An Interventionist God?

(Taken from AFC Family News March Edition)

All of us have been touched by the stories we have heard from the recent flooding in both the South West and closer to home in the Thames Valley.  My former church is very close to the Somerset Levels and we regularly visited the villages and beauty spots around Wells and Glastonbury which, as I write, are still under water.

With that in mind I was intrigued by the comments of a casual ‘customer’ at our Friday Coffee Break in The Alfred Ellis Hall the other week. As she was purchasing a home made cake she proclaimed in a rather loud voice that this year’s deluge was a direct result of people not praying enough and the government passing legislation for ‘gay marriage’ – I almost dropped my ginger biscuit!

I am sure (read that as I hope) you simply don’t believe in that kind of God – a vengeful and, quite frankly spiteful deity who indiscriminately dishes out punishment in a fit of temper.

Perhaps such a medieval way of thinking was grounded in an Old Testament paradigm that linked obedience to prosperity in the land and vice versa.  Yet surely since The Enlightenment we have needed to take a more nuanced view of God’s role in creation.

And perhaps issues such as wars and natural disasters always call us to question the idea of an ‘Interventionist God’ – or at least to ponder how the God of Love, revealed to us in Jesus Christ, touches our lives with goodness and hope at such times of crisis and suffering.

For most of us, I guess, that ‘intervention’ will not be in the sphere of the so-called ‘supernatural’ but through the ‘ordinary’ – and I, for one, think there’s nothing unspiritual about that.

In the two millennia since our Saviour walked the earth millions of people have been healed everyday through the ever developing medium of medicine.  As societies have struggled for political or religious freedom agencies such as Amnesty International or coalitions of Inter-faith pressure groups have campaigned on their behalf.  When earthquake or famine brings an already impoverished country to its knees Christian Aid, along with many other humanitarian organisations, will be one of the first on the scene offering resources often not just for the short but long term.

And maybe that is the point. We in the church often use the word ‘humanitarian’ in a slightly derisible way – to suggest that it’s ‘non-Christian.  However I like to think that whenever and whoever acts in a loving way to neighbour is actually the channel of God’s goodness in our world.  I suspect that’s why so many people have said to me as I’ve visited them in hospital – always in quiet tones as if telling me a state secret – ‘you know the nurses here are angels’ – well perhaps they really are!

The reality of suffering never goes away and no philosophical or religious argument really satisfies the ‘why’ question.  The truth is that bad things happen to good people.  And how does God intervene?  Well – the words of hymn by Henry Burton (one I must put on the order of service soon as it’s not in Rejoice and Sing) ring true for me:

‘...but his angels here are human,
not the shining hosts above,
for the drum-beats of his army
are the heart-beats of our love.’

All of us have a wonderful calling – to be ‘channels’ through which the love and goodness of God can flow to those with whom we are sharing this journey through life. And all of us have a wonderful privilege too – to receive that love from another person and recognise it as the goodness of God touching our lives.

With best wishes,

Ian