Not Just Any God
August 16,
2015
Shia and Sunni Muslims in Iraq say
they believe in God.
According to the Gallup Poll, 95% of
Americans say they believe in God. Over 71% of the American people say they
have never doubted God’s existence (SF Chronicle, 12/22/97).
But what can such faith mean, when on an average day
in America, according to Tom Heymann’s book entitled On An Average Day In America, 93,474 crimes are committed? 41,096 phone calls are made to dial-a-porn
and 875 calls are made to dial-a-prayer.
If all of us really do believe in
God, as we say we do, how can we commit five bank robberies a day in Los
Angeles? How can an American teenager
commit suicide every 90 minutes?
Is there a correlation between faith
in God and the way we live? In Ireland, Iraq,
Carmel?
And if behavior describes best what
we really believe, what divinity are we really worshiping?
Our parables this morning from the gospel of Matthew
all use metaphors to describe the treasure that is the “Kingdom of God” or the
“Reign of God”. Jesus uses the term to
describe the personal relationship one can have with God that moves us to
healing and wholeness. It describes the
dynamic and vital reality of God in the midst of history moving society to a
future of love, peace and justice.
For Jesus, understanding of, and
dedication to, this Reign of God is worth all risk, worth all cost. When an individual or a society invests
itself in the Reign of God they shall inherit nothing less than God’s future.
His generation longed for the glory
of the past when Israel was powerful and prosperous. For them the “kingdom of God” would be like
King David’s reign a thousand years before, free of the Roman occupation of
their nation. Their worship center in
Jerusalem would be restored. Jesus had
to use parables to explain the Reign of God, because the people he was serving
were convinced that faith is measured by success and achievement, power and
profit. They wanted the “god of the good
old days”.
I wonder if we are so different.
Let’s be honest we worship the god
of Achievement.
Public opinion polls show most of us
hold a vague and romantic notion of God as a wise and powerful male, dispensing
blessings from Heaven on those who are good.
Our prayers to this God are often a list of the things we want; health
for a loved one, comfort for those in pain, a new job for the unemployed. It is very good to ask exactly what is on our
hearts from the God of the Bible, but we struggle when we don’t get what we ask
for.
In the religion of the god of
Achievement, prosperity, health and success are how we measure faith. Many large and busy churches have been built
on a message preached about the pie-in-the-sky prosperity. For them, and many of us, God must be with
the successful. Thus, if you don’t have
it, then you just don’t have enough faith.
Even Jesus’ disciples had the same
notion when the Lord explained to them that it would be harder for a rich man
to enter the Kingdom of Heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a
needle. They responded, “Who then can be
saved?!” (Mark 10:26)
A man was walking through a forest
pondering life. He walked, pondered,
walked and pondered. He felt very close
to nature and for the first time very close to God. So he asked out loud, “God, are you
listening?”
And God replied, “Yes, my son, I am
here, I am always with you”.
The man stopped and looked toward
the sky and said, “God, what is a million years to you?” God replied, “Well my son, a second to me is
like a million years to you.”
So the man looked at the sky again
and said, “God, what is a million dollars to you?” And God replied, “My son, my son, a million
dollars to me is like a penny to you. It
means almost nothing to me.”
The man looked down, pondered a bit
and asked, “God, can I have a million dollars?”
And God replied, “In a second”.
Neither is the God of Jesus the god
of the past. Certainly we can learn
about and be inspired by God’s interactions with history but “the pearl of
great price” is about the promises of God’s future.
As a reaction to the failures of modern society,
fundamentalist movements in Christianity, Islam and Judaism argue that we
should return to an idealized piety of the past. Recreating the glory of “the good old days”
is not what the Kingdom of God is about.
Nowhere do we see this more than is how we use and misuse the Bible.
Protestants like us first go to the Bible for
guidance, and we should. Although most
answers lie within, discovering and applying them is not as simple as quoting a
few verses out of our favorite passages.
Anyone can quote from the Bible; even Satan can quote from the Bible
(Luke 4:9-11).
John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement
made a brilliant contribution to our faith by insisting that although the Bible
is the primary source of God’s revelation it is not the only source. Personal experience, human reason and the
traditions of the church are also places in which the individual can encounter
the reality of God. In fact these four
resources…the Bible, personal experience, reason and tradition…interact with
one another, instruct, form and guide one another, in the life of the faithful
(United Methodist Book of Discipline, Abingdon, TN, 2004, “Our Theological
Task” pp. 76-83).
Methodists reject the notion of a “wooden-headed”
literalism suggesting the words of the Bible must be taken literally without
human interpretation. The Bible itself
doesn’t suggest that. As we hear in our
scripture verses today, over and over again the Bible records how God’s
inspiration is expressed in and through very human poetry, narrative, history
and theology;
“…they shall
beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks…”(Isaiah
2:4)
“…beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning
hooks into spears…” (Joel 3:10)
If you are a Biblical literalist, what do you do
with your plowshares and hooks?
“…the wicked [God] will destroy…”(Psalm 145:20)
“…[God] is kind to … the wicked.” (Luke 6:35)
Whose side is God really on?
The Bible is the sacred record of one people’s
journey with God; from their origins as nomadic tribes to the formation of a
nation out of which will come the hope and redemption of all nations. But by its nature the Bible describes that
God’s inspiration is expressed through very human terms and in very human ways.
Reasonable and faithful people can read the same
Bible and come to different conclusions; the pacifist will oppose war, reading
about Jesus “turning the other cheek” (Mathew 5:39) and telling Peter to put
away his sword warning, “those who live by the sword will die by the sword”
(Matthew 26:52), while the Christian warrior committed to the ethic of
self-defense will put on a military or police uniform having read Jesus’ saying
“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, than to
lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:12-13).
To the Pharisees who object to Jesus healing the
sick on the Sabbath, Jesus says, “You search the scriptures because you think
that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my
behalf. Yet you refuse to come to me to
have life.” (John 5:39-40).
Jesus is the word of God (John 1:1-18). We read and follow the scripture through
the “lens” of the living, dynamic presence of God in our lives.
This has meant that although the Bible codifies and
regulates slavery, Methodists found in the same Bible and their relationship to
the living God something new and worked to abolish slavery in England. Although the Bible relegates women to a
second-class citizenship as the property of the male head of household, because
they read the Bible in relation to the living God, Methodists found something
new and led the struggle for women’s voting rights and ordination in our church
here in North America.
God didn’t stop speaking when this book was compiled
in the 4th century AD. Our faith
demands that we listen to what life and love God is calling us to next. God is found in the past, to be sure, but the
One we find in the past is always calling us into the future.
When Moses encounters this divinity at the burning
bush God’s name is revealed; I AM WHO I AM (Exodus 3:13-20). In the
original language, YHWH, or as mispronounced in the German, Jehovah. Our God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and
Jacob. This is the God of Creation, the
Author of the Commandments, the “still, small voice” in each of our hearts that
calls us towards faith and love.
Our God hears the cry of those oppressed and
suffering.
Our God acts, often through people just like us, to
bring freedom and faith into the future.
Our God asks that we live our lives in the light of
the commandment to love God and one another.
YHWH is a God of compassion, One who shares our
struggles and pain so much that God would even come as one of us, to take on
death and defeat it that we might live.
Is there a correlation between faith in God and the
way we live? There is if we worship
YHWH, the God of Jesus’ parables.
One of my favorite sermons to preach when I was a
missionary among the Ibans in Northern Borneo was “Tuhan Isa Ukai Orang Pute!”
which means in English, “Jesus Christ Was Not a White Man”.
When I would start the sermon our
Iban brothers and sisters would be shocked.
I would point to the Sallman picture of Jesus usually hanging near
by…you all know the painting, becoming popular during World War II, it depicts
a handsome Anglo-Saxon Jesus, just out of the hair dressers…and I would say
“Tuhan Isa Ukai Orang Pute!” and their jaws would drop.
It was shocking for them to learn
that Jesus was closer in their color and traditions than to the British and
American missionaries that first brought them the gospel. Along with that message came hospitals, and
schools and church buildings.
Missionaries lived in great houses and drove what cars there were. Of course, in the thinking of the Iban, this
new Christian god must be a white man!
Let me proclaim the same shocking
message to you.
God is not an American.
God is not a Republican…or a
Democrat.
God isn’t an Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
God isn’t a male…or a female.
God’s power cannot be measured by
what this world calls success. Some of
the most faithful people in the world live in terrible conditions of poverty
and oppression. For some of us it isn’t
until the cancer comes or our spouse dies that we finally open our hearts to
the reality of God.
In the end we discover what we
really believe about God by the way we live our live. And we call the God of Jesus “love” (I John
4).
Relationship with this God is worth all investment,
every risk. It is the treasure that
makes life worth living.
That’s the God I believe in.
How about you?
Amen.
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