Psalm Meditation 952
Proper 19
September 16, 2018

Psalm 42
1 As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.
2 My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?
3 My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, “Where is your God?”
4 These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I went with the throng, and led them in procession to the house of God, with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving, a multitude keeping festival.
5 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help
6 and my God. My soul is cast down within me; therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon, from Mount Mizar.
7 Deep calls to deep at the thunder of your cataracts; all your waves and your billows have gone over me.
8 By day the LORD commands his steadfast love, and at night his song is with me, a prayer to the God of my life.
9 I say to God, my rock, “Why have you forgotten me? Why must I walk about mournfully because the enemy oppresses me?”
10 As with a deadly wound in my body, my adversaries taunt me, while they say to me continually, “Where is your God?”
11 Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you disquieted within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God.
(NRSV)

“Where is your God?” is a question we each have to deal with at some point in our lives. Someone will ask us to prove the existence of the divine in some form or other. And when we can’t offer them satisfactory proof they will consider themselves successful in debunking our faith. Without objective, verifiable, repeatable evidence the existence of divinity fails the tests of the scientific method and is thereby proven false. Or worse, we go through a crisis and ask the question internally. When we can’t find the answer in a verifiable way we move away from our previous assurance.

The enlightenment helped us do great damage to faith. It was the beginning of the scientific method, asking questions, running experiments and coming to objective, verifiable, repeatable conclusions. Science was so much fun we began to subject everything to the scientific method. If it couldn’t be proven, it wasn’t real. Folks set out to prove that the Bible is true, literal, and straight from the hand of God. There is an amazing amount of gymnastics involved in the process, twisting words, meanings, and concepts to fit into science. There were other parts of the Bible that had to be downplayed or ignored to fit into the science of the enlightenment and beyond.

“Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. “ (Hebrews 11:1) Questions about God are not science questions, they are faith questions. In faith we are not looking for proof, we are looking for assurance. When we have faith, the world has not changed. The events of the world are the same, our actions in it are not that different than they were prior to coming to faith. The difference is a sense of assurance that we are not alone, that we do not have to do everything ourselves, that we do not suffer in isolation.

“Where is your God?” asks us to look for answers without looking for proof. If something can be proven there is no need for faith in order to believe. Faith questions are not about proof, they are about intuition, gut feeling, assurance, you know, faith.

September 10, 2018
LCM