Harvest 2013
6 October 2013
A friend of mine the other day wondered where God was? That is to say, he wondered why God had been thinking about other things and had consequently allowed him to stumble and to hurt his foot while running for a bus.
We need to set aside the whole issue of expecting 'daddy' to protect us from everything - absolutely everything - that life throws at us. We're not teenagers who go round saying they hate their parents and wish they'd never been born. Although we know that this is just their way of expressing their frustration and unhappiness at certain circumstances.
Having said that, of course, that is what sometimes we exactly do say to God. Not, perhaps, in so many words. But we are angry at God for all the horrible things in the world and all the problems and sadnesses that beset us and others.
But we know, don't we, deep down that this kind of talk is not really going to solve anything? We can't abdicate responsibility for our own lives and just sit around blaming God and then waiting for God to sort everything out for us. Like he owes us a living.
No, the interesting thing about my friend's statement - why did God let him turn his ankle over when running for a bus? - was, I realized, in what I replied:
We can't apportion everything that happens to us to God. In any case, using the same argument, we could say that God did intervene. Because we didn't do anything worse than sprain our ankle, we didn't stumble and fall in front of the bus and end up in hospital or worse...
You see? It works both ways. But this is, at best, a very shaky theology. Now I'm not saying my reply was particularly interesting, but the idea, I realized that lay behind it, certainly was: If we can't blame God for causing stuff to happen and we can't blame him for preventing other stuff from happening what can we do? Well, we can start by being grateful that we're here at all. For a brief, extraordinary moment in time we are here. Others aren't. No-one else. Just us. Just you and me. And, being here, we might as well make something of it.
And, as we make something of it, perhaps then we should also turn to God and say: Thank you. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to make something of this life, of this world. Which is partly what, Harvest Festival is all about. Saying thank you for the opportunity to participate in this astonishing, surprising, frustrating, but ultimately fascinating thing called Life.
So, next time we think something has gone wrong, let's all take a moment to think of all the other things that have gone right. That are going right in our lives. Count our blessings - to coin a phrase. And to thank God for the opportunity to still be around and make some kind of a difference in the whole history of humankind and in the whole story of the bringing in of the Kingdom of Heaven. Because that, after all, is what, really, we are all here for - whether we realize it, whether we believe it, or not.
Thank God.