Thank God, I'm not God

So sometimes, I think the hardest thing to accept is that we are not God. But you know, at the same time… THANK GOD, I’m not God…

This realization that I’m not God sometimes hits me like a 2×4. For example, there’s that one time I was working at an Advertising firm and I had worked long and hard for hours on an ad flyer for ConocoPhillips, and when I showed it to my supervisor, he looked at it and told me I had to basically change everything about the project, it was all wrong. I’m not God.

Or that time I tried to skate on a longboard for the first time and after trying for a few minutes the skate board shot out from under me and I fell terribly backwards, luckily I had a helmet on. I’m not God.

Or the time when I was a hospital chaplain and I got a call for a code blue, and the patient died. And I had to try to comfort the mother whose world had just crumbled before her. In that moment, I had no words of comfort, I had no words of wisdom. I only had myself, my very human self. And so I sat with her, and I prayed quietly for God to bring peace to this mother. I’m not God.

It can be easy to think or act like we can handle everything. To pretend that we are self-sufficient. That we don’t need any help. But it’s simply not true.

Yet sometimes, even if you DO want to depend on God, it’s hard because it doesn’t seem like God is doing anything about our situation. God doesn’t seem to help me when I’ve been out of work for a year and can’t seem to find a job. God doesn’t seem to help me when my loved one is struggling with cancer, God doesn’t seem to help me when my world is falling apart.

This is the problem in the first reading today. The prophet Habakkuk was living during the time of great turmoil, and like many of the other prophets came to prophecy against the Israelites who have begun to lose their faith in the God of Israel. The people stopped handing on the faith to their children. The political leaders of Israel have forgotten the law of God. And now their greatest political enemy, the Babylonians/the Chaldeans, are at the doorstep ready to attack them.

And so we hear Habakkuk’s complaint to God. He cries out, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you “Violence!” and you will not save?”…  “Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise.”

Habakkuk looks out on the people of God, on the political climate of his times, the violence amongst the people and cries for help from God.

Doesn’t this sound eerily familiar today? We look at our world today, we look at our political climate, we look at all the violence and persecution, we look at the lack of faithfulness to God and we too cry out, like prophet, to God: “how long?!” “do you not listen?!”.

So, what’s the Lord’s response to Habakkuk? He says, “Look at the nations, and see! Be astonished! Be astounded! For a work is being done in your days that you would not believe if you were told. For I am rousing the Chaldeans, that fierce and impetuous nation, who march through the breadth of the earth to seize dwellings not their own.” 

Now the Chaldeans, also known as the Babylonians, were the great enemy of Israel. And God says to Habakkuk, look! I’m going to work through THEM to bring the people back. That’s like God saying to us, “I am rousing up ISIS” and although they do wicked things and evil things, I will use them to do good.

The question for you and I today, is a question of Faith. Do we trust that God can do good in the midst of all this evil?

It’s easy to trust that God is good and that he loves me when everything is going well in my life. But what happens when I’m a mother and I lose my only son in the hospital? What happens when we look at the politics of our country and we can’t decide which will be worse for us? What happens when we see the violence and racial hate that still tearing our youth apart? And on top of that, ISIS and other extremists are still persecuting and beheading Christians. Can God bring about Good from all of this?

But this is exactly what God says he can do. In fact, this is exactly what he did with St. Paul, who before he encountered God was persecuting and beheading Christians and God eventually changed his heart and now we read his letters in Church! That’s like someone from ISIS having a conversion of heart and then writing letters to us and then reading those letters here at Mass! How shockingly disturbing this would be… but how unimaginably powerful is our God…

Do we have faith that God can bring about Good even from the greatest evil of our times? The Lord says to us through Habakkuk: “The vision still has its time!” … “The vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays WAIT for it, it will surely come… The rash one has no integrity; but the JUST one, because of his FAITH, shall LIVE.”

God who often would appear to St. Catherine of Sienna said to her: “Do you know, daughter, who you are and who I am? If you know these two things you will have beatitude within your grasp.  You are she who is not, and I AM HE WHO IS.” Trust that God is God and we are not.

And so, if we have trust, “if we have faith… the size of a mustard seed, you would say to the mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ and it would obey you.” There is great power in our Faith in God. “For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.” 

Without God, nothing truly good is possible. But with God all things are possible. Even in our darkest hour, even when we are abandoned by all our friends, even when our own people persecute us, even when they nail us to the cross… God’s power can overcome even death itself….

Trust in God, trust in his providence and trust that we are NOT God.