Proverbs Not Found in the Bible, Part II:
God Will Never Give You…
By Pastor Marcia Moret Sietstra
Feb. 11, 2007 Crestwood UCC
I Cor. 10:13
Two weeks ago, I gave you a little quiz over proverbs, those short sayings that often come from the Bible. But we discovered that a lot of proverbs that people assume come from the Bible, really don’t. Today I want to talk about another one of those popular sayings that people assume is in the Bible, but really isn’t, at least not in the form this saying takes.
Would you please finish this phrase for me: God never gives you… That’s right: God never gives you more than you can handle. I am quite sure that this popular proverb is based on I Corinthians 10:13, where Paul says, God is faithful and…will not let you be tested beyond your strength.
I know that many of you find this saying very comforting. I hear it so often, that I know this must be true. And today, I want to invite you to keep believing it, if it brings comfort to you, and if it makes sense to you. I don’t want to upset your belief system.
But I also know that, for many people, this saying is not comforting but troubling. They say to me, “If God is sending me all these problems and difficulties, because I am so strong, I wish I wasn’t so strong!” This is a reasonable response. The primary reason that I don’t find this proverb helpful, is because it implies that God is making bad things happen to us. It seems to suggest that God causes every bad thing that happens. Does God point a finger at a person and say, today you will get cancer, or today you will be raped and murdered? Did God cause the misery of the Holocaust, of Hurricane Katrina, or the widespread starvation in Darfur? How about the excruciating painful death of a 10-year old dying of leukemia?
Recently James Howell, the senior minister at Myers Park UMC in Charlotte, NC, wrote about the will of God in a Christian Century blog, an informal internet setting. He told about being on a local talk show. Just as the producer was motioning that it was time for a commercial break, the interviewer said to Rev. Howell, “How can you know what God wills? Give me an answer in three seconds.” All James Howell could do was stammer.1
Howell goes on to say that, just as you can’t really talk about God’s will in three seconds, the phrases that so many church-goers cling to as self-evident really don’t capture the complexity of this subject. Borrowing Stephen Cobert’s new word truthiness, which means what people believe to be true without reference to complicated facts, here is the typical truthiness on this subject: God is in control of everything or God needed your child in heaven more than you did or We cannot know why God caused that car accident. These platitudes are like 3-second sound bytes on a subject that has intrigued philosophers and theologians throughout the ages, and for me they are insufficient.
For example, in the case of the car accident attributed to God’s will, maybe God’s will is that we recognize the danger of mere mortals driving tons of metal down the highways at high speed. Perhaps God’s will is that we take some responsibility for the risks we take.
Let me tell you a story that has stuck with me ever since I read it about 20 years ago. Some of you have heard me tell it before, but it bears repeating. It is told by Leslie Weatherhead, a Methodist Bishop, in his tiny, classic book The Will of God. He describes an experience he had many years earlier in India:
I was standing on the veranda of an Indian home darkened by bereavement. My Indian friend had lost his little son, the light of his eyes, in a cholera epidemic. At the far end of the veranda his little daughter, the only remaining child, slept in a cot covered over with a mosquito net. We paced up and down, and I tried in my clumsy way to comfort and console him. But he said, “Well, padre, it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.”
Fortunately I knew him well enough to be able to reply without being misunderstood, and I said something like this: “Supposing someone crept up the steps onto the veranda tonight, while you all slept, and deliberately put a wad of cotton soaked in cholera germ culture over your little girl’s mouth as she lay in that cot there on the veranda, what would you think about that?”
“My God,” he said, “what would I think about that? Nobody would do such a damnable thing. If he attempted it and I caught him, I would kill him with as little compunction as I would a snake, and throw him over the veranda. What do you mean by suggesting such a thing?”
“But, John,” I said quietly, “isn’t that just what you have accused God of doing when you said it was his will? Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.” Surely we cannot identify as the will of God something for which a man would be locked up in jail, or put in a criminal lunatic asylum.
Weatherhead’s story always proves useful to me when I think about God’s will. God may ALLOW bad things to happen, but that does not mean that God CAUSES those things to happen. This subject has intrigued me since I was a child. Many of you know that I grew up surrounded by death. My mother died of cancer when I was 3, leaving my father with 10 chidren; all but one of my grandparents died by the time I was 9 or 10. When I was 10 or 11, my 4-month-old niece died of a rare blood disease. My nephew Jim was killed in the power take-off of a farm machine when he was 13 and I was 14. A year after Jim died, my dad died of a heart attack. A year later, on the same date in March, my brother died of pancreas cancer after a 6-week illness. At each funeral, the Calvinist minister said, “My, but God is really testing this family.” By the 4th grade, my poor Sunday school teachers were plagued by my constant questions about the will of God. No matter what the Sunday school lesson was about, for me it was about the will of God: Where were my family members? Why did God make children die? What was wrong with my prayers, that they didn’t work to keep people from dying? How come none of my friends’ families were dying? Finally when I was 15, I gave up on the God I saw as capricious and unfair.
Many years later, I vividly remember hearing a Lutheran minister preach about the death of his son from a gunshot. He said that he did not believe God caused his son’s death, for it would make God the triggerman. No, he said, God was there weeping with him, when his son was killed. Now that was a God I could relate to and trust.
To this day, I believe a God of love could not metaphorically point a finger and assign pain and tragedy to specific persons. But let me be honest here: in scripture you can find texts that suggest God causes bad things that happen. And you can find texts which suggest just the opposite, that God does not inflict pain. So if you disagree with me, you are in excellent company, because the writers of scripture held varying views about the will of God, too. We simply cannot know the mind or will of God with anything approaching certitude.
Let’s get back to the proverb. The second problem with the proverb God will never give you more than you can handle is that it ignores 2/3 of the verse it comes from, and by ignoring 67% of the verse, the meaning has changed 100%.2
Here’s what the first part of the verse says: No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. In other words, your trials are typical, universal, to be expected. Rev. Hope Harle-Mould explains, “The trials [you suffer] may be severe, but they are the standard modes operandi of life. This is why support groups are so powerful and helpful, like the Alanon Twelve-Step support groups or an Alzheimers Support Group. The first thing you learn is, you are not alone. Your extreme situation and extreme feelings are shared by many others who are going through the same things you are, and they can help guide and support you through to the other side of this crisis.”
So let’s add the beginning of the verse to the middle part: No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and… will not let you be tested beyond your strength… Now let’s finish the verse by adding the ending to the first two parts: with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.
Let me repeat that: with the testing God will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it. I believe it is life that tests us, again and again, and when it does, that is when we find our deepest source of strength—which is God—and we discover a new way of being. Sometimes it will happen that a new way of life presents itself because of the painful ending of a relationship or a career. Often we look back and realize that when life was hardest, we grew the most. Sometimes we can’t find anything good that comes from a tragedy, but we can recognize the presence of God walking with us, comforting us and giving us hope when we thought we could never smile again. Those amazing surprises are also part of what life offers to us, because God can be intimately involved in suffering without causing it. Albert Camus put it this way, “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that there was within me an invincible summer.”3
I wish I had an hour for this sermon because I feel like 15 minutes is barely more than a sound byte. Undoubtedly some of you are already thinking ahead, asking perhaps, “Is it logically consistent for Marcia to see God as the cause of our rescue but not the cause of our pain?” That is a fascinating and worthy question, but it will have to wait for another day. My short answer is this: I used to think it was inconsistent to see God as the originator of all that is good, and let God “off the hook” as the originator of evil. But I’ve changed my mind over the years. If we define God as the highest good, who, like a good parent, does not wish us harm, then it is consistent to attribute only “goodness” to the will of God. Thus we can credit God with our rescue, but find it inconceivable that God is the direct cause of our pain. Our pain may be part of God’s “allowed will,” but cannot be part of God’s intentional or ultimate will. I recommend Leslie Weatherhead’s little book The Will of God for an excellent explanation of this.
For now, I must close, so I would like to offer you an alternate version of the proverb with which I began today. Instead of: God will never give you more than you can handle, my version goes like this: God will never abandon you, no matter what hardship life brings. I think scripture, experience and reason combine to suggest this is true, and I invite you to try it out and see if you find it to be true in your life. God will never abandon you, no matter what hardship life brings. Amen