"God: Answer? Question? Neither? Both?"
We fast approach the end of the church’s liturgical year, what I
like to call the "Earth Church Year." The end fast approaches
us! Today we may see as Sunday of the United Nations, born October 24,
1945, San Francisco. The United Nations, wracked with conflict, riddled
with contentiousness, remains our best hope, so far as I know, of a
vision for the healing of the nations. God knows we need the healing of
the nations, 192 of them, and counting! Do we remember the 192nd
nation? East Timor, abetted by the singular efforts of St. John’s
United Methodist Church, San Francisco, while John Chamberlin was its
pastor.
I wrote John to check my memory that Sergio de Mello, who died among
peace workers of the United Nations blown up in Baghdad last August 19,
also had helped bring peace and liberation to East Timor. John wrote
back, "Yes, Sergio de Mello was head of the United Nations
Transitional Administration in East Timor (UNTAET). I met him briefly.
Indeed, I have a photo of him with President Xanana Gusmao at the
swearing in of East Timor’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in
Dili. His dedication, hard work, and respect for East Timor opinion and
experience earned him a place in the hearts of the people. His death is
a great, tragic loss."
Memorializing all the victims of that bombing attack, Norwegian
Bishop Gunnar Stalsett urges us, "The principles of universality,
inclusiveness and multilateralism must prevail, not the dictates of the
strong. We the people must insist on wise policies based on truth. We
must insist that in a world built on the moral standards of the United
Nations, military force should only be a last resort. Force must never
be a by-product of impatience or a substitute for the kind of dialogue
and justice that is the underpinning of lasting peace." We will
come back to our friend Job’s "kind of dialogue and justice"
with God in just a moment!
Next Sunday we celebrate Children’s Sabbath, prepared and led by
the children and youth, with offering for UNICEF and with communion! The
time is fast coming and now is when every issue, every decision is put
to the test: What does this do for the children? Whatever we dare not
say, theologically, ethically, to our children, our grandchildren, being
born, growing up in this womb-wounded world, we dare not say at all.
Whatever we offer our children, no quick fixes, no easy answers, no
cheap grace. In fact, let us not bring any more children or
grandchildren into this world, into this church, unless and until we are
doing all we possibly can to make both church and world just and
livable, sustainable.
Then comes All Saints Sunday! All Elders and All Veterans of War and
Peace! Thanksgiving Sunday, the Sunday of the Coming of the Cosmic
Christ! Matthew Fox begins his book of that name with a Job-like
question. "Albert Einstein once asked," Fox writes, "’What
is the most important question you can ask in life?’ He answered, ‘Is
the universe a friendly place or not?’" Is the universe a
friendly place or not! Can the God who speaks in the name of the
universe be trusted?
Mexican biblical scholar Jose Miranda asks, Is any existential
element more fascinating, yet more frustrating, to Hebrew-Christian
faith than belief that our world is not past recovery? That God is not
done with us yet? That God is still making things new? If not still
making new things? Would not a god who is reconciled or merely
indifferent to the pain of human beings become an immoral and merciless
god, a monster? Not the ethical God whom the Bible knows? Would we not
be morally obliged to rebel against such a god, even if our defeat were
inevitable? (Jose Miranda, Marx and the Bible, Being and the Messiah.)
Sheila Linn is a longtime friend of the first Latina woman to become
a District Court justice in Colorado. The horror of some of the cases
she hears, -- and we read about them all the time, they are just not in
our courtrooms, our livelihoods – causes the judge to question how God
can exist in the midst of our lives and our life together. There is
something to be said for the faithful witness of living with such
questions! Of living with such terrible, heart-rending questions!
Questions that lead us beyond understanding, even beyond comprehension.
We remember George Bernard Shaw: Some see things as they are and ask,
why? I dream things that never were and ask, why not?
Jurgen Moltmann calls the church a community of open questions! As
soon as we think we have found all the answers, we begin to cut
ourselves off, from one another, from the living God, from the world who
so needs our questions! Questioning is very Methodist, too! We are to
meet frequently in small groups, in classes, to ask one another, How
does it go with our souls? Do we stand in need of advice, reproof,
comfort, exhortation? And what are we giving toward the relief of the
preachers, the church, and the poor? Good questions to this very day!
Have we ever sat through Wesley’s "Historic Examination for
Admission into Full Connection and Ordination" at Annual
Conference, consisting of 19 original questions, and "any others
which may be thought necessary"? Our very "quadrilateral"
of experience, reason, tradition, and scripture is standing invitation
to interrogation! So please, do not trust uncritically, unquestioningly,
those who have found all the answers, for our church, or for any other.
Job here is engaged in a virtual shouting match with God! It goes on
for chapters, long after his family and friends have dropped out of
sight in embarrassment for him. That’s all right! Job stands in
defiant tradition with, Abraham bargaining with God over Sodom! Jacob
wrestling God all night for a blessing! Moses confronting God on the
mountain! Come, let us break hearts with Lear next Sunday, raging
against tragic destiny, cosmic fate. Or is that "comic" fate?
Sometimes we laugh just to keep on hoping, to keep on trying.
Bible translator J. B. Phillips is fond of asking us, How big is our
God? Is our God way too small? Our vision too short-sighted? Our horizon
too narrow-minded? How willing are we to engage and endure God, like
Job? Even to refuse and resist God when we are tempted to settle for
anything less than God’s promise for us all, to be fully human, freely
alive? How willing are we to hear, to respond, to change, and to grow?
Columbus gets all the credit, but I say St. Francis is the true Italian
discoverer of the New World! Not only the world as his parish, John
Wesley would say, but the whole universe as his friends! Brother sun,
sister moon! Brother wind, air, clouds, and rain! Sister water, brother
fire! Mother earth and sister death. Imagine how Francis would regard
Iraqis, Palestinians, Liberians, Haitians, Bolivians, Timorese, the
peoples of our own prisons and streets. How big is our God? Is our God
way too small?
Everything comes from God, waxes the psalmist, and everything comes
to us! What is the old question? If a tree falls and no one hears it,
does it really fall at all? Is there a world around us without all our
senses to absorb it? Bill Brown says of his mother something still
shaping him daily as a journalist: She could not stand for a day, or a
person, to go by without learning something! Is that right? She was not
alive unless she was soaking up wisdom, soaking up life! She would
absorb, absorb, absorb, marvels Bill, like a sapient sponge! Is our
species, screwed up as we are, not still gifted and called to be the
articulate and artistic, even activist consciousness of the whole
universe? Is not creation still being completed with and through us? Our
awareness? Our receptiveness? Our responsiveness? Our gratefulness?
Everything, everyone belongs to God.
Imagine if, for a moment, the sun stopped shining? The rains stopped
falling? The earth stopped revolving? If, for an instant, God stopped
breathing? Can we say, "cosmic power failure?" Can we? Are we
awake? "Cosmic power failure!" No light! No heat! No energy!
No connection! No life! Can we even begin to grasp how dependent we are?
How interdependent we are? How pretentious it is of us, person, family,
church, community, nation, world, or species to think we can go it
alone? We do not need one another? Every moment? Every day? Just asking!
I am, God is, we are, just asking. Just being asked. What right have we
ever to find ourselves bored with such a creation? Ever to make boring
the worship of such a Creator? Redeemer? Sanctifier and Sustainer?
With these dread-full and desperate disciples -- of whom Jesus keeps
asking, in effect, will they ever "get" a word I say? A deed I
do? – we, too, so often center ourselves on our own protection, our
own reputation, our circumstance and our clout. We can be so
self-conscious, so self-centered, so afflicted with anthropocentricity!
That’s, Anthro! Po! Centricity! The sin of thinking it’s all about
us! As a people, a nation, a faith, a culture, a color, a tongue, a
species! Whereas Jesus is all about, Risk! Defiance! Openness!
Vulnerability! Even sacrifice! Can we drink the cup of his baptism? His
death and his resurrection? The greatness of his leastness? The
servanthood of his suffering? Who really ends up on Jesus’ right and
left hands? Where James and John want so to be? The two rebels nailed to
crosses with him. They are the very first church!
Bishop Stalsett concludes his witness to the ongoing lives of those
United Nations workers blown up in Baghdad: "On those who live in
the dark land of death, the light will shine. Their death shall not have
been in vain. The great cause of their mission shall not fail. We make
this our sacred covenant: The light of peace and justice shall shine.
"Therefore: It is now for us, the living, the peacemakers one and
all, both to rally the forlorn while we endeavor to comfort the wounded.
"It is now for us, the living, peacemakers one and all, to resolve
again to announce that the hope of peace is more durable than the
promise of violence.
"It is now for us, the living, peacemakers one and all, to
replace the diabolical rhythm of hatred and murder, with the God-given
rhythm of love and justice that provides villagers respite and security.
"It is now for us, the living, peacemakers one and all, out of our
various faith communities, to resolve again to proclaim that there is no
God who desires death and there is no God who blesses destruction. There
is only a God who desires for us ‘to do justice, seek mercy, and walk
humbly’ with our God." Let us thank God!
Amen.
