SERMON: 4 Lent B 3 11 18
Jer31:31-34; Ps51:1-13; Heb5:5-10; Jn 12:20-33
You've probably heard this one, but it's a keeper, so I'm going to tell it again.
Once there was an exceedingly cranky Christian who believed God had his back, no matter what. "God will provide!" was his response when he lost his job, when his wife left him, when his car gave up the ghost. "God will provide," he assured his friends, few as they were, and his neighbors.
One spring the nearby river started to rise and people started hearing talk about evacuation. "God will provide," the man declared. When the water started coming up his driveway the Red Cross van pulled in and offered him a ride to the evacuation center. "I'm not moving," the man declared. "God will provide." A little later the water was 2 feet deep in the man's living room and a volunteer fire department crew in an open skiff motored into his front yard and yelled he needed to come with them to escape the flood. "God will provide," the man said, "I'm not leaving." The next morning found the man on his roof with water creeping toward the peak. Someone aboard a Coast Guard helicopter shouted down using a bullhorn, "You need to climb in the sling. The flood's gonna take your house!" You know already: the man replied, "God will provide. I'm not leaving.
Sadly the water rose and the man drowned. He showed up at the pearly gates, mad as a wet hen and demanding to see God Almighty. They'd never seen anyone quite so undone, so they got him an appointment, and before he knew it the man was sitting in the tastefully appointed office suite of God.
The man started wailing and sobbing. "All my life I believed in you," he told God. "I trusted in you. I told everybody, every chance I got, God will provide. You let me down."
God smiled broadly and responded, "I certainly tried." The man was totally unprepared for such a response. "What do you mean?" he sputtered.
With a kindly expression that only God could have mustered in the circumstances, God asked, "Who do you think sent the van, the boat and the helicopter?"
This joke has to do with paying attention and recognizing that God is at work in the world, even in our little worlds, our lives. It's about doing our part to fulfill God's plan. Or maybe just the impossible thickness of the human skull.
Many times our Sunday readings are directly focused on this kind of message: do not miss what is going on around you and the possibility that it is the work of God. Even when the wheels are coming off it seems the hand of God is involved. Not to cause us harm or distress, but there is usually some sign of the presence of the Almighty. Stuff happens and, frankly, sometimes it is the will of God.
How could you look at the response of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students to the shootings there a month ago and not think God was moving these kids to do what their parents and the rest of the adults have not been able to do, which is control the flood of guns in our nation? Their courage, their outrage, their activism gives us more hope than the NRA could ever spoil.
Throughout the Bible we read stories of people needing to be persuaded of the readiness of God to be at their side, facing whatever came their way. In today's Hebrew Bible reading from Jeremiah the people are being assured that the disaster of the flood is not going to happen again--please forget my joke--and that God's name is being written on their hearts. "They will be my people and I will be their God," God declares. Oddly that is very satisfying to hear. Comforting.
By the time Jeremiah made this prophesy the people knew they had really blown it. They had messed up badly. That God was going to show up for them anyway was a big relief. That is not to say that people didn't act up repeatedly thereafter. Rather, God recognized and accepted human limitations. We presume God came to accept human limitations because God loves us no matter what. No matter how feeble our capacities, how vast our limitations.
This idea is contained in the collect we prayed at the beginning of the service: "
Almighty God, you alone can bring into order the unruly wills and affections of sinners." It is as though we lack the power to behave on our own; we need God's help.
This is reinforced by the following line in which we prayed, "Grant your people grace to love what you command and desire what you promise."
This is a big ask. We are asking God to help us make the changes we know we should want to make, even if we don't yet want them, so that we can better be in alignment with God. But it seems clear we have to do some of the lifting ourselves.
But loving what God commands and desiring what God promises is kind of a chicken and egg proposition. Which comes first, the love or the desire? This is a test of human will every time we ask the question. Do we want the peace that passes human understanding, salvation even, enough to commit to do the things God asks? And then do we find that we love doing those things God asks? That is the calculus of faith.
For many the equation they encounter is something like discovering the peace in doing what God asks, rather than necessarily being moved by what God promises. And that permits a follower to discover that the peace is in the good behavior as well as in what God has promised.
This calculus also applies to the epistle. In our epistle reading we see that it was by suffering that Jesus learned to obey God. We relate to that because we feel we have had to experience some hardship when we have sought to live in the way God intends for us. Jesus followed the way God intended for him in order that we could be shown the way he trod, the way of the cross. This means we have to accept Jesus' suffering, unfair though it is, in order to bear witness to his resurrection and ascension. It also means we need to pick up our cross and bear it.
The marvel of it all is that in seeking this kind of surprising balance in our submission to the will of God we actually adopt it as our own. When our will becomes the desire to do God's will we find the emotional balance and the energy to accept what that is even when we can imagine more self-indulgent alternatives.
That realization that we love what God commands and desire what God promises generates in us a profound gratitude for the example of Christ. That is the gift of the Christian faith. In fact, that is our faith.
Amen
A sermon preached at St. Paul's Episcopal Church, Poughkeepsie NY on March 18, 2018 by The Rev. Tyler Jones, Rector
