Loving God

I want to open with a fable from a children’s books called Fables. I think of this story every time I sing the song “Oceans”: "You call me out upon the waters. The great unknown where feet may fail. And there I find You in the mystery, In oceans deep my faith will stand."

The Lobster and the Crab

On a stormy day, the Crab went strolling along the beach. He was surprised to see the Lobster preparing to set sail in his boat. “Lobster,” said the Crab, “it is foolhardy to venture out on a day like this.”

“Perhaps so,” said the Lobster, “but I love a squall at sea!”

“I will come with you,” said the Crab. “I will not let you face such danger alone.”

The Lobster and the Crab began their voyage. Soon they found themselves far from shore. Their boat was tossed and buffeted by the turbulent waters.

“Crab!” shouted the Lobster above the roar of the wind. “For me, the splashing of the salt spray is thrilling! The crashing of every wave takes my breath away!”

“Lobster, I think we are sinking!” cried the Crab.

“Yes, of course, we are sinking,” said the Lobster. “This old boat is full of holes. Have courage, my friend. Remember we are both creatures of the sea.”

The little boat capsized and sank.

“Horrors!” cried the Crab.

“Down we go!” shouted the Lobster.

The Crab was shaken and upset. The Lobster took him for a relaxing walk along the ocean floor.

“How brave we are,” said the Lobster. “What a wonderful adventure we have had!”

The Crab began to feel somewhat better. Although he usually enjoyed a quieter existence, he had to admit that the day had been pleasantly out of the ordinary.

We are out on the ocean in a storm here in Northwest Yearly Meeting. We do not agree on our understanding of the Bible, sexuality, membership, and leadership. We argue about Leviticus and Romans, Faith and Practice, authority and discernment, covenant and evangelism.  These arguments come between us as the brothers and sisters of Jesus. Sometimes I want to come to Jesus and ask him, “Which of us gets to sit at your right hand and call the shots for the rest?” Jesus’s answer to James and John remains the answer to us today, and it is, “Whoever wants to be greatest in God’s Kingdom must learn to serve all other people.” These words are just as hard to hear now as they were then.

 All we can see are the holes in our boat, and the stormy waves on our ocean.  But I want to say today, “Courage, my friends.  Our little boat is afloat in the love God has for us. Remember we are at home in God’s love.” Whether our boat floats or sinks, we are surrounded by God’s love. I have a hard time believing this when my love for God is conditional. But when  I am energetically  loving God with all my heart, I have zest for the adventures life brings. I think this is true for you, too.

I have been thinking about what it means to love the LORD our God with all our hearts. Jesus said this is the first and greatest commandment. What this means to us is that God is the focus of our whole lives, and that learning to love God unconditionally is our life’s work.  Jesus said this one commandment takes in and fulfills all the other God-focused commandments in the Law and the Prophets.

It seems that Jesus had some favorites among the books of the Hebrew testament, and that one of these is Deuteronomy.  The commandment to love God comes from Deuteronomy 6:5, and the phrase “love the LORD your God” repeats 8 additional times in Deuteronomy. Here are those passages.

Love the LORD your God and watch and wait for, treasure, observe, preserve, guard what he has given you to take care of, what he has assigned to you, his judgments concerning you, the work he has commissioned you to do  (Deut. 11:1)

Love the LORD your God and hear and obey what God has told you to do, to love and be a friend to the LORD your God, and to do the work God has given you with all your inner self—body, emotions, mind and will, (Deut. 11:13)

Your job is to hear and obey the LORD your God in all God tells you to do, to love the LORD your God, to walk on God’s road, to stick tight to God; the LORD has driven out all these peoples who are in your face, and you have dispossessed peoples bigger and stronger than yourselves   (Deut.11:21, 22)

If a prophet or dreamer of dreams gives you a sign of wonder, works a miracle, and then says to you, Let us go after other gods, gods you haven’t known, and let us serve them, do not hear and obey the words of that prophet or dreamer; the LORD your God is testing you to know whether you love the LORD your God with all your inner self—body, emotions, mind and will. You continue to walk right behind the LORD your God, respect, honor, and be in awe of God, and hear what God tells you to do and do what God says, and continue to do the work God has given you and stick tight to God. (Deut. 13:1-4)

When you have done all that I God have given you to do this day, to love the LORD your God, and to walk every day on God’s road, then you will add three more cities of refuge for the accidental killer, besides these three given today. (i.e., you will increase the opportunities for mercy rather than vengeance.) (Deut. 19:9)

And the LORD your God will have reshaped your and your children’s inner selves—body, emotions, mind and will—to love the LORD your God with all your inner self and all your identity, giving you life. (Deut. 30:6)

For this commandment I God command you this day is not extraordinary or beyond your power or difficult to understand; not remote from you; …my word, my speaking is exceedingly near you, in your mouth and in your whole inner being, so that you know what to do. See, I have set before you today life and happiness or death and misery, commanding you today to love the LORD your God, to walk on his road, to keep what he has given you to take care of, to fulfill what he has assigned to you, to respect his judgments concerning you, to do the work he has commissioned you to do. You will live and will be great, and the LORD your God will bless you and give you the land to which you are going. (Deut. 30:11, 14-16)

I expect you know that “heart” means far more than the physical organ, more than “I heart God,” more than a feeling of warm emotion toward the deity. The Hebrew words for heart (Leb, Lebab) refer by metaphor to the center of the self, the soul, the senses, affections and emotions, to how one thinks and acts, to one’s will and purpose, intellect and wisdom; the includes reflection and memory, resolution, and determination.  The heart is the complexity of the self, the complexity of mind and body together, it is who you and I are.

Our purpose on earth is to love God with our whole hearts, our whole selves, and to do the work God has given us to do. This is our foundation and our goal. We throw ourselves into loving God. We are God’s fans, loyal through winning and losing seasons.

God made us for this relationship. We aren’t our whole selves outside of relationship with God.  That’s why it is so crucial that we have nothing else sneaking in between us and God and that we recognize that we are human and God is God.  Jesus taught us by example and word that we are treasured by God as the best of all possible Fathers treasures his children, and that out of our relationship with God comes everything else.  Jesus taught us how God loves us and how we can love God back.

One aspect of loving God is remembering God’s work in our lives and in the lives of others.  Rehearse these things, say them over to yourself and to your children, remember how you were once enslaved and imprisoned and how God led you out through water and desert, through chains and locked doors to freedom. Remember when God spoke to you, even though you saw no one. Let’s take a few minutes to think about at least one of God’s redeeming works in our lives.  Write it down. Share it with someone. (Deut. 4:9)

A second aspect to loving God is trusting God.  Job, the perfect human in the Hebrew testament, says, “Though God slay me, yet will I trust in him; I will set my journey before him, and he will save me, because he will see I am not godless or a hypocrite” (Job 13:14, 15). Trust means waiting for God, hoping for God to show up, accepting God’s justice for ourselves, and accepting God’s mercy for others.  It means leaning on God with our whole selves, instead of leaning on our own understanding or wisdom, and learning from God the path God has for us, which God will lead us along (Proverbs 3:5, 6).  Trust in God at all times, people, pour out your inner selves before God; God is a shelter for us (Psalm 62.8).  Let’s pause right now and choose to trust in God; write a note to God that tells what you are waiting in hope and confidence for God to do for you, or perhaps for us. When we leave here this evening to enjoy each other’s company over ice cream, tell someone what you are trusting God for.

A third aspect of loving God is seeking God.  If we have let something else creep in between us and God, we just need to seek God again, with our whole selves, all our heart and all our soul (Deut. 4:29).  The Hebrew word here translated “seek” has in it so many ways of seeking: consult, inquire, investigate, study, follow, require.  David, the adulterous and murderous king of Israel, is named a man after God’s own heart because he seeks God. We can see him seeking God in Psalm 51:  “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and repair my spirit so it is stable…The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.” Many of David’s psalms are personal appeals to God for God to show up, or personal expressions of praise and loyalty to God. Jesus reiterates the continuousness of our seeking in his words to seek first the kingdom where God rules; to ask, seek and knock, and to keep on asking, seeking and knocking.  Take a moment now to ask God a question or to consult God for guidance.  Write it down so you remember that you did this when God responds. 

God promises to be found when we seek wholeheartedly. The author of Hebrews (11:6) echoes the promise of Deut. 4:29: God IS; believe this and seek with your whole heart and throughout your whole life for God, and God will reward you.

A fourth aspect of loving God is obeying God.  What does the LORD our God require of us? To revere and respect the LORD our God, to walk on God’s road, to love God, and to serve—to obey—the LORD our God with all our heart and all our soul.  Jesus said we are his friends when we do what he tells us. Jesus said, I do only what I hear from my Father. God’s word is near to us, in our mouths, and in our hearts, and we need to do what we know is the next right thing to do. This is the existential, risky edge of loving God: listening and doing what God says.  Now, in this moment. Take a few minutes to listen to God right now.  Ask God what you need to do next.  Write it down, and share it sometime this evening with someone who will help you remember do it.

How do we know that we are not loving God well? Many inner conditions and outer behaviors tell us that our love for God is not unconditional. We are discouraged when we face difficulty and we fear when we face opposition. We say that God does not see us and will not act, so we take matters into our own hands. And we forget God’s work on our behalf and are proud as if we were the source of our success; we forget God’s generosity to us and are hard-hearted to the poor and without hospitality to the stranger. We want more and more rather than being content, and we are twisted and crooked in our inner selves.  When we are not obeying God’s present instructions, we are afraid of God, we see God as wrathful, and we become preoccupied with other people’s sins and errors.  We become meticulously obedient in small things to hide how we are missing the mark elsewhere. We hold others to a higher standard than we do ourselves, and we bind burdens on others we will not carry ourselves or help them carry. We tithe our money and avoid the hard work of discerning what is right, of being ready to help those in misery, and of trusting in the character of God.

If in this stormy time, we have come to realize that we are having a hard time remembering God’s good work in us, that we cannot trust God, that something has crept in between us and God to delay or derail our seeking God, that we are not doing today what God wants us to do, this is a good time to run toward God to say we’re sorry.  This is a good time for us to pray for one another and to pray for ourselves to see clearly that God loves us so wholeheartedly; we will respond to that vision with love that takes our whole lives to express. Seeing God’s love clearly and loving God wholeheartedly gives us hope and a future.

Hearing vs. Listening: How Saul (Paul) Came to Change His Mind

Preached at Vancouver First Friends Church
Feb. 22, 2015

Jesus said to those around him several times, “You who have ears to hear, hear!” He echoes the words of God to Ezekiel, “Son of man, you dwell in the midst of a bitter, disobedient, rebellious family, which have eyes to see, and see not; they have ears to hear, and hear not: for they are a bitter, disobedient, rebellious house” (Ezek 12:2). Not all have ears to hear, and not all with the ability to hear actually listen so that what is said enters their hearts.

Jesus also echoes Deut. 29, where Moses says to all Israel, “Your eyes have seen all the LORD did in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh, and to all his servants, and to all his land; the great testings which your own eyes have seen, the signs, and those great miracles: yet the LORD has not given you a heart to perceive and understand, and eyes to see, and ears to hear, up to this day.” Then Moses called on Israel to enter into the covenant wherein they know that God is the LORD their God. “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to God’s voice, and hold fast to God. For the LORD is your life…”

God gives people hearts to perceive and understand, eyes to see, and ears to hear. Further, when God gives the ability to hear, we need to take into our inner selves the truth that we have one God and no other, that we will listen and do what God tells us to do.

Saul hears but doesn’t listen

We have an excellent example of hearing without listening in the life of Saul, also known as Paul, the apostle to the Gentiles. Saul enters the story as an enemy to the Gospel. Saul may in fact have been one of the Jews who hauled Stephen in before the priests; Acts 6 mentions people from Saul’s home province as disputing with Stephen and being unable to win. Their frustration moved them to get people to witness falsely that Stephen had spoken against Moses and against God and had said that Jesus would change the customs which Moses had given them.

When Stephen is given a chance to speak in his own defense, this is what he says:

Acts 7:1-60

1)   Stephen reviews the high points of Israel’s history

2)   Stephen reminds the Jews of what God directly said at two moments in the history,

A)   God promised Abraham that his descendants will possess the land after a period of slavery in a country not their own, and gave him the covenant sign of circumcision

B)   God called Moses to deliver Abraham’s descendants from slavery; God sent him to rule and judge the same people who had earlier rejected his authority as a ruler and judge

3)   Stephen reminds his audience of what the prophets Amos and Isaiah said to the people of Israel: “You have turned to idols and I will send you into exile in Babylon”; and “I do not live within creation or any house you build for me.”

4)   Stephen brings it home to his audience with a prophetic word: you are stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in your inner self and in your ability to hear.

A)   You are just like the ancient Hebrews who turned to idols.

B)   You always resist the Holy Spirit.

C)   You and your fathers persecute every prophet God sends you.

D)    And you have betrayed and murdered the Messiah.

E)    Even though you are the ones who received the law from God’s direct messengers, you have not obeyed it.

5)   Then Stephen said out of the fullness of the Holy Spirit, “I see heaven open and Jesus standing at God’s right hand.”

6)    Unsurprisingly, this was Stephen’s last sermon. They were infuriated and began to stone him. As he died, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (clear echoes of what Jesus Himself had said on the cross).

In this sermon are several lessons for Saul: You are not right—you have attached God to the land, the law and the temple and are worshiping the creation rather than the Creator; you are blind and deaf to the actual presence of God in your midst through Jesus and the Holy Spirit; you are in agreement with those who betrayed and murdered Jesus and now you resist the Holy Spirit.

Saul took none of this into his heart but instead reacted against it with violence.

I mentioned to a friend that I was thinking about Saul’s conversion into Paul, and she said, “Was he converted?” and that made me think about conversion in general. The inner meaning of convert is “to turn around” or “to cause to return” and literally this does not apply.  Saul continued to journey toward Damascus, continued to believe in the God of Israel. So I wondered whether “repent” might apply; the Latin root of repent includes the idea of regret or penitence, but we don’t see that in this story. However, the Greek of the New Testament uses the word metanoia, which means essentially to change the direction of the inner self, to change attitudes and conduct. This is a good picture of what happened to Saul. Because of the direct encounter with Jesus, he changed how he saw everything, how he heard. He changed his mind.

Saul listens and changes his mind

Acts 7:58, 8:1-3; 9:1-9:31

Saul was already a believer in the one true God and was zealous against those he perceived to be traitors to that belief (“I am a Jew, born in Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, but brought up in Jerusalem at the feet of Gamaliel, taught the law of the fathers with strictness and thoroughness, and I was zealous for God, as are you all today” Acts 22:3).

Saul was moved by the spectacle of the stoning of Stephen to embark on his own purifying mission; he was pleased by Stephen’s death; he agreed with those who stoned him. (“And when the blood of Your martyr Stephen was shed, I also was standing by, and consenting unto his death, and I guarded the clothes of those who killed him” Acts 22:20). Saul condoned and encouraged violence.

Saul imprisoned people to preserve the purity of the faith (“I persecuted followers of the Way to their death, binding and delivering both men and women into prisons” Acts 22:4).

When Saul met Jesus, he did not recognize him (“And I answered, Who are You, Lord?” Acts 22:8).

When Jesus met him personally, Jesus said that Saul was persecuting him personally (“And he said to me, I am Jesus of Nazareth, whom you are persecuting” Acts 22:8).

Saul’s subsequent physical blindness made obvious his previous spiritual blindness (“I could not see for the glory of that light” Acts 22:11).

But remember, he was a devout believer in the God of the Hebrew testament and was working to preserve and purify that faith (“And I said, Lord, they know that I imprisoned and beat those who believed on You in every synagogue” Acts 22:19).

Thus we learn that a zealous defense of the truth and the true God may coexist with spiritual blindness to how God is presently at work. We also learn that persecuting those who love and follow Jesus is the same as persecuting Jesus.

The road from blindness to sight for Paul ran through the community he had persecuted—that very community had to risk reaching out to Paul in order for his healing to take place (“And there was a certain disciple at Damascus named Ananias; and said the Lord said to him in a vision, Ananias…Arise and go into the Straight street, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prays and has seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight. Then Ananias answered, Lord, I have heard from many about this man and how much evil he has done to Your saints at Jerusalem: and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all that call on Your name” Acts 9:10-14; “And one Ananias, a devout man according to the law, having a good report of all the Jews who lived there, came to me, and stood, and said to me, Brother Saul, receive your sight. And the same hour I was able to see him” Acts 22:12-13).

Jesus incapacitated Saul thoroughly enough to halt Saul’s persecuting activities, and then Jesus worked with Ananias to overcome Ananias’s justifiable prejudice and fear. Saul never returned to his condoning of violence.

After recovering his physical sight, Saul threw himself so zealously into defending the followers of Jesus that his life was in danger. The believers sent him home to Tarsus and then enjoyed a time of peace. Saul’s trait of zealousness didn’t much change but his direction in life did. Instead of being the defender of the Law and the Temple, he brought to the Gentiles the good news of Jesus, in whose resurrection power we also live. Instead of putting people into prison, Paul told us how Christ’s resurrection sets us free. 

This speaks a truth about knowing the Law and hearing sermons: they do us little good by themselves. This speaks a second truth: when we refuse to listen, we justify our refusal and become violent against those who are listening. This speaks a third truth as well: meeting Jesus personally, which is possible every day of the week, and every day of our lives, blows away what we think we know and moves us to change our minds. Then, like Paul, we can be apostles of the Good News of Jesus.

Loving God Wholeheartedly

Preached June 22, 2002, still seems worth saying

When I was a little girl, I wanted to be God’s person and to love God.  I also wanted to be safe and loved and have friends and power and a lot of other things, too.  I’ve spent my whole life working on the process of getting all these in order, because I know that the most important of them is loving God. Loving God wholeheartedly is a journey for me, and I believe someday it will be a resting place.  

Jesus identified the two great commandments (Matthew 25):  the greatest is loving God with one’s whole heart, mind, strength and the second is loving one’s neighbor. This particular sermon is about loving God.  We’ll approach this through two stories:  Adam and Eve and the rich young ruler, all of whom failed to love God wholeheartedly. 

Genesis 2 and 3 tells the story of the Garden of Eden, a place where God put fruit trees, a river, the tree of life, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  God told Adam that he was free to enjoy all things in the garden except one; God warned Adam that in the day he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he would die. God made animals as companions for Adam, and Eve as his helper and partner; when Adam saw Eve, he said, “Shazzam!” He recognized that she shared his essential characteristics.  The innocence of Eden is symbolized in the fact of their unashamed nakedness before each other and God, who came to visit them in the garden.

It seems clear that from the beginning what God wanted from humans was—and is—for them to choose to love God.  The Old Testament and New Testament are full of images for the relationship between God and humans that emphasize the personal loving intimacy God wants: Husband and wife, mother and infant, father and son, hen and chicks, friends. Interestingly, however, when God made humans and called them very good, giving them the earth to care for and enjoy, God also gave humans freedom.  One aspect of freedom is the ability to imagine things being different from the way they are and to choose that option over the facts of the present. Another aspect of freedom is to look at all the evidence of surrounding love and choose something else.

In the New Testament, Matthew 19:16-26, we read about the encounter between a rich young man and Jesus.  The young man asked the question we all have:  “What good deed must I do to have eternal life.” Jesus replied to him, “If you want to enter into life, keep the commandments.”  Intelligently, the young man asked another question:  “Which ones?”  Jesus narrowed the various commandments of the Old Testament down to the following:  “Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t say false things; honor your parents, and, last but not least, love your neighbor as yourself.”  These are all quotations from the Jewish law, the last from Leviticus 19:16. The young man said, “I’ve kept all these; what do I still lack?”  Jesus said, “If you want to be perfect, sell your possessions and give the money to the poor; this means you know your treasure is in heaven; then come, follow me.” 

This young man has a life marked by innocence and pleasant circumstances.He has done no harm and has also done active good in his world.  But he feels that something is lacking.  He wants to make sure he has a good life for eternity. Jesus tells him one thing he can do to be perfect (or complete), which will make sure his eternity is happy.

There are some obvious differences between these two situations.  Adam and Eve were in paradise with only one prohibition; the rich young man was in an occupied country with diverse social classes and ethnic groups and had a lot of prohibitions.  Adam and Eve’s test was to keep from doing something; the rich young man’s test was to do something radical. 

What seems similar, however, is important. In both cases, people had so much going for them, so much to be thankful for, so many advantages.  In both cases, people wanted to make sure they had everything they could possibly want. In both cases, the people were willing to risk losing their relationship with God because they wanted something else more than they wanted that relationship.  Adam and Eve decided they wanted to be like God, to be the ones who separate good and evil, even if that separated them from God.  The rich young man wanted to live a good life and the good life, and was willing to do one more good thing to ensure a good future life, but he wasn’t willing to focus his desire on wanting God.  God has seen that for the world to be good, for love to be real, the option must exist for people to choose something else.  Even though God set things up so that humans can be satisfied only by knowing God intimately, God also embedded in the nature of the universe the possibility that humans can choose against relationship. The universe has gaps, dangers, prohibitions, and so on, which make that choice real.

God challenged Adam and Eve to enjoy everything around them including God except one thing.  Adam and Eve chose the knowledge of good and evil over knowing God intimately and left the Garden in sorrow.  Jesus challenged the rich young man to risk everything that made him comfortable and safe on a relationship with Jesus.  The young man went away in sorrow, because he was rich. In some ways the choices are opposite, but at the core all three faced the question of whether they were willing to trust in God’s love for them and love God unconditionally or whether they needed to take matters into their own hands. 

What does it look like to love God wholeheartedly and unconditionally? St. Paul in I Corinthians 13 gives us a picture of love that we can try on here.  If we love God, we are patient with God, kind to God (kindness meaning the sort of generosity and loyalty we feel for family in its root); we aren’t envious of God; we don’t boast to God; we don’t assume we know more than God, and we don’t treat God like an inferior with no feelings. If we love God, we don’t insist on our own way; we aren’t irritable or resentful toward God; we don’t enjoy getting away with doing wrong, but we rejoice when God tells us the truth and helps us live truly. Our love for God bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  This love never ends.

All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above.  The world is intricate, homey, grand, and improbable—all reasons we might want to love the one who made it and put us here. However, it’s as if the story of Adam and Eve or the rich young man is reenacted in each human being.

Even though so much around us is good, we often do not love God wholeheartedly.  We want something more than we want to love God. We do not trust in God’s goodness and wholehearted love for us, and we are therefore open to the temptation to trust ourselves instead.  “What good deed can we do to have eternal life?”

We tend to think that if we had their chances we’d make better choices, but the evidence is against us.  Think about all that we have that we would put in the category of blessings.  The fact that our bodies and our cars and gravity and the general peacefulness of our state and town have allowed us to be here are things we generally take for granted. When I read in Oliver Sacks’s book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat about the varieties of ways the brain can malfunction, I began to sense the enormous blessing it is when so much in the brain goes right for such long periods of time.  When I consider how many distracted people are driving cars, I am amazed that so few of them run into each other.  When I think about how much evil humans can do and how often they choose to do good instead, I can see that we are surrounded by evidence of God’s love and can even see its traces in ourselves when we choose kindness over cruelty or forgiveness over resentment.

St. Paul said that God is the one in whom we live and move and have our being, and that in him all things hold together.  Why don’t we label all the things that go right as evidence of God’s love for us? When so much is good, why do we find it difficult to love God wholeheartedly? Instead, we focus on negatives—what we can’t have, what we can’t get rid of.

I’m not talking primarily to those who don’t love God because they have never wondered, considered, or believed that there is a God.    

Some of us suspect or believe that there is a God, but God is above it all; God doesn’t want or need our love, and God isn’t paying attention to us.  God sees us, if God is looking this way, at best from a distance. It’s hard to get interested in loving a God like that. It’s like loving a force field. I hope that if there is anyone reading this who is like either of these, he or she might be moved to say: “God, if you’re out there somewhere, let me know.”

Even those who believe in a personal God need to realize that there is a sense in which God transcends our whole experience of life, the universe, and everything. We can’t pin God to a board and examine every aspect of the nature of God so that we can predict God’s next move. God remains mysterious, even when we have the Bible and countless records of people who have experiences they attribute to God’s activity in their lives.

We may even prefer to believe that God is distant and uninvolved on a daily basis because we see that sometimes bad people live well and long while good people suffer and die young.  If the universe tells us that God is all powerful, and our experience tells us that bad things happen to good people, it becomes very difficult to want a close relationship with a God who doesn’t act like a superhero, at least not predictably.  It is more difficult to hold together the idea that God is all powerful with the ideas that God is all good and all loving than it is to believe only one of the options.

We may find it hard to love God wholeheartedly because we think God is expecting a lot from us but doesn’t look out for us very well.  We are astonished and feel betrayed when something goes wrong, especially when we’ve tried to be good.  It is little comfort to believe in a personal, involved God who doesn’t use power and love to prevent all sorrow, pain, untimely death, destruction, and evil. 

Another barrier to loving God is that we know we’ve done something God won’t like and therefore God can’t or won’t love us.  When we do something we know in our stomachs is wrong, we become afraid of being found out, we’re ashamed, and we hide.  Sometimes we hide by creating smokescreens of self-justification; sometimes we hide in activities that distract us from thinking.  There are lots of ways to hide from God, and while we’re hiding, we’re not loving God wholeheartedly.

We may find it hard to love God because God allows our own actions and the actions of others combined with the laws of nature to have consequences that are terrible.  Though I think God works hard to distract people from doing wrong by attracting them to good things, when people choose to be abusive, hateful, murderous, or even when they do harm out of ignorance or carelessness, God permits horrors to occur. 

I want to acknowledge all these difficulties, these barriers in the way of loving God wholeheartedly.  We may see God as distant, or unfair, or untrustworthy. In fact, even when our own lives are happy, when we see others suffer, we may doubt that God is both loving and powerful. At one point in my own life, I was angry with God to the point of despair.  A friend said, “You know, sometime you’ll just have to forgive God.”  Despite the preposterous sound of this, I said, “I forgive you, God, for not living up to my expectations.” It was helpful.

I want to point out the ends of the stories we started with to suggest why we can trust in God’s love.

If the Bible is reliable about God, it’s clear that God wants to get personal: for instance, God’s idea of paradise is to visit Adam and Eve in person and give them everything they need, including the freedom to choose something else; Jesus wants nothing more than for that rich young man to come with him. Furthermore, after Adam and Eve choose knowledge over God, the response is not immediate death, though something dies, I think; instead, the evidence of the story is that God continues to love them: God provides clothing and food and occupation for them, promises them children, and continues to be available to them in relationship. In fact, Eve acknowledges this when she has her first child, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the Lord.” God also brings them into the open and makes them tell what they’ve done. Even though they blame others for their own fall, being partly honest is better than hiding, and those who can be honest and take responsibility will find it easier to believe that God still loves them.  God continues to love them, and that includes allowing them to experience the consequences of their choice to know good and evil.

Similarly, Jesus makes clear that God remains committed to the human, even when the human makes the wrong choice.  The gospel of Mark includes the detail that Jesus loves the rich young man. When the rich young man hangs his head and walks away, Jesus says, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, in fact.” The disciples, astounded, ask, “Who then can be saved?”  Jesus replies, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” God still intends to work on or with the rich young man.

The greatest commandment is to love God with our whole selves—heart, strength, mind.  What Jesus said about the rich young man is true for all of us: with mortals it is impossible.  Our main difficulty in loving God is our own dividedness.  Is loving God something we really want to do more than anything else?  If we do want to love God, we can tell we are moving in the right direction when patience, kindness, contentment, humility, courtesy, honesty, and commitment are what we want to share with God. We give evidence of loving God when we act or refrain from action just because we think that’s what God wants from us.  We can choose to move toward loving God, and God will take our choices and make them add up to love. As Jesus concluded, with God all things are possible.

On the Resurrection

(My mom died in March of 2014 and my dad in April of 2007. Today I ran across this, which I used in a Sunday School class in the fall of 2007. It seems good to share it on Easter Monday.)

Generally, I teach and preach out of where God is prodding me to grow. The death of someone you love has a focusing effect on a topic that may have been more theoretically interesting before.  The question my parents' deaths has focused for me is what difference does it make that I believe in the resurrection of Jesus from death? 

It made a huge difference for St. Paul.

1 Corinthians 15: 3, 4. 14, 15, 17-19 (TNIV)

For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins…, that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day, and that he appeared to Cephas…the Twelve…more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time…James…all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

…

And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless, and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that [God] raised Christ from the dead… And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.

I had two discussions with people about the resurrection, one with a Christian friend from OSU who does not feel any necessity to believe in it and the other with a Quaker friend who does; both of them said that their present lives were so worth living they did not insist on being personally resurrected.  They acknowledge that if life were more presently miserable, the hope of a blissful life after death would be more meaningful. And I have asked myself, if the human being is not eternal, does that make life here necessarily miserable?  I too have thought that the world is so lovely and the relationships so precious that it could be enough, and then I lose someone to death or tragedy strikes within my awareness, and I hope for some way beyond death and tragedy.

The eternality of the human soul was not taken for granted in the Old Testament—that’s why the psalmist often pleads with God to preserve life for God’s own sake, because the psalmist will not be able to praise God in the grave.  The best expression of this with a bit of hope is in Job 14: Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble. They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure….At least there is hope for a tree…but a man dies and is laid low; he breathes his last and is no more…If someone dies, will they live again?...You will call and I will answer you; you will long for the creature your hands have made. The only hope is that God will want to continue relationship with the creature rather than lose that to death. The immortality of the soul and the possibility of resurrection were topics of debate in Jesus’s day between Pharisees and Sadducees. Jesus enters the debate decisively on the side of the eternal human soul, justifying the faint hope expressed by the writer of Job.

Scripture records five “returns from death” prior to Jesus’s own resurrection. None of them has the history-changing effect of Jesus rising from death. Two are in the Old Testament.  1 Kings 17 tells the story of Elijah, the widow at Zarephath, and her only son.  When the boy sickened and stopped breathing, the widow accused Elijah of bringing judgment for her sin on her.  Elijah took the boy and prayed, “O Lord my God, let this boy’s life return to him.” The boy revived, and the woman took the miracle as a sign that Elijah was a man of God who spoke God’s truth.

2 Kings 13 tells a very odd story about desperate Israelites throwing a dead man into Elisha’s tomb. When the body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life.

Moved by compassion, Jesus raises a widow’s only son from death, saying, “Don’t cry” (Luke 7:11-15). He also raises a little girl, saying, “Stop wailing, she is not dead but asleep” (Luke 8:40-56).  And most famously, Jesus raised Lazarus from his grave after 4 days entombment, saying, “Your brother will live again…did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” For some, these miracles established Jesus’s credibility as a prophet and perhaps even the Messiah.

However, these miracles also had great potential for getting Jesus in trouble for sorcery, and they did not prevent the crowd from chanting “Crucify him!” As Jesus himself said in a parable, “They have Moses and the prophets, listen to them.  If they won’t listen to Moses and the prophets, they won’t listen just because someone rises from the dead”  (Luke 16:29, 31).

After the resurrection and ascension of Jesus into heaven. Peter raised a woman named Dorcas/Tabitha from death and Paul restored Eutychus to life after he fell out of a window. 

So the main point of these stories is that those God sends as Messiah, prophet or apostle can also return the dead to life on occasion, though of course, not always.  None of these stories requires belief in the immortality of the soul, only in the efficacy of God’s spirit working through God’s messenger.

The Bible teaches us that God is alive and eternal; God gives life and death; God’s spirit raises [some] dead people in the Bible; life and death are mysteries; and the return to physical life is not the same as the resurrection. In fact, Paul says that coming back to human life is not the very best outcome for the dead person (“to die is gain”). Paul says this because Jesus’s resurrection changes everything.  And it does so because it is unlike all these others and unlike the near-death experiences or even death-and-resuscitation experiences that occur each day. It is one of a kind, or, better put, the first of its kind.

Paul argues that if Christ didn’t rise from death we are not saved out of our sins and those who have died are simply dead. If Christ didn’t rise from death, we are more miserable than those who disbelieve in Christ and the resurrection.  Paul is not talking about simply regaining breath and a heartbeat, but entering an entirely new life through the doorway of death.

Romans 5: 10

For if while we were hate-filled, the death of God’s Son changed our hearts toward God, much more surely, having changed our hearts, his life will save and restore our lives.

Romans 6:3-4, 10-11

Do you not know that baptism signifies our participation in the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Baptism buries us with Christ in death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life¼ Jesus’s death severed all relationship with sin, all at once and one time for all; but the life Jesus lives, he lives in relationship with God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God through and with and in Christ Jesus.

Paul works to help his readers and us understand that Jesus’s death takes away any basis we thought we had for hating God, for turning our backs on God. Jesus’s death turns our faces toward God and makes loving God possible. Jesus’s death breaks our relationship of slavery to selfishness, contrariness, malice, moral laziness, despair, over-indulgence, and possessiveness. We die with Jesus. A slave who dies is free—out of the reach of the whip and chains of unresolved fear, shame, and guilt. But there’s more and even better news.  We are free to relate uncomplicatedly to God, like a child who trusts and loves a parent.  We can respond to God’s unconditional love with unconditional love of our own.  Pay attention to this truth, says Paul, so you don’t fool yourselves into living like slaves. Instead, live by the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved us and gave himself for our sakes. 

Essential to Paul's understanding of the work of Christ is the GLORY of the resurrected Jesus.  Now we are holy through Jesus and the resurrection, rather than the law. Jesus’s resurrection shows that he has the power to make us good, something the law could not do. Now we serve God guided by God’s own Spirit, rather than by law; our lives are characterized by the central question, “What does God want from me in this moment?” This is the life Jesus lived—"I do not do my own works but only what my Father tells me to do." Now we know that God is the best of all possible parents, and we are God’s sons and daughters. God is more intimate and accessible than our real daddy or mommy. The resurrection of Jesus means to us that nothing can separate us from God’s love.

The life of Jesus shows us what a life of intimacy with God looks like. We can see in Jesus how the wind of the Spirit blows wherever the Spirit wants, how God’s own self responds to restrictions and rules, how God feels about children and women, how God’s own self loved this good life even while he KNEW he would be resurrected; how impossible it was (and how hard it is even now) for ordinary humans to grasp the whole picture, to get the difference he was living before them on a daily basis.  So let's be merciful, just as God is merciful.  Let's love God and love our neighbors.  

The final seal of our adoption is the redemption of the body—the resurrection we look forward to, when the mortality of our present bodies is swallowed up in the immortality of new bodies, bodies like the resurrected Christ. We live in hope that when we see Jesus we will be like him; and, for now, in our present weakness, the Spirit intercedes for us. Now God works for our good, God calls us, God justifies us, God glorifies us, and if God is for us, who can be against us?  If God is on our side, who will condemn us? It is not Christ’s death alone but Christ’s death AND RESURRECTION that sets us right, sets us free, and sets us on fire with love for God Almighty.