We who have faith in Jesus Christ as our Lord
and Savior should never take our faith for granted.
It was during a
particularly challenging discussion in a longer than usual session meeting we first
heard the truth. Some of us were tired of hearing about “perceptions.” We were discussing, yet again, what sounded
like the same problems, the same complaints.
In the midst of it all
Session was doing a really good job of being faithful. They had long ago
embraced the notion that God has called us to serve those whom God sends our
way. We have embraced the vision that we are to take those who knock and ask
for a crumb of bread and give them a safe place. We are to let them be here
with us for comfort and nurture.
It is the desire of this Session to be faithful. It is the
desire of this Session to take what God sends us and tend to it. Be it our
poor, aging facilities infrastructure or these whom God has sent us who have
these “perceptions” we do not understand. No matter. We trust God knows what
God is doing.
In the midst of it all
we were complaining, just a little, about how hard being faithful can be. We do
try to glorify God as we tend to the challenges God brings but why must this be
so hard? Must every air conditioner on our campus break? What will leak next?
Who is to blame? Is it the ubiquitous “they.”
In exasperation Janette
spoke for us all when she said, with a hint of playfulness, “God is the
problem.” God is the problem. Of course!
She was right. God is the problem. If
God would just give us what we want and stop giving us these troubles things
would be so much better.
Indeed, dear ones, Janette
hit on something. God expects too much
from us and we are weary. God wants too
much from us and we struggle to be faithful. God demands too much from us and we are just
one person. How on earth can we do what
God is asking us to do?
Some days. Some days we scream at God and throw in the
towel. We want to be left alone. God.
You are our problem.
It began God when we
realized you were not finished with us after all. Your churches, Trinity, Wilshire, and now Genesis.
We found ourselves on the brink and you
grabbed hold of us and pulled us back, dusted us off, and set us on a new path.
Community bound. A worship center. Serving those you have brought to our campus
even as we have on occasion disagreed in the strongest of terms. Yet, here
we are. Still facing difficult
questions. Still gathering to worship
and pray and overcome ourselves to at least the point where we can move
forward. Where we can gather the energy
and faith we have to silence our resistance enough to humbly and patiently
realize the joy that has returned, the bounty we have as we have sought to
honor you by our acceptance and our giving away.
Our acceptance of
those whom you have brought us. With their demands and their challenges and
perspectives. Our acceptance of what we
are to give away. Yes, our sacred
spaces. Yes, our privacy too. And perhaps the greatest of all, a little bit
of our selves.
When I taught stress
management I would first state the obvious.
We all have stress. How
we manage our stress is what makes the difference for our health and
well-being. We can choose health or
unhealthy ways to do this. Unhealthy
ways are the easiest to follow. We
simply do what we enjoy in excess to drown out the pain. Healthy ways on the other hand require work,
change, and a life-long commitment.
I also reminded folks
that in a relationship, be it family or
work, we must adopt a position of selflessness. To be as healthy as we best can be we must adopt
a position of giving to the others in our lives all that we have. And it is
best to remember, we give to others on
their terms. We ask those others what
their needs are, what their passions are, what their sacred spaces are.
The hardest part in this dynamic, we
cannot expect anything in return for our effort. To do so puts us in the unhealthy position of
expecting a payoff. We then feel we are owed something in return for our labor.
To love, to have
faith, to serve is to chip away at that self that holds us back from modeling
Jesus’ life. God gave us his son freely. God did not set up an if/then relationship. No, God’s gift is freely ours without our
earning it.
But God has told us what
God wants from us. God’s expects us to follow Jesus’ model. Jesus gave his all and God expects our all.
See how problematic
God is. We have this great desire for
God. We love God. We even try making our life in God’s image. We try to live in a way that pleases God, that glorifies God. It just seems that God resists our efforts. God does not cooperate with our desires. God places more on our plate than we can
carry.
Yet, we cannot abandon
God. We yell it to ourselves more often
than we admit. God is the problem in our
lives but God’s resistance attracts us. God’s demands attract us. God’s resistance to our best efforts, our sincere desires, our careful planning attracts us even more to desire
God.
This seems counter to
everything logical in our lives doesn’t it?
The twentieth century Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said
that as we seek a God who is radically “Other,” our training in the exercise of longing and
loss prepares us for accepting the “desired” as something we never fully
realize. Yet, in the process, our
attraction is only deepened.
Desire for what he
calls the “Most-High” is keenly aroused by the joining of beauty with absence, by that which is inherently most desirable and
yet at the same time most elusive. “Desire
nourishes itself, one might say with its
hunger,” says Levinas. He insists that
the desire for the “Other” is necessarily “a desire without satisfaction.”
Yet our desire is not diminished by such insight. Our desire and our delight in knowing God leads
to a delight in God’s own matchless beauty and to the covenant responsibility
of safeguarding God’s reflected beauty in all of life and in all of God’s
created world.
A reformed and
thoroughly Calvinist aesthetic or beauty remains restless in us until it
expresses itself in moral action, In how
we do church, In how we serve others, In how we love.
Yet desire will always be the starting point. We desire God. We desire God’s attention and God’s love. We are attracted to God and all that God has
created. Our enchantment with God and the
world is prerequisite to the task of faithful discipleship. To a life served restoring and protecting all
of life. As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould
has argued, “We will not fight to save what we do not love.”
So we hear ourselves saying at session, “God is the problem.”
We realize at session we are fighting to
save what we love. Our relationship with
God and our desire to restore and protect our life on this campus as God’s
church. Even on God’s terms.
John Calvin gives us a unique perspective of how we might
love and fight for what we desire. He
speaks first of the importance of respecting all the creatures involved in the
drama of the world as a theater of God’s glory. He then goes on to see the simple act of
giving praise, of worship, as generating the life it celebrates.
As we struggle with
desire being unfulfilled this gives us hope. By giving praise to God solely for the reason
of giving praise and seeking nothing else in return, we will come closer to
generating the very object of our affection. We will come closer to God.
Giving praise, for
Calvin, requires performance. It springs
from an inner disposition of intense desire, influenced by its longing for the
object of its love. Hence, the act of
praise has a double effect: It
subjectively stirs desire in the one who celebrates and objectively makes
present and real that which is celebrated.
There is a subjective
aspect of our faithful living that relates to what the person absorbed in
praise is experiencing – what happens over time in the process of “becoming” what one desires. Subjectively, Calvin sees the worshipper as
being stirred to desire through the act of prayer.
The most important
reason for praying, he says, is “that our hearts may be fired with a zealous
and burning desire ever to seek, love, and serve God.”
But there is also an
objective aspect of religious devotion, located in its projection of a final reality
onto the object toward which it is directed. To God.
Faithful living, as
worship, for Calvin is a celebration to
the extent that its chief end is the praise of God’s glory. Yet, Calvin’s conception of worship is also,
as he has said, magical to the extent that the act of praise also contributes
to the maintenance of our real life world.
In the objective
dimension of worship, Calvin declared that our reverence generates a powerful
transaction of honor. Our facing again
and again the mundane, repeated ups and
downs of life honor God. Praise is able
to authenticate and sustain that toward which it is directed: God.
In the act of praise, the
liturgy, our tending to the brokenness in our life, our living faithfully for
God alone, changes the very world it
calls into being.
As theologian Jürgen Moltmann says, “It opens creation for
its true future. It is for this that human beings are created – for the feast
of creation, which praises the eternal, inexhaustible God . . . This song of
praise was sung before the appearance of human beings, is sung outside the
sphere of human beings, and will be sung
even after human beings have –perhaps-disappeared from this planet .”
We, dear ones, are
created to create. In our desire to faithfully serve others on
this campus we praise God and we bring God here to be with us.
As Belden Lane says,
“Day after day, God brings the world to its feet in ecstatic applause as the
curtain falls once again on God’s dramatic performance of desire. Smitten by longing, we stand alongside the others in speechless
awe, clapping our hands in hope of
another encore, determined-if we can help it-that the performance never ends.
We cannot imagine a God as eager to perform as we are to
enjoy. Held in strange and awesome
embrace, in the joyous meeting of God’s
desire and our own, we and the whole
world with us are sustained by praise.”
This God, who is our problem, we praise. Our God, who is so eager to perform,
celebrates us. God celebrates Genesis
Church for we desire God be known in our midst. We desire God’s encore. That God’s love never end.
God, dear ones, is
more than the problem. God is also the answer.
In the name of the
Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen 060213.Gpc
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