“Trust
God. Period.”
First Presbyterian
One of the challenges of being a
church like this one is that it pushes beyond the common conceptions of things
like God and faith and prayer. Sometimes
that makes us seem irreligious or deficiently religious when we are compared to
churches clinging more closely to conventional religion and tradition.
That is, however, a price I am more than willing to pay for every fiber
of my being tells me that God is far less interested in religion than in life,
far less interested in our becoming Christian than in our becoming truly and
fully human. Being a Christian is
always to be in the service of becoming a more whole and complete human being.
Christianity is always to be in the service of fashioning a more just and
compassionate humanity. Being a
Christian is never an end in itself. The
highest good in our life is not becoming a Christian, but becoming the best
human being we can be in relation to the world around us, people and planet.
Christians believe that we see in Jesus the consummate human being.
He so utterly epitomized humanity that the early community that gathered
in his name accorded him the status of divinity. In
him, we see that humanity and divinity are not two separate and disparate
entities. Rather, they comprise a
single continuum. The more ripe and
rife our humanity the more truly we incarnate divinity.
And what is true for us as Christians is true for all people and all
religions.
Too often, though, the purpose
of religion is misconstrued as becoming more deeply religious, more fanatically,
fastidiously, and fundamentally religious, and it is not.
It is about becoming more profoundly human.
Religion is not about church, but life.
Religion is not an end game. One
of the reasons for so much of the religiously inspired strife and conflict in
the world today is that people confuse means and ends.
So instead of learning from their religion how to enlarge, ennoble, and
elevate life, people become wrapped up in their religion and promote their brand
of it as Truth with a capital “T.” Then
they seek to impose it on others until it all gets badly distorted and
deleterious to life and peace and community.
Poet Philip Appleman gets it
right, I think, when, in a poem called Last Minute Message for a Time Capsule
that he wrote for extraterrestrial beings whom he imagines one day will
visit our world that will have been by then mortally wounded by the ravages of
war. He writes to warn them about
the dangers of religion, weeping as he writes,
I have to tell you this, whoever you are:
that on one summer morning here, the ocean
pounded in on tumbledown breakers,
a south wind, bustling along the shore,
whipped the froth into little rainbows,
and a reckless gull swept down the beach
as if to fly were everything it needed.
I thought of your hovering saucers,
looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,
so it wouldn’t be lost forever—
that once upon a time we had
meadows here, and astonishing things,
swans and frogs and luna moths
and blue skies that could stagger your heart.
We could have had them still,
and welcomed you to earth, but
we also had righteous ones
who worshiped the True Faith, and Holy War.
When you go home to your shining galaxy,
say that what you learned
from this dead and barren place is
to beware the righteous ones. (1)
The “righteous ones” not
only incite devastating and calamitous wars but, from time immemorial, they have
erected idols in the forms of theologies and ideologies that presume to know too
much about God and that suit their purposes and prejudices.
The righteous ones reduce God to a manageable magnitude so that they do
not have to trust God. Rather, they
trust in their own construals of God. They
say that what they believe about God comes not from their own ideas, but from
revelation. They claim, for
instance, that the Bible is direct revelation from God and they think that their
assertion of that settles everything. But
there is no way for them to know that it is direct revelation.
And, even if it is - I do not think so - the revelation still must be
interpreted. So then they anoint
their interpretations with the imprimatur of certitude and exclusivity.
They do not trust God, but rather their versions of God that then they
turn into theological systems and credos. They
make laws governing salvation and impose conditions on getting into heaven and
offer excuses when prayers go unanswered, and it all gets pretty silly and ugly.
Here is a case in point:
There was this weekend in
The church really only has one
mission. And that one mission is not
“to be right.” Do we think that
God is pleased with all of the divisions in our ecclesiastical circles,
divisions born of the arrogance that someone else’s theology is not pure
enough or orthodox enough or “right” enough for us?
The church only has one mission. And
that one mission is not to seek our own salvation.
Do we think that God is pleased when, in a broken, fractured, and
suffering world in which both peacemakers and neighbors are needed, our primary
religious concern is how to save our own souls and skins for some heavenly
future? The church really only has
one mission. And that one mission is
to love this world. To love this
world and the people who live in it as well as the planet that is our home and
mother. The church’s mission
is nothing more or else or other than that.
But if we did that, if the church really loved this world above all else
as God loves this world, my, oh my, what a world this could be!
I love theology.
I love to think it, talk it, argue it.
I even like to invent it. But
all theology is speculation. That is
why the older I get, the more I simply determine to trust God with my life.
I do not trust God to do what I think God should do.
I do not trust God to do what I want God to do.
I do not trust God to do any specific thing.
I just trust God with my life and my death.
Period. And then I abandon
myself to searching the myriad mysteries of God and I try to give myself to love
so that I may learn its ways and do its work.
The life and teachings of Jesus help me in that.
Love always has been and still is our best hope for the world.
Listen again to Jeremiah:
“Blessed are those who trust the Lord, whose trust is the Lord.
They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the
stream. It shall not fear when heat
comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not
anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit.”
We
are about to ordain and install elders and my charge to them is this:
Help us, by your example, to trust God and then to love this world in
every imaginable way.
Amen.
(1)
Appleman, Philip, New and Selected Poem, 1956-1996.
(2) Information is from online articles appearing on the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) website – www.pcusa.org - and on the website of The Presbyterian Outlook – www.pres-outlook.org on February 10, 2007
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