Jer. 4:11-12, 22-28; Luke 15:1-10

A small group of people have recently joined the Sunday Lection Miners. The purpose of this on-line group is to read the Lectionary texts for coming Sundays, to ask questions about them, comment on them, and share our insights with one another. My hope is that this process will instruct me on where and how I need to focus in preaching to develop sermons that meet our very real needs as individuals and as a congregation. If you would like to help with this effort, you are welcome to join. Just say something and I will add your email address to our distribution list.

In the past week of discussion, the group was struck, or perhaps a better word would be “chilled,” by the Jeremiah passage. Jim Ross said it was hard to hear it as anything other than a prophecy about the United States following our recent, year-long, study of the 12 Minor Prophets. He felt that our nation and our preferred form of Christianity (you know, the one that suits us), have become similarly disingenuous. He reflected that throughout the Minor Prophets, God uses “the gentiles” (foreigners) to chastise God’s people. Jim wondered aloud about our present stance in the world of nations as the only superpower and asked whether we have been taking on the role of God in the world rather than serving the will of God in the world. The real question might be: “Have we lost the ability to tell the difference?”

Karen Brown also felt that our nation and its leaders were merely reflections of the values of our society and individuals. She asked what might be at the root of our apparent celebration (in our actions, not in our words) of arrogance and pride – you know, the kind of actions that say, we have the power, we have the will, and by God we have the right to act in our own interests in any way we see fit. With wonderful insight, I think Karen identified the root of both our nation’s civic and religious problems – a sense of insecurity among us as individuals. More importantly, in my opinion, she says that the insecurity we feel stems from the absence of God’s substance in our lives. I love that word, “substance.” It means the essential, underlying reality of something, or the main content, or one might say the real meaning.

So, together, Jim and Karen arrive at similar conclusions. Because we have lost touch with the real meaning of God in our lives, we have become all ceremony and no substance. What a wonderful description of arrogance – all ceremony and no substance. At some level, since we are all confronted by reality (whether we want to face it or not), since we are all exposed to the essential, underlying reality of God (whether we want to confess it or not), and since this underlying reality of God is substantially absent from the parade of our lives through time and space, we feel insecure, we respond by building ourselves up, and justifying our lives (often by judging others).

Mark Twain once said “The human race consists of the damned and the ought-to-be-damned.” I think that’s a pretty accurate understanding of his Presbyterian roots in Hannibal, Missouri. He also said, “While the Bible tells us to love our neighbor, it also tells us to love our enemy… probably,” he notes, “because they’re the same people.”

Jesus raised a few eyebrows in his day because he hung out on the wrong side of the tracks. The good, religious folk grumbled about it, saying, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Karen pictures them at the office water cooler, taking pot shots at Jesus because he’s not paying enough attention to them. Doesn’t he know how much we’ve done for God? If he’s everything they say he is, wouldn’t he be sitting down with us? After all, we’ve dedicated all our time and talents to God – he should be spending more time ministering to us and our needs, not hanging around with them.

Somewhere along the way, they lost sight of the big picture. They thought Jesus should be acting more like them. Jesus tells the parables of the lost sheep and the lost coin to point out that had they been acting more like God, they would have been more concerned about the people on the outside of their religious circle than the people on the inside. To use that word again, “substance,” which in the Greek is “hupostasis,” it means the substance, substructure, or foundation, of true religion, should be others.

When I use the word “other,” it has a rich meaning in both religion and philosophy which often escapes “us,” precisely because “other” means something not of “us.” It is an adjective, which means “different, not the same.” It is a noun or pronoun, meaning “a different person or thing; not the same person or thing.” When Christ says, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets” (Mat. 7:12), it means treat people who are different than you, not the same as you, just as you would wish to be treated by them were the shoe on the other foot.

Of course, the trouble lies in human nature – when we meet an “other” we tend to be wary and suspicious because the “other” is not like “us.” Even worse, we have no natural power to keep the “other” in an-“other” place. The other is free, just as we are, unless we create the ability to erect artificial means of having power over the other. It is these artificial means of power over others that define our insecurity, and should we choose to use artificial means of power over others, then our insecurity becomes the substance, the real essence, the substrate and the foundation of our lives. However, if the law and the prophets are the substance, the real essence, the substrate and the foundation of our lives, we are prohibited from acting on our insecurity, and required to act instead on the security that God has promised us as God’s beloved. We are required to trust God and to love the other.

If you noticed, I described our response as a requirement, and so it is. Yet, by describing it as a prohibition or a ban, we misunderstand the true power that has been offered us by the teachings and the promises of God in the law and the prophets. In reality, we are not prohibited or banned from acting in accordance with our own nature. Rather, we are given the power and authority to act in accordance with God’s nature. In effect, we are freed from our insecurity by the promise of God’s love. We are freed to love by God’s love. We are freed to make ourselves vulnerable, even to the point of dying for the other, by God’s love. Because we are loved, we are free to love. Because we are forgiven, we are free to forgive. Because we know that God is absolutely trustworthy, we are free to trust God absolutely.

Now the difference in our choices is made clearer. Either we will live our lives entangled by our insecurities, keeping others in their place, using name calling and categories like “sinner,” “radical,” or “insert your favorite pejorative word here” as a means of power over the other, or, we will live our lives rooted and grounded in God’s love, trusting God absolutely with all that we have and all that we are. It is then, simply our failure to trust God that evicts God’s substance, essence, substrate, and foundation from our lives. Instead, we act out of our own wisdom, our own power, our own interests, and become, as Jim said in a recent email, “our own god.”

Astronauts who have seen the earth from space have commented on the profound change it made in them and the way they viewed life on earth.

For those who have seen the Earth from space, and for the hundreds and perhaps thousands more who will, the experience most certainly changes your perspective. The things that we share in our world are far more valuable than those which divide us. —Donald Williams, USA

From space I saw Earth indescribably beautiful with all the scars of national boundaries gone. —Muhammed Ahmad Faris, Syria

The first day, we pointed to our countries. Then we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day we were aware of only one Earth.
—Sultan Bin Salmon al-Saud, Saudi Arabia

My view of our planet was a glimpse of divinity.

—Edgar Mitchell, USA

Consider that all these folks were seeing was home – where we live. But, they were seeing it from an entirely unprecedented perspective. They were seeing it in a way that had never before been available to them. The result, as you heard, was “a glimpse of divinity, a world without the scars of national boundaries, a recognition that the things we share in common as human beings are more valuable than the things that divide us. Remember, all they were looking at was an atom, a particle of God’s creation.

The law and the prophets, the life of Jesus of Nazareth who has searched for us, sought us, called to us, these are a glimpse of divinity far surpassing the perspective of a mere human being. Yet, somehow, we lose sight of the tremendous power contained in their perspectives. Do we do it because we’re ignorant? No, I don’t think so. Do we do it because we’re mean spirited? No, I don’t think so. I think, perhaps, our problem is that in them we see more God than we want. We see a God who loves so fully, so completely, that the circles we draw, the boundaries we establish for our security, are the wounds and scars on the landscape of our lives, and the landscape of our world. They are the wounds and scars of our insecurity.

"He drew a circle..."

He drew a circle that shut me out--
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But Love and I had the wit to win:
We drew a circle that took him in!

"Outwitted" by Edwin Markham (complete poem)

Source: The Best Loved Poems of the American People. Doubleday, 1936. p.67

The pressing questions of our time will not be answered by our power over others, or by our ability to outwit others. No, the pressing questions of our time will be answered only by a complete and profound transformation of our perspective – a transformation powered not by rockets, or technology, but powered by a love so vast that it embraces even those “not like us.”

The point of Christ’s two parables is, first and foremost, to challenge our perspective – the way we think things are or ought to be. That’s why they’re dangerous and subversive. They assault the very substrate and foundation of our lives – the way we understand life and the way we live. Secondly, the point of these two parables is to ask whether we are going to grumble about God’s willingness to sit down with folks “unworthy of mercy by our standards,”[1] or join the celebration of a love so vast that it embraces even those “not like us” – so different from us in fact, that we are alienated from them, and they from us, by the borders and boundaries we have drawn.

Is it safe? No! That’s one of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. When the Beavers are going to introduce the children to Aslan, the lion, the Christ figure in the story, one little girl asks “Is he safe?” The Beavers answer, “Of course he’s not safe, silly; he’s a lion – but he’s good.” Is it safe to follow Christ in the world as it exists today? No! But, it’s good, and it’s what we’re called to do. God is more God than we want. God intrudes on our comfortable and acceptable boundaries. God crashes through our walls of divisions and makes a mess of our neatly ordered perspectives. Come Holy Spirit. Come to us with more God than we want; come to us as Lord and Savior of all, and let us rejoice.