"Why do bad things happen to good people?" is the way we say it today.

That surely must have been a question on the hearts and minds of those first-century Christians as they suffered under the brutal persecution of the Roman empire. It is a question that surely was on the hearts and minds to whom John had written this extraordinary piece of literature we call the book of Revelation. Many of them were convinced that they were innocent and righteous sufferers sent to their deaths in the coliseum because they had refused to "burn incense to Caesar" and acknowledge that any one else was Lord of their life than Jesus, the Christ.

But there is even a more troubling question than "Why do bad things happen to good people?" that must have bothered them. "Why does a holy, righteous, and loving God permit the unrighteous to swallow the righteous, the wicked to devour the innocent? Why does God permit such suffering and seemingly do nothing about it?"

It is bad enough if some outsider is the villain. It is intolerable when the villain is homegrown. It's like having the fireman start the fire, the policeman rob the bank and murder the citizens, the government extort money from its subjects, and the armed forces ravage their own country. Outsiders we could excuse by saying that they are outsiders. But how does one excuse the insiders? This is the most haunting question of all raised by those to whom John wrote his book.

"God, how could you do this to your own people?"

How could God be a god of love and still permit this kind of suffering? Either he is not an all-powerful God ... or worse yet, not loving.

These first-century Christian martyrs were not the first nor would they be the last to raise this poignant question. When our Lord Jesus Christ cried in anguish from the cross, "My God, my God, why have your forsaken me?" it was the same question. Why should God turn on the one who without question has been faithful? The fact that he does makes this question very important. Easy explanations are out. We should not be surprised or ashamed to find ourselves crying out with the same question.

How do God's people excuse God, the righteous God, for letting the righteous, good people be victimized at will by those who scorn him and them?

That same cry was raised by many in our land after the attack of September 11, 2001. Over 7,000 people, just going about their daily business, were suddenly destroyed by these four flying bombs. They were innocent victims who bore no malice toward those terrorists. It is easy to understand our anger and our desire to get back and get even. In the same way many Christians in the Roman empire were angered and infuriated. Many were outraged by what had happened to their brothers and sisters in the faith at the hands of the brutal and ruthless Romans, and God seemed to be doing nothing about it!

This problem also vexes us. We just don't understand the ways of God. We especially do not understand God's timing! We want quick, immediate action when someone has been wronged or injustice has been inflicted. Especially when we have been wronged, we want immediate retaliation. We grow impatient with God's inaction, with God's seeming reluctance to balance the scales of justice. We want God to follow our timetable. Instant justice! Immediate eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth!

But ... would we ask for the same, immediate solution when we are the ones who have done the wrong, when we have been unjust, when we have used power to serve only ourselves? Then, it is a different matter, isn't it? Then we are quick to plead "extenuating circumstances," give explanations and beg forgiveness. Then we are not unlike the criminal who refuses to extend mercy to his victim but who pleads weeping for mercy when he has been caught. Perhaps God might be rejecting the instantaneous response because that would mean wiping out just about everyone with his judgment, including those who were pleading for swift retaliation as long as it was not directed at them.

God understands time much differently than we do. Since we measure time in milliseconds, a little time seems like a lot of time. In our demand for justice now, we forget that God is the inventor, the creator of time. His relationship to time differs from that of ours. "A thousand years as one day, and one day as 1,000 years," says scripture. His timing is not like our timing.

For example, the people of Israel were in bondage in Egypt for an inordinate number of years. They cry out to God to free them. Then God remembers his promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. When did that promising take place? Only 400 years before! His delivery of the people of Israel is regarded as fulfilling that 400-year-old promise! That is certainly a different way of keeping a promise and that certainly is a different sense of timing than ours.

 A guide at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem once explained it this way, this divine sense of timing that is so different from ours. A devout Jew who lives far from Jerusalem has his heart set on getting to the Wailing Wall during his lifetime. He dies without having made the journey. His children then take up the wish and the dream. They do not make it. Then the grandchildren. They are not successful. Then the great-grandchildren, the great-great grandchildren and the great-great-great grandchildren. At last one of the great-great-great-great grandchildren makes it to the Wailing Wall. In the person and presence of this child, the hopes and dreams of all that went before him are fulfilled. The devout father who died hundreds of years before is at the Wailing Wall, as this child now prays there.

 That is why God said he had fulfilled his promise to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, when we would say that he only fulfilled it for those Hebrews he brought out of Egypt some 400 years later.

We are impatient with God's timing. Individualism has become such a strong religion in our world that we cannot work very well with the idea that promises made to us are fulfilled when they come true in the life of our offspring generations later. Because we were never able to taste them personally, they were promises broken and not promises kept.

Our sense of time has a much shorter fuse. We like it when God's timing agrees with ours. When it does, we gloat over the misfortunes of the unjust, the wicked, of those whom we are convinced deserved it. And so we rejoice at the downfall of a religious leader, at the resignation of a politician, the suicide of Adolf Hitler, the stroke-induced death of a Joseph Stalin, the execution of Sadaam Hussein ... or even on a much lesser scale, the crushing of a sports hero by one still younger, or by the aging of the beautiful, or the bankruptcy of a tycoon. We delight when the great are brought down. We are sure they had it coming.

More often than not God's sense of timing does not agree with ours. God's timing seems so slow and it is so painful to wait for it. Just ask those first-century Christians, the audience of John's book, who had lost brothers, sisters, parents, and friends in the bloody persecutions of Nero and Domitian. Just ask the parents of missing children, the families keeping vigil at the deathbed of their loved ones, the poor who are longing to flee from their ghetto of deprivation, the widows and widowers and divorced who are still trying to fill the emptiness in their lives ... all who find it so difficult to wait.

We want God to act now! And when he doesn't, we often find it necessary to take matters into our own hands. We get angry. We abuse our children, our spouse, our neighbor. We lose our tempers. We become violent. Or worse yet, we give up ... as all too many Christians did at the end of the first century when they decided to burn incense to Caesar and deny that Jesus was Lord when faced with their own martyrdom.

Most often our impatience results in our reluctance to forgive. Forgiveness requires a willingness to be patient, the willingness to wait, to wait out our own anger and the anger of those with whom we are in conflict. Forgiveness requires the willingness to withhold judgment, getting even, and extracting our "pound of flesh." Forgiveness means that we must be willing to forgo the impatient race of our time for the gentle flow of God's time. It means to be patient enough to forgive one another, to never stop forgiving, to withhold cutting off the brother, to resist lashing out in righteous wrath, because you never know according to God's timetable when your forgiveness may finally be able to reclaim your enemy.

There were also many of those about-to-be-martyred Christians who cried out in desperation for God to increase their faith. Without an increase in faith, they would never be able forgive their enemies or their friends who had betrayed them. They sensed that it was going to be very difficult to live according to God's time, not just because they were used to their own time, but ultimately because they did not trust God and his time schedule.

If the first-century Christians to whom John addressed his book cried out to God to increase their faith, so also do we. When bad things happen to good people, when the world is riddled with violence that so often strikes the innocent, when we find ourselves the victims of injustice and oppression, it takes a lot of faith to still trust God. It takes a lot of faith to trust his time schedule, to curb our own impatience, and lust for revenge. It takes a lot of faith not to be anxious and worried when you lose your job or the company is losing money. It takes a lot faith to trust the promises of God when so much in life seems to contradict them. To risk ostracism, ridicule, humiliation, and even our jobs because we won't "burn incense to Caesar" takes a whole lot of faith, more faith than you or I could ever hope to muster on our own. So, we get tired of waiting. We get tired of God's timing. We join those first-century Christians in Asia Minor crying out for more faith. We are about to give up on God.

But God's time is not our time. In his time, he truly does keep his promises. In his time, he rights the wrongs and saves his people. In today's reading, the dramatic conclusion to the entire book of Revelation, God speaks to John and shows a vision of the future when in God's time, in the fullness of time ... all things shall be accomplished. All shall be set right.

Yes, the delay between the sin of Adam and Eve and the coming of Christ was a long time. Yes, three hours on the cross was a long time, especially after you have first been beaten until the white of your backbone and white of your ribs shows through the mangled flesh that once covered them.

Yes, God's time is difficult to understand. And, as if to heighten the confusion even more, what Jesus seemed to call an injustice ("My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?") was the ultimate working out of justice. This was God finally keeping his promise. And he did it in a way that was utterly different from the way we usually understand justice. We expect God to just sock it to the evil ones of this earth. But that would be nothing more than the same old routine. That would be God caving into the demands of our time and our cries for revenge. But what if God finally vented his justice not on all the sin and evil of this world but on himself, on his only begotten Son? What if the cries of all the innocent victims of history for justice and righteous destruction of all the bad guys of this world were finally answered not by blasting them to smithereens but in the cross, in the dumping of all that righteous anger on his Son?

What would that mean? That would mean the end of anger. That would mean forgiveness, mercy, new life! That would mean salvation ... for you, for me, for our enemies, for the world.

That is exactly what happened on Good Friday and Easter, on the cross and at the empty tomb. All in God's time God kept his promise. God finally made good on what he had promised to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, David ... and those first-century victims of persecution. God acted decisively, once and for all, for you and for me. For all the lives lost in the rubble of the World Trade Center, for the broken bodies and lives of the Pentagon, for those trapped under the debris of all the unjust suffering and hurt of this world, for the victims of Katrina, of cancer, for the starving in Darfur, for those crushed by the screeching tires, shattered glass, and smashing metal on a slippery, midnight road, God acts once and for all. God offers not with an explanation as to why these things happen, but with a solution, with a way through them, with a deliverance from their ability to crush the faith of their victims and with a promise of rescue from their eternal consequences.

Do you now begin to see the wonder of God's timing, that his timing is not our timing? Isn't it good that God chooses to be so merciful and patient ... not only with those scoundrels who deserve hell, fire, and brimstone, but with you and me?

Just think of it. Do we really want God's timing to be so quick and swift when we too are standing among the wicked? Thank God that his timing is different, that the fullness of time arrived at the cross and empty tomb, instead of the last time we wanted to pop our enemy in the nose. Thank God that his timing is so different that he is so patient with us, that he does not take pleasure in the death of the wicked, that he permitted his only Son to die, raised him again and promised that he would come again, so that we might live!

We complain, "Why do bad things happen to such good people?" when we ought to be praising God with "Why has such a good thing happened to such bad people?"

God's timing is not our timing. That is difficult to accept. Some times it seems to defy all common sense. Sometimes it seems down right cruel. We can't wait. We can't help but get angry. We can't help but shed tears over the immense suffering that afflicts so much of human life. We can't help but doubt and wonder if there is a God at all. But God is patient. God is patient with us. The faith that seems so weak now will grow strong, strong enough to not only refuse to bow down and worship the powers of this world, but to save our souls. God has promised to make it that strong ... all in his time!

John, in today's second reading, declares that this time has arrived ... now! As he pens these words, as he declares the victory of God that has already been accomplished at Good Friday and Easter and these words are trusted by his readers, God's time is
fulfilled!

That time has also arrived now as you come to this table. Here you receive a foretaste of the feast to come ... now. Now God makes you his beloved sons and daughters. Now he says,

The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." And let everyone who hears say, "Come." And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.... The one who testifies to these things says, "Surely I am coming soon." Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! — Revelation 22:17, 20-21

Trusting that promise, you can move mountains, thumb your nose at the empty promises of this world, defy the threats of "Caesar," love your enemies, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, change the world, all in God's time! Amen.