Who do you blame?

I would like you to reflect for a moment on how you respond when something bad happens, or things generally are not going so well for you. What is your reaction?

Perhaps you blame yourself, thinking: ‘Have I done something wrong’ or ‘Am I at fault somehow’. Or perhaps you blame somebody else, or the circumstances.  We may wish to reflect how we respond as a nation to things going badly as well. Do we blame, self-examine, change our ways?

I’d like us to put our response alongside that of the prophets of the Old Testament. They ask, when things go badly: ‘Have we been unfaithful to God/Yahweh’. The first thing to note is that the prophets are thinking collectively (of the whole community of the faithful that is) and they are thinking theologically (is this somehow related to our covenant with God). The prophets ensure, then, that their collective experiences are understood theologically. They want to know how their experience relates to their God, to His promises to them, to their keeping of the covenant.

Jeremiah, whose book of Prophecy we are going to be hearing a lot more of this autumn, is a book which profoundly reflects on the faithfulness (or lack of it) of the people of God. It is written mainly in the context of exile, which the people experienced in Babylon during the time of the Book. Why were they in exile? What had gone wrong? Had they been faithless? Jeremiah’s response is to say that yes they had been unfaithful to the covenant and its laws. They profoundly believed in a correlation between things going well and their adherence to the covenant.

Sometimes we can read the Old Testament without understanding and appreciating the depths of its theological reasoning. We may look critically at it and think, why do they see God as on their side in wars, why do they reflect that God is angry with them if things are going badly; we may scorn their theology and think we are more superior to it.

I would like to suggest, alternatively, that we tend toward secularism in our reasoning and that we should learn from them.

How so?

The first principle to take from the OT prophets is that of putting our experiences into a theological context. We have moved away from an unhelpful correlation that was made between bad things happening and God’s wrath, between illness and sin, but I think we have also moved away from a proper recollection of and a proper theological understanding of our individual and collective experiences. The OT prophets teach us that understanding our experiences in the light of our relationship with God, is what the people of God do. If we don’t reflect on the presence of God’s hand in our experiences, then are we not really atheists?

So, in learning from them, our proper daily response to our experiences should be: where is God in my experience today? Where is God in my experience of illness? Where is God in this new challenge? Where is God in our experience of an ageing and declining national church? Where is God in our waiting for a new Director of Music? Where is God in our culture of secularism?  It is the fundamental practice in our lives as believers, to bring God in, to make space for God, to recognise God’s sovereignty and divine providence. It also creates a helpful spaciousness to our common life, it turns us away from the tendency to blame, either ourselves or one another, and encourages us rather, to take it all to God in prayer. If God is the ruler, the great ‘I am’ then we can turn from panic and fear to trust and to hope.

We know now, of course, that things going well do not equal God’s happiness with us, nor things going badly, being equal to our sin, however, there is a correlation between our faithfulness and our experiences of consolation: joy, peace, hope and faith. God is faithful to us and God’s hand is over all creation; like Jeremiah God knew us before we were knit in our mother’s womb, and has a plan for us, a plan to prosper us and to bless us. What God requires of us is a willingness to engage, to ask the right questions, to put ourselves in the right place. If we do so, we can say, that we too are a faithful people waiting patiently for the consolation of our God. Amen