Sunday, August 25, 2019

Falling Down


Do you remember some of the silly games that we used to play when we were kids? There are a couple that I remember that were always fun to play, mostly because you could get knocked around, fall down, and sing silly songs.
One of them was London Bridge is Falling Down.


That one was fun, and there were lots of different verses that you could sing, and they didn't ever have to make much sense, because we were kids.

The trouble is, as we grow up, we want to explain more things.  We want things to make sense, even if they really don't.  This is one of the reasons why you see so many email forwards, or Facebook posts for things that are just wrong (and can be disproved by a 30 second search on Snopes). This is also why we see so much fake news. We want explanations, but we can't always have them.

The Bible, especially the Old Testament, are full of stories that are hard to explain, or beyond our ability to explain.  In those cases, sometimes we try to fit explanations to the stories, but most often we either relegate those stories to VBS or children's sermons, or we just skip over them entirely because we don't want to deal with them.

One of those stories is about Joshua and the Battle of Jericho. It gets used mostly as a kids story today, but when you read through it, it gets dark very quickly. But because it has loud shouting, and walking in circles, and walls to be climbed, we tell it as a kids story.

A story that we skip over most of the time comes from Numbers 16.  The hardest part of the story comes vs. 31-35

As soon as he finished speaking these words, the ground under them split open. The earth opened its mouth and swallowed them and their households, including every human that belonged to Korah and all their possessions. They along with all their possessions descended alive to their graves, and the earth closed over them. They perished in the middle of the assembly. All the Israelites who were around them fled at their cry, for they said, "The earth may swallow us." Then fire went out from the LORD and consumed the two hundred fifty men offering incense.--Numbers 16:31-35
There was a conflict between Moses, Korah, and another family about who was going to lead Israel. To decide, whoever was left standing, i.e. didn't get swallowed up by the earth, would be the leader going forward.

What do we do with these stories? They aren't stories that give us warm and fuzzy feelings.  People outside of our faith would look at them and ask why they would want to believe in a God that does these things?

What do we do?

We work the process that we've been describing over the last few posts

We first try to put it in context, remembering that the Old Testament world was harder, harsher, more destructive, and more tragic than our world is today.  Then we try to deal with the strange things that happen by not getting caught up with them.

However, there are times, like in these stories when the strange is so big that we can't get around them.  Most stories aren't about the strange, but there are times when the strange gets in our way.

This is when it becomes even more important to ask another important question.


This is always a question we should ask, but in times like this it is the most important question.  We have to remember that no matter how big we think the strange is, that God is always bigger.

What we have to do is take a step back. We have to remember that God is telling a bigger story.  That these stories we find in scripture are a small part of what God is doing, and that we don't have to be able to explain them. 

Rather, we default to our faith in God. We rely on God to hold us up and not us hold God up.

We don't have to be able to explain it all.  That's okay.  Sometimes the answer is a mystery. What we remember is that God is working a bigger plan.  The long arc of the story is of God's redemption of his people.

In a world that is full of strange stories, we have an answer that doesn't have to figure it all out.  This is true if we're talking about strange stories, or if we're talking about strange people.  We don't have to understand them, and we shouldn't make up a story to try.

Instead, we remember that God is working on them to, and we don't have to explain them. We have to accept that we don't know, but God does. 

This is a message that we can bring to lots of folks who are dealing with the strange, but don't have another place to turn too. We can give them that place.

Go out, don't worry about the unexplained stories, but tell God's story instead, and do it in Jesus' name.

No comments:

Post a Comment