God's Restless Heart

Text: Acts 17:22-31

Standing on Mars Hill, called in Greek Areopagus—meaning the rock of the war god Ares—Paul is impatient. He has been driven out of Philippi and Thessalonica and the city of Berorea, and has been spirited away by his friends to cool his heels in Athens. But Paul, who cannot sit still for long, starts to chatter away in the market square about one thing and another, where one thing is Jesus and the other thing is God. He makes an impression: the Greeks, it says in the book of Acts from which this story comes, call him a babbler. The word in Greek describes the noisy chattering of flocks of small birds. So that’s how some saw Paul. But others think it’s worth a listen, and they gather on Mars Hill to hear him.

There is something about Paul and his words that draw them in. Why would these learned Greeks bother to listen to this noisy Jewish/Roman/Palestinian bird, aside, as it may be, from idle curiosity about some new idea? It may be that they, as Paul later says, are fumbling in the dark, as we all are, looking to touch God with their own hands. They wish to fill, as someone described it, an existential abyss. There is a emptiness that we all feel, a cosmic longing for something that completes us. Saint Augustine, who so strongly influenced Martin Luther, said of God: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” This restlessness, plus I’m sure Paul’s charisma and his way with words, open their ears to him.

Unlike Peter’s speech at Pentecost, which we’ll hear in a couple of weeks, Paul’s cannot call on the salvation history of the Jews to convince the Athenians. It is not their history. He cannot use jargon. He cannot assume sympathy. Instead, he gives a speech that lays down the fundamentals of his faith. This is a tiny treatise on monotheism—a foreign concept to the Greeks. Paul describes a single, timeless God, cosmic and intimate at the same time. He tells them three things about his God: who God is, what God does, and what we do in response to God.

Who Paul says God is.

God is creator of the universe. All things were made by him. Without him there is nothing made. God is very large. All the substance of the universe, all those stars and all that energy, all that knowledge that is embodied in the heavens—God made all that. God spoke the world into being: let there be light. God took chaos and made some things out of it. The order of the universe and the laws that govern it are embodiments of God.

But more than creator of the universe, God is an enthusiast. God is a fan of the universe. After creating each part, it says in Genesis—a word that means birth—God pronounced it good. We exist in a universe which at its core, in its DNA, in its essence, is goodness.

God does not live, Paul says, in shrines made by humans. God does not live in little boxes like temples or churches. God does not reside in idols or in symbols or even in words. These things can lead us to God and remind us of God, but they are not God. We do not worship them. By the same token, we do not need to maintain God, to feed God, to bring offerings to God, to appease God. We do not have to please God—as though he needed anything, Paul says.

Yet even though God is big and old and self-sufficient, God is at the same time small and spirited and intimately connected with the lives of people. God is not far from each of us, Paul says. God is neither standoffish nor condescending. God is as close to us as our parents, our family. We are, it says, we are God’s offspring.

What Paul says God does.

God gives life and all things. God takes creation and animates it with life. God organizes substance and energy into biology and consciousness. God takes time and organizes it into history. In other words, God takes things and organizes them into stories. Jordan Mueller, a member of Faith, did a research project a few months ago in which he counted the occurrence of each word in various Bible versions. In all cases, the most common word was—no surprise here—God (or Lord, or Jehovah). And the second most common word was “says.” God said, the Lord spoke. God, as Paul notes, allots times and boundaries by talking about them.

What Paul says we do in the face of this creating, speaking God.

We try to find God. We search for God. We try to fill the abyss, the empty space inside of us that seems to belong to God. It is as if we were created with this spot in us just so that God could fill it, reside in us. We search for God, Paul says, and we grope for God. A word that is perhaps better translated by other versions of the Bible as “feel after” or “reach out for.” As someone who is blind might reach ahead, generally and imperfectly seeking something specific and necessary.

And in the end, finding it. Finding God. For all the mystery and majesty, God can be found. This is a radical notion, meaning that it is at the root of our faith. This God, who is big and little, far and near, awesome and intimate. This God, who organizes existence, and creates patterns out of chaos and stories out of moments. This God to whom we owe our existence and our breath. This God wants to be found. God likes us, and God wants us to be near. God longs for us to be near as much as we long for it.

We live and move and have our being in God, Paul quotes a Greek poet to the Athenians. The Athenians agree with that much. But it is more than being like some mortal fish swimming in a Godly sea. In the experience that changed his life, that made him an apostle and missionary, Paul learned that God and humans desire each other fervently. God may be unbounded by space and time, but God is not without passion. It is as if God also knows an emptiness which is filled only by God’s creatures, and that God and creation, God and we, live in each other. Our reaching out is matched by God’s.

I am in my father and you in me and I in you, Jesus says to his disciples. We dwell in each other. Perhaps God’s presence among us means that God’s heart is restless, too.

Handyman

Text: Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16 Other texts: John 14:1-14

Into your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in your mercy, through Jesus Christ. In these words we conclude our own prayers each Sunday. Prayers of the people, this part of worship is called. Which strikes me as odd, since who else would be praying, and what are the other prayers if not ours? But of course, the title means prayers that are not written down beforehand or part of the formal liturgical prayers, but are prayers in our hearts—prayers thus of a particular person, you—and prayers that must be shared with others—all who are in this place in this moment, this particular congregation gathered here today.

Into your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray. We are handing over to God the people, including ourselves, and events for which we pray. From our hands to God’s hands. Our hands have proven themselves not to be sufficiently able to handle things.

For there are things that were beyond our reach and beyond our strength. Curing sickness, mending hearts, keeping people safe, banishing fears, undoing wrongs. In our prayers, we let go of our pretense that we can save others, or ourselves. Our petitions and thanksgivings, our concerns and celebrations, are humble prayers: asking God for a hand, or thanking God for a hand that was given.

Into your hands, O Lord, we commend all for whom we pray. These words come from today’s psalm, psalm 31. In it, someone seeks to be saved, to be delivered, to be rescued. To be redeemed. All of these words have one ordinary and urgent meaning: I am stuck in a bad place: get me out of here! And make haste it says: do it quick!

Deliver is the right word, here, because it conveys the notion of movement. We are in one place and hope to get to another place. Take me out of the net in which I’m trapped, the psalms says. Pluck me from the tangled mess I’m in.

People find themselves in enemy hands. Rescue me from the hand of enemies, the psalm says. Caught up in the nets they have woven for us. These enemies are many, tricky, and strong. And old-fashioned, as old as the psalm. Enemies within. Pride and greed and gluttony. Fear and anger. Worry and regret. And enemies without. Disease, addiction, and violence. The devil and all his empty promises. We put our lives into the hands of forces that are not trustworthy. Or just as often those forces grab us and hold us tight against our will.

I am in distress, it says in the few verses that the lectionary skipped over—I am in distress and my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. My life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing.

There is a tug of war here between, as Martin Luther wrote, between us and these forces that threaten to devour us. Our enemies are tenacious. Stronger than us.

Into your hands, O Lord, I commit my spirit, says the main character in the psalm. By stating this, we take ourselves from the hands of our enemies and give ourselves to the hands of God. It is a transfer of trust: from what is untrustworthy to one who can be trusted.

We commit to God those things which are beyond our own powers and abilities. We give our lives—that’s what the word spirit means here—we give all of ourselves to God. We let go of the notion that we are in control and put the course of events into the hands of God. Trusting, as we pray, in God’s mercy.

My times are in your hand, the psalm says. This is a statement of resolve: here, God, take my life. And also it is a realization: my life has always been yours. The psalmist, who starts by asking to be rescued, ends up by being freed. Letting go of one’s life results in freedom. Into your hands, O Lord, the verse more completely says, into your hands I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, trustworthy God.

The disciples are, like the person in the psalm, in the hands of enemies. The followers of Jesus are fearful—with good reason—of the present and the future. This Gospel passage is part of what is called the Farewell Discourse. The disciples know that danger threatens, that Jesus will leave them. They must have a notion by now that their lives, as followers of Jesus, will be difficult. The combination of almost certain impending danger and grief would trouble anyone.

Yet Jesus assures them: do not let your hearts be troubled.

The only antidote to this terror is to trust in God, Jesus says, and to trust in Jesus himself. In my father’s house, he tells them, there are many rooms. Or sometimes translated many mansions, or as in our Bible, many dwelling places. It is easy to think that Jesus is talking about some heavenly hotel. And Jesus is going to go talk to housekeeping about getting all the suites ready for his disciples.

Maybe so. But it seems as likely that Jesus is promising to each disciple what the person in the psalm prayed for. Which is a place for us in God’s hands. The word for dwelling place in this Gospel reading is “abide,” one of John’s favorite words. In John, Jesus is in us and we are in him. This mutual abiding is particular to each of us. Jesus did not promise that there would be one room big enough for everyone. There is one for each. The dwelling place is home. It is where we live, which in John is in Jesus.

Living in Jesus is another way of saying that we commit our spirit and time into God’s hands. The metaphor of rooms is reassurance by Jesus that for each of us, there is a place in God. That placing our lives in God’s hands is a particular event that God expects and is prepared for. We can trust in God not because of some vaguely hopeful sentiment, but because God’s hand is open to each person, ready.

We commit to God our lives and prayers for ourselves and others, trusting that God’s hands are eager to receive us.

When our hearts are troubled, when the future looks scary, when we are tangled up in net fashioned by enemies within and without, when our grip seems weak, into Gods’s hands we commend all for whom we pray, trusting in God’s mercy, through Jesus Christ.

But we had hoped

Text: Luke 24:13-35

Grace and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.

But we had hoped. Four heart-rending words.

This is a sentence people speak to each other each in grief. In mutual consolation. Supporting one another. A resignation that things did not work out—not that we thought they necessarily would; probably they wouldn’t. But they might have. This one time they might have. There was a pretty good chance. It would have been so great, so much better, if things had worked out like we thought they might do.

On the road to Emmaus, two friends were talking to each other. We had high expectations, they might have said, we followers of Jesus. Jesus encouraged us. By his deeds, we could see he was a prophet, more than a prophet even. He healed people beyond healing. Made the blind see. Some say he raised people from the dead. By his words, we could see he was wise, brave, and intense. He claimed the authority of God. He condemned the hypocrites who ruled the church and the land. He shamed and embarrassed the rulers. By the promises that everyone read into his sermons—about being free, about evil being overturned, about the poor and the destitute receiving the blessings so far reserved for others—by those promises we could see a new kind of world. By the very fact that crowds came to be with him, to hear him, to be changed by him, and just recently to sing hosannas to him, we could see it was coming soon. And finally, by our own need for victory and freedom in a land of poor people oppressed by a foreign power, our hopes were fed.

We had high expectations. Foolish ones, though, as it turned out. But we had hoped.

But we had hoped. People cannot help hoping. It is in us. It is not the same as wishing. The kind of hope the two had on the road to Emmaus, seven miles from Jerusalem where Jesus had been killed, is a hope for a new way of the world to be. A new physics, a change in the laws of mind, spirit, and nature. It is hope for things to be very different than usual. It is the same hope we have that our mortal diseases will be cured, that our addictions will be lifted, that our broken hearts will be mended. It is the hope that time could reverse itself just a little to undo what was irrevocably done. It is the longing that nothing is irrevocable, nothing is impossible, nothing is final or fatal. It is a hope that leads us to have unreasonable expectations.

But we had hoped. The walkers on the road are trying to re-set. They are trying to talk themselves down. Talking to each other about all the things that had happened, it says. We had hoped, but we know now that was silly. We heard he was alive, but people have not seen him. You can hear the two friends trying to make things make sense again. They are trying to get back into the ordinary way of looking at things. They are trying, as poet T.S. Eliot wrote, to be cured of craving something they cannot find. They are trying to learn to avoid excessive expectations.

In that moment, Jesus appears. They are, he explains, seeing things in the old way. That way leads to the morass of self-recrimination and hopelessness in which they find themselves. There is a new way, just as they had once thought. It was declared by the prophets. They are foolish—how foolish you are, he says—but foolish on the flip side. Not fools to be hopeful, but fools to give up hope so easily. They have been quick to abandon what they knew. The evil does not erase the truth of the good. The crucifixion does not erase the ministry of Jesus. Just as disease does not erase good times past, and as addiction does not erase past steadfastness, and as heartbreak does not erase past love.

The travelers do not see him. Within the framework of the possible, Jesus is unrecognized. Jesus encourages them to try out a new strategy, a new frame of mind. Consider this: God is different than you think. The world is less limited than you think. God is more involved in your lives than you think. Our normal experiences are not necessarily good indicators of what is possible.

Yet all this almost-pedantic talk is not sufficient. Jesus can tell it is not working. Coyly he walks ahead, it says, as if he were going on. They invite him—as he figured they would—they invite this strange yet strangely familiar man, to their homes. There, he re-enacts what we readers recognize as the pattern of the Lord’s Supper, the Eucharistic pattern. He took bread, and blessed it, and broke it, and gave it to them. And then their eyes were opened. Jesus was made known to them, it says, in the breaking of the bread.

It is a turning point in their lives. They see Jesus and remember him. The walkers escape their disappointment, not through figuring out and talking about it, but through sharing a meal together in a special way, through a ritual that is full of meaning and memory, one that Jesus commanded them to do.

We celebrate The Lord’s Supper every week for many reasons. For example, Martin Luther said we should do so because we needed to eat to be strong to fight the devil. But another reason is that the Lord’s Supper is a way of thinking that is out of the ordinary. Sacraments, like other rituals, are a kind of new physics. They are messages spoken in another language. They are guided by tradition and scripture and the Spirit. And most of all they are something that we approach with humility and mystery. For a moment, we put aside the ordinary way of seeing things and adopt a new way. We come forward, and hear words that are both strange and comforting, we eat as we were instructed to by Jesus, and we leave transformed. We come back week after week, because we need reminding that there is a way to see things that we usually do not see.

The travelers on the road start out convinced that nothing has changed. That the world and their lives will be as they always have been. But Christians are right to have excessive expectations. It is what Jesus taught us. We are right to think that what is broken can be healed and what is stuck can be freed.

As the hymn from the Iona community says:

Goodness is stronger than evil; love is stronger than hate; Light is stronger than darkness; life is stronger than death.

It is risky to hope so deeply. It makes us vulnerable to grief and disappointment. Yet not to hope deeply, starves us.

Leave this room

Text: John 20:19-31

It might seem like this passage in John’s Gospel is two stories, nearly identical versions, paternal twins. One without Thomas and one with Thomas. In each one, Jesus appears to the disciples who are locked in or shut in a room together. In each one, Jesus greets them saying “Peace be to you.” In each one, Jesus shows them his wounds to verify his identity. And in each one, some one or some many realize at that point that he is the same Jesus that they followed. The same Jesus who just a few day earlier was tried, convicted, and executed cruelly on the cross.

John’s Gospel was the last of the four to be written. Perhaps there were two stories circulating in the community when John wrote down his rendition of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Or perhaps he was including versions from two separate communities.

Either way, there is only one story now, made up of two similar parts. We assume that John has put the parts together for a reason. To indicate some important step in the development of the life of the church and the development of the relationship between God and people, God and us. There is a dramatic tension in the story as it stands. Between the first and the second parts, something happens, something changes, some new order is unfolding.

One thing that might be happening has to do with believing and seeing. Belief and seeing are important to John, so this interpretation makes sense. In that case, the most important line is “blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”

The emphasis here is on Thomas, usually and unfairly called Doubting Thomas. Unfairly, because he only wants what the other disciples already have: the chance to see Jesus with his own eyes. All the disciples in both stories are understandably non-plussed when Jesus appears. Can this be the real Jesus? Can this be the same one we knew? And all are convinced when they see his hands and side. There are two things different between the two stories, and in this view the important difference is that Thomas is missing from the first story but present in the second.

But the other thing that might be happening here has nothing to do with seeing or believing. Instead, it has to do with mission. The important difference between the two stories is not Thomas’s presence, but that in the first story the disciples are commissioned to continue the work of Jesus in the world, and in the second story they—through the words of Thomas—accept that commission. In this interpretation, the most important line is “Thomas answered him: my Lord and my God.” This is not so much about the identity of Jesus as about his continuing role as master, teacher, and guide for the disciples. From then up to now.

The story describes a contract, which is what a commission is. An offer, an acceptance, a consideration. Jesus makes the disciples an offer. It sounds like an order—commissions do sound like that—but it is an offer nonetheless, as commissions really are. As the Father sent me, so I send you. The disciples may allow themselves to be sent or they may refuse. You may wish to send me, but I may refuse to go. The offer may be denied.

But this offer by Jesus to the disciples is not denied. It is accepted. Though the disciples hesitate in the first story, and though we have to wait a week to learn their decision, when Thomas comes back he speaks for them all. You are my Lord, Thomas says. You are my Lord, I am your subject. The movement of the total story through the two different versions is the doing of the deal, the making of the agreement, and provisioning for its implementation.

Jesus does not leave the disciples without resources. He grants them three. First, he gives them peace. Peace be with you. A valuable gift considering their fear and wonder. Second, he gives them the continuing presence of the Holy Spirit. Receive the Holy Spirit, he says, and he breathes on them. And third, he gives them a power, or an authority. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them. This is a huge power (and it even has a name: the power of the keys—and is one of the few given to clergy on their ordination), though the power as always rests with God. They also get a fourth gift, the foundation for the others: the evidence that Jesus lives and is here.

The story of God and humans in the whole Bible has a trajectory, a story arc, or a motive, or the thing that pulls it forward through all its books. That trajectory is toward peace and freedom. Against fear and bondage. Against anxiety and captivity. Against judgment and toward grace—which is another way to say it.

The resurrection stories are part of that arc. They coincide with that arc. The readings for today mention peace, but they are mostly about freedom. In the reading from Acts, we hear how Jesus is freed from the power of death. It is, it says, part of the plan. In the psalm, we hear how God frees us from the power of fear. In the Gospel reading, how God frees us from the power of unforgiven sins. Jesus himself is a statement by God: you are free from the power of evil.

The disciples are locked in or confined in a room of fear. The door is closed. But earlier in John (in a passage about the good shepherd) Jesus told them: I am the door. Whoever enters by me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. Jesus both is a door and opens the door.

For Thomas, and for John, belief is not an action, not something we have to strive for or work at or feel bad about not having enough of. Not about doubting and conviction. But instead, it is a consequence of action. Or as in this case, the consequence of accepting the commission Jesus offers. Being convinced, through whatever means and experiences, that Jesus has the authority to make the offer in the first place. As God has sent me so I send you, Jesus says. And then being willing, both because of and in spite of all we know about following Jesus—both the joys and the hardships—to accept the offer. To be freed. To be sent. To open the door and go out.