God Isn’t Fair

Do you remember the Palm Sunday five years ago when twin suicide bombings took place in Egypt? One was at St. George’s Church in the Nile delta, and the other was at Saint Mark’s Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria, the seat of the Coptic papacy. It’s one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Most scholars believe that the Ethiopian eunuch Philip baptized in Acts is the founder of that community. At least 45 people were reported killed and 126 injured.

And then there are the Christians in Iraq and Syria and Turkey. They date from even before the Egyptian Coptics. They still speak Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke. The first community of all was in Antioch, now Antakya, Turkey. That was where Paul was headed when he was struck blind and fell off of his horse and went on to convert Western Europe. Recent earthquakes have all but wiped out the city. In the 1980s there were over 1.4 million Christians in Iraq, about 8.5% of the population. By 2013 they were down to about 450,000 – a third of the previous number - and at last count there were only about 250,000. In Syria, the Christian population has also declined by about two thirds just since 2011, with fewer than 700,000 left. Pastors have been kidnapped and murdered, churches have been burned.

It’s not fair. Christian communities are hard-working, law-abiding, hospitable. And they were there first! They’ve stood up to hundreds of years of pressure, been faithful to God and to their neighbors. Why does God let this happen? What about the promise in Psalm 121:4: "He who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep." Sure looks doesn't look like he was paying attention, does it?

Maybe we should be asking, instead, “Is it fair that people in the United States can worship anytime they like, and be reasonably sure that they won’t be dragged out and murdered, or have the church burned over their heads, or be thrown into jail, while in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Vietnam and Nigeria and dozens of other countries around the world this kind of act is almost an everyday occurrence?”

Maybe this is not just a tragedy. Maybe this is a wake-up call.

In this country only “disturbed” people kill one another because of their faith, or their race, or their politics, or their position in life. Not even ISIS has targeted Christian churches here. It is Western civilization as a whole, rather than Christianity in particular, that seems to be under attack. And so these terrible events in other parts of the world might seem random or pointless. After all, more Muslims have been killed by terrorists than Christians. But perhaps it will make us think about whether or not we would be willing to gather to worship God if there were danger, if we knew that people hostile to the Gospel might break in on us and burn our Bibles and break our windows and perhaps even take our lives.

How many of us come to church, worship God, and live decent, orderly lives because it’s the prudent thing to do? How many of us obey God out of an expectation that if we do, everything will go well? How many of us - how many of our friends and neighbors - respond when senseless tragedy strikes, “It isn’t fair!” because we’ve played by the rules, and done all the right things.

I used to wonder why it was that, the first time I lent my car to a needy friend when I was out of town, a flying stone took the windshield out, and the second time a tourist from Los Angeles broadsided it making an illegal left-hand turn. You’d think that God would protect the generous! It wasn’t fair!

But why do we expect things to be fair?

All over the world things are happening that aren’t fair. It isn’t fair that the Rohingya Muslims are being chased out of Burma, across the border to Bangladesh, which is already one of the poorest countries in the world. It’s nothing new to them; they’re described as “the world’s least wanted people.” They have always been denied citizenship, and they don’t have the right to free movement or higher education.

Ethnic cleansing is nothing new, of course. It’s only been a few years since the Serbians were slaughtering Albanians and before that it was the Tamil minority in Sri Lanka and the East Timorese in Indonesia and last century the Armenians in Turkey… It makes the Egyptian treatment of the Hebrew slaves seem almost humane by comparison.

That’s what I thought about, and wondered about, as I read the passage from Exodus this week. There are refugees, and then there are refugees. Moses had talked them all into leaving Egypt, making a brave stand for freedom in the face of impossible, unbelievable odds, and there they are, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, starving to death. “It’s not fair,” they whine, “we thought all the hard times were behind us.”