Holy Longing

Texts: Isaiah 1.1, 10-20; Ps 50.1-8; 22-23; Hebrews 11.1-3; 8-16; Luke 12.32-40

The God we encounter in today’s lections is, in many ways, a pretty angry God.  In the passage we read from Isaiah, the Lord tells Israel that he is sick and tired of all its hypocrisy.  ‘Sure,’ says God, ‘you turn up to worship regularly, you bring along the sacrifices prescribed in the law of Moses.  But your heart isn’t in it.  You have blood on your hands.  You neglect and mistreat the poor, the widow and the orphan.  Unless you get your act together,’ says God, ‘unless you stop doing evil and start doing good, I will put you to the sword.’  The Psalmist echoes these same sentiments when he has God say (and I paraphrase):  ‘Listen up, all you hypocrites who take my covenant on your lips and turn up to worship with the prescribed offerings.  I don’t care how many offerings you make, or how many promises you make; unless you walk the walk as well as talk the talk, I’m going to tear you apart.  What I want most of all is an attitude of thanksgiving, and a people who will actually do as they have promised.’

Now, there have always been some Christians who are very uncomfortable with all this anger from God.  From the second century there was a crowd known as the Marcionites who wanted to excise the Hebrew Bible from the Christian canon altogether.  In their view, the God of the Hebrew bible was not the God of Jesus Christ.  The God of the Hebrews was an angry demiurge who breathed fire and vengeance, while the God of Jesus was loving and forgiving, always regarding human foibles with a smiling tolerance.  In the 19^th and early 20^th centuries, with a characteristically northern European distaste for strong emotions of any kind, many learned theologians and ministers argued that it was wrong to associate anger with God—for God is our best name for all that is calm and peaceful in the cosmos, a kind of mystical still-point around which the chaos and anger of the universe turns.  In more recent decades, a whole swag of theologians have argued that the biblical anger of God should be dismissed as nothing more than a projection of our all-too-human anger.  ‘God does not get angry,’ they argue, ‘WE get angry and then anthropomorphise God so that we can enlist God to our cause.’

What are we to make of these claims?  Well, what can I say except that even the most appalling theology has some truth in it!  Marcion wanted to emphasise that God was a God of love, which—surprisingly enough!— I think is right.  God is love, and God does love us.  That is the clear message of both the New Testament and the Old, I would have thought.  But stay with me now.  Isn’t it precisely because God loves us that God gets angry with us sometimes?  Wouldn’t a God who never got angry be evidence that God is actually entirely indifferent to what we do—cold, unaffected and distant like the stars in the sky?  I think so.  Indeed, these days it is widely recognised by both Jews and Christians that the kind of theology that wants to remove every apparently ‘human’ characteristic or emotion from God is dodgy theology, for it fails to take account of the deepest meaning of the biblical covenants: that is, that God has thrown God’s lot in with us, for better or for worse, that God has chosen to become corrigible, indeed vulnerable, to all that human beings decide and do. 

For Christians, of course, this covenant logic reaches its fulfilment in the fleshly career of one Jesus of Nazareth.  What we learn from Jesus is that it is in the very nature of God to become human, and therefore vulnerable to all that being human actually means.  Like getting hurt and disappointed in love, like becoming angry and wishing that one could die.  Every one of those emotions, and a whole lot more, were seen in Jesus of Nazareth who, in Christian theology, is the best picture of God that we have.  And if the best picture of God that we have is a human being, why should it be wrong to think of a God who is vulnerable to all that we do or don’t do in response to divine love?  Love, you see, does not make one strong and indifferent.  It makes one vulnerable to being hurt.

A few years ago I threw a ‘Thank-God-I-survived-my-doctorate’ party.  Some of you were there.  Now you have to understand that this was a very important celebration for my family and I.  It’s not everyday that a kid who grew up in poverty earns a doctorate, you know.  That night therefore represented a wonderful celebration of what God is able to do in us. But I had one disappointment.  A close friend, a friend whom I love a great deal, did not turn up even though she had promised she would.  I looked for her all night, but my looking was in vane, and the excuses she gave after the fact were really, really lame.  I still feel rather hurt and angry about that.  I will get over it, of course, but I am hurt and angry nevertheless.   Love is like that.  If you get close to someone, if you make yourself vulnerable, you can experience great joy.  If that someone betrays you, however, the wound goes very deep.  For when your guard is down, the knife strikes much deeper.

 

That is how it is with God, too, I think.  God loves us more deeply that anyone.  God has come so close to us, in Christ and in the Spirit, that God has rendered Godself almost powerless in the face of our wavering loyalties.  When we make a promise to God, but then we break it, God is really affected.  The cross of Christ is our best icon or image of this, for there God is not only wounded by our faithlessness, but mortally so.  In Christ God dies the horrible death of unrequited love.

The good news, of course, is that love is not without its own power.  It is, as the very heart of who God is, actually stronger than death.  The same passages that present us with a hurt and angry God also assure us that God will always be waiting to forgive our faithlessness and renew the relationship.  God is not one, we are told, who will hang on to the bitterness of God’s disappointment forever, real and visceral as that disappointment actually is.  God’s holy longing for us indeed makes God vulnerable.  But our sin does not, we are told, kill off God’s longing altogether.  God never will become cold and indifferent.  God will always be waiting for that time when we come to our senses in a far-off country.  God will always be waiting to embrace us in forgiving, reconciling love.  God will always stand before us and beside us, in Christ, to show us what a truly redeemed humanity actually looks like.  In Christ, you see, God has been pleased to place in our hands the very kingdom of God, which is gospel-speak for God’s own self.

The strictly theological point to make from this is, of course, that while God may indeed be different to human beings, and we should therefore be very careful to avoid making God into whatever serves our ideological purposes, a very large part of that classical problematic stems from the fact that, in Christ, God is actually more human than we are.  In Christ, God shows us what a human being infused by divine love actually longs for in the face of the very great inhumanity that shadows our world.

Let me conclude by pointing out that this precisely human longing of God also finds a mirror and embodiment in the longing of God’s baptised people for justice, peace and reconciliation in the world.  The dismay and anger that we, as God’s people, feel in the face of the troubles all about us reflects the dismay and anger of God.  The longing we feel for that ‘better country’ described by the writer to the Hebrews, may be understood as an expression and sacramental embodiment of God’s own longing.  For, in the end, it is not that God is slow in bringing about the revolution we so long for.  It is not that God has made a promise but is slow to keep it.  In the end, our longing is that longing which God has placed in our hearts.  It is a longing that motivates us to get off our backsides and do something for this world which God loves so passionately and for which Christ died. 

The challenge for each of us this morning is therefore this.  As God’s child, God has placed God’s longing in your heart.  Will you allow that longing to take flesh, as Christ has taken flesh?  Will you engage the world anew, with all its soiled relationships, in the faith, hope and love of Jesus?  Will you go from this church and actually keep the promises you made in your baptism, to turn from evil and do good, to stop being part of the problem and start becoming part of the new humanity inaugurated in Christ?  Will you care enough even to become hurt and angry?  It’s up to you.  Remember that God is not the kind of God who will bully you into anything.  God will rail with anger, certainly, remonstrating passionately with all in your life and your world that is less than the humanity revealed in Jesus.  But the choice, and all that follows from that choice, is still with you.  The way of God’s Spirit in the world is that of longing and lamenting, of hoping and imagining.  So, will you answer God’s prayers?  Will you light your lamp and keep it burning, that the world may be transfigured in love?

This homily was first preached at the Uniting Church's Centre for Theology and Ministry in 2010.

Claiming God's Faithfulness

Texts:  Isaiah 64. 1-9; Psalm 80. 1-7, 17-19; 1 Cor 1.3-9; Mark 13. 24-37

I hope there are some Monty Python fans amongst you this morning, because I want to begin by recalling a scene from one of their funniest movies, Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Perhaps you will remember it.  King Arthur and his brave companions have just been done over by an incredibly well-educated peasant on one of the King’s estates, and are feeling a little despondent about being part of the aristocracy.  Arthur decides to seek divine guidance.  Afterall, there’s not a great deal for a king to do if even the peasants won’t obey you!  But before his prayer has progressed very far at all, Arthur is suddenly interrupted by a trap-door which opens in one of the clouds above, and a rather grumpy-looking God appears.  Immediately the whole company falls to its knees in eager-to-please obeisance and fear.  But God tells them to stop grovelling. “Oh please”, he says, “stop all that silly grovelling.  ‘Forgive me’ this, and ‘I’m sorry for’ that.  It really gets on my nerves”.  “Sorry, Lord” says Arthur.  “Don’t say sorry!”, says God, rather angrily, “I’m sick of people being sorry.  All those grovelling Psalms really are very boring !”  And after God calms down a bit, they finally receive their mission to seek the holy grail.

Now, like a lot of good comedy, Pythonesque comedy is strong on hyperbole.  That is, overdoing things in order to make a rather modest point.  And whether they knew they were engaging in theological reflection or not, the Python managed to make a rather spot-on theological point in this particular sketch.  And that is that many Christians are far too concerned about being sorry about their sins.  You might be surprised that I say that.  Afterall, we said a rather stark confessional prayer this morning, and clearly I do see a confessional moment as quite essential to our worship of God, whether that be at Sunday service or elsewhere.  We are sinners.  We really do need to acknowledge our guilt before our Maker.  Nevertheless, I also believe that there is a very real danger in becoming too much concerned with confession.  For if we are forever thinking about our sins, we might even become inclined to invent sins to be sorry about—to blame ourselves, and no-body else, for all that seems to go wrong in life.  This kind of attitude seems particularly prevalent amongst Protestants who, consciously or unconsciously, are followers of Luther or Calvin.  Both these venerable gentleman had, on occasion, a rather morbid approach to the sinfulness of human beings.  But I shan’t go into that now.

Instead, I will simply point out that the things that go wrong in life are not always our fault.  Sometimes they are someone else’s fault.  Sometimes they are no-one’s fault.  And sometimes, sometimes, the things that go wrong in life may well be God’s doing.  That is most certainly the view of the prophet in our reading from Isaiah.  In speaking with God about the sins which led to Judah’s captivity in Babylon, the prophet says this:

                            You were angry, and we sinned;

                            because you hid yourself, we transgressed.

Earlier in this same prayer, in chapter 63 verse 17, the prophet says something similar:

                            Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from our ways

                            and harden our heart, so that we do not fear you?

What an alarming suggestion!  We are used to thinking, are we not, that God gets angry because we sin, that God hides Godself from us because we have departed from the terms of the covenant?  Yet here the prophet claims that the opposite may be the case sometimes as well:  that we sin because we experience God’s anger, and it feels cruel and unfair.  Sometimes, he suggests, we fall into a gutter of despair and sin because we find that God has disappeared, and is no longer there to support us, which leaves us with a sense of having been abandoned.  What are we to make of these claims?  How do we make sense of them?  Can we really hold God responsible for some of the chaos in our lives?  Could we dare?  Is God really one who sends calamity without regard to justice? 

Well, I shall not be answering that question in full this morning.  There is no time.  But I would ask you to notice that whatever God may be up to “objectively”, as it were, the particular passages we are examining this morning show absolutely no interest, no interest whatsoever, in  justifying the ways of God to human beings.   What the passages are interested to do, however, is acknowledge and validate the legitimacy of that experience we have been examining i.e.  that sense one occasionally gets that God has abandoned us for no reason that we can readily identify.  Now, of course, when everything appears to be collapsing and life has fallen into a great big pit from which there appears to be very little chance of escape, we are right to search ourselves for character flaws, or sins.  We are also right to search our families, our culture, or even the world economic order for the effects of sin, for patterns of repression or evil intent.  But after all that can be known is known, after all the truth-telling and repenting has been done, it may still be the case that the sky is falling in and it is simply impossible to see any decent reason why.  In that moment, we can only really see ourselves as powerless before forces which seem indifferent to our very real, very present, and very personal pain.  At such moments the words of the psalmist come easily to our lips:  “How long, O Lord, will you be angry with your people’s prayers?  You have fed them with the bread of tears, and given them tears to drink in full measure.” (80.4).  Indeed, at times like this, our prayers seem to bounce off a God who, far from being indifferent, actually seems to have it in for us!

When life is like that, what are we to do?  Well, this is not a time for confession.  Confession is something we do when we can actually identify and acknowledge what we have done wrong ourselves, or in acquiescence with someone else’s wrongdoing.  Having searched ourselves long and hard, having confessed whatever there is to confess already, there’s no point in going on to invent sins that aren’t actually there.  Inventing sins for ourselves has another name.  Masochism.  And Christians are not called to masochism, which is a form of fantasy and reality-denial.  Rather, we are called to lament what has happened to us, and claim the promise of God’s salvation.  Which is precisely what the prophet does in the passage we are reading.

The kind of language we are investigating is called LAMENT.  Lament is what you do when disaster has come and you’ve confessed until your mouth is dry.  You’ve confessed and repented of everything you can find, but the disaster just keeps on coming.  The best example of lament in the bible is the aptly named Book of Lamentations, which reflects on the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of its inhabitants.  But the two Old Testament passages set for today are good examples as well.  Here the writers tell God that life is pretty much in the gutter, and that God had better do something about it.  Lament is what you do when there’s nothing else you can do.  As a key part of their lamentations, our psalmist and our prophet both point out that God actually has an obligation to do something for them, to rescue them. And they base that claim on two things that they know about God already:  (1) God is a compassionate creator;  (2) God has made a covenant with them, in which salvation is promised to all who abandon their sin and cling to God.  I want to spend a few moments looking at each of these in turn, because I think they give us some important clues for how we might do our own lamenting. 

When the bottom falls out of life, I first encourage you to call on God as the Compassionate Creator.   The prophet says:

                            Look down from heaven and see,

                            from your holy and glorious habitation.

                            Where are your zeal and your might?

                            The yearning of your heart and your compassion?  (Is 63. 15)

                            Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;

                we are the clay, and you are the potter;

                            we are all the work of your hand.

                            Do not be exceedingly angry, O Lord,

                            and do not remember iniquity forever.

                            Now consider, we are all your people.

Here God is imaged as a father who is also a potter.  The point is clear.  God did not create us with indifference, but with compassion, love, and father-like affection.  Therefore we may count on God to eventually let go of his anger and relent.  We are his own beloved people, the extraordinary products of his own tender imagination.  No matter what we may do, God will not destroy, absolutely, what God has made.

When the tidal wave hits, I would also encourage you to call on God as the senior signatory to a rather special covenant.  The Psalmist says this:

                            You brought a vine out of Egypt;

                            you drove out the nations and planted it.

                            You cleared the ground for it;

                            it took deep root and filled the land.

                            The mountains were covered with its shade,

                            the mighty cedars with its branches;

                            it sends out its branches to the sea,

                            and its shoots to the river.

                            Why then have you broken down its walls,

                            so that all who pass along the way pluck its fruit? . . .

                            Turn again, O God of hosts,

                            look from heaven and see.

                            Have regard for this vine,

                            the stock that your right hand planted . . .

                            Restore us, O Lord, God of hosts;

                            let your face shine, that we may be saved.

This allegory of a vine is the story of Israel in miniature.  It speaks of the history of the relationship between God and Israel.  How God created the Hebrew nation in Egypt, and rescued it from slavery.  How God cleared a land for the people to live in.  How they prospered and bore much fruit because of God’s guidance and care.  And yet now, with Jerusalem destroyed and the land in ruins, the fruitful nation has become plunder for others.  In telling this story, the Psalmist emphasises the role of God in the relationship.  God is the primary actor, the protagonist who makes things happen.  That’s how it was with ancient, middle-eastern, covenants.  One party, the stronger party, takes the initiative to grace the other with its protection and care.  All the weaker party is asked for in return is trust and loyalty.  And in the case of the covenant between Yahweh and Israel, even if Israel withdrew its loyalty for a time, the terms of the covenant could be reactivated with a genuine renewal of Israel’s faith.  Here the Psalmist is arguing that Israel has indeed renewed its trust so that, under the terms of the covenant, God should now jolly-well offer his care and protection once more.  And immediately.

As Christians we are members of a ‘new’ covenant that nevertheless owes a great deal to the ‘old’ covenant between Israel and Yahweh.  In Jesus, we are privileged to have witnessed just how seriously God takes his side of the bargain made with Israel.  Through the life and death of Christ, God has shown us clearly and unambiguously that disloyalty need be no impediment.  In Christ, all is forgiven.  This is so not only for the Hebrew people, but for all who are called into the community of God created by Jesus.  As the book of 1 Corinthians tells us, ‘He will strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of Lord Jesus Christ.  God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord’ (1. 8, 9).  On that basis, when the bombs fall on you from the sky and the ground opens up beneath you, you have every right to call on God and demand what is yours: Salvation!  Not just the salvation of your soul, but the salvation of your body and your planet as well.  This is God’s promise and God’s gift to all who are joined to Christ.  So don’t be backward in coming forward.  If life is giving you a hard time, if GOD is giving you a hard time, and you’ve run out of honest confessions, then call on God to honour the promises God has made.  Pour out your lament, and don’t hold back.  Ask for what is yours as a child of God: your salvation, your healing, the liberation of the world from its bondage to decay.

There is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with pleading for what is already yours in the gift of God.