One of the things that still divides our denomination is the matter of “inclusive language.” It’s a difference that lines up pretty much the same way as all the other hot-button issues, with theological liberals on one side and theological conservatives on the other. But there are exceptions. My predecessor, Laura Smit. Who was as conservative as I am on most issues if not more so, changes the words in dozens of our choir anthems to take out “he” and “his” and “men” and
“mankind” and so on. I don’t think she was quite as touchy about referring to God with the masculine pronoun, though.
Anyway, one of the reasons for this change in the way we handle language is because using the masculine pronoun to mean both sexes has been blamed for past mistreatment and marginalization of women. I don’t think that changing the words was the right solution, myself, but that’s another story. But having pretty much won that argument, the language police then got started on trying to change the way we refer to God. Some Presbyterian congregations don’t even use the
classical trinitarian formula “Father, Son and Holy Spirit“ in baptism, even though that’s what both Jesus and our Book of Worship require. Instead, they say :Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.”
There are really two ideas behind this push to de-personalize the deity. The first is again to undo past misuse. God is spirit, not flesh, and is certainly not an old man with a long beard sitting on a throne surrounded by fat little cherubs playing harps no matter what Michelangelo did in the Sistine Chapel. Again, I think that changing the words doesn’t help matters at all. The Bible uses metaphors
because we need them, to make the invisible world real, to help our relationship with God come alive.
But the second reason for changing the language is a little more sensitive. Some feminist theologians argue that many women are unable to resonate to the image of God as father because their own fathers were absent or abusive or otherwise inadequate. Well, again, it is certainly true that fathers in our society have not lived up to the heavenly model. Although in my opinion it is the absent father, rather than the abusive one, that is the larger problem in our society. But in
either case, substituting either a mother god or an impersonal force for the Father God Jesus gives us access to isn’t the way to handle the problem. And of course it ignores the fact that there are just as many abusive mothers out there as abusive fathers. God’s solution for wounded spirits is much more creative and powerful than to avoid the risk of being in relationship.
I’ve talked to a lot of people about this issue, because it does divide our denomination and it shouldn’t. And frankly some of them have accused me of being insensitive to the pain abused women have experienced. But that is not true. Like many of you - both men and women - I had an abusive father. My sister was just down from New York a couple of weeks ago, and as we usually do we spend some time peeling back some more layers of our common experience. It
turns out that we have yet another thing in common. Neither one of us can handle having people being mad at us. Our palms sweat, our hearts pound, and our minds go blank as we wait for the world to end. We never knew what would set him off, and we never knew if he’d stop before someone got really hurt.
And when I became a Christian, it took me years before I even realized that this father-fear got in the way of my relationship with God. Every time I read one of the passages about the wrath of God I was absolutely convinced that I was right smack in the crosshairs of the celestial bazooka. The text I particularly remember was from Revelation 21 “But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death." [Rev 21:8] Because I recognized myself particularly as a coward but had more than a nodding acquaintance with the rest of the sins on the list. Today’s text got to me, too, not so vividly but it still took me a long time before I could handle most of the book of Revelation.
But what I finally figured out was that I had it all backward.
How many of you have heard someone say, “How can God allow such suffering?” when looking at the devastation in, for instance, the Congo - where at least 2 million people have died in the latest civil war? Or the endless tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, or - well, you know what I mean. Do we really want a God - or a father - who isn’t outraged at dishonesty and injustice and cruelty? Do we really want a father - or a mother - or a God- who doesn’t really care what we do, who just cleans up our messes after us and never lifts a finger to put us back on the right track? Do we want a blindly doting sugar daddy or an impersonal traffic cop? Do we really want a world where there is neither meaning nor justice?
Job didn’t like that idea at all. He wanted God to get angry. But he wanted God to be mad at the bad guys, not at him. “Why do the wicked live on, reach old age, and grow mighty in power?” [Job 21:7] He asked. “They spend their days in prosperity.... They say to God, 'Leave us alone! We do not desire to know your ways.” [Job 21:13-14] What bothered Job was the injustice of it all. He looked round himself and saw perfectly horrible people getting away with murder and complained that God was lying down on the job. "How often is the lamp of the wicked put out?” he exclaims indignantly. “How often does calamity come upon them? How often does God distribute pains in his anger? [Job 21:7] Job’s friends tried to explain God’s ways to him, they say, “'God stores up their iniquity for their children.' [Job 21:19] but aside from the fact that they were wrong, it
wasn’t what Job wanted. He wanted the bad guys to get what was coming to them right then and there. Job didn’t want them to think they’d gotten away with - whatever it was they had done, from cheating their customers to beating their servants to ignoring God. “Let [their sins] be paid back to them, so that they may know it,” says Job, “Let their own eyes see their destruction, and let them
drink of the wrath of the Almighty.” Job wanted things to be fixed now.
And most of us have felt like Job, at one time or another. We’re born, it seems, with an instinct for getting even. And I don’t mean that in the negative sense, in the sense of wanting to hurt the people who have hurt us. No, what I mean is that we like things to make sense, to be fair, to be in balance. And when it doesn’t, when evil goes unpunished and innocence is either ignored or taken advantage of, it affects us in quite profound ways.
One of my favorite authors, Thomas Hardy, wrote a poem called “Hap”
“If but some vengeful god would call to me
from up the sky and laugh, thou suffering thing,
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
that thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”
Then would I bear it, clench myself and die,
steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased, in that a Powerfuller than I
had willed and meted me the tears I shed.”
What bothered Hardy was the meaninglessness of it all. He could have even handled injustice if it meant something, if there were some pattern, some rhyme or reason to life.
And the book of Revelation gives us the answer both to Job’s desperate desire for justice, and to Hardy’s desperate desire for meaning. Because John shows us that there is both justice and meaning with God. Not only have we been given instructions for how to live, but we have been given a glimpse of the end of the story. For the Christian’s of John’s day, they would have understood Babylon to
be Rome. In our day, perhaps it’s San Francisco or New York or Amsterdam or even Baghdad. The geography isn’t the important thing.
What’s important is that the world that has been built on self- indulgence, acquisition of wealth and power and defiance of God, is going to fall. In fact, in has already fallen - we just haven’t seen it collapse yet, because we are down in the valley of our own limited perspective. "Fallen, fallen is Babylon the great! She has made all nations drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." [Rev. 14:8]
There is no country in the world, no human system on earth, that is not eventually tempted and overthrown by the lust for power and the delusion that we can live without God indefinitely. Any number of historians have charted the rise and fall of empires, with prosperity turning into decadence turning into barbarism. Babylon always falls. God is in charge, and his enemies do not win.
The anger of God, our father God, is not directed at us. God’s wrath is our strength and our comfort, because it is not directed us but at his enemies, who are also ours. God’s wrath is our defender, our avenger. It is because God hates sin, hates injustice, hates lies and cruelty and evil of all kinds, that we are free to love mercy and walk humbly with God, freed from the need to seek vengeance. God is in charge, and he is not asleep or on vacation. “Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep.” [Ps 121:4]
Yes, we do work for justice, we do use our hands and our feet and our voices to lift up the cause of God and defend the oppressed. Jesus asked for us to be protected in the world, not from it. As John says, “Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and hold fast to the faith of Jesus.” If we understand that there is both meaning and justice to the world God has created, then we can go about our part of God’s business in the certain knowledge that God is in charge of history.
The glimpse we have been given of the last days is to reassure and encourage God’s people, not to threaten them - us. When we look around and see evil go seemingly unpunished, it’s not that God doesn’t care, or isn’t doing anything about it. "Those who worship the beast and its image, and receive a mark on their foreheads or on their hands, they will also drink the wine of God's wrath,
poured unmixed into the cup of his anger.”
Did your Mom or Dad ever make you drink or eat something you absolutely hated? Was it just a matter of not getting your dessert until you’d eaten your green beans or did they hold your nose to make you open your mouth and then shovel the spinach in?
Well, God doesn’t have to force his enemies to drink of this wine, he doesn’t hold this cup to their teeth and dribble it down their unwilling throats. No, this is the same wine that ruined Babylon, the wine of self-indulgence and lust for power and indifference to suffering. Those who worship the beast like this wine. They don’t
know that when they drink it they are poisoning themselves as surely as if they were drinking Drano. Unfortunately, this cup doesn’t come with the final relief of death; those who drink it just keep rotting away from the inside out.
We do not have to ask, “Let this cup pass from me.” [Lk 22:42] It is ours to accept or refuse, just as it is ours to accept or refuse the cup of salvation.
We are all thirsty. We’re born that way, we’re human. Which cup have you chosen to drink from? You can’t have both. The love of God, poured out in Jesus Christ, is complete, unlimited and unmixed; the wrath of God is simply what’s left over when his love is refused.
