This is in the story about Deborah, the judge and ruler. She summoned Barak, I’m presuming a warrior, and to overtake Sisera, I’m presuming a bad guy. Barak, and his 10,000 warrior followers headed out, along with Deborah. They found Sisera and his meager troops, and after Sisera fled on foot, all of Sisera’s troops were killed. Sisera finds safety from another tribe, with whom his tribe had peace. Jael, the wife of the clan leader comes out to meet Sisera, lets him in her tent, gives him drink, and lets him sleep on the soft rug, telling the guards to let no one in. Up to this point in the story, it sounds like Sisera has found peace. But no. Jael takes a tent peg, and puts it through Sisera’s temple, killing him. Eventually Barak comes looking for SIsera, and Jael shows him Sisera, dead on the rug with the tent peg in his head.
The structure of Morning Prayer is that there’s a reading from the Psalms, then the Old Testament, New Testament, and finally Gospels. In between the scripture readings, there’s a ‘canticle’ which is a bit from scripture that is a song or poem recited by someone in scriptures. This morning’s appointed canticle after the Old Testament reading was The Song of Moses, which I think in part is actually sung by his sister. In any case, it is a song of praise, sung by the Israelites after crossing the red sea. It merrily talks about the horse and the rider being hurled into the sea, and how God stretched out God’s hand and the earth swallowed them up.
Between these two readings, I get a sense that there was a punitive, angry, judging God, who’d condone tent pegs in the head, and cause people to be drowned in the sea.
Maybe it’s my sunshiny disposition, or maybe its heresy, but I think they had it all wrong. I don’t think God, the God Jesus talks about, is a God who causes mass casualties, or condones murder. Those are not the traits that Jesus describes when he talks about God. Rather, Jesus talks about an all-loving, all-merciful God. Yes, God is all-powerful too, but just because he could cause mass casualties, I don’t think that’s God’s way. Nor do I think the existence of casualties proves that God is mean or not all powerful. Sometimes bad things happen. Sometimes they happen to good people, and sometimes they happen to people I deem bad.
But I do not believe that I know enough about other humans to pass that judgment, to decide that someone else is bad enough to warrant God’s wrath. Again, that is not the God Jesus proclaims. Jesus, in fact, ate with the people society had deemed as bad – the prostitutes, corrupt tax collectors, sinners.
Sometimes, despite my best efforts, I find someone who I think is genuinely bad, and it’s easy to presume that God agrees with me. When something bad happens to that person, it’s easy for me to think that bad thing was because God was smiting them. But again, that’s not the God Jesus talks about.
I have plenty of loving colleagues who could write their own canticle, about God, race, police, murder, mass casualties. I think they’re wrong too. I think God doesn’t want or cause bad things to happen, to anyone. I think God wants peace.
The reading from the New Testament this morning was about the selection of Matthias as the twelfth apostle. The others actually drew straws to pick Matthias. I don’t think God made them pick the Matthias straw. But I do think God looked at what we humans did, and said, “I can work with that”.
This morning, I’m thinking about an all-loving God, and how I don’t think tent pegs would be God’s instrument of peace, any more than riots, or murders, or violent mobs. I think we judgmental, myopic humans can ascribe to God bad things, particularly when they happen to people we perceive as our enemies. But would we do that if the other person was our friend? Would we think that God caused mass casualties if the casualties were our loved ones?
Wouldn’t we be better off becoming friends with the ‘other’, rather than taking a tent peg to their head, all in the name of God?
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