July13, 2014
Scriptures:
Matthew 13:1-9
Romans 8:1-4
My sermon title today is “Learning about God.” My texts are:
Matthew 13:9: “Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty and some thirty. Let anyone with ears listen.”
Romans 8:1: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.”
This sermon is a follow up to David Hilfiker’s teaching last Sunday, and continues the conversation about racial reconciliation and healing. In this sermon I will be weaving together three themes, moving back and forth instead of in a straight line. My first theme is illustrated by a small child who speaks a yearning perhaps all of us feel, the yearning for concreteness in learning about God. My second theme is the accessibility of concreteness in learning and thinking about God as distinct from abstraction if we only look and listen for it. My third theme is the challenge of anti-racism as perhaps a call to 8th Day. Remember I am not following a straight line from one theme to another but weaving them together.
My sermon title “Learning about God” came to me from the child I just mentioned, my six year old step grandson, Riley, who lives in Seattle, WA. Riley’s parents, Jocelyn and Phil, were raised in church-going families, one Episcopal and the other Seventh Day Adventist. After they married they visited a number of churches but couldn’t find one that satisfied both. After a while they quit going and like more and more of the younger generation they now use their Sundays to relax, play and do work projects around the house.
Some time ago Riley expressed interest to his mother about going to Sunday school. Jocelyn asked him why he wanted to go to Sunday school. Riley answered “I want to learn about God.”
Is this a piece of what draws you here on Sunday morning? It is for me. I remember as a child Riley’s age thinking of the world as so vast and impossibly complicated and myself as so small and limited that I needed a partner beyond my parents and teachers to guide me and give me strength. I also wanted a connection that I could trust. I still feel this longing many decades later. Perhaps you do also.
That longing is fed by the change in American society over the last century such that the word “God” has little to no power in these times. I believe that the reason for the current emptiness of the name “God” is that this name no longer has specific meaning in our culture. By in large it means whatever the individual intends it to mean. Children, youth and adults in our country who share Riley’s longing want to learn about God in a way that is more specific and concrete. What does it mean, for example, to “stand before God” given that the God of the Bible is invisible and communicates only in mysterious ways which takes a special kind of sensitivity and openness to recognize.
For kids Riley’s age, they get their clues about standing before God from their experience of standing before their parents. A while back Riley was very angry with his mother for setting a limit for him saying, “RILEY DO NOT DO THAT!” Riley replied, “YOU ARE MEAN, MOMMY. I HATE YOU!” His mother kept her cool and just waited to see what he would do next. Riley then moved toward her and said softly, “but I love you.”
His mother then said, “And I love you more.” And Riley responded, “And I love you even more.” And back and forth they went for a couple of minutes in their private ritual of reconciliation.
More recently Riley was visiting Sherrill and me here in DC. One day I corrected him and set a boundary, and he, already steamed up, said, “Papa, you’re mean. I’m not going to speak to you again until I get out of college.” When I heard that I noted with satisfaction that this child already had planted in his brain that he was going to college.
Unfortunately, not all parents are as mature and calm as Riley’s. When that kind of safety is not present children learn to survive by shutting down emotionally and even intellectually in a home or school environment which returns anger to anger. To survive they learn to be compliant rather than expressive – that is, to hold feelings in until they feel safe. The long term cost of such relationships is considerable. Some of us have had to work with that.
As Riley is taught about God, fortunately he has in his conscious and unconscious memory bank experiences with his parents that will help him trust the Word of the grace of God which generates the experience of safety within us, an experience that rises up to us from scripture.
You might be wondering “What does this have to do with racial reconciliation and healing and David’s teaching last week?” I’ll get to some of David’s thoughts in a moment. So far I am speaking about the importance of concreteness in learning about God. It may surprise you, but it is true that, as I reflected on why II joined the Racial Reconciliation and Healing mission group, my answer was that I see the mission group as a place where I can learn about God, and today I am bearing witness to concrete experience in this learning process.
Let me remind you of the recent days many of us shared in learning about God under the leadership of Wes Howard-Brook and Sue Johnson. During their teaching I sensed us as a group setting aside our preconceptions and opening ourselves in a new way. As they led and we responded with genuine openness, their teaching about God through John’s Gospel began to ring with a new kind of concreteness about God as mystery:“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and was God …” The Fourth Gospel began to make sense in the midst of the fog of our secularized culture that the living God can be known not directly in the exact same way we can know each other but in a way that honors and preserves God’s mystery.
What I am saying in recalling our experience with Wes and Sue is that we, too, in this small church have a memory bank of experience that teaches us that God is indeed gracious, that when we feel or act full of hate toward God and others, God does not respond in kind, but waits with love and openness while, as Romans 8:26-28 describes it, the Spirit hovers between us and God trying to call our attention to our groaning too deep for words and the unconditional love of God. Think of our experience in mission and responding to call for starters.
Our text, Romans 8:1says, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” Jesus lived out this revelation in life and on the cross. It applies to all people, including In Riley’s memory bank is a taste of this in his relationship with your mother. This is the ground for our connectedness with God.
When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was languishing in prison, facing the specter of hanging by the Nazis for his participation in a plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, one of the books that stirred his soul was by his mentor, Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1. In this volume Barth turned on its head the contentious traditional doctrine of double predestination – that God had predestined some to salvation and others to hell. Instead, Barth said, that God’s grace is irresistible in its concreteness and when the veil is removed, no finite reality can finally deny its saving power or hide from its reach. Therefore all humanity – past, present, and future – has been redeemed in possibility from the control of sin by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Bonhoeffer heard Barth saying as the Word of God: “Here is the essence of God - love over-abounding.” Bonhoeffer then in a new way began to draw upon this image of God as he faced the darkness of his own situation, the collapse of the church before Nazism and the eclipse of God in secularized western culture.
Charles Marsh in his new biography of Bonhoeffer says that Bonhoeffer during his final year in prison attested to having undergone a “great liberation from guilt and self-doubt.” Marsh asks, “What had stirred this liberation.” He noted that while Bonhoeffer was sustained by his disciplines to the end, in this last year a new element entered his being. Reading Barth, the Greek word hilaritas – meaning hilarity and good humor - leapt off the page at him. He then recalled “hilaritas” shimmering and sparkling in all of humanity’s good and beautiful creations and in the triumph of grace by the God “who has saved all humanity” in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, crucified, dead and risen. Over the ages this message has been given concreteness painting, music and writing of such artists and prophets as Raphael, Mozart, Luther and on and on. Hilaritas connoted boldness, audacity, and a willingness to defy the world and popular opinion which one did by living out of the “firm conviction” that with his work one is giving to the world something good, “even if the world is not pleased with it.”
Marsh says that ignited by hilaritas Bonhoeffer’s prison writings opened his mind to the knowledge accumulated over the years which coalesced for him in some of the freshest, most vivid, and yet confounding theological meditations of the modern age. Bonhoeffer became “unshackled to convention” as he indulged in “trial combinations” of ideas and “lightening flashes” of spiritual insight. In his cell as he surveyed the story of modernity, Bonhoeffer grasped what Marsh calls “an enlivening worldly godlessness that felt closer to the gospel than any formal religiosity he had known.” As he did so, he experienced in his soul and body a new concreteness and connectedness as one standing before the Biblical God of grace and judgment.
Bonhoeffer asked, “What is Christianity, or who is Christ for us today?” God, Christ, Christianity had become a matter of each person’s private opinion; hence because of this equivocation and confusion the rickety scaffolding of Protestantism had tumbled finally to the ground in Germany in the wake of the German church’s complicity with the Nazis. Moreover, Bonhoeffer saw, every attempt “to force it once again” into the shape of a powerful institution will “only delay its inescapable reckoning.” Given the white church’s complicity with slavery, segregation and the continuation of racism and the black church’s complicity with the “prosperity gospel,” it is a live issue whether the same fate is happening here.
This takes us back to our theme spoken by Riley, “I want to learn about God.” In the 1940s and 50s the questions of “who and where is God and how far can we go in knowing God?” rarely surfaced. We simply assumed God was above us somewhere and moving among us in spirit form and that if we knocked long and loud enough God would open the door for us to draw us close. With the advances of science and astronomy, where our whole universe is but a small part of a seeming endless infinity of space, thinking of God in terms of occupying particular space and being in the way we think of each other as separate beings leaves most of us floundering.
The question is not is God knowable, but how far is God known and how far is God knowable? When I came to the Church of the Saviour in the 1960s that question of “how far” never came up. In a time in history when God has been pushed to the periphery of our common life, when we can answer almost all of our pressing surface questions without reference to God, the question of how far God is known in real personal experience and how far God is knowable by his people as faith communities in our corporate experience has come to the fore.
Barth says that the church of Jesus Christ lives by the grace of the Word and we can and must say that to the extent that any expression of the church is alive, it is alive because some connection with God is taking place. In some way we are being bound to the God who in his Word gives himself to the Church to be known as God. This is not pretending or wishing. This is something real happening. As Wes and Sue put it, this is being penetrated by God as Word and our penetrating the mystery of God in a way that grants us an element of life transforming concreteness to which we can bear witness to one another and the world.The key to this “interpenetration”, as Wes and Sue called it, is faith. Faith is our receiving what God is offering in his Word and celebrating God’s gift in our bodies, our human bodies and our shared body as the Body of Christ.
Let me now focus on the call to racial reconciliation and healing. For some of us the “anti” before “racism” has been a turnoff. It was for me until I took the Damascus Road training and realized that “anti-racism” is a critical code word for acknowledging the hidden history, structures and attitudes that persist in the face of what appears on the surface as increasing “color blindness.” Without getting to the brutal stuff underneath, color blindness is a mask. As David unpacked anti-racism last week, he pointed to the internalized white supremacy generated by our culture in white people and the self-doubt and image of inferiority among African Americans. Until we get down to this level racial reconciliation and healing will not happen.
This brings me as a final note to an example from our mission group in which I learned something concrete about standing before God. As David pointed out last week it is true and right for white people of good will to say, “I am a racist but more than a racist.” The qualifier is crucial to learning about God.
I shared in the mission group a recent experience in which I became aware of a group I was in consisting of three whites and one black person. We whites were doing all the talking, drawing upon our internalized assumption that when push comes to shove it is our responsibility to get things done. The black person listened quietly waiting to be invited into the conversation. When there was a lull he offered a story of his being recognized in a past job for one of the skills we needed. When we whites resumed our speaking we rushed by the black person’s contribution until a white person stopped us and said to the single black person, “you know when you talked about your previous experience and training I sense a different level of energy coming from you and in response from me. Did anyone else notice that?”
After the meeting I said to the black person who like me had participated in Damascus Road training, “You know what – I realize now that I behaved in that meeting like a white supremacist, and it felt so much better when you spoke up and we started to really listen to you.”
When I acknowledge that I am a racist, what I am acknowledging, as David pointed out, is that racist images and feelings jump up in my mind involuntarily again and again. That’s the way I was enculturated as a white person in this country. While I cannot prevent this from happening, what I can do is to turn my attention to different images and feelings which also are in my consciousness. That is what I mean by saying, “I am a racist but more than a racist” and “I am a white supremacist and more than a white supremacist.”
When I shared this story the African Americans in the group that day to a person smiled broadly, a couple saying, “Yes! Now we can talk.”
Shortly after than exchange something very funny and touching occurred, and I have Mike Smith’s permission to tell this. Mike was responding to a member of the group with whom he was disagreeing passionately. After a few minutes of this he smacked himself upside the head and said, “My God, I’m talking like a spiritual supremacist.” Mike looked at me and I looked at him, and we bonded as brothers on this journey.