SERMON NOTES FOR 3.7.10
What is God’s relationship to us, and how is God involved in our lives? These may be some of the most important questions we will ever ask. There are Christians who will answer this question in a spectrum, ranging from God as a distant being who watches with amusement what we do; to, on the other end of the spectrum, some who say that God controls, plans and engineers every event that occurs, from the butterfly’s wing in Ecuador that causes the hurricane in China, to the next breath you or I will take.
And you have heard this last kind of belief expressed in many ways. How about this? A teenage girl is killed in an auto accident, and it turns out she was text messaging while she was driving. A momentary lapse in judgment that cost her her life. At her funeral, someone makes sense of it all by saying, “God needed another angel in heaven, and so he took her.” To which I always want to say – “God, we need her more than you do! Send her back!” Or, an elderly woman develops Alzheimer’s and becomes very difficult for her family to deal with, but they try the best they know how. Her daughter says, “I know God is doing this to teach me a lesson.” Or, a man loses his job and goes for months looking for a way to support his family. Burdened by worry and guilt, he says, “I am being punished for the bad things I did when I was young.” Pat Robertson believed that the Haitian earthquake was divine punishment for a pact with the devil; Jerry Falwell declared that God allowed 9/11 to happen because America was so full of sin.
These are all statements that try to bring order into a chaotic world. When we are in grief, when we are suffering, when we are full of worries and anxieties, when we can’t see our way ahead because the cloud of confusion that surrounds us is too thick, we comfort ourselves by imposing order on our chaos and attributing these events to God.
But are these statements true? Is this what our Bible tells us? These are the questions asked by our scriptures today. These scriptures are asking us: how is God involved in the ordinary events of human life? And like most scriptures, they don’t give us a straightforward answer – they come at the answer sideways, and we have to work at it to get it out.
In Jesus’ time, people were convinced God was intimately involved in their lives. Because they knew that God was a God of justice, they believed that God would ensure that justice happened to all people – and therefore, people who were blessed in their lives must deserve it, and people suffering from a calamity were sure to have deserved it. Which, if you are a person who is reasonably prosperous, in power or on good terms with people in power, with a rewarding family life, is a comfortable thing to believe – it allows you to be complacent about way things are, because those other suffering people must have deserved it. The unfortunate thing is that the people who are suffering are the ones motivated to change the world – but they have no power to change things. So a world where people believe that everything happens according to God’s carefully engineered plan, is a world where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, the sick get sicker, the oppressed get more oppressed.
Jesus has a different way of looking at things. A famous 20th century preacher said that you should preach with the Bible in one hand and the New York Times in the other. That’s what Jesus is doing here. Jesus is the preacher who preaches with the Bible in one hand, and the Jerusalem Times in the other.
In the Jerusalem Times today are a couple of stories everyone is talking about – we don’t know these stories from any other source, but we can guess what happened. Apparently a tower called the Tower of Siloam was under construction when it fell, killing 18 construction workers. And in another story, apparently a group of Galileans had come to the temple to perform ritual sacrifices, Pilate grew agitated with them for some reason and sent soldiers to massacre them in the temple. Everyone in Jerusalem is talking about it and speculating why God would not protect people who were right in the middle of praying, for God’s sake. The only way to push back the fear that arises – the fear that nothing can protect you – is to say ah, but those people are different from me – they’re sinners. Blaming the victims for their downfall is the only way of pushing back the darkness of reality – that we live in an unstable and dangerous world. If God is doing this to those other people because they deserved it, then maybe we are safe.
But Jesus says no – that is not the God we worship, and that is not how God is involved in our lives. God is not the punishing judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve, and who might visit vengeance on us at any moment – if he were, then we might protect ourselves forever by rigidly adhering to a godly code of conduct and obeying all its rules. Yet Jesus knows that we all break the rules. And Jesus is here to tell us that we are all sinners, just the same as those poor massacred people in the temple, and just the same as the construction workers – we can’t protect ourselves from their fate by pretending we are better. And we can’t excuse ourselves from reaching out to help those in need, either – by pretending that those who are suffering deserve what they are getting. We have an obligation to help.
Because the truth is, we all in some way deserve the same fate – we all have sinned and fallen short of God’s hope for us. We’re no different from those Galileans, or those construction workers at the tower, or the teenage girl killed on the freeway, or earthquake victims in Haiti. But there is good news, and the good news is, God’s mercy is as strong as God’s judgment – and so God was not the one who willed death upon them. Visiting vengeance on sinners is NOT how God is involved in our lives, any more than God is involved by rewarding those who obey the rules.
Remember our opening question: how is God involved in our lives – is God a judge who makes sure everyone gets what they deserve? Jesus says no – that’s not it. Then he tells this story of a fig tree – unproductive – gardener begs for one more year to give it nourishment and help it bear fruit. So God is the gardener who nourishes us and protects us and keeps on giving us second chances.
But if you really want an example of how God is involved in our lives, look at our Old Testament lesson today: the call of Moses. Moses had grown up in Pharaoh’s palace in Egypt, but he had seen an overseer mistreating a Hebrew slave. In a fit of anger, Moses’ passion for justice rises up and he murders the overseer. He becomes a fugitive from justice and has to flee for his life.
So today, here is Moses in the wilderness – a fugitive from justice, a man busy with ordinary work of raising a family, tending his business. A man whose once-consuming passion for justice and freedom has been tamped down to no more than a glowing spark in his heart – something perhaps he remembers with anguish in the dark of the night, something he tries to forget as he has tried to forget his whole past in Egypt. And yet that little spark has not died. And in the middle of his everyday world, something happens. We don’t know what it is that he saw as a burning bush. But in Moses’ heart – the wind stirred, the voice of God spoke as that great and mysterious I AM stirred the embers of his heart to life. And once again his passion for justice woke up and he was called to action.
And when he began to question himself and to question God, to ask how in the world could he do this thing God was inspiring him to do and who in the world would ever believe that he had the right to do it – God said only one thing: you can do it, because I will be with you. And that promise of God’s – I will be with you – was enough to free a nation.
If you want to ask the question – how is God involved in our lives – I think this is how. I don’t think God is a punishing parent, ready to visit revenge on sinners. I think God is the one who created us and knows what is in our hearts. I think God is one who never forgets us, no matter how we try to forget him. I think God is the one who calls to us in the middle of our ordinary, busy days, reawakening the hopes we thought we had forgotten; stirring to life embers of passions we had buried in the busyness of our lives; calling us to new ministries and new ways to make a difference in our world.
And if we start to ask the question of God: how in the world can I do these things you are calling me to do? God has one simple answer for us: you can do it, because I will be with you. I will be with you as you do the things you didn’t think you could do alone. I will be with you as you awaken a passion for justice and mercy in our world. I will be with you, nurturing and encouraging you, as you grow into the image and likeness of God you were created to be; bearing the fruit that I know is in you; living the reality of the kingdom of God on earth.
We want to impose order on this chaotic world, we want to think that life always makes sense and that people always get what they deserve. Yet God is not so easy to categorize – God is something far more mysterious, the great I AM whose name we can never truly understand. We cannot know God’s thoughts or plans – but we can know something better. As Frederick Buechner said: “God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals himself. He doesn’t show us why things are as they are. He shows his face.”
How is God involved in our lives? God is involved as the one who loves us, who calls us, who stirs us to action in his name.
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