EYES WIDE OPEN
Sermon on Sunday July 25, 1999
Vacation time is for getting away from it all; escape from the routines of work, from the worries of the world. But sometimes, even while on vacation, public events transpire which we can’t ignore.
During my vacation this month, Nancy saw me off Saturday morning a week ago at the Roanoke airport. Upon checking into the departure hall, several hundred other travellers, standing in clusters before TV monitors. A sure sign that something big was capturing their attention. They were learning, as I did, at that hour of the disappearance the night before of the plane piloted by JFK Jr.
That unfolding tragic story was to accompany the remainder of my vacation as it was to impact upon the private lives of millions of others.
**** As a Christian my faith in the God of our Lord Jesus Christ forces me to seek God’s will, purpose and plan in historic and public events. That’s not easy, however, but is necessary if our understanding of the Gospel is that Jesus Christ did not live and die mainly for me, or even you, and certainly not for the Church, but as the Gospel of John puts it: He died to save the world. If that is so I expect to find signs of God’s grace in the world; I look to discover the seeds, treasures, and catches of redemption which Jesus speaks about in today’s parables in the world.
A few times I have done found the Kingdom clearly working God’s will in my times. I believe that the Kingdom seeks to eradicate racism and so I have viewed the civil rights movement of the US of the l950s and 60s, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, as pretty clear evidence of what side of history God was working.
Some other movements, which I once embraced as Kingdom inspired or Kingdom confirming, I have re-evaluated. I was thrilled with the election of John F. Kennedy and his death altered my life forever. I left one form of church ministry and joined a form of worldly ministry, the U.S. Foreign Service, because of Kennedy. And until a week ago I harbored, along with a few million other liberals, that his son might someday give me a second chance to vote for a Kennedy.
However, I view the deaths of neither Kennedy as either part of God’s plan for the Kingdom, nor as the devil’s plan. Tragic accidents and fatal errors of judgement can ensnare the powerful, famous and promising as readily as anyone. We do not require a theological explanation to explain political tragedies and human accidents.
There’s a surprising twist at the conclusion of Jesus’ half dozen parables on the Kingdom of God. So often the disciples have not understood Jesus’ parables, but in this instance, Jesus asks of his listeners: HAVE YOU UNDERSTOOD ALL THIS? And, it’s reported, THEY ANSWERED, "YES."
I am open to insight to God’s plan for humanity in happenings like the Kennedy tragedy, the Balkan horror, the unending discord in the Middle East, growing evidence of spiritual vacuums both in China and in America paradoxically when the economies of both nations are arguably at their zenith.
I realize that Kingdom watchers must be prepared for surprises. For example, does it not seem odd to you that the current spiritual threat to Chinese Marxism comes, not from the Chinese Christian Churches, but from the Falun Gong which is a mainly Buddhist inspired spirituality? But my insights about the Kingdom are always qualified. It is far easier for me to accept the Kingdom of God in a parable than in real life.
One thing I do expect, however, from my church is that it be sensitive, at least now and then, to my desire to hear reassurance of God’s loving actions amidst the flotsam and jetsam of human error, sin and tragedy.
And so last Sunday I went to church expecting to hear some word of reassurance in the context of the Kennedy sadness. I even enticed my non-church attending brother to accompany me because he was sufficiently upset by the Kennedy news to be willing to make one of his exceptional appearances at church.
We checked out the yellow pages with hundreds of church advertisements and chose the University Methodist Church: it had a big advertisement, offered three different hours of worship, and its self-naming as University suggested that the preaching and worship would be of a relatively high intellectual order.
We were to be disappointed. It turned out that the University in the title meant more physically located near the University of Las Vegas than of the university millieu. And the self-description of the l0AM service we attended as "contemporary" meant informality and enthusiastic singing but no other link up with the modern world.
Don’t get me wrong: it was a well planned and executed service and the love of God was preached to the persons present. But the main reason we went, to hear some reassurance in light of the nation’s sadness, went unaddressed. The Kennedy loss was not mentioned; in fact, there were no prayers at all or for anyone. The love of God was restricted to the 200 persons present and, frankly, to hell with the world. I thought it strange, too, that in a service premised exclusively upon the love of God for everyone, I was the sole person to approach and speak with a black couple seated in the rear of the church during the exchange of the greeting in Christ, and that though my brother and I lingered and were the last to depart from the sanctuary, not a single regular worshiper approached us.
But really not strange at all because when a congregation limits the grace of God to personal salvation, and when we diminish Kingdom theology to simply feeling good in Sunday worship, we have reduced public worship to merely personal pietism. And when that happens we will soon not need corporate worship at all for each person can pray and read the scriptures at home in private if the only message from God is personal salvation.
The trouble with that, other than not being biblical, is that at the end of the day we don’t need public worship for personal pietism. We can say our prayers privately anywhere and read our bibles at home.
**** While Jesus steadily counselled his disciples to go easy on reading the signs of the end and jumping to conclusions about the Kingdom of God, his teachings in Mathew as with our other two texts of today do give guidelines about Kingdom of God theology.
One principle which runs through Jesus’ parables in Matthew is that God’s will and purpose as they are disclosed in the emerging Kingdom of Heaven show forth in life, hope, new growth and are not linked with death, decay and denial. God loves life, not death; God is love, not hate; the Kingdom bursts forth in growth, not decay. I think the Kennedy and Bissette families showed remarkable sensitivity to Kingdom faith in proceeding quickly with the last rites even as public sentimentality called for prolonging the tragedy.
And so Jesus compares the Kingdom of God to: a humble mustard seed, yeast, a treasure hidden in a field, a merchant seeking and coming upon superlative pearls; a net to catch fish whose catch exceeds all expectations. These metaphors were in Jesus’ day ordinary references since his listeners knew all about the functions of a fish net, of yeast, and of the mustard seed and everyone could fantasize about a search for buried treasure and fine pearls. These Kingdom illustrations have in common that the Kingdom of God takes place as the ordinary evolves into the extraordinary: the humble seed generates a huge weed as big as a small tree, the ordinary yeast creates a hundred fold increase in the dough; the hopeful net overflows with catch, and the illusive search for treasure or a superb quality in jewels results in thrilling discoveries beyond human expectations.
And yet Christians are tempted, when hit by a dramatic and adverse development, to grow impatient with the Jesus’ teaching that God takes his time in history. We easily despair that the Kingdom grows slowly, silently like the seed, the yeast; steadily and doggedly like the relentless search for treasure and like Jacob’s twice servitude to Laban. Since God planned for Jacob to father twelve sons to form the nation of Israel, why did he let Jacob waste so much time in getting Rachel!
God’s love so often appears checkmated by human opposition and divine hope appears held in bondage by evil powers. Where is that vindication so often promised? How long must the creation groan in its labor? God, if you would just advance the Kingdom with despatch, our attention would not be fixed so intently on the stubborn persistence of evil than on the slow emergence of good. Have you not at times railed at God like the sons of Thunder, James and John, did to Jesus: Lord, give us the power to call down fire from heaven and consume all evil doers. Instead they got Jesus’ parables on what the Kingdom of God is like.
But when we are in a better and more scriptural spirit we perceive that the realisation of human potential is more important to God than the eradication of human faults. God loves goodness more than God hates evil.
In the Greek tragedy that bears her name, Medea kills both of her sons in revenge against her faithless husband. When he asks how she could have done such a thing, she replies, "Because I hated you more than I loved them."
For God the opposite is true: hate can never be a stronger emotion than love.
**** Some developments in our common life and in our private realms yield neither to rational analysis nor to easy spiritual spins. When all the public gloss is removed from the loss of JFK Jr. and his wife and sister-in-law, the two families intimately involved are left with unspeakable tragedies that must test their faith. It is trying times such as the Kennedys and Bissettes have undergone that call to heart Paul’s wondrous passages WHO WILL SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE OF CHRIST? WILL HARDSHIP, OR DISTRESS, OR PERSECUTION, OR FAMINE, OR NAKEDNESS, OR PERIL, OR SWORD? No, Paul argues, in all such adversities persons of faith are conquerors because God loves us. Loves us with such completeness that NEITHER DEATH, NOR LIFE, NOR ANGELS, NOR RULERS, NOR THINGS PRESENT, NOR THINGS TO COME, NOR POWERS, NOR HEIGHT, NOR DEPTH, NOR ANYTHING ELSE IN ALL CREATION, WILL BE ABLE TO SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST JESUS OUR LORD.
In his memoirs, the Russian and Christian author, Alexander Solhenizen, tells of arriving at a day, after he had spent l4 years of his life serving penal work in the gulag simply because he was one of God’s wild weeds which the Soviet system could not tolerate, when he came to the point of wanting to give up and end his life. All he had to do was to sit down on the work detail. The punishment was that a guard would approach and ask once: will you get up and get back to work. If the prisoner answered NO, or refused to answer, the proscribed further response was for the guard to pick up the prisoner’s abandoned shovel or pick and smash the laggard’s skull in.
In his ultimate desperation Solhenizen thus sat down on the job to await the routine yet deadly punishment. After a brief spell, a shadow approached and hung over him and he awaited his death blow. Instead one hand went to rest upon his shoulder and the other reached to the earth drawing the sign of the cross. Solhenizen looked up and saw the face of a much older prisoner who had survived many more years in that hell than had he. Nothing was said between the two prisoners, but Solhenizen pulled himself together, got up and continued to do slave labor and to survive and to bring his unique spiritual witness to the world. THERE IS NOTHING IN ALL CREATION, NOTHING SO EVIL, SO DESPAIRING, SO DEHUMANIZING, THAT CAN EVER SEPARATE US FROM THE LOVE OF GOD IN CHRIST JESUS.
Part of the mystery; of the unfolding of the kingdom of God is how and why some like Solhenizen survive while so many other victims do not. How is it that some families like the Kennedy's can sustain their public idealism and service in the face of awful setbacks whereas other families, visited by their own tragedies, retreat into privatism. What is the source of supernatural optimism, which credits God’s driving energy as affirming us despite misfortune except the cross of Christ?
We all know how resilient humans can be. God has made the "bounce back" factor fundamental to human nature and survival. And near superhuman endurance and survival need not wear the armour of Christian faith. We Christians do not have a monopoly upon the powers of the human spirit to endure and triumph.
But Christians do have the special understanding that faith in God is the cornerstone of our resiliency. It is in the model of Christ that we know we are both vulnerable and invincible. True resiliency knows nothing of vacant, empty hope or giving in to pessimistic fate. Nor does true resiliency rest on simply a good mental attitude. Resiliency’s cornerstones are faith, hope and love in the biblical sense of those words. And the greatest of these, Paul commented, is love because love is God’s way to bring us home to him and to make right all the groanings of this world when the final and peaceable kingdom of our God comes in fullness of Christ’s time.