September 18, 2016
God (Part 2)
- Matthew 1:18-25
Last week we kicked off our True North series by talking about God. We talked about how, in the Creation story, we learn several things about who God is. That God and not us, are the creators of the world. While few of us would ever say we believe we are the creators of the world, in many ways we may actually live like we believe this. We struggle at times with not thinking that our skills and talents, that what we have achieved and what we own, are things we have done and accomplished rather than gifts from the Creator God. Or perhaps we struggle with anxiety and worry which oftentimes is a sign that we are trying to control the uncontrollable, not choosing to remember that only the one who creates can control everything. God is the creator of the earth.
We also talked about how God is a God of beauty and creativity. God could have made everything black and white or made us into stick people, but instead God made the world in vibrant colors and made men and women with vibrant personalities. It’s a great reminder to us of that beauty and creativity are not “extras” but are essential to who God is and subsequently who we are. We must always ensure that we don’t allow pragmatism and practicality to squeeze out beauty and creativity, because in so doing we are squeezing a critical attribute of God. We must make space for breathing in of God’s beauty and for breathing out, by the way we live and act and create, new vibrant life in the world in which we live.
God is also a God who brings order out of chaos and so too, are we called to bring order out of chaos. In fact, many of our vocations, if we have the eyes to see it, are jobs which reflect who God is. Whether it be police or military or attorneys or stay at home moms and dads-those things are bringing order out of chaos. Farmers and doctors are helping to steward this amazing world that God has created. Artists and architects are bringing beauty and creativity to all of us. We were created to work and in that work we reveal in deeper ways who God is.
Finally, we were reminded that in order for us to be God’s agent in the world and to reflect him that God gave us freedom. Freedom to create and bring beauty and order and steward this earth, but also freedom to choose to worship creation over the Creator, to bring evil rather than good. But, God loved us too much to not give us freedom and so we live in the reality of that freedom today.
And this week, as I mentioned last Sunday, we’re going to stay on the subject of God by looking primarily at our passage in Matthew. What does even just the beginning of Jesus’ life here on earth tell us about who God is? For one, this story reminds us that just as it was God who initiated the creation of the world, it is God who initiates his relationship with us. As Dale Bruner puts it, “It is the Holy Spirit and not human initiative that brings Jesus into personal life (first Mary’s and then ours).” This is something that we talk about with some regularity here because we are a Presbyterian church and in our tradition we have a strong emphasis on the fact that before we can ever reach up to take God’s hand, God has reached down to grab a hold of us. This counters our oftentimes American mindset that says we have to earn things, but instead says that our relationship with God is a gift.
One of the ways in which we symbolize this in profound fashion is when we baptize infants. It is the beautiful image that acts out what we believe which is that before we could make any movement toward God, that God has moved in our direction. That doesn’t, of course, mean that we never do anything, but it does mean that God is the first and primary mover in the relationship.
It’s a bit like when you first have a child. I can still remember pretty distinctly Megan and my emotions after we had our first child, Shaughnessy. At first, it’s really exciting, but then as the weeks progress you realize you are giving and giving and giving and getting very, very, very little in return. Megan would feed her, we’d change her diaper, we’d hold her and burp her and wake up in the middle of the night for her and all she’d do is cry and look around blindly and cry and go to the bathroom and cry. It was so frustrating and yet, perhaps in that moment newborn parents are given a slight sense of how God looks at us from the very beginning. That God creates and gives and gives and gives and we oftentimes whine and cry and look around blindly like we don’t see him and rarely give thanks, but hopefully, at some point, just like Shaughnessy finally began to smile and see us and even thank us at times, so too will we hopefully begin to see God and live joyfully in him and give thanks for what he has given to us. But the initial move is God’s move toward us and that’s important for us to always be mindful of.
But we also see how the God we discover in scripture is a God who works in surprising ways. Rest assured that neither Mary nor Joseph, nor any of their contemporaries, were expecting God to work how he did. Throughout Jesus’ life he was always doing things that surprised people. Healing people, eating with the wrong people, doing work on the Sabbath, rising from the dead (you know, things like that!) I think we sometimes look at Jesus’ life and we think, “Oh, I would have expected that,” but the truth is that most of us probably would have missed him entirely because we had an expectation of how God would show up and what God would look like. As Isaiah puts it, God’s thoughts are not our thoughts and God’s ways are not our ways. This should give us a certain amount of humility before we stat thinking that we have God all figured out and can put him in a neat little box because just about the time we do that, we turn around and say, “Wait, how’d you get over there?!”
So, serving a God who surprises us should give us humility, but it should also give us a certain amount of joy. Some of the most joyless people I know are Christians who think they have God all figured out. Not only is their lack of joy a result of their pride, but there also is a lack of excitement about the fact that Jesus could do anything at any moment. One of the good things about growing up in the Pentecostal church is that you felt like, no matter what situation you were in or what adversity you faced, that there was always a great chance that somehow and in some way Jesus was going to show up and do something amazing. There was a sense of expectation and hope that can only come when you know God is active and apt to work in surprising ways and that no situation is without hope. God may not always show up exactly as we had hoped and in the way we imagined, but God will show up and for those who are expecting it, there is a joy that simply cannot be shaken.
God initiates and God surprises and we also see in both our Matthew and Psalm passages that God is the God who saves. Now we’ll talk about this a little more in a couple weeks, so let’s focus today on how God saves by being with us. This is the preposition that I want you all to live with this week: with. With is a remarkably important word in Christianity and one that cannot be underestimated. We see it in the 23rd psalm, “Yea though I walk through the valley of death, I will fear no evil. For thou art with me.” And, in Matthew, what does the angel say Jesus is to be called? Emmanuel. And what does that mean? “God with us.” This is critical in our understanding of who God is. God is the God who is with us.
Americans, research has revealed, believe in God (and even a “Christiany” God) in very high measure. However, research has also shown that, as sociologists have coined it, they believe in a therapeutic, moralistic, deistic God. A God who really just wants to make sure you feel good, who gives you a few rules to abide by like being nice to others and then basically leaves you alone. But one of the things that we see in scripture again and again and again is that the last thing that God wants to do or will do is leave us alone. God is with us.
Just listen to a few of these. In Genesis, God tells Isaac to not be afraid for he is with him. In Deuteronomy, not once, not twice, not three times, but 4 times, God says “I am with you.” In the book of Judges an angel comes down to tell Gideon, “The Lord is with you.” In Jeremiah, God says, “…I am with you to deliver you.” In Acts, the Lord tells Paul to not be afraid because he is with him. There is nothing deistic or “hands off” about this God.
If you’re not convinced yet, look at the 23rd psalm. As we talked about a couple of summers ago, not only does the psalmist say that God is with us, but that phrase is at the very center of the passage. The number of words in Hebrew to get to the phrase “for you are with me” is 26 and the number of words after the phrase is 26. In other words, this is central. Or look again at Matthew. It begins by saying that Jesus is Emmanuel, God with us. Do you remember how the Gospel of Matthew ends? The very last sentence of the 28th chapter Jesus says, “And remember I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” It would be difficult to find a theme that is any stronger in the scripture then the theme that God is with us. This is not a distant, uncaring, distracted God. It is the God who is with us.
What’s that mean? Well it means that in the difficult times God is with us. When I preached on the 23rd psalm I told the story about my dad, his tightwadedness and hotels. If my dad walked into a hotel and there weren’t at least 10 cockroaches in the room then he knew he’d paid too much. And so in those scary moments when I would wake up in the middle of the night of a less than glamorous hotel, certain that cockroaches (or something worse) would soon attack me I would lay as quietly as possible until the ridiculously noisy air-conditioner would turn off and wait to hear my dad breathing and as soon as I did then there was this immeasurable peace that would come over me. Sure it was still dark and scary, but knowing that my father was with me made all the difference.
Now, that’s important to always keep in mind, but we also have to remember that when we talk about God being with us that means more than just in those more difficult times. It means that God is with us at all times. What’s interesting about the research that talks about our love of a moralistic, therapeutic, deistic God is that they discovered that actually people want God with them, but only when there’s a problem. In other words when we need God we like him to be with us, but other than that we’d much prefer to have him just up in the heavens or with someone else; leaving us alone. The truth is that this makes things much easier for us. However, if we want to serve the God we see in scripture then we can’t allow him to be a god of our own making that we can control because then he’s not actually God. No, because he is a God who is always with us then we can’t segment him to just the times when we want him or feel like we need him.
If God is the God who saves us then that means there are parts of all us he’s going to have to deal with, to wrestle with, to restore. The angel tells Joseph that God is going to save his people from their sins. Did you notice what the angel doesn’t say? He doesn’t say, “God’s going to save all those other people from what they’ve done.” In other words, God’s plan is to rescue people from their own evils. Dale Bruner makes the great point that unlike most radical movements that forge a burning hatred on an external enemy, Jesus (God), focuses almost exclusively on us. So, if we’re being honest, genuinely understanding that God is with us is both beautiful and a bit scary. Because it means that God is with us when we grieve, when we’re in pain, when we’re calling out to him and when we’re at work, when we’re at home, when we’re on business trips, when we’re writing checks, when we’re driving our car and might, well, prefer him to close his eyes. Areas of our lives that we may more easily detach from God, so as to allow us to just stay as we are. Areas where God says, nope, I’m right here, shining a light in even those most dark of places where you may be hiding.
I’ve been thinking about God being with me when I drive for the last couple of months, an area of my life when, quite frankly, I try to hide from God! A little while back now I was driving home from church and was at the light at Michigan, turning left onto 116th. As you probably know there are two lanes there that turn fairly quickly into one lane which can be a little tricky at times. (Let me also be clear that I feel very strongly about fairness and justice when it comes to merging.) Anyway, when I was pulling up to the light there was one car in the left lane and so I decided to go to the right lane. All along, I knew that when we got a green I wasn’t going to spin out and try to get ahead of that person, because that’s not right. Anyway, right before the light turned green another car came into the left lane and was behind the first car. As you know, that car should merge behind me, right?!?! You probably know where this is going which is that the person behind the first car did not politely allow me over, but instead got as close to the first car as was possible. I kept trying to slowly move over to the left and he kept not letting me until finally I was basically driving on the shoulder. When I saw another car coming in the opposite direction I decided that it probably wasn’t worth taking out another car and so I abruptly braked and got behind the non-Christian car.
Now, it wouldn’t be completely accurate to say I wasn’t thinking about God, because I was praying, but my prayer was not, “Lord, I know you are with me and so at the end of the day this is probably not that big of a deal and so I’m going to focus on the creation around me and your beauty and I’m going to ask that whatever is going on with this person in front of me that you will please let him know that you are with him as well.” No, my prayers was this. “C’mon, God, C’mon God. Let that light be red when we get up to Main Street.” And God answered my prayers. So, I got out of my car and walked up to the guy. Now, let me be clear I was not screaming or using foul language or even thinking about any kind of violence. I just wanted to ask him as sternly and calmly as possible what exactly he was thinking. So, I walked up, praying that it was not someone from ZPC, and so you can imagine my surprise when Scott Shelton rolled his window down. No, just kidding. It was not anyone I recognized, but I did have a conversation where I let him know that I was not overly pleased by his decision to not let me in and perhaps he should think again before he does something like that.
Now, there was certainly a part of me that felt good in doing that, but there is also a big part of me that has subsequently said, “Hmmmm, I wonder if God still needs to deal with some parts of me?” While I would love to focus on how ridiculous and selfish that guy was (which may very well be the case, unless you’re visiting us today!), there’s probably something else going on inside of me that I should examine, or better yet, have God shine a light on. Perhaps a bit more grace might be needed in my life and if I really believe in Emmanuel, God with us, then how might God begin to transform not just certain parts of me, but all of me. That begins, not with my telling others where God should work in their lives, but with asking where are the parts in my own life that I’d prefer to ignore or act as if I serve a deistic God who is distant and could care less.
And while that is a little scary, what makes this possible (and a bit less scary) is the reminder that God is the one who initiates our relationship out of love in the very first place. His wanting to examine and restore every part of us is not so he can get us, but so that he can heal us. I’m fairly certain that when Jesus saw me get out of that car and start walking up to the man in front of me that he was shaking his head and saying, “C’mon Deck, what are you doing?!” Get back in the car!” But I also know that when I got back in that car he was there to embrace me and to say, “What’s going on and what can we heal in you that may allow you to deal with that better next time?” A sense of love and a sense that he’s not done with me. That he loves me too much to ever let go and that he loves me too much to let me stay the same.
Sisters and brothers in Christ, God is with us. From the beginning of time and from the beginning of our lives. He may not always work in the ways we expect, but he is always at work in our lives, in every part of our lives. May his salvation seep deeply into us that we might be transformed and look more and more like our Creator, our Savior. Emmanuel-God with us. Thanks be to God. Amen.
Benediction
As I arise today,
may the strength of God pilot me,
the power of God uphold me,
the wisdom of God guide me.
May the eye of God look before me,
the ear of God hear me,
the word of God speak for me.
May the hand of God protect me,
the way of God lie before me,
the shield of God defend me,
the host of God save me.
May Christ shield me today.
Christ with me, Christ before me,
Christ behind me,
Christ in me, Christ beneath me,
Christ above me,
Christ on my right, Christ on my left,
Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit,
Christ when I stand,
Christ in the heart of everyone who thinks of me,
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me,
Christ in every eye that sees me,
Christ in every ear that hears me.
Amen.