Do you love God? Wait a moment. Wait a moment before you answer, and think, because you are in danger of perjuring yourselves. Quite frankly, I’m deeply suspicious of people who are always running around saying how much they love God. You see, I remember the words of our Lord: "You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy about you when he said, ‘This people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me.’" 

I am confronted with the fact that such a man as Saint Paul was constantly tortured by the fact that he didn't love God, and that he was separated from Him. Saint Augustine was always plagued by the truth that he didn’t really want God to be God, and therefore he didn’t really love Him. Martin Luther was the victim of incessant feelings of guilt because he could not say that he truly loved God and that there were many times in his life when he actually HATED Him. The simple fact is that as a human family we have, by our sin, separated ourselves from God. We DENY Him, we DEFY Him, we IGNORE Him, and, deep in our hearts, deep in the recesses of where we really live, we HATE Him, because we don't want God to be God!  We want to be our own god. 

One cannot think very far in this tangled human situation without asking some questions about God. How does God feel looking down upon this spinning earth and this sinning human race? Does the world seem utterly hopeless to Him after all of the centuries of striving? How does He feel when He hears the thunder of guns and sees men hunt each other down like animals and blast each other into the tangled messes of blood-seared flesh? How does He feel when He sees His beautiful earth defaced by human greed, lust and passion? What is the feeling in the heart of God? Anger? Disgust? Pity? 

If you have seen the play, "Green Pastures," you remember that scene in which God looks down upon the earth, with His hands clasped behind His back, and He is torn between His justice and His mercy, between His anger and His love, between His vengeance and His compassion; one moment determining to be through with man, leaving him to his own devices, and the next wanting to lift man up in His arms and hold him to His heart. How does God feel? Of course, that goes back to the deeper question, "What is God like?" 

Studdert-Kennedy, the famous Chaplain for the British troops in World War I, tells that, in his experience, man, in the army, felt that this was the basic question of life, the one that most mattered to him. He quotes his conversation with one young officer. The young officer said, "What I want to know, Padre, is what is God like? I never thought about it very much before the war. I took the world for granted. I was not religious, though I was confirmed and I went to Communion once and again with my wife. But now it is different. I have come to realize that I am a member of the human race, with a duty toward it, and it makes me want to know what God is like. When I am transferred to a new battalion, I want to know what the Colonel is like. And so, Padre, I would like to know what the Colonel of this world is like, and you ought to know, Padre. That’s your business." 

Not alone on the battlefield, not alone in war time, or even in the time of trial or tribulation, that is the big question. Sometimes we ask it anxiously. Sometimes we ask it in bewilderment and bafflement. Sometimes we ask it in bitterness and derision. What is God like? What is the nature and character of the Almighty? And the great word for God from the lips of His Christ was "Father." And somehow, it is that word and in that word that the answer lies. 

Oh, yes, there were words for God before Christ came - Creator, Judge, King, the Almighty Lord. But even in that day, there were some who dared to think that the Infinite Power behind all life could be like a father. The psalmist said it: "Like a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth us." Six times in the Old Testament, haltingly, there are vague expressions of that attitude. But it was our Lord Jesus Christ to whom we are in eternal debt for taking that word so rich in human tenderness, so familiar, and making it the rallying watchword of everything that we believe. He taught the halting tongues of mankind to say boldly, confidently, "Our Father, who art in heaven." He never let us forget that word. There was never a sermon that He did not use it in. He prayed no prayer without reference to the Father. The first words that we have recorded from His lips in the gospel are: "Didn’t you know that I must be in my Father’s House?" And the last words that He spoke upon the Cross were: "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit." When He wanted us to understand what God is like, He took the word and wove it into an incomparable, unforgettable story: "A certain father had two sons ..." 

When you understand that word "Father" in reference to God, then you begin to understand the risk that God had taken when He made of man a FREE spirit, with the power of choice, with the freedom of will. While the concept of fatherhood is a joyous view of God and gathers with it all the happiest human affection, it also gathers to itself all of the most piercing sorrow that clusters around the Cross of Calvary. The sorrow of God? That sounds peculiar, doesn’t it? The sorrow of God - they are essentially the sorrows of a father. Estrangement first. The helpless sorrow of a Father God over the estrangement of His sons. Most earthly fathers experience that. 

Bishop Ralph Cushman has a little poem:

"Life is so strange!
I lay awake last night.
You ask me why?
I cannot tell - exactly,
Only I have lost a boy! 

And you won’t understand
Unless you too have lost a pal,
A boy, who walked with you the fields,
And jumped with you the brooks,
Together with you climbed the trees. 

You watched him as he grew,
You told him all the secrets of the skies
And your hopes for him.
And then, one day, you came to realize
That you’d lost your son!" 

The deep sorrow of God is the sorrow of loneliness. Parents know about that loneliness, as they see their children grow up and away from them. Not long ago a father, whose son was in deep trouble, came to me. I asked, "Have you talked to him?" "Talk to him?" he said. "I don’t even know him!" And that is the heartrending cry of many a father. You see them go to joys and interests outside the home, the dictates of their calendar, the call to the college campus, the girl on the next block - all part of growing up. 

But the sorrow of God is infinitely more heartbreaking than that. Here is a willful estrangement. To bring a child to beautiful life, then to see him grow coarse and cheap, to see him throw away his birthright like a fool, to dream of the best for him and see him choose the worst, to seek fellowship with your children and get cold indifference, to long for affection and get harsh ingratitude, to provide a lovely home and surroundings and then have the son look for life outside of any attachment to that home - that is the sorrow of God at the estrangement of His children. 

No wonder the prophets thundered, "To see people hold out their hands to God to get every good thing that God can give and then TURN THEIR BACKS AND RUN AFTER IDOLS." And so Isaiah put it: "I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me. The ox knoweth his owner and the ass his master’s crib, but my children do not know." 

Today I am full of what must be the sorrow of God as He looks upon the City of Des Moines, where on Good Friday Des Moines will be just another day at school. Oh, yes, we’re meticulously careful about keeping religion out of our schools. That is against the law, the Constitution, and we must be lawful. Of the school’s constantly encroaching upon any time that the children might have for the CHURCH - that’s a different thing. Oh, yes, they are dismissed for the Drake Relays. They are dismissed from school for the Teachers’ Convention, at which a few teachers attend and the rest go on a shopping spree downtown, as any shopkeeper will tell you. They are free and dismissed for the Student-Parent Conferences. But GOOD FRIDAY? NO! It’s just another day at school, insulting not only us Christians, but the Jews for whom Friday evening is the Sabbath of Passover Week. That’s Des Moines! 

And, to top it all off, I heard that at Roosevelt High School - one of the great, Godly institutions of this great, Godly city of ours - they are having FUN NIGHT on GOOD FRIDAY evening, in which the children will gather in the school for their annual spree of roller skating in the halls and dancing in the gym and swimming together in the pool. I talked to the assistant principal this morning, and he had the arrogance to say to me that the Student Council set the date. Doesn’t the Student Council have advisors? "Oh, yes, but this was the ONLY Friday throughout the year when we could have it. We were aware that it was Good Friday, but this was the ONLY FRIDAY that we could have FUN NIGHT!" Of course, we want our children to have fun, but the constant way in which our schools tear our children away from that which they might have at the church forces them into a dilemma. 

One of our boys is on our high school tennis team. The teacher, the coach of the tennis team, set the time for a practice on Wednesday afternoon. Our boy, who is a member of that team said, "I’m sorry, I can’t be there." And the coach replied, "Oh, yeah, you’re that kid that has to go to church on Wednesday afternoon and pray." GOD FORGIVE US! 

The YMCA - the Young Men’s CHRISTIAN Association - schedules a Swimming Meet on Sunday morning, and they schedule a Chess Tournament on Sunday morning, to which one of my confirmands had to go. Oh, yes, let’s keep religion out of the schools, but let’s keep religion out of all the rest of their free time, too. All of the love that God has given us, and our response? NOTHING! 

One father told me that his son had gone away as a prodigal, and he came one night into his son’s room and found it reeking with alcohol. The boy’s mother was kneeling by his bedside, stroking his hair, kissing his forehead, caressing him. And looking up at the father, she said, "He won’t let me love him when he’s awake." 

But the sorrow of God is deeper than that. It is the sorrow of impoverishment. A controversy has whirled for centuries around the idea of God’s omnipotence. What do we mean by "Almighty God?" Obviously, some people think of Him as the great, all-powerful King sitting on a throne, with earth as His footstool trembling beneath His feet, getting what He wants done, miraculously, by a wave of His hand or a nod of His head or a blow of His fist. With this idea of omnipotence, they pray their foolish prayers, and they ask their foolish questions, as they do their stupid thing. Why doesn’t God stop wars? Why doesn’t He smash the schemes of wicked men? Why doesn’t He come in power and put an end to this human tragedy? If this is His will, why doesn’t He get His will done? Maybe God is just helpless when things go wrong and cannot control what He has made. 

You wonder why evil is not put an end to? Stop to think of the implications. What would God do? Kill all evil men? How? Earthquake? Fire? Lightning? Who? Where does He stop? If God destroys all who resist His will, how would you and I come out? No, God has another way, the way of the loving Father. He meets man where he is, in man’s world. He suffers everything that man’s sin can bring upon the world. He does it all with a breaking heart. 

What is God like? The Cross tells that. He lets the rejection run its full course to the Cross. He lets His sons do their evil damndest, because this is what it takes to reconcile His sons to Himself. Don’t ask me how or why the Cross has reconciled me to God. I only know that it speaks of God’s love. When they pierced His heart, they found that He had died, not of pain or loss of blood, but that He had died of a broken heart. 

A famous clergyman had a prodigal son who rejected his father and his father’s faith, who disgraced him in every way. And one of the clergyman’s sons said, "If he was my son, I’d disown him and throw him out for good." "Yes," said the clergyman, "if he was your son, I’d do that, too, but he’s my son and I love him." And that is the reason for the Cross and reconciliation. 

William Stidger has these lines: 

"I saw God bare his soul one day
Where all the earth might see
The stark and naked heart of him
On lonely Calvary. 

There was a crimson sky of blood
And overhead a storm;
When lightning slit the clouds
And light engulfed his form. 

Beyond the storm a rainbow lent
A light to every clod,
For on that cross mine eyes beheld
The naked soul of God."