Sunday's Sermon

Pondering Unanswerable Questions
Can We Know God's Will?
Text: Colossians 1:9-12
Rev. Dr. John E. Manzo
February 21, 2010

Money is tight and you do not have any money to purchase groceries this week. The man walking in front of you has a $100.00 slip out of his pocket and fall to the ground. He does not know he has lost it and no one has seen you pick it up. Is it God’s will for you to keep the money because of how things took place?

You really like lemon filled doughnuts at Krispy Kreme and, by chance, you are passing a Krispy Kreme. Is it God’s will for you to buy the doughnut?

There is a person you know whose life and lifestyle you don’t approve of. You decide to tell them exactly how you feel about them and their lifestyle choices. You tell them God has told you to talk to them. Was it really God’s will for you to talk to them?

You are married or in a committed relationship and you meet someone in church who you find very attractive. One thing leads to another and you become intimate and both of you determine, because you met in church, God has called you together. Was this really God’s will?

God’s will. I’m beginning this Lenten Series on Pondering Unanswerable Questions with the question: Can we know God’s will?

If I give an absolute answer to this, ‘yes’ or ‘no’ then the question is not really an unanswerable question. It is actually an amazingly complex question.

On one hand, if we believe in divine revelation, if we believe that God is still speaking as the United Church of Christ states, and if we believe that God does call people in life, if we believe the Bible is the living Word of God, then there is a sense that we do have some ability to know God’s will.

On the other hand, it seems like there is great mystery about God’s will. In this letter to the Colossians, St. Paul was praying for people unceasingly that they might be filled with God’s knowledge. God’s will, Paul seems to be implying, is something that comes only through lot of prayer and an amazing sense of obedience. Additionally, there are so many mysteries in life that we struggle with that it’s very difficult, maybe impossible, to say we have a good grasp of God’s will.

One of my favorite quotes is from Pierre Teilhard de Chard in, who was a French theologian and philosopher. He said:
He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. --

Teilhard, who rarely was simple, has a moment of stark simplicity with this. Either our brains are massive, far more massive than usual, or, our foundation of belief is too small. In essence, if we believe we can fully comprehend the will of God, than our view of God does not have a big enough God.

There are observations to be made about grappling with God’s will and they are all pretty difficult things with which to grapple.

My first observation is this. When people speak about God’s will, our society has cheapened God’s will.

Abraham Lincoln, a man who struggled with faith, probably said some of the best things about God’s will ever stated.

After the second Battle at Bull Run in 1862, a crushing defeat for the Union, Lincoln said:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God can not be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party -- and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose.


In his second Inaugural Address he said:
Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.

Political leaders rarely speak like this now. Often we hear leaders speak with a complete certainty on what God is telling them to do. Preachers don’t either.

We now have people preaching that God has spoken to them and told them to tell people that if they have real faith in God they will have a big house, a Mercedes, and all good things will come their way and they say this in spite of Jesus’ repeated warning that if we faithfully follow him we were sure to be crucified with him.

Sometimes churches have conflicts and disagreements and people say that if a church was a real church they wouldn’t have conflicts and disagreements. It presumes that someone in the church has a really clear understanding of God’s will and the other one doesn’t.

The will of God is often cheapened by culture, society, and even the church. It is much easier to profess God’s will than to totally understand it.

My second observation is that just because things happen, doesn’t make them God’s will.

Things happen. Good things happen, mundane things happen, and bad things happen. Things happen.

Not everything that happens is God’s will.

Some years ago in the small town I was serving, there were a rash of teen suicides. It was horrible. The clergy in the town met with groups of young people and parents doing pastoral care with a great effort to try and assure these tragedies would not occur any longer.

In a group discussion, one woman said that God had called the young man who committed suicide, home. It was, I’m sure, her way of coping. But she didn’t like my response when I said that God didn’t tell this boy to commit suicide. I believed in my heart of hearts that God embraced the boy, and forgave the boy, and welcome the boy to his side, but God didn’t will this young man to die. God fixed a broken life and healed a devastating wound, but God did not make the boy kill himself.

The fact that things happen does not make those things God’s will. Much of life is lived outside of God’s will. Tragedies, sins, crimes, etc., may happen, but they don’t happen because God willed them. They happen because we live in an imperfect, often broken worlds.

The third thing is this. We need to be careful not to confuse God’s will with our own will. Sometimes different people decide that Christianity as it exists is not an adequate expression of what they believe it ought to be. As a result, people end up being victimized by bad religion.

To me, one of the real tragic stories in the news has been of Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina. Comedians speak of his ‘hiking the Appalachian’ trail and find great humor in it and many people have jumped on him politically. He did have an affair and we can say that was wrong but the story is not a story that is funny or even political. It’s actually rather tragic.

Sanford belonged to a group called The Family. This group is led by a man named Doug Coe and the organization has been around for decades. It attracts people in Washington, D.C. from both parties and promotes Jesus Christ. It is often misrepresented as conservative Christianity, which it is not. It really isn’t Christian. While they read the same Bible as all other Christians, and while they pray the same prayers, there is a distinct difference. Coe promotes an idea of Jesus plus nothing. Part of this is that people empty themselves of everything leaving only Jesus----which, again, at face value is good, but it also leaves out the core of Christianity. Participants in this group believe that Jesus is speaking directly to them, unfiltered by anyone or anything else. The Bible is there’s to interpret however they want. As a result people’s own ambitions and desires become “God’s will.”

In reading about this group and Sanford, who I think is, at his core, a very good man, he embraced his own thoughts, feelings, and, frankly, lustings, as God’s will. And it cost him dearly.

In the mid 1950's an Evangelical and Reformed (which became the United Church of Christ), Pastor in Van Wert, Ohio withdrew from the denomination and started his own movement called The Way International. Victor Paul Wierwille determined that the Christian Church had lost its way in the first century and that God had sent him to redefine what God had meant all along. Thousands of people joined The Way International, generally classified as a cult, which still exists today.

Wierwille, from all accounts, had himself quite a life and the people around him enjoyed a great many luxurious excesses in the name of God’s will.

People get victimized by all of this. When we presume because we want something or will something, and pray about it, it means it’s God’s will. It may not work like that, however.

I have read numerous times that the way to determine if it’s God’s will or our own will is this. If somehow our life is made far better, more profitable, more comfortable, and gear around our own wants, then it’s probably our will at work. If our life is made more difficult, we are called on to make sacrifices, and our desires are far from met, it’s probably God’s will.

God’s will. Can we know God’s will? It is, in many ways, an unanswerable question. There are times and portions of God’s will we can truly know, but we need to always remain humble enough to recognize there is much we never know.

Teilhard de Chardin was right: He that will believe only what he can fully comprehend must have a long head or a very short creed. --