One Sunday morning when I was a teenager, a guest pastor preached at my church.  I have little memory of his sermon; I can't recall its title, or what Scriptures it was based on.  All I remember is a single sentence — a single sentence that caused an uproar in the church.  "Sometimes," the preacher said, "we need to forgive God."

Hoo boy, the poor fellow!  If only he'd known what he was in for.  Us?  Us sinful mortals?  Forgive God, who is holy and perfect?  As if we have any right!  As if God needs our piddly forgiveness! 

The scandal lasted for days.  I have no idea what kind of talking-to that ill-fated pastor received from our church elders, but I do know he never preached at our church again.

Sometimes we need to forgive God.  As a teenager, I knew I was supposed to find the idea disrespectful.  Heretical.  Even dangerous.  I knew it didn't jibe with the official hierarchy; humans offend, and God forgives. 

In the form of Christianity I was taught, doctrinal precision trumped everything else — even my supposedly "personal" relationship with Jesus.  If I had thoughts or feelings towards God which weren't orthodox, my job was to erase them.  Though I didn't have the appropriate language back then, I understood vaguely that what the adults in my church heard in that audacious preacher's sentence was the encroachment of pop-psychology and modern feel-good-ism into the realms of faith.

What they also heard was a challenge to beliefs many Christians hold dear.  For example, the belief that if you trust in God, he will never let you down.  Or the belief that anger is a sin to be avoided at all cost.  Or the belief that nothing happens in this world outside of God's perfect will.  Or the belief that forgiveness always presupposes a moral failing on the part of the offender.

Are these beliefs true?  I'm not convinced anymore that they are.  So I'm less scandalized now by the possibility that sometimes — often? — we might need to forgive God.  The bare-bones reality I live with is this:  God is both profoundly good, and profoundly powerful.  And yet the world around me is full of sorrow, injustice, and suffering.  There's no way around this tension; far more often than I would like, God lets me down.  He lets me down by his inaction.  He lets me down by his silence.  He lets me down by his apparent hiddenness.  These aren't doctrinal dilemmas; they're emotional ones. 

To forgive God is to say, "I don't understand, but I still want you in my life.  I feel hurt and betrayed, but I don't want to succumb to bitterness.  I have no idea what to do with the mystery you've turned out to be, but walking away from you is not an option."

Jonah angry about Ninevah.

When I read the Bible these days, I'm struck by the radical honesty of the  characters we call champions of faith.  They for sure had to forgive God.  They raged against him.  They wrestled him to the ground.  They called him names.  And then?  They stuck around, anyway. 

"My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, 
by night, but I find no rest," David cried out in the Psalms.  "God hates me and angrily tears me apart.  He snaps his teeth at me and pierces me with his eyes," said Job.  "I'm so angry I wish I were dead," muttered Jonah.  "The Lord is like an enemy… He has barred my way with blocks of stone; he has made my paths crooked," said the writer of Lamentations.

If I'm reading correctly, these writers weren't accusing God of moral shortcomings.  They were naming his failure to act according to their earnest hopes and expectations.  They were calling out the basic unfairness of a world in which terrible things happen to frail and helpless people.  They were articulating their disappointment. 

And God?  He was not scandalized at all.  He didn't fry them for blasphemy.  He honored the fact that they clung to him even when it hurt them to do so.  He listened, even when the only prayers they could make with integrity were prayers of outrage.

If these Bible characters are meant to teach us something worth knowing, I wonder if the lesson is this: maybe the opposite of loving God isn't hating him.  Maybe the opposite of loving God is not giving a damn. 

Forgiving God is my best protection against spiritual apathy.  Forgiving God keeps him relevant in my life — it keeps him personal and a force to reckon with, rather than a dusty relic to stick on a shelf. 

In my human relationships, I don't bother getting angry when I don't care.  I don't fight with people I'm passionless about.  To work towards forgiving God is to insist that he matters, and that my stakes in him are very high.  It is to say, "God, no matter what you say, don't say, do, or don't do, you and I are in this for the long haul.  I will not let you go."