Sermon 10-27-13 God's Grace Is Sufficient

          Our gospel lesson contrasts the prayer life of a tax collector and a Pharisee. The Pharisee is a righteous, pious  person who believes in strictly following Jewish laws about purity, prayer, fasting, diet, and things like that. The Pharisees who lived this very strict, pious lifestyle often looked down on other Jews who were a bit more lax in their practice of the faith. That’s because they believed that living righteously and by the letter of the law was the way to please God and receive God’s favor.

     So the Pharisee goes to the temple to pray.  And when he goes to God in prayer, he is feeling confident about himself and his own righteousness.  He thinks he’s a really good Jew; really, much better at being Jewish than most other Jews. And so his prayer reflects his attitude. “Lord,” he says, “I’m so thankful that you’ve shown me exactly the right way to be Jewish. You have put into my mind just exactly what you want and expect from your people, and I am doing just that. I’m thankful, Lord, that I’m not like all those other Jews around here. I’m not like all those people who don’t dress right, and who don’t live their lives right, who are living sinfully and who really aren’t acting in a very Jewish way towards their brothers and sisters. Look at me, Lord, and notice that I’m not like them. I mean, was there ever a better example of how a Jewish person should live than I?  I fast regularly, I tithe, I know exactly what your commandments are, and I live them out every day. I’m such a good man, Lord.  And I know that because I’m such a good man, you will reward me.”

     The tax collector prays a very different kind of prayer.  In Jesus’ day, a tax collector was a BAD man, a BAD Jew. After all he was collecting money from his fellow Jews to give to the Roman oppressors. So this tax collector also goes to the temple to pray. And just as with the Pharisee, his prayer reflects his attitude. He knows he’s not a righteous man. He knows he’s made mistakes and that he deserves to be punished by God for the way that he lives his life. So he throws himself on the ground, and he can’t even raise his eyes to look toward heaven. He beats his chest, and he cries out in humility and helplessness, begging God to save him in spite of his inability to do what God has commanded. He prays because that’s just what flows out of him in his state of desperation. He doesn’t have much hope that his prayer is going to change God’s mind about him. But maybe he does hope that throwing himself on the mercy of God will help him change himself. And Jesus says that it is not the righteous Pharisee who will be exalted for his prayer; rather, it is the tax collector who has got it right.

     Pharisees were devoted to God and righteousness.  Most of their faults were the result of over-striving for holiness. Their zeal may have been misguided, but they did have zeal in their desire to please God.  So why does Jesus not appreciate them?  

     The Pharisee is presuming that he is righteous enough and does not also need to ask for mercy. But we are all both saints and sinners. No matter how hard we try to love God and our neighbor, there are always times, perhaps even most of the time, when we are self-absorbed. Any serious attempt at daily examination of our life makes us painfully aware of our failures. We need to beg God for mercy with all the fervor of the tax collector.

     Secondly, the Pharisee thought he could earn God’s grace. But God’s grace is a gift that is freely given to us and to everyone else in the world. We don’t earn a thing when it comes to God’s love. We only try to live in response to the gift. The movement in our relationship to God is always from God to us. Always! We can’t, through our piety or goodness move closer to God. God is always coming near to us, especially in the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, and in worship and prayer.

    The Pharisee is not only sure that he is righteous; he also assumes that anyone not as righteous as he is not even worthy of consideration. In the world today, we are being continuously encouraged to build ourselves up by denouncing the “other,” whether the “other” is viewed as the illegal immigrant, the Muslim, the homosexual, the rich or the “elite.” This is one of the traps Jesus is urging us to avoid.

     The real contrast is about the attitude of the hearers. The Pharisees, self-righteous people who despised sinners, were ignoring the fact that God actually does forgive sinners and restores sinners to righteousness, freeing sinners who seek it from both the penalty and the power of sin. To despise sinners is to do something God does not do, and therefore, by definition, to be unrighteous. It is instead to exalt ourselves above the very God who is pleased to forgive all who come in humble honesty and repent. God will humiliate those who exalt themselves. And God will exalt those who seek righteousness with an honest, humble heart. The tax collector was truly repentant and begged for forgiveness of his sins.  In his humility, he saw through to the great heart of God, and he cast himself on God’s divine mercy. Jesus teaches his disciples a lesson about God's mercy in justifying the tax collector, instead of the apparently holy Pharisee.

     Even more importantly, the Pharisees put ‘getting it right’ over responding to the needs of others. Clearly, Jesus’ first priority—the widow, the orphan, the poor—was their last priority.  Unfortunately, we see the same thing today.  On November 1st, as the sequester kicks in, more families will be taken off the Food Stamp program than Feeding America provides with food.  We are deluding ourselves if we think private charity will fill in the gap.

     Praying with humility seems to be the main point of this week’s parable. We’re not supposed to go to God in prayer, expecting that God is going to be at our beck and call to give us what we want, or give us a clear answer. We are supposed to go to God in prayer because we can’t help it, because we don’t know what else to do. When we go to God with that kind of attitude, that’s when the prayer we offer flows out of us day and night.

We are supposed to turn to God because we know that without God, we are truly, truly helpless and because we know that if we happen to have a blessing, if we happen to have good things happen in our lives, it isn’t because we deserve it because we are so good and righteous. That’s the kind of attitude we ought to have, says Jesus: persistence and humility.  Not just in our prayers, but in the way we live our whole lives. And if we are blessed, if we happen to be so lucky, as most of us are, then we ought to just be thankful and know that it isn’t because we deserve it.

We pray because it changes US.

·         It changes us into people with humble and grateful hearts.

·         It changes us into people who aren’t so focused on what WE are getting out of this world and how we are feeling from day to day.

·         It changes us into people who are able to love God no matter how our lives our going and love others as much as we love ourselves.

Scripture for 10-27-13

Luke 18:9-14

 

9 He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others:

10 "Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

11 The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

12 I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.'

13 But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!'

14 I tell you, this man went down to his house justified rather than the other; for every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted."

Sermon for Sunday October 20, 2013 Rekindle Your Faith

Rekindle Your Faith

 

"If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this mulberry tree, 'Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.” (Luke 17:6)

     The disciples have implored Jesus, "Lord, increase our faith!"  That is, “give us more faith,” a request I would guess most of us can identify with. Haven’t we all felt at times that our faith was inadequate? When we have doubts and questions, when we’re confused, when we recognize that our faith is not really at the center of our lives?

     Jesus doesn’t answer their request as they put it. It’s not more faith that they need. It’s a different kind of faith: Mustard weed faith. Mustard weed was the scourge of farmers in Palestine. It grew wild. Birds would eat the seeds, but only partially digest them, and then drop them everywhere. Mustard weed grew rapidly and would take over fields and vineyards. Pulling it up did little good, because more birds would just bring more seed from somewhere else.  It was persistent, irritating, and fast-spreading. It would be there whether you liked it or not.

It sounds like thistles in our church yard.  We kill them, we  dig them up, and within a week or two they’ve grown back.

     That's the kind of faith we need, Jesus says, faith small and contagious enough to be carried everywhere. Not more. Not bigger. Not even deeper. Just contagious enough to be caught, dropped, and then take root.

     I like the interpretation Kimberly Bracken Long offers in Feasting on the Word. She suggests Jesus is saying to his disciples, in as loving a way as possible, that even though they still need to grow in their faith, even with a weak and undeveloped faith, they are qualified to do the work. In the verses just before today’s reading Jesus has told the disciples that true discipleship required vigilance and that they were bound to stumble so they needed to be careful and constantly on guard (Luke 17:1-4). Bracken Long suggests their response is to panic and say, “Lord, help us then! Fix the problem! Increase our faith!”

     After just that one verse about faith telling the disciples they only need faith as small as a mustard seed, Jesus changes the subject to being a servant. Jesus is reminding the disciples, and us, that faith does not spread like mustard weed if we think we've got all the strategies down just right, or if we think we control the mission and act like we do. The mission is God's, not ours. We get to help, even as we've been helped by God’s grace. But, we must remember, we go and serve at the bidding of Jesus, like a family servant, not because we feel like it or because we want to make our own ministries bigger. God is in charge, not us.

     Last year on NPRs “All Things Considered,” there was a story of a United Methodist pastor who decided she was an atheist. The situation was scary and awkward for her. Who could she tell?  What would she do now to earn her living?     Lacking someone to confide in, she secretly confessed to her iPhone, “Sometimes I think to myself: If I could just go back a few years and not ask the questions and just be one of the sheep and blindly follow and not know the truth, it would be so much easier.  I’d just keep my job. But I can’t do that. I know it’s a lie. I know it’s false.” Eventually she left the ministry. 

     I believe doubts are a part of our faith. As the father of the child Jesus cured of demons said, “I believe. Help thou my unbelief.” (Mark 9:24) As John Wesley said, “When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me”

     The problem I think is with our current cultural understanding of faith. The printing press provided the technological change that led to the Protestant Reformation. For the next 500 years, Christians became very focused on “the word.”  But then we took it to extreme and identified faith with particular beliefs. This focus on beliefs led to divisiveness. Various humans, presuming to speak for God, came up with vastly different interpretations of the same verse which they vehemently held to. Today, there are over 39,000 different Protestant denominations. Martin Luther’s injunction, “sola scriptura,” led to the doctrine of Bible inerrancy. But inerrancy to what canon?  There are 293 different translations of the Bible on sale on Amazon.  Which one are you going to be inerrant with?

     That wasn’t the definition of faith in Jesus’ day.

For Jesus, faith was a question of commitment, commitment to a relationship with the great, “I am.” Humans couldn’t name God!  There are hundreds of images of God in the Bible, all valid, all incomplete. The immensity of God can not be reduced to words. Faith is a sense of awe and wonder at the immensity and power of the creator of the universe and, at the same time, a sense of intimacy with the one who knows your every thought and feeling and provides care with steadfast love. The essential component is trust, trust in the grace of God. As Emmanuel Célestin Suhard said so beautifully, "To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda or even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery; it means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."      

     To live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist. Jesus was teaching the disciples that first and foremost, faith is a way of life. Their duty to serve God is part of the relationship, just as God’s gift of grace, which imparts faith into them, is part of the relationship. Because it is the nature of the relationship,

they don’t have to worry about whether or not they have enough faith. Even a little faith is enough to render them worthy of performing the work to which they have been called.

     There’s a certain faith that comes with believing what you were taught as a child and sticking with the convictions that you had as an adult. There’s something very scary and vulnerable about saying, “I’m open to change. I’m open to changing my mind.”  It’s a very scary place to be --to be willing to change your mind. But we need to remember it’s our minds that are changing. God’s not changing. After all, if the disciples would inevitably stumble and fall at times, surely we too will stumble and fall at times and God’s grace will be sufficient.

     Faith is a journey. As humans we seek to understand. But we can never have full understanding of the mystery of God. Doubts and questions are part of our faith journey. As long as we remain in relationship with God; as long as God remains, “In him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28), our faith is sufficient.  Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough for now.

Scripture for Sunday, October 20, 2013 Luke 17:5-10

Luke 17:5-10

 

5 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"

6 And the Lord said, "If you had faith as a grain of mustard seed, you could say to this sycamine tree, 'Be rooted up, and be planted in the sea,' and it would obey you.

7 "Will any one of you, who has a servant plowing or keeping sheep, say to him when he has come in from the field, 'Come at once and sit down at table'?

8 Will he not rather say to him, 'Prepare supper for me, and gird yourself and serve me, till I eat and drink; and afterward you shall eat and drink'?

9 Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded?

10 So you also, when you have done all that is commanded you, say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'"

The New Covenant, Sermon, Sunday, October 13, 2013

A New Covenant

 

A poor man named Lazarus, is destitute, longing for crumbs from the rich man's table, and covered with sores. The poor man dies. And then the rich man dies. A reversal takes place, the first is now last, the last first. Hasn’t Jesus been teaching this throughout his ministry, time and time again? Isn’t this exactly how God’s kingdom works? The first are last? The least are greatest? The servant of all rules all?

     The rich man goes to Hades while Lazarus is “carried” by angels to “Abraham’s side.” There is no getting from one side to the other, but, interestingly, in Jesus’ story, there is communication between the two sides. The rich man asks Abraham to have Lazarus get him some water, because he is “in anguish because of the flames.” People in hell can communicate with people in heaven? The rich man is in the fire, and he can talk? He’s surviving?

     But notice, the rich man wants Lazarus to serve him. In life, the rich man saw himself as better than Lazarus, and now, in hell, the rich man still sees himself as above Lazarus, as entitled to ask Lazarus to serve him. It’s no wonder Abraham says there’s a chasm that can’t be crossed. The chasm is the rich man’s heart. It hasn’t changed. Even in death, he’s still clinging to the old hierarchy. He still thinks he’s better.

He still misses the Gospel message. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of THE GOD who shows no favoritism.

     The most powerful image in this story is of the chasm, a giant ditch, that separates the rich and the poor.  As Jesus tells the story, Lazarus and the rich man are interdependent, although they live in different worlds. Jesus is telling us that we have a choice: to connect with the poor in this world or to be forever separate from them in eternity.   

     The message of this story is totally clear!  We will be judged on the basis of how we treat the poor. We, the rich, have received our reward on earth; the poor will be blessed in heaven.

     The rich man pleads, "Send someone to warn my brothers, so that they don't end up like me!" Jesus’ story about Lazarus and the unnamed rich man is very like a well-known folk tale in the ancient world.  But, Jesus has changed the story.  Usually when someone asked to send a message back to the people who were still alive on earth, the message was sent. But in Jesus’ version, the Pharisees are told, “They’ve got Moses and the prophets.  Let them listen to them.”  And, even more strongly, “If they don’t listen to Moses and the prophets neither would they be convinced, even if someone rose from the dead.”  WOW!  We won’t. . .Is that still true today? 

     Jesus’ warning is consistent with the law and the prophets. Our Old Testament reading for today was Jeremiah’s promise of a new covenant. The new covenant would not be on tablets of stone, but on human hearts. This new covenant would be found in the minds and lives of every person, NOT on a monument most people could only occasionally visit.
     Jeremiah’s prophecy was fulfilled, partially at least, during the exile. Unable to sacrifice or depend on Temple rituals, the exiles developed new patterns of worship, based on daily reading of Scripture and offering prayers. The development of Judaism during the exile was making the promise of Jeremiah’s prophecy of a “new covenant… written on hearts… [where] everyone would know the Lord” a reality for many more people. And it was a promise to everyone in the covenant, “from the least of them to the greatest.”

     Jesus fulfilled it even more radically. The Pharisees were criticizing Jesus for welcoming outcasts and sinners. They were behaving to the people Jesus was welcoming exactly like the rich man was behaving to Lazarus. Jesus was putting into practice in the present world the reversal that would happen in the future world.  He was fulfilling the LORD’S requirement to, “do justice, love kindness and walk humbly with your LORD.” (Micah 6:8)  Jesus was practicing what he had taught his disciples to pray “Thy kingdom come, they will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Anyone who understands the law and the prophets must therefore see that Jesus was bringing the law and the prophets to completion.  If his listeners, or we, do not understand, then not even someone rising from the dead will bring them to their senses.
     God cares immensely for the poor and the downtrodden. Any person claiming to love God should be living a life that shows that care.  How would the world see Christians--and especially the Christ they follow--if we put our energies, our time and our money, where are prayers and Bible claim they lie? What a vision!  Are we listening?  If we were truly listening, what would we do? 

Scriptures for Sunday, October 13, 2013

Luke 16:19-31

19 "There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day.

20 And at his gate lay a poor man named Laz'arus, full of sores,

21 who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores.

22 The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's bosom. The rich man also died and was buried;

23 and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Laz'arus in his bosom.

24 And he called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Laz'arus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.'

25 But Abraham said, 'Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Laz'arus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish.

26 And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.'

27 And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house,

28 for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment.'

29 But Abraham said, 'They have Moses and the prophets; let them hear them.'

30 And he said, 'No, father Abraham; but if some one goes to them from the dead, they will repent.'

31 He said to him, 'If they do not hear Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced if some one should rise from the dead.'"

 

 

Jeremiah 31:27-34

27 "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of man and the seed of beast.

28 And it shall come to pass that as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD.

29 In those days they shall no longer say: 'The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge.'

30 But every one shall die for his own sin; each man who eats sour grapes, his teeth shall be set on edge.

31 "Behold, the days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah,

32 not like the covenant which I made with their fathers when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant which they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD.

33 But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.

34 And no longer shall each man teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more."

 

Sermon 9-29-13 Thy Kingdom Come

     The prophet Jeremiah lived and preached in some very dark days for the Jewish people – just before Israel and Judah were conquered by the Babylonians, who took Israel, the northern kingdom, in 597 BCE and Judah, the southern kingdom, about ten years later. Jeremiah was called by God to deliver a difficult message to the people of Israel--to tell them because they had been disobedient and unfaithful to the Lord their God, they were going to be punished.  An enemy from the north was going to conquer them. In today’s passage, Jeremiah’s prophecies are coming true. The armies of Babylon are closing in, the city is under siege, and the enemy is literally at the gates. The situation is desperate.  The people have lost all hope, and they don’t know what to do.

     The people of Israel struggled with the question of whether God had abandoned his people?  Or was God punishing them because they had done something wrong?  Why didn’t God hear and respond to their cries? “Where is God in the midst of suffering?  Isn’t the Lord with us?

    We can all relate to how the people of Israel felt because we’ve been there. We watched in horror as the two towers at the World Trade Center fell twelve years ago. We saw the devastation of the tsunamis that hit Indonesia and Japan, and the hurricanes that struck the east coast. We witnessed the mass shootings in schools and movie theaters. We’ve seen the power of tornados to destroy a town in mere minutes, and watched fires swallow up acres and acres of timber, homes, people, and anything else that dares get in the path. Where is God now, when so many things seem out of control?

     What makes the book of Jeremiah so meaningful, so moving, is that we can relate to it. We respond to the feelings of all people who have ever suffered or felt abandoned by God in their time of need. It seems natural to feel that way. At this moment of greatest desperation and hopelessness, Scripture tells us that the prophet Jeremiah buys a piece of land outside of Jerusalem, which which has already been CONQUERED by the Babylonians and is thus no longer held by Judah. Why in the world Jeremiah would do such a crazy thing? 

     We could say it’s because that’s what God told him to do. But it’s more than that, isn’t it?  He did it because, even under these dire circumstances, God wanted him to give the people some hope.  He did it because he believed that even as bad as the situation was, SOMEDAY, things would get better. His willingness to purchase this land, to invest in an unknown future, is a clear and tangible sign of his faith that God would one day redeem Israel.

     It’s like the rainbow that God put in the sky to remind Noah of the promise never again to destroy the people of the earth in a flood. It’s a sign of hope. What do we cling to when life begins to spin out of control and we feel like we are hanging on by a thread?  To whom do we turn?  Where can we go to look for a sign of God’s promise that one day things will get better?  Where can we find some hope?

     We all faces times when we don’t know how we’re going to make it through the day. What do we do?  How do we go on?  Where can we look for a sign of God’s promise that one day things will be better?

     Maybe when things go wrong in our lives, we’re like the people of Israel and think that somehow God doesn’t hear our cries, that God has abandoned us, or that God is punishing us because we’ve done something wrong. But maybe the problem isn’t that God doesn’t answer.  Maybe the problem is that we are not always able to see how God is at work in so many ways in this world. Maybe the problem is that we’re not asking the right question, that we’re not asking, What are we to do?  Rather than expecting God to bind up our wounds, ease our sorrows and our suffering, and make the wounded whole, maybe we should be listening for how God wants us to join in his actions to relieve the suffering of this world.

     The irony is that it was during these dark days, that the prophets developed the sacred dream of the peaceable kingdom. We first glimpse this vision of the world as God wants it to be with the image of the promised land – a land flowing with milk and honey. What a powerful image that must have been for freed slaves traveling though the Sinai desert. Or, later, during the exile, for nostalgic refugees dreaming of home.

     The nation of Israel flourishes only very briefly during the reigns of King Saul, David and Solomon less than 100 years, from 1020-930 BCE). But then the nation was torn by civil war, sickened by corruption, threatened by a succession of powerful enemies and eventually conquered. It’s brightest and best were carried away as exiles to Babylon. And then the great irony. It was as refugees in a foreign land, that the Jewish religion matured and flourished.  During the exile, the dream of a peaceable kingdom changes from a dream of a promised land to a promised day or time, the Day of the Lord, when oppressors will be overthrown, when corruption and unfaithfulness will be replaced by virtue and integrity, and when the blessing, justice, and peace of God will flow like a river and fill the earth as waters fill the oceans.

Swords into plowshares. Today that would mean dreaming about tanks being melted down into playground jungle gyms and machine guns being recast as swing sets. Wolves living with lambs. Today that would mean Christians and Jews and Muslims throwing a picnic together or Left- and Right-wingers forming a band and singing in harmony, or nuclear weapons engineers being redeployed to develop green energy. Children playing with snakes, centenarians seeming to be in the prime of life. Today those wouldn’t suggest snake handling in heaven or the need for bigger retirement funds, but rather a time of deep safety for vulnerable people, without gaps in the health-care system, so all can live a full life from childhood to senior citizenship. Everyone with a vine and fig tree. That wouldn’t necessarily mean a return to an agricultural economy for everyone, but it would suggest full employment for all families everywhere, all having some secure place in a healthy, sustainable, regenerative economy. Men and women prophesying, the knowledge of the LORD covering the earth like water covers the ocean basin. That would mean a deep kind of universal and egalitarian spirituality. There are foretastes of the dream coming true, of course, even though the dream itself always beckons and is never fully grasped.

     Are these passages just images of heaven or of a post-apocalyptic future?  Maybe there’s a different way to read them. If we are people who live in the Genesis story of creation and covenant and the Exodus story of liberation and formation into God’s people, what if we were to hear these images as a vision of the kind of future toward which God is inviting us in history? What if we saw them less as an eternal destination beyond history and more as a guiding star within it, less as a description and prediction and more as a promise and hope, as an unquenchable dream that inspires us to unceasing efforts to make the dream a reality?

     The Bible says that God created the universe and that as part of that God created us, each one as an individual with a unique personality and character traits. We are all different from one another. We possess free wills. The Bible says that God, too, is a person. In fact, God is in three persons in  the trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is not just a force or an energy or a set of impersonal laws or scientific principals. God is personal, like a mother or a father.

     In the Old Testament, God frequently is viewed from the perspective of a growing child. First, from the standpoint of a toddler, God seems like a giant and sometimes terrifying father figure who rants and raves and doles out punishment mysteriously with his mighty arm. Then, as the prophets of Israel grow in their understanding of God, and as Israel herself develops into a teenager, so to speak, God is seen as a father who says to the erring child, “I’ve had it! You are grounded!” Isn’t this, after all, just exactly what God is saying to the nation of Israel when, through the prophet Jeremiah. “Isn’t God saying, “Now come on, child of mine Israel!  I’ve told you and told you not to do that.  Now I am making plans against you and getting ready to punish you for your continued evil ways. Stop living sinful lives! Change what you are doing right now because you are on the verge of being grounded!”

     According to the Bible, God is always intensely personal because God wants us to grow up to become people who are responsible. The future is waiting to be created; it is not fatalistically predetermined. God hasn’t already prerecorded history so that it waits like digital information on a disk, already “made” but only being “played” in real time. Life is “live.” History isn’t a “show”—not even a “reality show.” History is unscripted, unrehearsed reality, happening now—really happening.

     The story of the peace-making kingdom provides our faith with a sacred vision of the future, a vision of hope, a vision of love. It represents a new creation, and a new exodus—a new promised land that isn’t one patch of ground held by a chosen people, but that encompasses the whole earth. It acknowledges that whatever we have become or ruined, there is hope for a better tomorrow; whatever we have achieved or destroyed, new possibilities await us; no matter how far we have come or backslidden, there are new and more glorious adventures ahead. And, the prophets insist, this is not just a human pipe dream, wishful thinking, whistling in the dark; this hope is the very word of the Lord, the firm promise of the living God.  The liberating, hope-inspiring God whose image emerges in the prophets’ sacred stories.