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The following message is delivered by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled, "With Things as They Are, Why is God Silent?" Let us continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word, as it is recorded in the Psalm numbered 83. I begin at the verse numbered 1.

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O God, do not keep silence. Do not hold thy peace or be still, O God. For lo, thy enemies are in tumult. Those who hate thee have raised their heads. They lay crafty plans against thy people. They consult together against thy protected ones. They say, "Come, let us wipe them out as a nation. Let the name of Israel be remembered no more." Yea,

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they conspire with one accord. Against thee they have made covenant. The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites, Gebel and Ammon and Amalek, Philistia with the inhabitants of Tyre, Assyria also has joined them. They are the strong arm of the children of Lot. Do to them as thou didst to Midian, as to Sisera and Jabin at the river Kishon, who was destroyed at Endor,

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who became dung for the ground. Make their nobles like Oreb and Zeb, all their princes like Zeba and Zalmunna, who said, "Let us take possession for ourselves of the pastures of God." O my God, make them like whirling dust, like chaff before the wind. As fire consumes the forest, as the flames set the mountains ablaze, so do thou pursue them with thy tempest and terrify them with thy

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hurricane. Fill their faces with shame that they may seek thy name, O Lord. Let them be put to shame and dismayed forever. Let them perish in disgrace. Let them know that thou alone, whose name is the Lord, art the most high over all the earth. And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of

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the Son and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Two young brothers were sent off to camp for the first time. After about six days, their parents received a postcard which read, "Dear Mom and Dad, we hope you have not forgotten where you put us." Do you ever feel that way about God? Do you ever feel that he has forgotten where he has put you? I sometimes feel very much that way. Isaiah speaks

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of God's gift to us at Christmas in the person of his sons by telling us that his son is a wonderful counselor, and we can understand that, for we see in Jesus availability, availability to all, a great tenderness and understanding and trust, and above all, an overwhelming love. I think most of us as Christians have experienced Christ as counselor at many times in our lives.

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But then Isaiah goes on to say that this son who is to be given will also be mighty God. Now, the words "mighty God" are an inaccurate translation. Actually, the words should read "divine protector." This one who comes to us in Jesus Christ is to be our divine protector. And I will confess to you that there are times when I do not feel protected, when planes tear

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themselves to shreds on runways, when the economic plight of the nation and indeed of the whole world is threatening to us all, when a madman with God knows what kind of weapons holds the whole world hostage to his hatred, when we see our loved ones, young women and men, going off to serve in the military. I think of the 16 different people that I know right now who are

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dying of terminal cancer, and I want to say, "Why is the divine protector silent?" I feel very much that the words of the psalmist ought to be my words. "Oh God, do not keep silence. Do not hold thy peace or be still, O God. For lo, thy enemies are in tumult. Those who hate thee have raised their head." With things as they are, why is God, the divine protector, silent? Well, I think of

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this a lot late at night after the 11 o'clock horror stories on the news, and out of my ruminations, I'd like to share with you four conclusions. The first thing I think we need to remember is that God's power, as it is evidenced in all creation, is most often silent. About 800 years before Christ, a Greek philosopher by the name of Thales posited that all life came forth from water. Some years

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after him came another Greek thinker named Anaximander, who argued that all life came forth from dust. A short time after that, a third thinker, Anaximenes, took both of these ideas and put them together. He said that life came forth out of water and dust. That is, he looked at mud and said, "This is the origin of life." Now it's interesting to notice the parallel between

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this Greek thought and the Hebrew thought, which was so much older, because you remember very well in the creation story as it is told to us in Genesis, that the water and the earth play a major role. The face of the deep is described, the waters above the firmament, the waters beneath the firmament, Adam is made out of the dust of the ground. But the Hebrews went one step beyond

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the Greeks. They ask, "What power is there behind these common elements of earth that have led to created humankind as we know it?" And this unique power that they sought to discover and describe, they called God. Their word for him was Elohim, which means literally "vital power." And this vital creative power of God is, interestingly enough, most often quite silent. If our world

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began, as the astrophysicist suggests, if the universe had its Genesis in a great bang, there was no one there to hear it. When light came across space and touched this dark earth as it was spinning through the blackness of the frigidity of space, when that light touched the earth and brought with it the possibilities of life, there was no sound. No one has ever heard the sound of

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a sperm penetrating an egg. No one has ever heard the sound of cells beginning to split and form a human being. All this power, all this miracle, done in silence. A hundred years ago, a New England farmer by the name of Rutherford Pratt wanted to discover how much power there was within a growing squash, how much pressure, internal pressure of growth, was built up. And so he fastened that

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squash up to a weightlifting device, and he discovered, to his amazement, that that squash, in the process of growth, demonstrated more than 4,000 pounds of pressure per square inch. Now, I think of that when I go out into the woods, and I walk among the elms and the oaks and the birch and the beech, and I see their leafy crowns high above me, and their branches intertangled in

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beautiful networks, and I see the bushes and the ivy and the many colored flowers lifting their heads toward the sun, and I stand on some greensward where the grass is emerald in color and soft to my feet, and I think to myself, "If within a single squash there is in the process of creative growth 4,000 pounds of pressure per square inch, then how much power must be evidenced

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in all of this growth which surrounds me in this woodland glade?" And yet, I don't hear a sound. It is indeed so silent there that the noise of a passing busy bee is quite clear to my ear. Just because God seems to be silent does not mean he is not at work, for his creative power demonstrates that his might often comes forward in great quiet. A second thought to think is this,

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that this silent power of God is the strongest and the most lasting power in all the world. When I was a little boy, my brother and I used to go and like to visit my grandfather Wheeler, who was the general baggage agent of the Pennsylvania Railroad Station here in Pittsburgh. Now, those, of course, were the days of the great puffer bellies, when those huge steam engines

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would come into the station gleaming, their bells ringing, spitting steam from their sides, smoke coming from their chimneys, the glow of the fire from the firemen lighting up the inside of the cab. And as they would move through the station, their great weight would cause everything about them to vibrate. But my grandfather would take me in one arm and my brother in the other

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arm and he would go up and he would stand right at the edge of the platform, right near where this was happening. And I can remember how the engineers and the conductors would wave to him because they all knew him. He was with the railroad for 53 years. And you know, as I stood there, with all the roar of that tremendous piece of machinery moving past me, with all of its obvious power,

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I felt no fear at all. Why? Because the power of my grandfather's love was more important to me than any power produced by a puffer belly. Just as a little child will find more power in a mother's lap when it's nestled there than it does in the thunderstorm which is raging outside.

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So the power of God is oft times silent, even in the midst of clamor. We fall for the lie that that which is most noisy is most powerful. But the fact is that the silent powers are often the greater. There is no greater power than gravity and yet no one has ever heard its sound. There are no greater powers than love and truth

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and freedom and beauty. And yet you do not hear the sound of these things. Look at the testimony of history. I spoke a few minutes ago about some Greek philosophers. The days, the golden days of Greece are long gone. The phalanxed armies of Alexander the Great, we hear the tread of their boots no more. But the writings of Homer, the Iliad, the Odyssey,

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the dialogues of Plato, these live and have power still. Or think of the Hebrews with their great temple. "Today not one stone stands upon another. The trumpets which were sounded when the morning sacrifice was offered, they sound no more. It is not but a ruin to be shown to gaping tourists and that which is claimed to be in fact one thing is often not that thing at

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all. Yet the prophets of ancient Israel, the singers of psalms, the gospel writers, and the writers of the New Testament letters, what they did still lives and has transforming power. That which splits our eardrums today will pass away and lose even its echo tomorrow. It is spiritual truth alone that endures. Empires rise and fall, but the Word of God stands forever.

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When I think to myself that the same silent power which can cause a petunia to grow up straight through the concrete slab of a parking lot as it reaches for the sun, that that same power is evident in the announcement of the truth, for the truth can do things in the world that no weapon ever conceived in the minds of human beings has been able to equal. When I think of

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that, I am reminded that the strongest and the most lasting of powers are the silent powers of God. And here is a third thought for your thinking. This silent power of God is always, inevitably and invariably, working against evil. Think of the matter philosophically. About 200 years ago, there lived in the Prussian town of

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Königsberg a little man, very affable, good-natured, a man so punctilious in his habits that people could set their watches by the time he would start out for his daily walk each day. This little man, Immanuel Kant, developed a philosophy which has been the most influential philosophy of the last 20 decades. Now, Immanuel Kant, in his critique of practical reason, argues that there is inside

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every human being a sense of ought. Now, that sense of ought, what we ought to do, is not the same for everyone, but there is a basic sense of oughtness in us, and he called this sense of oughtness the categorical imperative. And he said, since we have this sense of ought, that implies that we may either go along with it or we may deny it, which means that we have freedom. So he

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postulated that humankind was free. At the same time, he observed that we are drawn toward this goal of oughtness. Therefore, he said, there must be some standard of morality toward which this sense of oughtness within us gravitates and moves. And the fact that this thing within us has nothing to do with the body itself means that we have souls. It is our souls which respond as we try to

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obey the sense of ought and move toward that which is good. And so he postulated the existence of the soul. And then he went a step further, and he said, the soul, by definition, is eternal, not temporal. And so he postulated that every one of us is finally immortal. And he finally argued that if we are immortal, if our souls are going to live, and if there

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is within those souls a desire to fulfill this sense of ought and to live up to this moral standard, to make the free choices that are necessary to achieve that kind of goal, then there must be some reason or someone who says, I have made you and it is my will for you that you do what you ought to do. And this someone Kant called God. Now, this philosophy is not what we

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would describe as a Christian philosophy today. But Kant's postulates of freedom and immortality and God, all built on the categorical imperative, the idea of ought, all built toward moving toward the good, emphasize the fact that it is God's will that good triumph and that evil be defeated. Let us illustrate the point from the Bible. Here is a man named Belshazzar,

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who was the king of the Babylonian empire at the time when it rules the Middle East. He holds all the religions of the people whom he has conquered in contempt. And so one night he has a great feast to which he invites a thousand of his lords. And to show his complete disdain for the God of the Jews, he takes the sacred golden vessels

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which the Babylonians had stolen from the Jewish temple, and he uses those as the common tableware of the evening. And in the middle of the festivities, suddenly there's a great silence, for everyone sees as with a single pair of eyes, a hand, just a hand, writing on a wall, "Many, many, teckel apfarsin, thou hast been weighed in the balance and found wanting."

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And that night, Babylon and Belshazzar and his thousand lords began the course toward dusty death. Theodore Momsen, the historian, says that there is in history a sense of nemesis, which means there is a doom that inevitably attaches itself to everything that is evil and brings it finally to destruction. Matthew Arnold put it this way, "There is a power not of ourselves,

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which is always moving toward righteousness." Charles Beard said, "The mills of God grind slow, but they grind exceeding fine." And it's very calming to my heart. To realize that this silent God, invariably and inevitably set against evil, is standing in the shadows, keeping watch above his own.

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And one last thought. This silent power of God can be experienced in the individual life. Sometimes you have to get a distance away from a life to see that, but take a man like Louis Pasteur. His early experiments were failures. He was, as I'm sure most of you know, tragically paralyzed. He was mocked by the people in his town. When a war was to be fought and he could

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not go to participate because of his tripled state, they jeered him so that one night he came home weeping and he said to his wife through his tears, "I have something to give to France that men with swords cannot give." And in the end, he did just that. And Pasteur's contributions to science have saved more lives than the sword has ever taken. And when Pasteur was asked,

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whence he had the courage and the tenacity to pursue his goal in the face of all the abuse he received while he did it, his immediate and invariable answer was this, "Christ made me what I am." And how often the world is blessed because the silent power of God is moving through some woman or man to bless it. We see this preeminently, of course, in the example of our Lord Jesus

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himself. When he was being crucified, the priests screamed at him, the thieves cursed him, the crowds mocked him, Caiaphas challenged him, Pilate ignored him. They thought they were rid of him once and for all. His candle was blown out. Now they are all gone and there attaches to their names nothing other than reproach and shame. But Jesus Christ lives. And being lifted up from the

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earth, he draws people to him. There is in him some tremendous gravitational pull of the Spirit which has drawn more men and women to his feet across centuries than that of any other person who has ever lived. And more people own him as Lord now than had ever so called him in all of the times that are behind us. And so in days like these, when there are wars and rumors of wars,

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when the economy is a shambles, when we are filled with anxiety and no suffering, we must not fall for the lie that the loudest is the strongest. Oh, it is very easy to believe that a war or an earthquake is stronger than love and truth and justice, but don't fall for that lie. The silent power of God is at work in the world and it is forever dependable. It is only for us

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to bring the deep in ourselves into contact with the deep in God, to go to those green pastures and beside those still waters where he can restore our souls. So when you are doubtful and when you are inclined to say with the psalmist, "Oh God, do not keep silence. Do not hold by peace or be still, oh God, for lo, thy enemies are in tumult and those who hate thee have raised their head."

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When you're inclined to say that or think that, remember that even in the silence, the might of God moves. It is evident in creation. It is evident in the things which endure and the things which pass away. It is evident in the final destruction of all that is evil and it is evident not only in history but in the individual personal life. I think the singer of this Psalm numbered 83

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came to some recognition of this, for he concludes his psalm by saying, "Thou art most high over all the earth." Or perhaps he remembered what had been written by a psalmist before him, the singer of Psalm 46, who speaking in the Lord's spirit said, "Be still and know that I am God." Let us pray.

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Speak to us out of the roar, not of the wind or the storm or the fire, but speak to us with that still, small voice which is thine. Take away our doubts, our fears, our anxieties, our agonies, and give to us that peace which the knowledge of thine invincible power bestows. For we pray our prayer in the name of that one who is wonderful counselor and divine protector. Amen.

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Amen. [ Silence ]