Sunday, September 24, 2017 | 8:00 a.m.

The Sovereignty of God

“Always Reforming”
A Sermon Series Marking the 500th Anniversary of the Reformation

Judith L. Watt
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 105:1–6, 37–45
Exodus 16:2–15

What makes something bread from heaven? Is it the thing itself or the one who sends it? How you answer those questions has a lot to do with how you sense God’s presence in your life. . . . If you are willing to look at everything that comes to you as coming to you from God, then there will be no end to the manna in your life. Nothing will be too ordinary or too transitory to remind you of God. The miracle is that God is always sending us something to eat. . . . God gives the true bread from heaven, the bread that gives life to the world.

Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels

The Sovereignty of God? The Sovereignty of God!

There was a food crisis. It was a severe food crisis, so severe it led to a faith crisis. It was the age-old problem of faith and belief in the face of suffering. If this God of ours is all good and all powerful and all merciful, then why do bad things happen in the world? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do I have to suffer?

The Israelites weren’t thinking about doctrine and theology. The question about God’s power in the world and why bad things—even evil things—continue to happen is what theologians call theodicy, the exploration into the question of evil in the world and how its existence links up with our belief in a good and sovereign God. Those Israelites weren’t thinking in lofty doctrinal terms. They were hungry and they had every reason to complain and every reason to start questioning their faith in a God who had supposedly chosen them because God loved them so. They didn’t set out on this trip to the Promised Land thinking that they would spend time starving in the wilderness.

If you’ve been around long enough you know the story of the Exodus and you know about the great grumbling in the wilderness. My tendency—I don’t know about yours—has been to look down upon the faith of those wandering Israelites and all their complaining and grumbling. But, of course, I know the end of the story. They didn’t. Their complaining was not complaining for its own sake. It was real and was with great cause. They were starving. And things were so bad the people wanted to go back to Egypt, forgetting all about the slavery and oppression they had experienced there.

We still don’t have the answer to the question—why bad things happen to good people—especially if we try to believe in a God who is supposedly all powerful and all good and all loving. There is so much suffering. One hurricane after another pounding down on islands and cities, followed by two earthquakes in succession in Mexico, along with people being oppressed or moved or killed all over the world. Threats of decimation one country to another. Real hunger and need for food in so many places, even here locally, along with a real hunger we have for signs of God’s love and care and order . . . Where is this good God of ours? Can’t God straighten all of this out? In his writing about God’s sovereignty, Robert McAfee Brown writes, “God doesn’t seem to have a firm handle on things” and “If God is in control, then the evil in the world makes it seem as though God is an evil monster” (Robert McAfee Brown, The Spirit of Protestantism, p. 81).

Today begins a seven-week “Always Reforming” sermon focus in all of our worship services. Each week the preaching pastors will focus on a particular Reformation theme in conjunction with this year being the 500th anniversary of the Reformation—of Martin Luther’s posting his 95 Theses on the Wittenberg church doors. This first week the focus is God’s sovereignty.

What do we mean when we Presbyterians and other people of the Reformed churches proclaim that we believe that our God is sovereign?

This past week we heard the word sovereignty mentioned twenty-plus times in our president’s speech to the United Nations. His use of the word was in regard to nations and their rights rather than in relation to God. Though his claim about rights to sovereignty changed over the course of his speech, his use of the word conveyed independence and autonomy—that our nation and all nations have a right to make their own rules, live according to their own ways and beliefs, without interference. Sovereign.

A free and independent and autonomous God, bound to no one or nothing, is one of the interpretations of God’s sovereignty. God is free and independent and is not limited by our idea of who or what God should be.

The challenge that comes with that narrow interpretation of the word sovereign as it relates to God—independent, beyond interference, controlled by no other—is that it makes God sound arrogant and capricious. I begin to ask questions and wonder if humanity has any effect on God, or if there is any collaboration between God and humanity. I wonder about the few stories in scripture that tell us about God changing God’s mind or Jesus changing his own mind at the pleading and praying of others. I wonder about today’s story and Moses telling the complaining Israelites that God has heard their complaining. I think of the covenants God made with humanity. I don’t like the idea of an arrogant or capricious God, a disengaged God, and I don’t believe God is any of those things.

God was thoroughly engaged with Moses and Aaron, revealing what God would do, declaring to them that the complaints of the Israelites had been heard. In Reformed thought, God’s engagement with humanity is of God’s own doing, not forced by any other power and not forced by us. A free and independent God, whose engagement with humanity is at God’s initiative.

It helps me to conceive of a God who is not bound to special interest groups, who is not bound to lobbyists and the best sales people or the best prayers or the people with the most money. A God not bound to Christians only. If God weren’t free to be autonomous, free to act in any way God decided it was best to act, then God would be always brokering deals, owing favors.

Linked with our idea of God’s sovereignty is also a belief in the sureness of God’s love, despite what is going on in the world or in our lives. Calvinists sang a hymn, “The Lord our God is good; his mercy is forever sure; his truth at all times firmly stood and shall from age to age endure.” Despite evil and suffering, God’s mercy is forever sure. Robert McAfee Brown and other theologians explain that we know of God’s mercy, not by looking at the world only but by looking at the world through the lens of Jesus Christ. Our confessions declare that Jesus Christ is the center of our faith and that, when we look at the life and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we know the underlying theme of God’s mercy and forgiveness and salvation, the underlying theme of a plan for this world, the hope and proclamation that even in the midst of the horror of the cross and suffering of all kinds, there is something more, something beyond—the promise of new life. A free and independent God to be who God will be but whose mercy is forever sure.

The writers of our Westminster Confession of Faith, written in the 1600s, were reacting to the harshness and arbitrary nature of their king at the time. That ruler and so many others claimed sovereignty and absolute power over subjects. The writers of the Westminster Confession of Faith were reacting against the claim of that kind of power by any human being and were claiming God as the only being with sovereign power. They were giving heartfelt expression to their trust in God’s ultimate care, to the sovereignty of God meaning that human beings at every moment of our lives are in relationship to the living God. Not cast aside. Not forgotten. Process theologians like John Cobb speak of God’s sovereignty, God’s power, with a different focus: that God’s power is not the sort that prevents people from doing evil but instead that God seeks to persuade. God’s power is the power only of empathy and of liberty, of persuasive and empowering love. The power to open our eyes little by little to see the glory of the Lord, even in the wilderness, to open our eyes little by little to the mercy of God, even in the face of suffering and confusion, to give us the courage to keep looking into our unknown futures, expecting to see the glory of the Lord.

The Israelites were in the wilderness. They wanted food and questioned why they were even on this journey. And though their journey took place thousands of years before Jesus, God was on that journey with them. They wanted God to pull the strings, to give them exactly what they wanted, to end the suffering they were enduring, and they wanted to turn around and go back. Moses assured them that God had heard their complaining and directed them to look right into the wilderness, not back, but forward right into their unknown futures, and if they did, they would see God’s glory. What they saw was manna, which sounds to us like a miracle that God pulled off. But manna was an ordinary occurrence, something that happened when a certain kind of insect punctured the fruit of the tamarisk tree, forming a white flaky substance full of carbohydrates and nutrition. When they looked into the wilderness, they did not see bread in the way they expected, but they saw the sustenance they needed to make it for a few more days, to stay on the path for just a little longer. They saw the glory of the Lord.

I have no delusions that I’ve given you a full understanding of what it means that we believe in a sovereign God. I hope you can grapple with what it means that we have a God not bound to any of our ideas of what God should be. But I also hope you can see the wonder of a God who gave up all the privileges of being divine to come into this world in Jesus Christ and suffer with us in our humanity, to know our human sufferings—all at God’s own initiative—with generosity and with a mercy that is forever sure.

Over the last several months I’ve been facing into the issues of aging and my future as I age. I doubt I’m alone in this. In August I spent four days in New Mexico at a Benedictine monastery, and I was fortunate enough to go hiking a few times. On one of those days, as I hiked into the beauty of New Mexico, I also had a long conversation with God. No one was around, so I talked out loud to God about knowing that there were many paths ahead of me and many ways my aging could play out. I admitted my not knowing what direction to take, which path was best, and I admitted my fear about what the future held. The whole time during this hike I was surrounded by beautiful mountain ranges and a vast open space in front of me. In the middle of my conversation, I decided to stop and to turn around and to look at where I’d come from. As I looked back at my path, it dawned on me that I’d gotten this far, not only on my hike but also in my life, and that God had been with me through it all, even when I hadn’t been aware. If God had been with me up to this point, why wouldn’t God be with me though the next chapters. Then I looked forward again, stood and looked at the vista in front of me, into the future, and saw how much beauty was still in front of me. I decided to take a few more steps forward, and in a moment, everything around me became ever so much more beautiful. It was a moment I will treasure as I keep wandering into the wilderness of my unknown future.

We believe in a God who is free to act, and sovereign over all the earth, always in relationship with us, not a puppeteer pulling strings, but a God full of grace and mercy who is patient and persuasive, who goes behind us and goes in front of us and walks with us even on our wilderness journeys. And we believe, because God is sovereign, that there is nothing, not life nor death, not principalities nor powers, nothing in all the world, that can separate any of us from the love of God. Amen.