The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
February 8, 2004 

If the Lord is with us…
Judges 6:11-24a

The news gives plenty of reasons to despair for our world and even to fear for your life. Just this week, there was the gripping video of Carlie Brucia being abducted behind a Sarasota, Florida car wash. After five days of the nation holding its collective breath with the 11 year old girl’s family, we got the tragic news that her body was found behind a church two miles from the spot where she was kidnapped. 

Added to this specific tragedy are the general fears of terrorism from afar and other violence here at home. In case the sense of danger was diminishing, it turns out that the fear of the bad taste of Castor Oil in my youth has morphed this week into something more sinister as it turns out that the same plant can be used to manufacture the poison Ricin, which was found in a Senate mailroom this week. 

I could go on, but you get the idea. Listening to the news is enough to make one question the existence of God. Can there really be a God watching over a world like this? Was God conveniently looking the other way when things went wrong this week? Or was God asleep at the switch? Or perhaps God was just watching on with a vague, slightly bored interest in the lives of us humans? We can sing “This is the day that the Lord has made” on a Sunday morning, but where is the proof in the midst of the very real despair we see around us during any given week? 

We get this same question on the lips of the sometimes larger than life Old Testament hero Gideon in this week’s Old Testament lesson. As Gideon puts the question to an angel, “But sir, If the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?” If we want to begin to answer this question from a biblical point of view, we’ll have to find out more about this guy Gideon and his times. 

First, as we meet Gideon he is threshing wheat. That parts mundane enough. But Gideon is doing his threshing in a wine press. The wine press would have been a depression carved in the rock, a whole big enough for Gideon to drop down into it for a little threshing out of site of anyone looking on from a distance. Gideon has to hide his agricultural chore as Israel has at this point been under the thumb of the Midianites for seven years. The section of the Book of Judges right before our reading for today tells us that the Midianites keep descending like locusts on Israel’s foodstuffs and most everyone is hiding out in caves or clefts in the mountains.  

Gideon is trying on the sly to get a little usable grain out of his wheat when an angel of the Lord appears and declares the most unlikely of facts, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.”

Gideon is quite sure that the angel is mistaken. Mighty warriors do not hide in the bottom of a wine press to thresh wheat, and if God is with anyone in the seemingly God-forsaken Israel, then why is all this happening? 

Gideon will get his answer. It is probably not the one he wants, but he will get the answer. This is one of several times and several ways that the problem of suffering gets answered in the Bible. There are various kinds of suffering and various reasons are given for why God allows suffering and what we are to do about it. 

Sometimes, it is clear that we humans, through our own bad choices bring suffering on ourselves. At a simple level, if you stick your hand in a fire, you will get burned. It’s just the way the world works without God having to will pain for you at that moment. Of course, sometimes other folks bring suffering on us. A person can choose to drive drunk and then hit someone else while they are out on the roads.  

Miracles are possible, but the rules of creation tend to be in force more often than not. Actions have reactions, sometimes bad ones. God does not have to want it to happen. If we are to have free will then we and everyone else can have the choice to cause pain, intentionally and unintentionally. 

Please know that not all the suffering in the world is brought on directly by free will and bad choices. But this is the type of suffering Gideon experiences and learns about. There are other types of suffering and there are more answers. [see related talk with a broader discussion on suffering here] But for today, we will look at this one area. 

So sometimes, we, or someone else brings suffering on us. This is what we find in the story of Gideon. Earlier in the chapter, we learn that Israel departed from God’s ways and in time they came under the rule of the Midianites. The people did not listen to God and in time they came to find themselves suffering for their own bad choices. 

The first thing to notice is that though the people chose to disregard God, God did not chose to disregard God’s people. God will give you the free reign to make mistakes, but God will not abandon you even in your folly. 

Even with his head down in the wine press for fear of the Midianites, God is present with Gideon. So, the good news is that God is with you, even in the midst of despair, even when you are sure God has given up on you. God is present with you especially when you are certain that your problems are not on God’s radar screen.  

Next Gideon more or less blames God for the problems saying, “Where are all [God’s] wonderful deeds that our ancestors recounted to us, saying, ‘Did not the Lord bring us up from Egypt?’ But now the Lord has cast us off, and given us into the hand of Midian.” Yet even with Gideon complaints, Gideon remains God’s chosen leader for Israel.  

You may have heard that you should not complain about God, or say things against God. But the stories in the Bible show us again and again that as long as you are still talking with God, even if all you are doing is complaining, then God will stay in that conversation with you. God is big enough to take your anger.  

The only downside is that God may expect you to do something about the things you are complaining about. That’s what Gideon finds out. That day in the wine press, Gideon dared to ask what God was going to do for Israel. Gideon said, if the Lord is with us, then why does this happen, but what he is really looking for is some divine action. But the answer God has is Gideon himself. Gideon is to take some action to set change in motion. 

So you too may be God’s solution to the problems you pose in prayer. But before you take this idea and run with it, you should know a little bit more about Gideon’s story. Gideon is a bona fide hero of Israel, I don’t want to take that from him, but his story presents not one Gideon, but two.  

The distinction between the two sides of Gideon is so strong, he is known by two names. He is Gideon, which means “hacker” in the sense of “cutting something.” That was his name at birth. But not much later in the story, Gideon is going to start turning Israel away from idols and back to the true God by destroying his Dad’s altar to the god Baal and his pole raised to the goddess Asherah. When the neighbors get to kill Gideon for angering the god and goddess, his own Dad will speak up and say that Baal should fight his own battles. If Baal is angry with Gideon for destroying the altar, then let Baal contend with Gideon. Gideon goes on to rid the nation of its idols and becomes known as Jerubbaal, which means something to the effect of “Let Baal contend against him.”

Here is the problem. Sometimes he is Jerubbaal, the great leader who trusts God against all odds and takes on lesser gods in the struggle to lead Israel back to faithfulness. Then at other times, he is Gideon again, relying on his own abilities rather than trusting God. Before his time as Judge of Israel is through, Jerubbaal, the great destroyer of idols, will be Gideon, the leader who creates an Ephod, which Israel comes to worship. We also read how Gideon led a much smaller army over more powerful forces by trusting in God for the victory, but in some later battles, where he trusts in his own might, his soldiers become “exhausted and famished.” 

The Gideon-Jerubbaal struggle is one that continues for each of us. Once you try to follow God’s will, a tug of war begins, just as it did for Gideon. God will ask you to destroy the other allegiances you have in your life. Easy right? No one seems to trust in Baal or Asherah these days, so what’s the problem? But lots of us trust in the stock market, trust in their job, trust in a relationship, or trust just about anything but the God who loves you. Gideon constantly struggled between trusting God and trusting in his own abilities and in things he could see.  

I want to stop now with the story and try to weave together the threads I’ve shared. The Bible deals with different forms of suffering in different ways. But the predominant form of pain and anguish in our world comes from our wrong use of free will. We hurt ourselves and we hurt one another in the choices we make. The good news is that God is with us in our hurt and pain. God can even redeem the tragedy in your life often by bringing good from the suffering. Even if God does not cause the pain or want you to suffer, God can redeem the hurt with good. 

The suffering any of us sees in our own lives at times is more than enough to bear without even tuning into to the woes of the world on the evening news. But to push what we have learned from the story of Gideon further, any time you start to say, “If the Lord is with us, then why is this happening?” then God may want to use you as part, a small part perhaps, of the solution. You won’t be able to change the world, but you can change yourself and that is always a start. 

Yet, once you try to become part of the solution, the tug of war begins between trusting God and trusting in your own abilities. Like Gideon, you will only be effective to the degree that you trust God rather than yourself. Try to handle it all on your own and you are just back to using your own free will in possibly wrong ways. 

Each of us can be an idol maker or an idol breaker. Trusting in other people, institutions, or stuff of this life, is making an idol, giving your trust to something else. Giving up on other people or things and trusting God is being an idol breaker. If you can get rid of all of the other allegiances in your life that you place above God and trust in God alone, you will be doing all you can to be part of the solution to the suffering in our world. It might not seem like much of an answer, it didn’t to Gideon at the time either. But if the Lord is with us, then the answer to how things can start to go right in this fallen world may well start with you and me. 

Amen.