God did not make the honey bee as big as a horse

God did not make the honey bee as big as a horse.
Had he made it so big, the bee would be stinging people to death.
God does not elevate

People who would ridicule the unfortunate.
God does not give power to those who would be wicked to their fellowmen.
No one gains anything through being wicked.

So sing the Yoruba people of Nigeria in one of the songs from their religious tradition.

I’m glad that honey bees aren’t as big as horses. But I don’t believe God acts alone. If god is to be visible in the world, it will be through our actions. 

Some of us believe that depending on God to make things right is part of what has kept things wrong.

God has been replaced, for many of us, with other, non-theistic equivalents.  The notion of progress is one such equivalent.  Just as the people of ancient Israel had faith in God, so the people of the Enlightenment had faith in the power of education and reason and freedom to usher in a golden age.  But the descent of Germany, the most cultured and educated Western nation, into the evils of war and genocide in the 1930's has shaken our faith in the power of the Enlightenment.

Some would put their faith in the invisible hand of the market.  They believe that most of the social ills we are prone to would disappear if we only had enough jobs and the only way to create these jobs is by removing the burden of excessive regulation and taxes. In the best of faith, they tell us, “Trust in the market and we will grow our way out of injustice.”

I don’t believe in or hope for supernatural interventions by God.  But I also don’t believe in progress or the wisdom of the market’s vaunted invisible hand.  I do believe, nonetheless, that goodness will prevail.  I do believe that the wicked and the treacherous will suffer.  I believe that just as time heals all wounds, all heels are eventually wounded. I have confidence in the moral coherence of the world.  I believe that goodness cannot be forever mocked.  I believe that there is a moral order that will inevitably crush all tyrannies and punish all oppressors.

Yet, despite this belief, I often find it difficult to sustain my faith in the moral coherence of the world.  It often seems that the forces of hate and greed are winning and that they have always won.  It too often seems that might makes right, that brutality, intimidation, calculated self-interest and corruption have the upper hand in public life.

At such times, though, I need to remind myself that goodness and justice have prevailed and won against evil.   Or as the Unitarian minster Rev. Theodore Parker observed in 1853, "I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one….But from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”