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Sometimes we need the refuge of familiar Scripture. There’s nothing more obscene than the wanton taking of a human life, and so, in the face of that obscenity, we look to Scripture.


I’m not here to defend God or to address the question, 'Why do such things happen?' They happen because of human sinfulness, and they grieve God. God’s own Son died a violent death, and so have other faithful people through the ages.


It’s not explanations we look for, and no explanation is sufficient. Even the psalmist prays to God for vengeance. Of the evil people of the world, the psalmist says, '[God] will bring back on them their iniquity and wipe them out for their wickedness; the Lord our God will wipe them out (94:23).'


Someone has said the psalms tell as much about what we think and how we feel as they tell about God.


In that same psalm, the psalmist talks about how God has held him up and brought him consolation. And so, even in the face of the most obscene evil which we as humans know, God holds us up if we only can see it.


'The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want,' the psalmist says; 'he makes me lie down in green pastures,' and those words might cause mixed feelings here today. How, in the face of violence and terror, can we say of God, 'He leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul'?


But there’s another portion to that psalm. 'Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil; for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.'


Thou art with me. In his book Who Needs God, Rabbi Harold Kushner points out that in this part of the psalm the relationship has changed. No longer is God the impersonal He who provides us everything we need. Now God is the friend who walks with us in our grief. Even in our anger and our terror, God brings us comfort.


Nothing makes this act of violence any less obscene, and nothing changes our or God’s abhorrence toward it. But the God we worship is the one whose Scripture promises that those who come out of the great tribulation will have their robes washed in the blood of the Lamb. 'For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,' it says in Revelation, ‘‘and he will guide them to springs of living water.’’


That promise made to Christian martyrs is a sign of what it means to say God walks with us.


'Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you,' the Master said as he too was about to go away; 'not as the world gives do I give you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.'


In the face of such great pain, how can that be? It can be because the God we worship is the God of the whole universe, the one the psalmist calls by the familiar 'tour,' the one whose Son tells us, 'Let not your hearts be troubled; believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And when I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may also be.'


It’s just a temporary victory, this victory which it seems right now that evil’s won. We need not fear.


Of the evil people of the world, the psalmist says, '[God] will bring back on them their iniquity ...' To which I’d add, God will do that by taking death and turning it around. God will do that, not with more death, but instead, with resurrection.

Let Us Pray


So little can be said, Lord. And there is so little for us to do except to look at you as you walk with us in our hour of need. Help us hear the message of the Scripture, and help us claim the promise that, in you, we find not death, but resurrection.



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