May 12, 2013 – 7th Sunday of Easter

May 15, 2013 All Sermons

Year C, Easter 7
May 12, 2013
The Reverend Dr. Brent Was“

Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me.”

Do you all remember Robert Fulghum? He is the author of All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. He’s a Northwesterner. I think he used to live in Portland, he is in Seattle now. In a book he published back in 1995, he shared a prayer that he found, literally found: it has a rather ignoble genesis, it was taped inside the stall of a men’s room at a seminary in Berkeley. We are told to pray ceaselessly… It is a beautiful prayer that goes like this:

God, I have a problem.
I’m just a man and I’m feeling so alone.
God, I know you have no name, but I need to call you something.
God, I know you are not a man like me, but I need to think of you that way.
God, I know you are everywhere, but I need to talk to you somewhere.
God, I know you are eternal, but I need you now.
God, forgive my limitations, and help me. Amen.
(From Beginning to End, 1995)

How do we meet God in Acts? What an odd story. A slave girl pimped out as a fortune teller by her owners annoys Paul with her insistence, “These men are slaves to the Most High God…” to which Paul responds to with an exorcism. Then beaten and thrown in prison at the behest of the wealthy owners who were now out a fortune teller, God knocks the prison down with an earthquake and so stills the hearts of Paul and Silas that they remain that the jailer might be saved in body and spirit.

The god we learn of in the Acts of the Apostles, particularly in this scene, is a very active god. Visible and active. Heaven and Earth move when this god wills it. Hearts are changed, radically, in the hands of this god. Stripped, “severely” beaten, thrown in stocks and chains in the inner most cell and what do they do? Pray and sing hymns to God. Then God frees their bonds in the miracle of an earthquake and Paul and Silas do not run off, but offer counsel and the sacraments to their tormenter right then, in real time. It is a fantastic story. Our God is a visible God.

How do we meet God in Revelation? Well, how do we meet the Alpha and the Omega? How do we embrace the bright morning star that is Jesus Christ? How do we meet this god? With our arms wide and our hearts bared. “Come,” says the Spirit and the bride. “Let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes to take the water of life as a gift…” come. The god revealed in St. John the Divine blows it all open, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, God is beyond comprehension yet is well within the experience of anyone with the eyes to see and the ears to hear. Like the vastness of space, I can’t comprehend an infinite universe, but lying in a field in Jasper looking up into the stars these crystal clear nights recently, layer upon layer upon layer, depth into depth into depth… we can’t comprehend the infinite but we can participate in it fully. Our God is a mysterious God.

How do we meet God in the Gospels? Well in today’s selection from St. John’s Gospel, at least, we meet God the Son praying on our behalf to God the Father. That is dynamic. One face of God addressing another face of God for us. The glory of God shared from Father to Son to the faithful and the faithful yet to come. A god of knowing and being known, a loving god who calls us to love god and each other. “I made your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.” Our God is an intimate, tender God, a loving God.

Three little passages in the Bible. At least three very different ideas about the nature of God, at least three very different ideas about how we can or will meet God, about how we can or should approach God. And we hear these passages in a very particular way, we hear them, first off, read aloud. We are hearing them together, as part of the common Anglican form of Christian sacramental worship. And that is just our experience of God in Church.

How do you experience God in relation to the tragedy in Savar, Bangladesh? Do you feel the horror of it? The raw display of greed and self interest that led to the death of over 1000 of the world’s poorest, most vulnerable people, that what, we might buy cheap clothes at Walmart or the Gap? Where is God in this scene? Or maybe the question is is God in that scene at all, or maybe God is actually brutally and fully present maybe most particularly in a time of great horror, terrible suffering?

How do you experience God in relation to the death of a loved one? Are you angry that they have been taken? Are you at a loss for the hole left in your life? Are you blessedly assured that she is in the arms of a loving God, that he is getting his justice now, finally? All of these at once?

Where is God in the wild scene at Occupy Medical on Sunday afternoons, or at the Dining Room on any given weeknight or at the Sunday Breakfast? In the faces of the poor? In the hands of the helpers? Where is God in the world that such need is present, that such suffering could be to begin with? How do we make sense of it all?

As someone who lives rather deeply into my head, like a goodly number of us here, as someone who makes decisions based on whether something makes sense or not, whether there is some interior logic to a system, Christianity can be rather confounding. Like so many of us getting so much from the profound teaching of the Dalai Lama, but we forget that he is the patriarch of a radically patriarchal feudal theocracy, the Lamas ruled Tibet with an iron fist before the Chinese threw them out. Similarly, sometimes Christianity doesn’t make any sense. The violence of the Psalter. The scandalous lives of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. The Divine and Royal Lordship of the Crucified God. Simply the notion of God the Father, God as He can be confounding, alienating, oppressive or simply off putting to so many, it doesn’t make any sense God with a gender… but sometimes, sometimes we just feel so alone. Sometimes we need to put a name to the nameless, we need to imagine a beam of light from the heavenly lighthouse. Sometimes we need a friend, a divine friend, a friend in Jesus even if we don’t have any idea what that means or how to do it. Sometimes we need to corral the infinite that we might find at least the hem of a robe to touch. Always and everywhere means that, truly, right? It includes right here and right now, right?

My point, if there is a point to a sermon, that can get pretty dangerous, my point is that we need to forgive ourselves our humanness, our limitations, our prejudices. We need to forgive our need for order and sensibility. We need to recognize our scar tissue, see where we have been damaged, broken, hurt, we need to acknowledge our blind spots, account for the gaps in our systems of understanding. We need to recognize that very little about God makes sense. What we must do is everything in our power to meet God and each other where we can and not just in the ways that make sense, in the times that are approved, with vocabulary that we have had handed down to us. We should not walk away from traditions just out of hand, that is not the Anglican, the catholic (with a small “c”) way, but where the tried and true way fails us, where sense fails us, all we can do is ask God to forgive our limitations and help us. And hope upon hope God will. AMEN.