Lectionary Readings
Gracious and loving God, Graft in our hearts
the love of your Name; increase in us true religion; and nourish us with all
goodness. This we pray in the name of the God who is. Amen.
What is religion? It seems like such a simple question, but the answer has implications that will, quite literally, change our lives and our world. There are certainly many ways to think about religion – as being the defining narrative story of our lives, as the ultimate truth of the world, as the beliefs about God that bind us together, as our value and ethical system, or, as one person has put it, our preferred sin management solution.
The
question that I’m really getting at is whether or not religion is a part of our
lives, something that influences our decisions and shapes our values, or is
religion the entirety, not just a part, of our lives? Something that not
influences our decisions, but drives them and that does not merely shape our
values, but dictates them. Today’s Collect gives us a clue as to which of these
is we’re after: “Lord of all power and might, the author and giver of all
good gifts.”
God
is not one priority among many, God is all in all. Other priorities might flow
from faith in God, but God is the only thing that matters because everything
else derives its meaning from God. This is at the root of Judaism and
Christianity. Faithful Jews recite Deuteronomy 6:4-5, known as the Shema,
several times a day. It reads, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God; the Lord
alone. You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all our soul, and with all your
strength.” And when Jesus is asked what the greatest commandment is, he starts
there, with the Shema, which is an acknowledgment of the unilateral and
unequivocal totality of God in our world and in our lives. Using today’s texts
from Exodus and Matthew, I want us to consider why it is that we have such a
difficult time letting God be God.
We
start with Exodus because, in this passage, we have one of the clearest revelations
into the nature and identity of God. Last Sunday, we heard about the birth of
Moses which really was a story about the five women who saved him from being
drowned in the Nile. We skip ahead in the narrative to one day when Moses saw a
bush ablaze that was not consumed by the fire, which leads to one of the
holiest encounters in Scripture. A voice comes from the bush identifying itself
as the God of Moses’ father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who has heard
the cries of the Hebrew people, God’s own people, in Egypt. God sees us in our
pain and misery. God is moved with outrage and passion when people are
oppressed. And God intends to do something about this. God tells Moses that he
will go to Pharaoh and liberate the people from their slavery.
Moses
isn’t so sure. “Well, that’s nice of you to think of me as being the right
person for that job. I’m really not well qualified for this work. And, uh, I
don’t think I caught your name. See, I couldn’t even tell Pharaoh who sent me
on this mission. I’m pretty busy out here in Midian, what with the flock and all.
But best of luck to you.” “I AM WHO I AM,” comes the response. And God
clarifies, “This is my name forever, and my title for all generations.” This is
why this passage gets so much attention – this is God’s name and title.
And
if we had kept reading from Exodus, we’d see Moses come up with other reasons
for why he isn’t the right person for this task. But God counters all these
excuses and Moses does eventually go down, way down in Egypt’s land to tell ol’
Pharaoh to let God’s people go. Of great interest is the name that God gives:
“I AM WHO I AM,” which is shortened to as “I AM.” Whenever you are reading
Scripture and you run into the word “Lord”
in all capital letters, it is a direct reference to this divine name. It’s part
of what gets Jesus in so much trouble when he goes around saying things like “I
am the bread of life” or “I am the good shepherd.” He’s harkening back to this
personal name of God Almighty.
It’s
a notoriously difficult phrase to translate, and the most that we can
definitively say about it is that God’s name is related to the word for
“being.” It might mean, “I am who I will be,” connoting a sense of
everlastingness. It might be, “I will be known by what I do,” alluding to God’s
faithfulness. Some scholars note that in Hebrew, this name is full of breathy
sounds, almost as if God’s name is breathed, not said. However we want to
understand this name, it is an enigma. God’s name is not something that means
anything, rather it envelops all meaning. God’s essence is not something to be
understood, as God passes all understanding. God’s being is not to be grasped,
as God is always a mystery beyond our full knowing. God is wild and untamable,
the source of all that is and all that shall be. The truest thing that we can
ever say, both from a philosophical and Biblical perspective is that God is.
And this is the core of religion – God’s being. We live our lives in response
to and in light of the fact that God is. This is why it is so important to hear
each day that the Lord is God
alone and that we are to love this God who is being with all our heart, souls,
and strength.
But,
if we’re honest with ourselves, we admit that we don’t always live with “God
is” as our central story. We fit religion into our lives instead of fitting our
lives into the reality of loving God with all our heart, soul, and strength. We
don’t want such a demanding God. We don’t want a God who is Lord of all things
– because we’d really rather have politics, and economics, and conflicts
resolution, and romance be arenas where we are the masters of our own domains.
A stand-in for you and me this morning is St. Peter, who says as much to Jesus.
In
last Sunday’s reading, when Jesus asked his disciples “Who do you say that I
am?” (and you’ll hear a double meaning there with God’s proper name) Peter
says, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” In the section we heard
today, Jesus gives some details into what that means, namely that he “must go
to Jerusalem, endure suffering, be killed, and rise on the third day.” To be
clear, that final part about rising on the third day does not undo the tragedy
of all that comes before. This isn’t the version of God’s Messiah that Peter
wanted. Jesus is talking about picking up a cross. The best modern analogy to
this is the sort of lynching that so many blacks endured in this nation.
Crucifixion, like lynching, was about inflicting as much pain and humiliation
as was possible in a way that was dehumanizing and degrading.
Notice
that Jesus doesn’t explain to Peter and the disciples that his Crucifixion
would probably happen because he was going to upset the status quo. No, Jesus says
that he “must” endure these things. Jesus is saying that there is a logical and
necessary connection between the Messiah and the Cross. And this makes no sense
to Peter, or to any of us.
Looking
at our society, and our own preferences, we see that we value things like
power, fame, glory, wealth, strength, and winning. But the Cross is none of
these things. The Cross is about weakness, shame, rejection, humiliation, pain,
death, and criminality. Just as we don’t particularly want religion to influence
every decision, action, and interaction, we don’t want losing to be at the
center of who we are. But Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let
them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” One of the many
wonderful Prayer Book prayers prays, “Grant that we, walking in the way of the
cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace.” And today’s
Collect had us to pray for true religion to be increased in us. Well, now we
see what true religion is all about – it is about a God who gets into every
nook and cranny of our lives and would have us to share in Jesus’ Crucifixion
as a way of life. In the words of St. Peter, “God forbid it.”
Like
Peter, this isn’t what we expect or want. So we find ways to domesticate the
Gospel and make it fit into our terms. Maybe you’ve seen him – there’s a guy
that walks around Salisbury carrying a large wooden cross, but he’s attached a
wheel to it to make it easier to carry. That’s a metaphor what for St. Peter
did when he rebuked Jesus and that’s what we do when we have God as a part of
our life instead of the totality of it; or when we forget that Jesus has more
in common with a victim of lynching than someone running for Congress. And,
rightly, Jesus turns back to Peter and says, “Get behind me, Satan.” Just last
Sunday we hear Peter being called the “rock” and now he’s a “stumbling block.”
Jesus notes that Peter is at fault for setting his mind on human things and not
divine things. In other words, he’s not focusing on true religion, he’s living
a version of religion that better suits his narrative. He’s not letting God be
God.
Just
look at the quagmire that our society is in right now. We’ve got a crisis of
leadership, we have bitter and blind partisanship instead of a functioning
democracy, we remain in the midst of a pandemic, we have social, economic, and
racial inequalities that are baked into our systems, and I could go on, but we
don’t need more examples to overwhelm us. Now am I saying that if all just
turned to my version of Christianity that things would magically get better? Of
course not.
But
I do know that the Church looks more like a club than true religion in most of
its manifestations. I do know that we put God into boxes and fight over who
controls the box. I do know that we live in a death-dealing society instead of
a life-affirming one. I do know that given a choice between the Cross and
another path, like Frank Sinatra, we prefer to do it my way. I do know that I
like the easy way out.
When
Moses first questions God, asking “Who am I that I should go?” God gives Moses
a rather odd sign of assurance. God says, “When you have brought the people out
of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.” Essentially, when everything
is okay, you will know that things are okay. But this strange promise actually
tells us something about true religion. God not only delivers us from something
– sin, death, oppression, selfishness – but God also delivers us to something.
God brings us to a place where we can worship, where we can be still and know
that God is God, where we can love the Lord
our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our strength. Worship is
where we find our fulfillment, our purpose, our joy. Worship is about encountering
the God who is – the source of everything and the orientation towards which all
things point. Worship is about acknowledging, adoring, and aligning ourselves
with the Crucified Jesus. In worship, we find true religion. Will worship solve
all of our societal problems? Probably not. Worship is not a means to an end.
But a greater focus on worshipping the Lord
who is and who died on a Cross out of love for us will be the sign that, indeed,
God is with us and that all shall be well.
