy with nothing to his name, he could rely on the provision of the LORD.
Good is God and Good he is doing.
His affliction overtook his ego, giving him eyes to see the handiwork of God and the provision not only for himself but for others.
Good you have done to me according to your word.
The dreams he interpreted as a younger fellow were not dreams given to fuel his ego, but to remind Joseph of a promise made long ago, a promise he learned from the stories told around the dinner table, while working the crops and the cattle. The dreams were not fulfilled in Joseph but by God through Joseph.
Reading and hearing the Story God makes for Godself runs through Cross and Resurrection. That is when he read these stories, consider these events, we cannot help but see them as revealing the Love That Is God, Love determined beforehand.
Joseph’s family was healed of their afflictions as Good is God kept his word.
Good you have done for me according to your word, the Psalm begins.
The prophet Isaiah forecasts the One whose Jospeh’s story points.
Isaiah 53
Who has believed what we have heard?
And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?
. . .
Yet he himself bore our sicknesses,
and he carried our pains;
but we in turn regarded him stricken,
struck down by God, and afflicted.
. . .
He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth.
Like a lamb led to the slaughter
and like a sheep silent before her shearers,
he did not open his mouth.
. . .
After his anguish,
he will see light[g] and be satisfied.
By his knowledge,
my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will carry their iniquities.
Therefore I will give him[h] the many as a portion,
and he will receive[i] the mighty as spoil,
because he willingly submitted to death,
and was counted among the rebels;
yet he bore the sin of many
and interceded for the rebels.
Good is God.
We sat in our usual circle last Sunday night. We have been looking at the story and song that give us the Incarnation, the birth and life of Jesus, the Messiah. Our conversations that had ended two weeks earlier pointing to our need to practice what Mary did. When we hear how Good is God, we share it, we tell it we proclaim it. We agreed it is not enough to keep it to ourselves. Our individual experience does not fill up what it means that God has a people, that the Church is a Body, that we are a family. It would not be enough for us to individually sit with those moments of revelation where Good is God and Good is he doing.
We need a community for we do not know for what we are troubled, why we are afflicted. But we know that when trouble comes we have a community with us and for us. A Body of which we are a part. A family of which we are a member.
One of our ladies looked across the circle at another of our ladies,
If I ever get a breast cancer diagnosis, I am coming to you.
God does not give us explanations for our afflictions, he gives us a community to suffer with us in our troubles, who help us learn the Ways of the LORD.
Good for me to be afflicted
so that I could learn your statutes - ways, decrees, word, command, precepts, instruction.
Good is God to us and for us.
As the only Body Jesus has on earth today, we pray by God’s Spirit that we might be to and for others the revelation that Good is God and Good is God doing for all.