Four Annoying Things about God:
Why doesn’t God Fix Things So They Stay Fixed?ⁱ
Psalm 104.24-35
Rev. Matthew M. Fry

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. Give us, we pray, O God, thoughts higher than our own thoughts, prayers better than our own prayers, powers beyond our biological possibilities, that we may spend and be spent in the preaching and hearing of Thy Word. Amen.

Hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Psalm 104. Listen. Psalm 104.22-35.

²⁴ O Lord, how manifold are your works!
         In wisdom you have made them all;
         the earth is full of your creatures.
 ²⁵  Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
         creeping things innumerable are there,
         living things both small and great.
 ²⁶  There go the ships,
         and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it.

 ²⁷  These all look to you
         to give them their food in due season;
 ²⁸  when you give to them, they gather it up;
         when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
 ²⁹  When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
         when you take away their breath, they die
         and return to their dust.
 ³⁰  When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
         and you renew the face of the ground.

 ³¹  May the glory of the Lord endure forever;
         may the Lord rejoice in his works--
 ³²  who looks on the earth and it trembles,
         who touches the mountains and they smoke.
 ³³  I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;
         I will sing praise to my God while I have being.
 ³⁴  May my meditation be pleasing to him,
         for I rejoice in the Lord.
 ³⁵  Let sinners be consumed from the earth,
         and let the wicked be no more.
     Bless the Lord, O my soul.
     Praise the Lord!

The Grass withers, the Flower falls, but the Word of the Lord endures forever…Thanks be to God.

When I was younger and dumber, okay, well younger anyway, I tried to make a pair of golf shoes. I took an old pair of tennis shoes that were mostly worn through, and began to cut small holes in the bottom. With little holes and a little super glue, I figured I’d have shoes as good as anyone else’s, just cheaper. The problem, as if there were only one in this scenario, was that the knife I was using was a pocketknife, and when it folded over on my finger, well, the blood was plenty. I didn’t have any band aids in the house, so I drove to the Kroger with my finger wrapped in an old t-shirt. I was hoping that if I wrapped it well enough over night, it might not need stitches.

When I woke up the next morning, it was incredibly sore. I called my mom who said that meant that I should go to the doctor. Turns out, my previous tetanus shot was 5 years and 3 days before that. 4 days earlier, I wouldn’t need a tetanus shot. But, as luck would have it, I did need a tetanus shot. I remember the doctor, who thought that the golf shoe idea was a good one by the way, and told me to keep making them, just with a smaller, non foldable knife. Anyway I remember the doctor saying what a shame it was that tetanus shots don’t keep. People need a new one every 10 years, even if they haven’t stepped on a nail, or made golf shoes, that didn’t work in the long run by the way. I found it ironic that it was my fleshy part that was receiving the shot while the doctor was going on about the shame of the non-permanence of tetanus shots, but such is life.

I began to wonder, what other things don’t “take” as they should. What other things were non-permanent. I gave my life to Jesus as a kid. I wondered, did I need to do that again also? I had a sore tush and all of a sudden a troubled soul. Whatever happened to the concept of lifetime warranty? In the stories I read to Kayla, Cinderella gets the prince, Ariel gets legs and a guy named Eric, Aladdin gets Jasmine, and they all live happily ever after. Well, I met Jesus, gave my heart to Jesus. What ever happened to the “happily ever after” part?

During this past year I have preached some sermons. And some of them have prompted positive responses from some of you. In fact, several of you have said that this sermon or that sermon I have preached has been your favorite sermon of mine. And invariably, the following day, while I am excitedly reading your email or remembering the conversation when you explained how the sermon moved you, while that is fresh in my mind, I have to give Lisa the sermon title for the next bulletin. Apparently I have to preach again, even if I have just said it as good as I can. Preacher’s Law of Geometry: the shortest distance between any two points is the distance from one Sunday to the next.

It’s time for a talk with Jesus. “When you fix things, Lord, why don’t they stay fixed? I appreciate your answering my prayers, but sometimes your answers have the half life of a tsetse fly.”

And the Lord God answered and said, “Tell me about it. It would be a lot easier on me if I could provide One Big Solution, One Great Miracle! And I certainly tried. In the days of Noah, things got so bad that I erased the whole package: sent a flood and gave creation a brand-new start. Three verses after the ark, Noah was drunk and naked again.”

“When the children of Israel left Egypt I gave them a miracle so spectacular that no one would ever doubt my power and my providence again. I parted the waters of the Red Sea, and they walked across to safety, and I released the waters and drowned the Egyptian army. Safely on the other side, my people were suitably impressed and they sang God’s praises, pledging their undying love forever. ‘The Lord will be our king forever and ever!’ Which lasted for all of 48 hours. By the third day the people were hot, tired, and thirsty. They complained to Moses that the whole trip was a bad idea.”

“Then I had Jesus feed 5,000 people with a few loaves and fish, but you know what? The next day all those people were hungry again.”

I began to realize, no matter how impressive a miracle that God does, or how brilliant an answer, it doesn’t solve the issues of life for more than a day or so, any more than the finest meal doesn’t mean that I’ll never be hungry again, or the biggest breath doesn’t mean I won’t have to bother breathing again.

Maybe Jesus was on to something when he taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread.”

Maybe some of my wanting God to fix things permanently comes from the Great American Virtue of Independence. I don’t like to ask for help, and if God fixed things once and for all, I wouldn’t have to ask for help again. When Ken or Marc do something for me on the computer, or fix something on my computer, after I say thanks I say, “Show me how to do that so I can do it for myself next time.”

The Great American Virtue of Independence or Self-sufficiency is different from the Great Christian Virtue of trust – of trusting that every day I will receive from God what I need for that day.

I often forget that the goal of life isn’t for life to get fixed, but for God and I to be friends. Friendship with God is the goal of human life. And friendship with God cannot be separated from friendship with you. I dream of endowments so that NPC’s financial needs can be met and we won’t have to worry about that any more. But I think God prefers us to have to give regularly, so that we continue to remember that we need each other. I met the pastor of a Presbyterian church in Pittsburgh which had received a multi-million dollar endowment, enough to meet their budget for all the future. The main thing they do in church now…fight about money. The dream isn’t working out so well. The main thing we do about money at NPC is ask and we contribute; and the main thing that happens is that we draw closer together, knowing we do this together.

The purpose of life isn’t to get life fixed; the purpose of life is for us to be friends: friends with God and community with each other.

Give us this day our daily bread. If you receive your daily bread, if you find that on a given day you’ve been given just enough for that day, and your mind tells you that in the long run, this won’t last, then don’t live in the long run. Accept the fact that nothing lasts as one of the truths of life and learn to live in the now. Learn to savor the moment, even if it doesn’t last forever. In fact, learn to savor it because it is only a moment and will not last. A gorgeous sunset, a rainbow, a kiss, a new-born baby – stop and enjoy their sweetness, which is even more sweet because they don’t last.

Sometimes I am in such a hurry pursuing the Big Answer, the One Great Solution that I rush through my days trying to attain the final ingredient that will make life work forever. Often I eat my lunch like my desk is a NASCAR pit area. What if life isn’t out there, just ahead of us? What if life is behind us, trying to catch up? The more we hurry, the harder it is for life to reach us. What if life is already alongside us, but it’s taking everything just to keep up the pace in pursuit of attaining the Missing Ingredient that will make life work? Instead of longing for the Ultimate Heavenly Banquet, what if that were already what is laid out before us, and we need to learn to ask for and enjoy “our daily bread.”

If I but had the fix that would stay fixed, then my future would be secure. I would have the answer that would never come undone. And frankly, many times I would rather have a secure future than a living God. Remember, our God is a living God, one who makes all things new.

We don’t want what happened to the church to also happen to God. The church started out as a movement, an underground movement even. Then, around 300, Christianity became the official religion of the empire. No empire is going to encourage its favored religion to be fluid and adaptable. An empire needs its religion to ensure stability, to enhance permanence and steadiness. People in an empire don’t want to belong to something that is moving, changing, in a flux; they want to be part of something stable and stationary, steadfast and permanent. The Roman Empire coupled with the Christian Church – there’s the answer! And thus the ultimate solution was officially proclaimed.

Ever since then, the church has been behind the times. In the name of stability and security it has always addressed life the way it used to be, speaking King James English to a hip-hop world, offering the perfect fix to yesterday’s problems.

Life is change, and when churches refuse to change, they always tend to cut themselves off from life. Out God is a living God. That’s what faith relies on: whatever happens, the living God will be with us, and whatever happens, God will love. Amen.