6 Practices - Week 5: Responding

Jeremiah 1:4-10

I Corinthians 13:1-13

Preachers can easily become the boy who cried “wolf.”  If every week we say, “This is the most important thing!” – soon you’ll grow accustomed to that and learn to dismiss it.  And so I try not to say it often.  But I will take the risk today.  The practice we'll explore this week is the most important practice of all.  It was this practice around which the whole sermon series was built.  

We have four practices on the table already – paying attention, leading, reconciling, and singing.  And we have one more to go next week – connecting.  But this week the practice is “responding.”  And if for some reason I were allowed to address only one of the practices, this would be my choice.  The other practices name specific behaviors and actions that make up the life of those learning to love God and others.  But they won’t make any sense unless you can see your whole life, from beginning to end, as a way of “responding” to God.

Now many of our friends and neighbors will find this claim unpersuasive.  They do not imagine life as an extended practice of responding to God.  Their skepticism is driven by the suspicion that God might not exist.  The “God” we Christians refer to might not be real.  Perhaps some of us here today have known this feeling.  It is hard, in fact, to make your way through life and never once bring to mind this possibility.  What if God isn’t real? 

After all, there is nothing like proof or evidence.  There is the tradition of others gathering to sing, pray and listen.  There are testimonies of people who make sacrifices so they can love and share with others.  There are confessions and catechisms that instruct adults and young people what it is we believe.  There are stories of people poor by cultural measures who have experienced a bottomless love that embraces and dignifies their lives.  There are traditions of singing and praying that seem to connect us to some kind of loving power much bigger than us.  There are sacred texts handed down by our forebears that name this surprising God, tell this God’s story, and call us God’s beloved children.  And yet none of this can convert the life of faith into something obvious and free of ambiguity.

We pray.  We work and hope.  We struggle with a world tilted against goodness.  We witness that much within us remains distorted.  We resist our culture’s stories about success and wealth so that we can be among those who know they are poor.  And yet our friends and neighbors may be right.  Maybe this whole thing – the religious life – is manufactured.  Maybe we aren’t responding to anything at all.  Maybe we’ve taken the initiative to shape a life that protects us from some darkness we cannot bring ourselves to face.

One thing is for sure, if there’s any room for us to imagine that God is real, and that our lives are ways of responding to this God, then it’s time for a grown up version of this life.  The time for trading in children’s tales - for believing childish things - is past.  Silly things we believed when children can be put away.  It is only grown up faith that sustain us, if anything can.

When we were young, we believed that god was magic (like Santa Claus or the tooth fairy).  We believed this magic god often stopped the normal flow of life to fix things.  We believed the magic god lived up there in heaven, and would save us from pain and trouble and hardship.  We believed this god would steer around life’s hidden reefs.  This magic god rules the roost and calls the shots down here from somewhere up there.  And it’s time to let this magic god go.  Even our friends and neighbors can sense that this version of god isn’t real.  Even our friends and neighbors can tell that this god isn’t worth leveraging your life and risking everything. 

But once the childish, magic god disappears, then something real can arrive.  There is now room for a fleshy god.  There is room for a god who is close to us.  There is room for a god who delights in all that’s made, who loves the world, who gently and patiently leads it toward a better future.  There is room for the quiet god who is always-already-loving us and the whole world even before we can bring ourselves to ask the question.  There is the kind of god who loves us by dwelling with us in our pain and confusion.  (Not the god who fixes everything for us.)  This is the god who shares our lives, the god whose spirit draws us into something like friendship, like participation in an ongoing project of loving, healing, and blessing.

I Corinthians 13 – This precious and seemingly sentimental ode to love – a favorite at weddings - is not quite what it seems.  There is conflict and disagreement within the congregation.  Different people are jockeying for position.  They are pushing themselves forward. Look at my gifts!  Look at mine!  And so Paul feels it necessary to sort things out for this divisive and selfish congregation.  And to do so he takes the long view.  What will remain when all is said and done?  Only love.  At the end of your life, and at the end of the world, only love remains.  The other gifts will cease.  But love won’t.  Love lasts.  From birth through death, the only thing that can last is to make of your life a long and loving response to the love of God.

“This is how God showed his love among us: God sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love, not that we loved God, but that God loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. . . . We love because God first loved us”  (I John 4:10-11, 19).

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. . . . God demonstrates how own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:6, 8).

“Because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4).

When Jesus tells a story about a son who disrespects his father, leaves home and ruins his life, then returns in shame, ready to plead for mercy and the role of a house servant, the son isn’t even allowed to make the speech.  He doesn’t have to go into the house to find the father.  The father is already out on the road, waiting and watching, and runs to meet him.

Jeremiah testifies, “The word of the Lord came to me, saying, ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart’.”

Scripture uses language to describe us as those who can only respond.  We are called before we were born.  Predestined to be loved before the world began.  Given birth by love before we could be aware of what was happening. 

And yet, in spite of this good news that calls for the life-long practice of responding to God, we still want to play at being the ones in charge.  We dream of being self-made.

Even as people who “go to church,” it is easy to imagine that the initiative lies with us.  We chose to belong.  We decided to affiliate.  And yet the truth is something much more mysterious.  We do not gather here as those who’ve gotten ourselves here.  We’re here as those gathered by God.

Because God leaves us great freedom and responsibility to shape our lives, we often imagine that we can make our way all by ourselves.  But we are frail and fragile creatures, vulnerable to pain and loss, frustration and fatigue.  We cannot keep ourselves going.  And so we lie down each night, exhausted and spent.  And before you awaken each day, God is actively relating to you as the one who creates and sustains you in existence; as the one who offers you a future; as the one who reconciles you in all the ways you're estranged and divided.  

This is happening all day every day, whether you're thinking about it or not.  It's happening whether you believe it or not.  And if God is doing all this, what is there for us to do?  Only to respond in faith, hope, and love.  All of life - in its height and depth, its boring stretches and occasional moments of excitement - all of it is a "response" to God's unmistakable way of relating to us in Jesus Christ.  

This response of faith, hope, and love ought not be narrowed down to what we call the “religious” life.  All the range of our experience is gathered up into this response.  Our laughter and tears.  Our delight in the red of the cardinal and the blue of the bluejay against the snow.  The balancing of the checkbook.  The folding of laundry.  The oil changes and other errands that fill our days.  The clocking in and earning a living by the sweat of your brow.  The cuddling with children.  The love of music and good books.  The slightly shameful enjoyment of TV.  The letting go of petty squabbles.  The hard work it takes to be kind.  The struggle to hope for a good future, for yourself and others.  All this, with nothing left out, is our response to the God who loves us as we’re formed in our mother’s womb.

I spent the last week teaching a course at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.  I taught from 9am-4pm each day.  Usually we’d meet for dinner together.  There was a Belgian pub nearby (with a great beer list).  I confess to eating there twice.  One of my students was a Presbyterian pastor from Ohio.  He ordered shrimp and grits (which isn’t “Belgian,” but oh well) . . . which led him into a story about grits.

He told a story about a long drive late at night through Mississippi.  He was trying to drive through the night, but he was getting tired.  In some little town he noticed a diner still open at 2am, and so decided to stop and go in.  He wasn’t hungry.  He just needed something to keep him awake.  He ordered a coffee and toast at the counter bar.  “Just coffee and toast?” The waitress asked.  “Just coffee and toast.”  “Nothing else?”  “Nothing else.”

She brought him his coffee.  Then she brought him his toast, set it down, and walked away.  The toast was covered with something white.  He didn’t know what it was.  And so he called her over, “What is this on my toast?”  “Them’s grits.”  “But I didn’t order grits.”  She looked at him and said, “Oh honey, you don’t order grits . . . grits just comes.” 

Grits just comes.  And the Psalmist says, “The mercies of the Lord are new every morning.”  Let your life be a fresh and creative response to this daily mercy.  Let your life be a life of faith, hope, and love, offered to the God who always loves us first.  Amen.