How Big Is Your God?

How Big Is Your God?

Mark 8: 27-38

September 16, 2018

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, a lot was said and done. Some of it beautiful, brave, and profound, some of it small, scared, and simple.

Among the later, one that I’ve never quite forgotten was the U.S. military officer, a self-professing evangelical so-called Christian, who, recalling a battlefield encounter with a Somali Muslim soldier, said, “I knew that my God was bigger than his.”

“Wisdom cries out in the street; in the squares she raises her voice. At the busiest corner she cries out; at the entrance of the city gates she speaks: How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?”

How long, she asks, will you worship a God created in your image? A God whose power flows from the end of your weapons? A God who waves the same flag that you salute, or is that the other way round?

How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple?

Wisdom says to the general, “sir, your God is, in fact, way too small.”

Jesus says to Peter, “son, your God is, in fact, way too small.”

Or, maybe he put it this way, “hey y’all, you’re setting your mind on small things; my mind is on much larger concerns. You’re imagining a messiah who feels no pain. That’s not salvation, that’s sedation. You’re imagining a savior who stands apart from humanity. I want no part of that for true salvation comes not in being apart from the community but in being a part of the community – the beloved community. You’ve got the wrong preposition and it’s leading you to the wrong proposition. You’re framing this whole messiah question on petty squabbles about popularity; my mind is on ultimate concerns about real power. Get thee behind me, satan.”

Bernard Loomer, who was dean of the University of Chicago Divinity School way before my time there, “described two kinds of power: unilateral and relational. Unilateral power builds walls, silences opposition, decides without consultation, and separates the world into us and them. […] In contrast, relational power leads by empathy, inclusion, listening, and receptivity. It transforms the world by a dynamic process of call and response, of adjusting […] to the experiences of others. God saves the world by love and not coercion, by embrace and not alienation.”[1]

To experience such salvation requires relationship, for that is what love ultimately amounts to – relationship. Stepping into this relationship really is a simple as answering an invitation. Jesus says, if you want to understand this message, if you want to truly hear this good news and then share it, if you want to experience the kindom of God, the beloved community, then just do this one thing: follow me. Take up your cross and follow me.

To be in relationship with Jesus is to be walking the way he’s going.

It really is, as it turns out, all that simple. But, of course, it’s not.

The problem, of course, is that Jesus seems to be walking into all kinds of places most of us would rather than go, and, worse than that, he seems to be hanging out with all kinds of people we’d rather not find ourselves walking with. Jesus seems to be hanging out with poor folks. Jesus seems to be hanging out with powerless people. Jesus seems to be hanging out with the sick and even the dying. Jesus seems to be hanging out with the sinners. Heck, at the end of his life, Jesus found himself literally hanging between two thieves.

These are just not the places and people that most of us nice, middle-class, people want to be.

But, if we call ourselves followers of Jesus – even if it’s just aspirational – if we want to be in relationship with this compelling figure in whom the fullness of God somehow dwells, if we want that, then we are going to find ourselves, as Dr. King put it, bound together in an inescapable web of mutuality, a single garment of destiny.

As Bruce Epperly recalled recently in Christian Century:

Well Campbell, the only white person at the 1957 founding of [Dr. King’s organization] the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, scandalized many of his friends when he provided pastoral care for members of the Ku Klux Klan. When a reporter asked why he attended the trial of one parishioner, a former KKK imperial wizard who killed a grocer for selling food to African Americans, Campbell responded, “Because I’m a Christian, Goddammit!” […] “If you’re gonna love one, you’ve got to love ‘em all.”[2]

I want to follow a God big enough to love us all with a love powerful enough to transform us all. That is the God we meet in Jesus. May we be bold enough to be transformed by the power of love. Amen.

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[1]Bruce Epperly, “Living By the Word,” https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/september-16-ordinary-24b-mark-827-38

[2] Ibid.

What Are We Waiting For?

What Are We Waiting For?

Isaiah 35:1-10

September 9, 2018

“They shall see the glory of the Lord, the majesty of our God.” When that great day of liberation comes, light will shine in the darkness and every eye shall see it. When that great day of justice comes it will roll on like the river Jordan after the rains fall. When that great day of salvation comes, all God’s children shall seek shalom and pursue it.

These are the promises of the prophets and apostles, of the righteous kings and of the messiah, of the holy texts of this and every age. When that great day comes, it will be well with my soul and all manner of things will be well.

And I want to know, what are we waiting for?

I began this homily several times last week and kept tossing it aside. I think I was waiting for true inspiration – for a vision burnt across the sky, a lightning bolt, or, maybe, angelic visitations – heck, an anonymous op-ed sermon dropped over the transom would have been OK. But the end of the week came, and the words just didn’t.

I did some a-level procrastination around here: I walked through the building making a list of needed repairs. I even changed out a switch plate that’s been sitting in my in-box for months. I looked through cupboards at ancient sheet music that no choir at CPC has sung in decades, and I actually did find a beautiful kyrie that I’ve looked for several times over the past half-dozen years and finally found it in a stack of unsorted music. It’ll be coming ‘round in Lent! As I said, some a-level procrastination!

I did catch the irony of all of this given that I’d jotted down “what are we waiting for” as a provisional title at the beginning of the week.

When Isaiah wrote these words -- the wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing – he was writing to a community in exile. They probably felt like they had been waiting forever for a sign that God still cared about them. They probably felt that their cries for justice and restoration would never be heard. They may well have ceased to believe that they were waiting for anything because they may well have lost all hope that anything better was going to come along.

They may have stopped asking “what are we waiting for?” and simply resigned themselves to living as strangers in a strange and foreign land.

The cupboards need to be cleaned out and a bunch of old papers purged. The garden needs some serious weeding, and the grass needs to be mowed. There’s a stack of thank-you notes waiting to be addressed and mailed. We’re not hoping for the promised land – the day of liberation, of justice, of healing, wholeness, and peace – and we’re not waiting for something better, we’re just making the to-do list and checking things off.

In this strange and foreign land, some folks have risen to positions of relative prominence. They have responsibilities beyond the domestic sphere, so they’ve got important meetings to arrange, staff to manage, programs to run.

But into the middle of this – this world where the captives have become residents and maybe even joined the middle class – into the midst of this Isaiah offers an alternative vision:

For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert […] A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; […] it shall be for God’s people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray. No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there. And the ransomed of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

For Isaiah – as for all the great prophetic voices of Israel – the vision of shalom is indivisible from a vision of justice. These things – water in desert, songs instead of sighs – these things are signs that accompany the day of jubilee, that day when the oppressed go free, the blind have new sight, the poor hear good news. These signs of shalom mark the coming of another world, the inbreaking of what Jesus would call the kingdom of God come as close as the air we breathe.

Isaiah cast this vision of a future otherwise, and Jesus wants to know, “what are you waiting for?” It’s here, in your midst, if you would but trust the vision, live into it without fear, and follow where I am leading.

I think I understand how the exiles felt. They were resident aliens in a culture that did not fully share their values, and they no doubt sometimes felt the foundation of their own values shifting beneath their feet as they went along to get along with the culture around them. They must have felt powerless to change the systems that controlled their lives and they must have also sometimes felt that those systems were changing them and their children.

So Isaiah reminds them who they are. In the piece I just quoted I left out a line that sometimes troubles me. When Isaiah describes the highway in the desert, the Holy Way, he also says “the unclean shall not travel on it.”

You can imagine why that bothers me as purity codes are often used to exclude marginalized persons. But this time through, I was reminded that the practices that marked the faithful as the children of God were, first and foremost, reminders to the people of who they were and to whom they belonged.

Isaiah is reminding them: it’s never too late to put into practice the things you say you believe, the things that mark you as God’s own. You can sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land. You can practice the golden rule even in a society in which the rules are twisted and the leaders dominate by monopolizing the gold. There is never a wrong time to do the right thing, even when the culture around you does not value those things.

That’s why we workshopped what we workshopped this morning. Feeding hungry people is always the right thing to do. You don’t have to go to the mountaintop to find beauty; you can see and celebrate beauty and feel God’s presence right here in the city. You can sing a new song unto the Lord this and every day.

What are you waiting for? What are we waiting for?

We may well be tempted to wait. But, friends, heaven shall not wait. Amen.