Angry God?

Whenever there is a disaster (and I am thinking, of course, of the terrible storms in the USA) and Sunday rolls around I often find myself praying for those folks who are heading out to church to get a belly full of God's wrath. It must be someone's fault - the country is paying the price for....... - and then fill in the blank with anything from Barack Obama, through a more liberal acceptance of various sexual orientations to the fact the some evil people allow their wives to go out to work (yes really!).

It is easy to poke at the religious right but there is a more serious issue which we all face lurking underneath. Many of us from time to time will have said - "What have I done to deserve this?". Whilst the question for most is merely rhetorical it points to a cultural perception that somehow bad things happen to bad people and if it is all going wrong we must, somehow, be to blame.

Whilst I could quote the Bible to try to be reassuring there is still a lot of the wrathful God in it, especially in the Old Testament. As we churn through the Pentateuch (the first five books) at Morning and Evening Prayer we know there will be some horrifying and stomach churning acts attributed to God - mostly surrounding the idea that God preserves the relationship with His chosen people at all costs - whether it is swallowing enemies into the ground or punishing Israel itself for breaking away and doing their own thing.

Last week there was the account of Moses going up the mountain in the lectionary readings. He had already been up once, got the tablets and smashed them in outrage that the people had built a golden calf in his absence. And so he heads out again and is given replacements. And this is where the Old Testament seems to make a lot more sense - whilst in God's words to Moses there is the idea that vengeance will be wrought on generations this is overwhelmingly a moment of reconciliation and mercy.

And this is the message of the whole Old Testament and then of the New - that despite the fact we wander off time and time again God calls us back. Jesus even tries to dispel this idea that bad things happen only to bad people when he talks about an industrial accident where a tower collapsed - where those men who died there worse than anyone else he asks. Whilst the Old Testament leaves us with an apparently rutted and pothole laiden playing field, ready to trip us with things of which we are not aware, Jesus makes it clear that the push and emphasis of the meta-narrative of the Old Testament - ie. God's mercy in longing for relationship with us, is indeed the way which things truly are. The anthropomorphic and grudge carrying "old man in the sky with a stick" picture which the Old Testament tends to resort to is replaced with a here and now dancing, loving Holy Spirit.

This is not to say that our actions do not have consequences. We are made in a certain way by a loving hand and at the risk of sounding highly moralistic, if we ignore that, if we behave in ways which make us smaller than we really are we will feel it. We all understand that sticking our hands in the fire hurts - we seem to want to blame someone else when we drink to much, think only about ourselves and abuse our own bodies and those of others. Some actions simply have their own punishments, often in the deep psychological recesses of our minds which try to contain the feelings of loneliness and abandonment which we do not want to admit to.

Christianity sets high standards, not because we are afraid of God, but because we want to love God better and better. Because we know we are called to be more like God. But when we turn to God and begin to walk in God's direction there is no hint that God will throw a fit and start doing nasty things to us - that is counterintuitive, even on a human level. It is true that sometimes giving up our addictions to the things of the world will hurt significantly - sometimes we will have to turn ourselves and our lives inside out and that is not an easy or comfortable process. But it is not something which we are punished for attempting either. Our own guilt and God's mercy should not get confused as an excuse to stay huddled in a rather dark, but at least familiar, corner.

I am not going to try to unravel why bad things happen - that is something which words do not seem to have an adequate span to explain - although many great and good minds have written much to comfort us. The important thing is that when they do we find God in the middle - not laughing and snickering - Ha! Ha! I showed them! - but as both helpless child and crucified saviour - victim and conqueror - and somehow, even in the darkest place - that can make sense.