In the name of God ☩
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Amen.
You all really deserve some credit. I mean that – I’m not just being complimentary. I have the honor and duty of being here on Sunday mornings – but you? You could say “You know, I’m tired of this online church thing, let’s give it a break.” But you’re here. You could be worshipping with another congregation – perhaps one that has a tv studio-level production setup that would give you a “better viewing experience.” But you’re here. You could just catch the sermon on the podcast later this week and listen while you’re doing dishes or taking a walk. But you’re here.
Now,
I’ve heard there are certain advantages to watching church online. You can grab
a cup of coffee and participate while you’re sitting on your comfortable couch
and wear your pjs. If you need to go to the bathroom, well, you can pause me.
You can multi-task and fold laundry while you join in prayers. But you could
have a lot of things on your device right now – news, sports, movies – but
you’ve decided to be here, to watch an online liturgy for the 45th
Sunday of this pandemic. Now, I appreciate your being here and your
faithfulness, but it also makes me wonder – what motivates us to keep doing
this?
Why am I still
spending a day each week praying, researching, outlining, writing, and
practicing a sermon? Why is Caroline producing a bulletin each week that
contains all of the hymns and readings? Why is Matt choosing excellent hymns
and practicing organ pieces? Why have Beth and Hunter been committing to being
soloists every other week? Why is Judy Newman coming in the middle of the week
to refill candles and Lynn Mills coming to make sure that our flowers, even if
artificial sometimes, are looking their best? Certainly, not every church is
doing this. Some are doing Zoom gatherings, some are doing a more simple
liturgy. To be clear – I’m not criticizing those choices, but we clearly
haven’t chosen to do all that we are because it’s the most logistically simple
way to do it.
And if there is
something odd and puzzling about our liturgical behavior during this pandemic,
that fits perfectly with God who is revealed in Scripture and in Jesus Christ.
Psalm 62:7 proclaims, “God alone is my rock and my salvation, my stronghold, so
that I shall not be broken.” The past 10 months have certainly been the sort
that could break us – bitter partisanship, racial injustice on full display,
ongoing environmental degradation, and a pandemic that has made us isolated
from one another, has taken over 400,000 Americans, and has wreaked havoc on
our economy. But in the midst of all of these things that might break us – we
have come and seen that God alone is our rock and our salvation. We’ve learned
that anything and everything else will ultimately disappoint us and nothing is
as certain as we thought it was. As the Psalmist says, “Truly, my hope is in
God.” And knowing that, even if God is an enigma, we do some strange things in
following a strange God.
Yes, God is rather
odd. Just consider the readings that we have today. Jonah is an Israelite whom
God calls to go to Nineveh. Nineveh was an enemy of Israel, so not only would
Jonah have been raised to resent these people, but it was a dangerous mission.
Imagine being asked by God to go to North Korea or a QAnon meeting and tell
them that God is going to destroy them if they don’t repent. For one, we’d
probably fear for our lives with such a mission. And secondly, maybe we sort of
want to watch God destroy them. So, Jonah goes in the opposite direction and
gets on a boat, which is eventually engulfed in a tremendous storm, so Jonah
jumps off the boat, is swallowed by a big fish, and is eventually spit out on
dry land. Message received. It’s a story we’re familiar with, but it’s a very
strange story. Certainly, God could have chosen someone who was going to be
more willing. And what an odd story for the people of God to record in sacred
Scripture.
So he goes to
Nineveh, probably expecting the worst, and preaches a sermon that is a mere
five words in Hebrew: “After forty days, Nineveh overthrown.” And, to his shock
and consternation, everyone repents, even the cows put on sackcloth. That’s the
part of the story we heard this morning. But the real “meat” of the book of
Jonah is the fourth and final chapter – where Jonah sits down outside the city,
fuming that these evil people are getting a pardon from God. While he’s been
sitting there, a small bush has been providing him shade from the heat. But God
causes this bush to wither. Again, this is a very odd sort of God who teaches
lessons in some very interesting ways. It’s a reminder to us that nothing is
too insignificant to be a message from the Almighty. And when this bush
withers, Jonah gets irate. To which God says, “You’re mad about a little bush
that you’ve known for all of a few minutes dying? How do you think I’d feel
about destroying a whole city full of my children?”
God is strangely
and prodigiously lavish when it comes to grace and forgiveness. We might even
say that God is promiscuously gracious. Now, there are a lot of ways that God
could have made it known that God loves even those we would call our enemies.
But here, God seems to be rubbing our faces in that fact – “You see those
people who are your sworn enemy? Well, they’re my children, too, and I love
them and want nothing but the best for them.” This is one way that we know that
God isn’t just an idea we’ve manufactured, as we would have dismissed such
challenging and crazy stories such as Jonah’s if it were up to us.
Turning to the
Psalm, we see that God expects obedience: “Put your trust in him always, O
people.” This Psalm makes it clear that “Those of high degree are but a
fleeting breath, even those of low estate cannot be trusted. On the scales they
are lighter than a breath, all of them together.” We spend so much time
pursuing things that get us nowhere but further from the joy and peace of God.
We are told “though wealth increase, set not your heart upon it.” The
strangeness of God is that we are called to go against all of the things that
society has trained us to value.
And we see this in
St. Paul’s words from 1 Corinthians, that “the present form of this world is
passing away.” Really, all of these readings this morning contain the theme of
repentance. As I often comment, repentance is not about making apologies or
promising to do better. No, to repent, in the language of the Bible, means to
have a change of heart and a change of mind. To repent means to see things in a
fundamentally new way and to act accordingly. St. Paul is not telling us to
abandon our spouses in this passage, that would be a misreading of three verses
plucked out of their context. The larger point is about living differently in
this world. And this is a strange call of God – to live in the world but be not
of the world, to orient ourselves towards the Kingdom of God instead of the
kingdoms of humanity.
We then move to
the call of the first disciples of Jesus, which, again, really is an odd sort
of story. Two brothers, Simon, who is better known by nickname of Peter, and
Andrew are at work fishing on their boat in the Sea of Galilee when a stranger
calls their names and says “Follow me and I’ll make turn you fishermen into
fishers of men.” And, somewhat surprisingly, they immediately leave their nets
and follow him. They don’t ask for a fuller explanation. They don’t take the
night to sleep on the decision. Immediately, they follow. Then Jesus finds
James and John and issues the invitation to them and, likewise, they
immediately follow and leave behind their father, presumably walking away from
their future in the family business.
As the Lutheran
pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote before he was killed by the Nazis, “When
Christ calls us, he bids us come and die.” Sometimes that call is metaphorical,
sometimes it is more than that, but never less. Following Jesus involves
repentance, it involves change. To be clear, our response to the Gospel does not
earn us anything, rather our response is how we participate in this Kingdom of
God that has come near. And this is the odd and awesome way of God – not to act
without us, but rather to invite us into all the glory of his marvelous works,
as our Collect this morning put it. Yes, we all know that God so loved the
world, and God also so enables the world, so trusts the world, so equips the
world, so invites the world to participate in this love.
And, as if there
weren’t enough oddities thus far, the very same God who loves our enemies and
sometimes has a fish swallow us to make that point, who asks us to repent and
change how we see things, who calls us to immediately leave behind our old
priorities to follow him, this God comes to us in bread and wine. And even when
a pandemic prevents us from gathering with one another to share this bread,
this God will not be deterred and assures us that even the desire to partake of
his Body and Blood is sufficient enough to receive the grace of the Eucharist.
Of all the ways for God to be known – bread and wine broken and shared in
remembrance of his sacrifice – it certainly takes an interesting God to be
manifest in this way. And to trust us, to be his Body in the world, it’s
borderline crazy. Flawed, imperfect, temperamental people like us? And yet this
is how God chooses to be made known.
As
the Methodist Bishop Will Willimon puts it, the absurdity of God is seen in
that God was a Jew who lived briefly, died violently, rose unexpectedly, and
appeared to those who deserted him. Wow! If it weren’t true, we’d have trouble
believing it.
So
given the rather unintuitive and strange ways that God is and would have us to
be – why do we do it? Certainly, Christianity isn’t the blueprint for an easy
and care-free life. Well, as the disciples will say in John when people start
deserting Jesus because of just how strange he is, “To who else can we go?
Jesus has the words of eternal life.” As we saw in the Psalm, there’s only one
God worth following out there; and so, here we are. Sure, there are lots of false gods out there
like pleasure, wealth, fame, security, power; and they might be fun for a
while, they might give us what we want for a bit. But the thing about false gods
is that they always demand more than they give. That’s the thing that’s so
refreshingly strange about the God we’ve known in Jesus Christ, this God
demands nothing and gives us everything. Some might call this strange, absurd,
or even stupid. But to those of us for whom it is our salvation, we have a
different word for it: Grace.
