Once upon a time, we all believed in God. In an earlier epoch, we believed in God (or gods) as effortlessly as we believed in the firm ground beneath our feet and the expanse of sky above our heads. An ancient Greek poet expressed it like this in a hymn to Zeus (later reappropriated by the apostle Paul): “In him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). For the ancients, the divine was as immanent as the air they breathed. But that was before everything was on fire. That was before the conflagration of world wars, before the skies over Auschwitz were darkened with human ash, before the ominous mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, before the world witnessed twin pillars of smoke rising into the September sky over Manhattan, before long-venerated institutions were engulfed in the flames of scandal, before the scorched-earth assault on Christianity by its cultured despisers. Today, it’s harder to believe, harder to hold on to faith, and nearly impossible to embrace religion with unjaded innocence. We live in a time when everything is on fire and the faith of millions is imperiled. Zahnd, Brian. When Everything’s on Fire . InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition
He is right: everything is on fire. Old assumptions no long hold sway. It like we’ve fallen down a rabbit hole and Alice in Wonderland is speaking in jabberwocky and we can’t make sense of it. All we know is that either things have changed around us or perhaps within us, or God has changed. I can tell you with all that is in me, that God remains the same. The issue is with us and the world around us.
Our faith seems to be like that parking lot that Joni Mitchell sang about: “Don’t it always seem to go; That you don’t know what you’ve got ’Till it’s gone They paved paradise And put up a parking lot.” And it’s not doctrine that seems to be missed but the mystery, the transcendence, the sacred. Everything seems to be monetized and it’s a challenge to not get swept into all of that.
And into this context of our world today, we hear the Gospel. Luke tells us that: “Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God,” and so on. I want you to notice how the crowd yearned to hear Jesus preach. They, the gospel says, pressed in on him on every side. There is a sense of expectancy and hope in those words. People wanted to hear Jesus. They hoped to hear something that would give them hope. They lived among the hopeless. They were captive to Roman rule. Even their worship was controlled. They had felt that God was on their side, yet there was nothing present in their life to support such feelings. All evidence to the contrary, they still hoped. And Jesus stood in the breach between promises that they still clinged to and the reality of what they faced.
Isn’t different for us, isn’t it? I wonder why. Sure, we’re living in a secular world that either looks to God as a sort of a celestial card dealer, doling out the good cards to a few but the rest of us seem to keep losing and drawing jokers rather than a winning hand. We’re here in church but the numbers are lower than those who will shop at Walmart today. Does one find hope at Walmart? Will one find salvation as a blue light special? How about the number of people who will watch the Superbowl today compared to those who will receive communion? If you were an alien from space and were taking notes, the church would probably be one of the last places where you would think people would come for hope. And yet, hope is what we offer.
The biblical scholar NT Wright wrote that “people often get upset when you teach them what is in the Bible rather than what they presume is in the Bible.” And that’s one of the reasons that people don’t show up to hear the Word of God and would prefer to simply stay home, warm up the queso and watch the pregame show. Indeed, if I could be so bold, if we water the Word of God down, I don’t blame them. I prefer to listen to Terry Bradshaw over some half-baked replica of the good news.
There is a benefit in growing older. I have seen and heard a lot. I have also learned much from the mistakes I have made a long the way. I once lightheartedly said that the name of one of the books I want to write will be called “The mistakes of Darrel Proffitt.” There’s a lot of truth in that because the more honest I am with both the failures and self-imposed limitations I placed on my ministry, the more I grow and trust in God. Ministry has more to do than the clever turning of a phrase in a sermon or a well-placed relevant joke inserted in just the right place to make people feel comfortable and willing to come back and listen for another week. There’s an old saying attributed to Jesus that I have heard most of my life but for a variety of reasons seemed hard to truly believe. Seek the truth and the truth will set you free. Truth seeking and truth proclaiming are the twin towers of effective ministry and Christian living. It seems so easy but yet it is so difficult.
I am thankful to hear the Gospel this morning and gives me courage and hope to speak the truth. Jesus said: “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. “Blessed are you who are hungry now, for you will be filled. “Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh. “Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets.”
This sort of reminds me of what was said of Harry Truman during his barnstorming campaign from the back of a train. At one stop someone yelled “Give ‘em hell Harry.” It is said that he responded, “I only tell them the truth and it feels like hell.”
But not always. It only feels like hell when the truth reveals that we have put something, or someone in the place where God only fulfills us. We get stuck, all the time, in a shame and guilt-based faith that seems to have been peddled to us from those from afar and those close by. But Walter Brueggemann suggests that there is a “credo of five adjectives” that continually recurs in the Hebrew Scriptures: This God that Israel—and Jesus—discovered is consistently seen to be “merciful, gracious, faithful, forgiving, and steadfast in love.” . Richard Rohr writes “When we get to the Risen Jesus, there is nothing to be afraid of in God. His very breath is identified with forgiveness and the Divine Shalom… If the Risen Jesus is the final revelation of the nature of the heart of God, then suddenly we live in a safe and lovely universe. But it is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus. It is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen.”Rohr, Richard. Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (p. 20). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.
And keep hungry, keep searching. What seems like judgment is simply a true statement. Jesus concludes the gospel this morning by saying “Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. “Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. “Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”
If we ever get to the place where we think there is no where else to go, no place to grow, nothing to learn and no one else to love, woe to us. Again, Richard Rohr reminds us “Most of religion, historically, expected we would come to God by finding spiritual locations, precise rituals, or right words. Our correct behavior or morality would bring us to God, or God to us. Actually, almost everybody starts there—looking for the right maps, hoping to pass some kind of cosmic SAT test—the assumption being that if you get the right answers, God will like you. God’s love was always highly contingent, and the clever were assumed to be the winners. The Bible will not make transformation dependent on cleverness at all, but on one of God’s favorite and most effective hiding places: humility. Such “poverty of spirit,” Jesus says, is something we seem to lose as we grow into supposed adulthood (see Matthew 18:2–4; Mark 9:35–37). Rohr, Richard. Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality (p. 23). Franciscan Media. Kindle Edition.
This is why Jesus says the kingdom cannot be inherited unless we are like little children: unburdened by how we think God ought to act and periodically upset when God loves the wrong kind of people and then calls us to follow where he is leading. I get it. It’s a challenge especially if we have grown up with a sense that God is a celestial kill joy who gives our love begrudgingly. But, be encouraged, our God is not like that. That’s why Jesus came to show us that God loves. God loves in such a messy way, stumbling through the corridors of our lives, seeking us to comfort, empower, and make us more like God. And when you find yourself stumbling over the person next to you to love the stranger and the strange, then blessed are you.
In Jesus name.