God's Agency
25th June 2006, Parish Communion
1 Sam 17: 32-49 David Kills Goliath
2 Cor 6: 1-13 Paul’s defence.
Mark 4: 35-end Calming the storm
1. A recent scientific study attempted to test the power of prayer in healing
2. Typical – two groups of patients. Blind Randomised Test
3. It was an attempt to measure God’s agency.
4. How God works in the world is one of the most important and difficult questions for us to understand as adult Christians. One sermon is not long enough to tackle this, and I am not going to try and offer a simple answer.
5. I think our understanding of this question is characterised by diversity, mystery and faith.
6. Diversity. God works in a great diversity of ways, and there is a great diversity of ways in which God’s action in the world is understood.
7. As you know, St Andrew’s is a place of great diversity, and with Christians of all sorts living together.
8. One of the areas of disagreement is our various understandings of how God works in the world.
9. There are some people whose sense of the way God works in the world is balanced very strongly by the belief that God characteristically allows the world to work in accordance with the principals and laws that are inherent in nature. These people see very little evidence of the direct intervention and alteration of the course of events by God.
10. There are others who sense the guiding and effective purpose of God in almost every detail of their lives, in coincidences and chance conversations.
11. I would be worried about this were it not for the fact that, as you get to know your bible, it becomes increasingly clear that there is a very wide range of representations of God’s agency in the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament. One day I would like to spend a week or so going through the bible in a systematic way, and drawing up a list of the kinds of action that God is understood as doing. I shall stick with the OT for a little while.
a. Action through creation, related specifically to the invariant things: Sun, Moon, Stars, Seasons, Species.
b. Action through calling of individuals. Abraham. Moses.
c. Action through birth under unlikely circumstances. Isaac, Samuel.
d. Action through miracles healings. Burning Bush. Healing of Naaman.
e. Action through revelation. The vision of Jacob. The giving of the Commandments.
12. It is important to realise that different books of the OT have different perspectives on God’s agency. If you are looking for miracles in the OT you would be looking for stories about Moses, Joshua, Elijah and Elisha. If you are looking for stories about God working largely without miraculous intervention you could look at stories about Joseph, Jeremiah, Ezra or Nehemiah.
13. Mystery.
14. The scientists who wanted to do the experiment on God, Prayer and Healing were looking for clarity and simplicity. This is an excellent thing in science, if you can achieve it honestly.
15. It is seldom available in life, and surely beyond us when we think about God and his action.
16. Our two story readings this morning illustrate the point I am trying to make very well. In the first one, the Shepherd boy, David, kills the great warrior Goliath with a stone from a slingshot, and begins the process of liberating the children of Israel from the fear of the Philistines. At one level it is very clearly given to us as a key point on David’s spectacular career as God’s chosen one. But the stone is just a stone, the hand that guided it is just a hand. Can anyone say what was God’s specific action in this story. Can anyone reasonably create an experiment that would make it clear?
17. In the second one, Jesus is at sea and commands the storm to cease. I have heard it said often enough that storms on the Sea of Galilee come up out of nothing and vanish into nothing. The bible tells us that the stilling of the storm was Christ’s action, and I have no difficulty in believing it, but I also know that some who saw it would not have been convinced, and there is not the slightest possibility of using it to convince someone today, two thousand years later, and thousands of miles away. It is wise to search for God’s action in the world, and good if we can be sure that we understand His action in a particular area, but foolish to expect to convince other people of this, unless they are inclined to believe it anyway.
18. This leads us on to faith. God’s action in the world is seen and understood by faith.
19. We need to remind ourselves, that faith sees the presence of God in ordinary things as well as extraordinary. When the Sun shines, or babies are born, or a couple stay loving through a long marriage, or just the right people fall in love, faith sees God’s presence and God’s grace in these ordinary and wonderful things.
20. It is not the strangeness of an event which makes it a wonder of God’s action. It is the ability of faith to see meaning and purpose in it. But we do want to know and we do want to be able to see God in all the ways he acts, to know his presence and his love, through faith, in the ordinary and the extraordinary.
21. This is because all of us have Goliaths in our lives, in the sense that there are problems which are too large for us to handle, and therefore we have a very strong interest in knowing how to find the David, or be the David who can kill them. The image of a group of people on a crowded little boat which is about to be swamped by the storm could also be a description of an experience which is very common to us, which we can see in our lives and those around us.
22. There are, however, a few rules, which I think are useful, and a guide for faith, so that it does not become simply credulity.
a. It is usually easier to be sure of God’s presence and action in particular ways in retrospect, rather than at the time. Distance makes things clearer.
b. It generally true in my experience that God deals with our problems by making possibilities, rather than simply by solving them.
c. It is very usual for us to find that the only way out of a problem or a difficulty in our lives is through – and this may mean a path that leads to death and beyond.
23. The loving presence and power of God to make and mend and heal is something that each of us will have experienced in different ways at different times. Ultimately it is not our job or place to know how this power is going to be exercised in particular parts of our daily lives, or in the wider agonies of the world.
24. It is our job, however, for the present, to seek to understand where God is working – where love and faith and hope and redemption are present and possible, and to do our part by joining in.
25. It is also our job to look back over the complex pattern of our lives and to recollect the Goliaths killed and the Storms stilled, and to give God the glory.