Twelfth Sunday After Pentecost Year A

12 Pentecost A 08
August 3, 2008

Romans 9:1-5
1 I am speaking the truth in Christ--I am not lying; my conscience confirms it by the Holy Spirit-- 2 I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. 3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; 5 to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah, who is over all, God blessed forever. Amen.

The Unacceptable God

I overheard a strange conversation in line at the bank on Friday. A man was reporting that he’d hunted some squirrels on his land because they’d been getting into his bird feeder. Having grown up hunting, he considered that anything one killed one should eat as a matter of respect. So he skinned the squirrels and cooked them for supper.

It seems his mother-in-law happened to be coming by for dinner. She asked him what he was serving and he said, “Squirrel.”

She looked at him quizzically. “Squab?” she asked.

“No,” he said, “Squirrel.”

She paused, staring at him in incomprehension, “Did you say grill?”

“No,” he said, “Squirrel.”

She looked around the table at the other family members, still perplexed. “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said, poking at the meat with her fork. “You’re not suggesting this is squash, are you?”

I don’t recall all the different things she suggested, but the idea that they were actually eating little furry nut-gathering rodents with big fuzzy tails was apparently unacceptable to her, so unacceptable that her mind simply screened out what he was saying.

We cannot underestimate the power of the human mind to deny what it refuses to believe.

For whatever reason, our larger culture, aided and abetted by mainstream churches, has created an idol I call the pop-god. When most people out there hear the word “God,” they don’t think of the God described in the bible. They think of the pop-god.

And so when we go to bible study, it’s the pop-god we’re looking for, and when we don’t find him, we just tune out whatever it is we’re reading. “Sooner or later,” we think, “if we just keep reading all this irrelevant stuff, we’ll find the god we’ve already decided to believe in. Sooner or later if I keep tasting this strange piece of meat on my plate, it will evolve into some food I would consider eating.”

The pop-God has many contradictory characteristics. The pop-God has all power and all knowledge and all goodness, yet he makes babies die in tsunamis. The pop-God is a puppeteer manipulating every facet of history, making everything that happens happen, and therefore must have a reason for everything, even killing those babies. The pop-God is in heaven and plans to stay there; he wants everyone to go there when they die, since the pop-God is eventually going to destroy the world. The pop-God gave us all free will so our choice to believe or not is what ultimately gets us into heaven or dooms us to hell. The American Pop-God favors America in all wars and prefers democracy over all other kinds of government, provided of course only Christians are elected. The pop-God judges our individual habits and those who have good ones go to heaven and those who have bad ones go to hell. The pop-God has very little to do with Jesus, who is really more of a kindly ghost waiting to hug us when we get to heaven. For some, Jesus is the ultimate boy or girl-friend, always with you, ready to listen, totally supportive, and never, ever challenging or judgmental, as opposed to his Father who is always smiting people. For some, Jesus paid for our sins in advance, giving us a “get-out-of-hell-free” card for the low, low price of believing that he did. And finally the pop-God gave us the bible, which is the guidebook that tells you how to get to heaven and stay out of hell.

Very little if any of this is in the bible, however. Almost none of it can be found in Jesus’ teachings.

And many people, quite reasonably, refuse to believe in such a God. But many don’t realize that what they refuse to believe isn’t what the Christian religion was ever supposed to be about in the first place.

But this is the pop-religion that many have learned somehow somewhere, probably mostly from TV. Most of these things are the things people mean when they argue about religion, some for the truth of the pop-God and some against. And so often when someone wants to encounter the living God, they go to church and find out that the pop-god is what is being worshipped. This is the kind of thing that breaks your heart, as it broke Paul’s heart all those years ago.

A number of people have asked me recently why the church is so enamored of the bible. Aren’t there all kinds of salutary spiritual texts out there that could accomplish the same goals better than the bible does? Stories and letters and volumes written by people closer to our own age and facing the same kinds of things we’re facing?

I’ve given a lot of thought to this question. The reason the bible must remain normative is because almost everything it says has been completely incomprehensible to the majority of people who have read it. The truths it articulates, far from having been long understood and accepted, are in fact still largely ignored. For those who encounter it and grasp its message, it is as new and fresh and alive as it was two thousand years ago. For the rest it remains an inscrutable mystery, like a plate of squirrel to a person who cannot entertain the notion of eating such a thing.

And most of the more contemporary texts that say anything like the bible says would be just as incomprehensible without comprehending the bible first. Indeed most of them were written by people who themselves would have been the first to defend the authority of scripture, who themselves had been deeply shaped by it.

The story is told in Genesis that one night long ago, old Jacob was jumped by God by the river, and Jacob wrestled with God with the goal of mastering him. Jacob wanted God’s name. If he got it, he felt sure he could command him. But God turned the tables. Not only did he refrain from giving Jacob his name, he gave Jacob a new name: Israel, “human striving against God.” This story was included because it is a wonderful metaphor for the whole story of God’s creation of a people for himself. It is as if God were some football player who tackled a whole nation. God pins them down and says, “You will be my people and I will be your god!” And the people say, “I’m sorry, what was that? Did you say that you will take care of us and do nice things for us no matter what?”

Long ago, when I was just beginning my search for a spiritual life, I remember telling someone, “I don’t need just any god. I need the big one.” Strangely enough, the only truly powerful God is the one who refuses to be pinned down, who refuses to play by human rules, who refuses to fit our preconceptions, who will ask us to live and to be exactly the opposite of what makes the most conventional sense. And yet this is the very God most people find as impossible to swallow as that poor woman found that squirrel.

We live in a culture that more or less accepts the segregation of Christians of color from Christians of European descent. Nothing can be done about it, most of us think. Sharon Watkins, the General Minister and President of our denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), attended the Chi-Rho Camp at Craig Springs that our two boys, Zach Brown and Gray Dickerson, just attended a few weeks ago. The camp was an inspired vision of a pastor in Newport News named Terrye Williams, who saw it as an opportunity to open young minds to Christ’s message of reconciling love among even very different peoples. She just sent out a email letter to every congregation in the United States and Canada. She wrote that the “Reconciliation Camp gives me hope for the future. If we can raise our children to see beyond stereotypes, to value the variations in culture as a gift, and to thrive in a world of diversity, then I see the reign of God drawing near.”

God is God and there is no other. Love your neighbor as yourself. Love your enemy. Give everything you have back to God for his use.

“I’m sorry. What did you say? God is good and there are lots of other things that are better? Love those who love me? Hate my enemies? Give only what is left over after I take all I want? I don’t believe I understood you.”

Jesus is our Messiah, our Christ, because he raises us out of ourselves and into the light of God’s infinite possibilities, because he carries us along into a new world God is already creating.

Amen.