Sunday, May 10, 2015

Sermon: "Who are we that we might hinder God?"

St. Matthew's, Chandler AZ
Sixth Sunday of Easter
Year B

"The student looked up from the Gospel reading and said "Thomas is a punk!"[1]

She used considerably stronger language.

Tuesday nights at the ministry house on campus were our community’s opportunity to gather for a meal and worship; and while I would occasionally give a sermon or a reflection, I most often left the space for an impromptu Bible Study on the texts for the coming Sunday.  I might have some interesting tidbit about the text or a comment about some theme, but I most often asked those gathered questions like:

What phrases struck them in a strong way?
What new ideas did the text inspire them to think about?
What is God doing in this passage and how are we called to respond to that action?


I am always interested to see where people might take these questions, and I knew we were doing something right when we got to a place of an unvarnished, raw, reaction to something in the text—be it a testimony to God’s action in one’s life in a way strikingly similar to the biblical situation, a disagreement with something in the Bible, or an outburst about one of the people in the passage we had just read.  Those raw reactions make me sit up and take notice; they make something of the divine come alive within me.  God acts frequently in the midst of disruptions, and casting aspersions on the disciples we are told in subtle ways by the tradition to emulate or see ourselves as like isn’t the way smooth bible studies are supposed to go, but whoo-boy God shows up in those moments.  I also have the type of personality that responds to sass with sass.  You can find God there too, it turns out. 

And to be fair, the student is right. Thomas is a punk—and I swear that I’m not recycling a sermon on Thomas—but think about it.  We talk about Thomas as though the only thing he’s known for is that he doubted.  First of all, all the disciples doubted the resurrection until Jesus showed up in the locked room.  We remember Thomas like he somehow different from them.  

But that’s not even the worst thing Thomas did.  Before Jesus and his entourage even arrive in Jerusalem before the crucifixion, it was known that going there will mean death because the religious leaders were looking to kill them.  And Thomas said, in his first sentence in the Gospels, that they should “go and die with him.”[2]  Sounds pretty brave, right?  

But guess who does not end up on a cross with Jesus?  If Jesus was the passive-aggressive type, you can imagine that the last words from the cross could have been, “Gee, who said they would follow me all the way to my death, and who is nowhere to be found?  Thomas and Peter.”  So, Thomas didn’t follow through with his promise.  

He punked out on Jesus.  
Thomas is a punk.

But here is where the student seemed to have the real problem.  Jesus’ forgiveness of Thomas and the other disciples came too easily.  Jesus just shows up and forgives.  And Thomas gets exactly what he asks for:  to see Jesus again in the flesh. 

Jesus could have just said, “If Thomas won’t believe the other disciples, then tough for him.  Out he goes, the unbeliever.” And, if you’ll remember, the disciples had received the Holy Spirit at this point from Jesus, and they keep the unbelieving Thomas around for a week in the same house.[3]  That’s a long time to keep someone who disagrees with you around when you do not have a smartphone to distract you.  The disciples as bearers of the Holy Spirit and Jesus could have just written Thomas off, but they do not.  They stay with Thomas and the truth is revealed to him (even though he was a punk).

See, here’s the thing:  we are so used to conditions being put on love, on affections, on friendship, on religious life, on all of our interactions, that witnessing the indiscriminate love God has for us and for others is often difficult—even offensive—to us.  The forgiveness and love of God is given to us freely, and because of this, we sometimes think it comes to too easily. 

Father Robert Capon, an Episcopal priest, once wrote a prayer that encapsulated the difficulty of living with the reality of God’s freely-given love and grace.  He said:

“Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance.”[4]

The ironic thing about this prayer is that even though it shows how we may grasp at something—anything—we can control about the relationship we have to God, this is the one prayer God will never answer.  This love and grace God gives us is outrageous, but to allow us to carve out a space of our very own, to pretend that we can continue to struggle in this world on our own, God will not allow that.  To do so would be abandonment, and God will never do that. Nor will God respect our claims to set the conditions of the love God offers to us or to others. 

This is the sixth Sunday after Easter.  And all throughout this Easter season our readings have been pointing us to the nature of this love that God has for us—our readings from the Acts of the Apostles, from the Gospel of John, and from especially from the first Epistle of John, which is in part a treatise on love.  Through Jesus’s resurrection appearances, we see a love that reconstitutes broken relationships, a love that pursues even when we think the object of God’s love is unworthy, even if that object of God’s love is one’s self. 

Though the Acts of the Apostles, we see the Holy Spirit constantly a few steps ahead of the disciples, showing them that Ethiopian eunuchs and Roman gentiles are within God’s grasp and loving purpose.  All the disciples can do is breathlessly make official the radical, barrier-breaking movements of God’s equal regard for all.  All the while the disciples--Peter especially--have to get over the revulsions engrained in them for profane animals and profane persons.  After the baptism we heard about today from Acts, Peter has to return to Jerusalem and explain to the offended disciples what happened, about which he said, “If God gave [those gentiles] the same gift that he gave us when we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?’[5]

The image of love scripture gives us is as wonderful as it is terrifying.  Assenting to it as a philosophical proposition—maybe that is possible. But how do we accept it?  Our relationships, our acquaintances, our common lives, our economics, all of these have a sense of quid pro quo so firmly rooted in them that it is so hard to imagine something so freely given and so unearned that also sometimes seems invisible.  

But there is also something attractive about this love.  Something that calls us to experience a reality greater than the one we see around us.  Something beyond the mundane, something that ignites holy desire and pushes us beyond our limits.  Something that strikes us a freely given but demands so much.  Others sense that attraction; even if it isn’t always clear that Christians act according to it.  Will we share what we know of such a mystery?

Beloved of God,
Who are we that we might hinder God?
Who might we prefer to set God’s love as conditional for?
Is it a particular person?
Is it a group of folks?
Is it yourself?
Where might the Holy Spirit be calling on each of us to break a boundary on God’s love we would rather keep in place?




[1] Of the many definitions for ‘punk,’ in this context the word refers to a cowardly individual.
[2] John 11:1-16 (particularly v.16).
[3] At least in John (20:21-22).
[4] Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace.
[5] Acts 11:17.

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