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.