The Color of God

sermon by guest speaker Joel Eikenberry
Job 42:1-16

This weekend Torin and I had the opportunity to go to Pittsburgh for an overnight.  We stayed a beloved Bed and Breakfast called the Parador Inn, ate Irish food, tromped around downtown Pittsburgh in the snow, had a delicious seafood meal, and then...the piece de resistance... we saw Wicked at the Benedum Center (be still my heart).

Not only did the in-laws watch the boys, Joel stepped into preach the sermon.  (which was nice since it took us two hours to get home on Saturday after the play due to snow).  Thank you Joel for bringing us your Good Word!

 

THE COLOR OF GOD

I have had a recent reminder that I need to be cautious about what I say.   On November 10^th a sermon Torin preached here started out with a quote from me:

“Job is the most useless book in the Bible.”  He links that to discussion of the series of sermons going  on here in Morgantown about forgiveness. He mentions that I suggested “we should have a sermon on forgiving God.  While I don’t remember all the conversation Torin and I had, whatever I said led to an invitation from Torin to preach a sermon on forgiving God.  I accepted the challenge, perhaps in a weak moment, though this is really more a simple reflection and it isn’t really about forgiving God.

I am not a trained theologian or preacher and not very orthodox in my theology.  I really don’t have answers; rather I am in an ongoing search for what seems right in my soul.  This is a personal reflection; sharing some thoughts about the nature of God.   

I still don’t like Job much.  What is troublesome to me is the apparent capricious nature of God as he and the devil spar and use Job as the betting token, so to speak.  That is not my vision of God. 

My understanding of the nature of God has changed as I have grown up, as for most of us.  It was formative that I was raised in a Christian home and attended a missionary boarding school in Nigeria.  Events in my life, things I have read, influential teachers, leaders and friends, and even a minor in philosophy in college have had great influence.  But they have raised questions that I have struggled with.  One of the biggest questions has been why bad or unpleasant things happen, to both good and bad people and what does that say about the nature of God.

A bit less than five months ago we were preparing to move into our new home and were doing some repair above a door.  The ladder I was standing on was very light gauge and one leg of the ladder actually bent.  I fell and dislocated my shoulder which led to surgery from which I am still recovering.   We had placed the ladder appropriately and so we were not really careless. 

But that raises the question: Why did that happen to me? 

I don’t think it was to punish me for something.  Was it natural law?  Certainly gravity as invoked (and I assure you it still works fine).  After all, God created the universe with natural laws and they operate whether we like it or not. 

That can explain a lot of things that happen.  Consider earthquakes destroying whole towns; Tsunamis with flooding and devastation; hurricanes.  But for me there are also limitations to this type natural law explanation.

And on a larger stage consider what is happening in Syria currently with so many apparently quite innocent people dying.  Or stories we hear of human trafficking.  What about 9/11?   They really don’t seem to be just natural law.  They involve mostly human choices; societal and cultural issues.  Can we explain it as some “greater purpose?”  What about sin or wrong doing?  Are such things inherent in human nature?   Where is God’s hand in these things? 

So I have a dilemma.

How can I reconcile the troublesome, even evil, things we witness with a God who made all things and whose nature we say is love?  Where is justice?  How do events such as these fit the will of God?  

And it leads to other questions.  Is there is a real force of evil, a Satan, outside of God’s creation.  If so, then God did not create everything. And if there is this evil force, can it act in opposition to God’s will?  If so, God is really not all powerful.  If on the other hand God is all powerful but allows those forces to act (or even capriciously engages them as it seems in Job), then that doesn’t mesh well with a view of a loving God, a just God. 

So what is the nature of God?

Well, here I admit I am at risk of speaking of things I do not understand and of wonders way over my head, to paraphrase the Job text.  Yet, what I have seen and experienced on the one hand, and been what I have been taught does mesh, does not make sense to me.  Unlike Job, I have not had direct vision from God nor heard from God directly.  But I, as all of us, have had some direct experience of God.  So, based on that experience, with both wonder and limited understanding, I go ahead.

Consider the possibility that indeed God did create all, and really is all; that God created and allows both good and evil?  That was a hard thought for me initially, but when I considered some of my own experiences it seemed to make good sense.  To illustrate, could I know, let alone understand, what light is without experiencing darkness?  The concept of cold for someone who has only lived in the tropics would be limited indeed compared to ours, especially this year.  Would I be able to understand or appreciate good health and lack of pain without at some point experiencing either?  In these types of situations, can I appropriately understand and appreciate one without experiencing the other?

Perhaps God created both good and bad, both love and fear, allowing us to recognize one in the presence of the other, and we can appreciate and value the great difference.  Maybe God has both good and evil within the being of God, but the totality is greater than either and therefore richer.  As one pastor friend suggested as we discussed my quandary, perhaps God is more truly purple than either blue or red.   In the book “Conversations with God” it is put this way:

“Perhaps love is to feeling what perfect white is to color.  Many think that white is the absence of color.  It is not.  It is the inclusion of all color.  White is every other color that exists, combined.

So, too, is love not the absence of an emotion (hatred, anger, lust, jealousy, covetousness), but the summation of all feeling.  It is the sum total.  The aggregate amount.   The everything.”

I have developed a vision where evil does not exist as an enemy to good but is a part of the whole within the nature and being of God, which enriches and even completes God’s creation.  This vision allows me to choose light, and need not fear darkness.  It allows me to truly have joy in good health, and recognize it even as I struggle with pain.  When I experience the down side and even evil, I know it to be the flip side of good and can possibly choose to react with love and not from fear. 

Knowing that I have that choice doesn’t mean I do choose well much of the time.  That doesn’t necessarily make the unpleasant and bad things any better.  It doesn’t mean I like things that seem wrong.  My shoulder still hurts.  Injustice it appears is no less than it was.  Wars unfortunately still continue.  As Anne Lamott says in her book, “Stitches”:

“… a reasonable person can’t help thinking how grotesque life is.  It can so suck, to use the theological term.”  (I like that writing style.)

We experience both the good and bad; the desired and the undesired.  And I think we have both a good side and a bad side within each of us. Yet we as total beings are greater than either one and have a richer existence.

I have come to believe God did create absolutely everything.  God made all.  God is in everything, including me and you.  God is compassion and justice, peace and joy, but also within the totality that is God is included the hate and fear, and injustice we see expressed in our world.  And just as our good and bad sides don’t make up our total being, so for God these two sides together are a greater totality.  And in that totality I understand God as love.  This is a God who is within me, who made me, who knows all about me, and who can accept and love all of me; the good, the bad, and in between.   

In recognizing both good and evil, and by choosing what paths bring out my best side, I have a fuller experience in God.   I can choose to be and live in congruence with the highest self I can envision in spite of things happening to me or around me that I don’t like or understand. Or, as is often true for me, I can choose not to.  If I choose to live in the love and the light of the great I Am, and if I am granted grace to achieve that choice, I believe it will lead me to live in a way that is closer to union with God.   There I can find peace, in spite of all the tumult and trouble around and in me.  And from that place I find I don’t really need to forgive God at all.

 

htiaF

sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 49:1-7   John 1:29-42

Someone once told me that you can tell a lot about a person by the bumper stickers they have on the back of their cars.  And I think that’s true.  Around here, I have seen many, many OBX stickers which I found very confusing.  After I finally figured out that those letters stood for the Outer Banks, I realized that it seems to be a point of pride for those drivers to let people know that they have visited the coast of North Carolina.

There are also a lot of cars that sport stickers proclaiming a certain political bent or try to send a message about certain issues.  That’s a bit more interesting to me, but to be honest, they don’t really make much of a mark on my thinking (unless I particularly disagree with them).  And then there are the cars that seem to be covered with slogans….  They can make for interesting reading when I stuck at a stop light for a while, but the sheer number of them do tend to take something away from the power of any one statement. 

Some of my favorites have been the “Tolerance” sticker that has a different religious symbol for each letter, the ones that say “Seek Peace and Pursue It,” the Ixthus and the Darwin fish kissing, and the one that we have on the back of our blue car that says “When Jesus said, ‘love your enemies,’ he probably meant don’t kill them.”

I am also taken by truly clever stickers like the one I first saw when I was 22.  It says, “Visualize Whirled Peas” (and I think Sue and Terry have one on their car).  When I saw that one, I stared at it for about five minutes and I still didn’t get it.  My friends laughingly told me to say it out loud.  I did … visualize whirled peas …, and I was still at a loss until one of them explained it to me…. (visualize world peace).

But a couple of days ago, I saw one that said, “America Bless God.”  It wasn’t the first time that I have seen that particular sticker, but they do seem to be few and far between.  Every time I see one, it sets my mind on the same track.  First I wonder how can anyone (let alone a whole country) could bless God?  And then, I reflect on how nice it is to have assumptions turned on their head so that we come to understand our thought habits and how they may be leading us astray.

 

The two scriptures that we heard today spark the same two thoughts.  In the first case, I find myself asking John the Baptist, “Really?!?  You really want us to believe that you did not know who Jesus was?”  They were cousins after all, and even more telling than that – John jumped for joy as he recognized the Messiah while he was still in the womb.  How could he honestly say (as he does twice in just a few sentences) “Here is the lamb of God who takes away [sin]! … I myself did not know him….”  It’s just a little bit hard to believe….  But I suppose John might have meant that he didn’t know who the Messiah would be until he saw the Spirit rest on him.

Isaiah’s words, on the other hand, are a good deal more intriguing….  “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity….  And now the Lord says, … “it is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations….”

The first part of that seems perfectly normal to me (if prophetic life can be normal).  Isaiah wrote in Jerusalem during the second half of the 8^th century BCE.  During that time, the part of Israel that had maintained its independence was under threat from the Assyrian Empire which had expanded to absorb Syria and Palestine.  Part of the story of that expansion included a war fought by local kings against Jerusalem because they refused to join a coalition for resistance.

During the following decades, the conflict moved back and forth around Israel and Jerusalem as the empire quelled rebellions.  Eventually, Jerusalem was put directly under siege, and though it was never taken by the Assyrians, it only remained free for a relatively short time before the Babylonians came along and sent Israel’s leadership into exile.

Isaiah’s calling was to serve as prophet to the king and country during this uncertain time – a king and country that largely ignored his words.  He understood himself to be responsible (though it was not for lack of effort or words that spoke too weakly).  He expressed his sense of despair about the future he saw coming and his own failure with those words – words that are not so different from things that I have thought myself at times.  So, I do feel like I can understand what he must have been feeling as he lamented his “wasted” effort.

 

God’s response, though … God’s responsive is surprising.  Isaiah comes with the weight of failure dragging him down, and God does not criticize him.  God doesn’t even offer words of encouragement and send him back out to keep plugging away….    No, God turns around and gives him an even bigger task to work on.  God seems to trust Isaiah beyond reason.  God has faith in the prophet, and she gives him the most important work that he could have.  “You’re thinking too small,” she says. “Don’t worry about the wayward people of Israel.  I am sending you as a light to the nations.  Go and bring the news of salvation to all my children.”

 

I don’t know about you, but that is not the kind of message that I get when I am unable to complete a task.  No one has ever responded to my failures by giving me even more important, more challenging work.  I certainly don’t do that with other people.  When my children are struggling with something at home or at school, I may set them to work on the same thing again (so that they can learn to master that particular skill), but I do not respond to badly broken eggs by setting Sebastian loose on a soufflé!  That’s just not how things work … at least in my experience.

 

I did know one man who had something of the same experience.  He was a medical student at the hospital in Indianapolis – one of the rare professionals there who asked to speak with the chaplains – and he had screwed up on one of his first hands-on surgeries.  It wasn’t a big surgery, and it wasn’t a serious error (not life threatening or anything like that).  But he was sure that he was going to get told off in a big way by his supervisor when they reviewed the case.

“It didn’t happen like that, though,” he told me.  “Dr. Francks didn’t yell at me at all.  He just sat down and asked me what happened.  I told him what I had been thinking and how I had cut the wrong artery before I even realized I had the wrong one.  He said, ‘all of us make mistakes like that sometimes.  Don’t worry about it.  There was no lasting harm done.’  Then he told me that he wanted me to take charge of the emergency splenectomy that had just come into the ER.”

It was an unexpected assignment after his last mistake, and as I listened to the young surgeon, I discovered that he had been less anxious going into the operating room that second time.  He hadn’t ever done a routine splenectomy before … let alone an emergency removal, but the faith that Dr. Francks had shown in him encouraged and studied him.  And that surgery (which was a complete success) gave him a sense of confidence and self-worth that he had been lacking.

 

God’s response was an amazing reversal, too.  It turns the way we usually think of as faith around … makes it about God’s faith in Isaiah … in us …  instead of our faith in God.  It goes beyond trust earned or confidence justified.  And these scriptures tell me two things.  Often … maybe most of the time, we don’t understand how God is working around us … not really … not clearly.  And, God has a faith in us that we do not have in ourselves.

Perhaps it was just coincidence that Carrie went off lectionary last week to talk about accepting and embracing our own imperfect struggles for perfection.  Perhaps it was what a friend of mine calls a “God-incidence” – the working of the Spirit among us in ways that we don’t perceive until after the fact.  Either way, her message to us is confirmed by these readings today.

 

You can tell a lot about a person by how they decorate their cars.  And you can tell even more about them by how they choose to live their lives … how they treat people … what they do and how they respond to success and failure….

 

All of us, here, have chosen to live lives that follow Christ.  Many of us have felt calls to particular works of service.  Most of us have failed along the way.

 

Take comfort from Isaiah.  You are chosen ... just as he was.  You are loved.  You are wonderful.  God has faith in you.

Waking to the Light

sermon by Torin Eikler
Isaiah 60:1-6   Matthew 2:1-12

Have you ever had a “wake up call”? … A moment when you realize that something about your life needs to change? 

I had a little one just this past week while we were visiting with Carrie’s family in Illinois.  As usual, I took a book along with me to the farm….  You know, to enjoy reading in the quiet evenings when the children were asleep and there was no housework to do.  But as often happens, I didn’t even get around to pulling it out of my bag.

It wasn’t that I was busy with family plans or that the children had sleeping issues that kept me occupied.  I simply got caught up in watching movies and football games and the odd game of solitaire on the computer … and the free time got used up.  It’s the sort of thing that often seems to happen when I’m on vacation.
 

When I got home, I found an email notification from the library that the book was overdue which wouldn’t really have been a problem except … except that this is the third or fourth time that I have gotten a notice like that for this same book.  I have been checking it out, renewing it, returning it, and checking it out again for about five months now … and I’m only about halfway through.   And I realized as I read that message that it’s not the book or my schedule that have made the reading take so long.  I have simply been spending too much time … wasting too much time in front of the TV and the computer. 
 

So, I have made a resolution this year to watch less and play less and read more.  Not such a momentous change, I’ll grant you, but I hope that it helps to engage my mind and add richness to my days.

 

I have a friend who had a much more significant wake up call.  Ryan and I both moved into North Manchester in seventh grade.  As the two new kids we developed a friendship quickly.  He and I and one other boy, Tim, became a tight-knit threesome.  We had many of the same classes.  We were in band together.  And we all played on the tennis team in high school.  Outside of our school activities, we spent a lot of time together as well, and our conversations ranged across all of the major topics of world events, religion, cultural issues and the less weighty subjects that tend to occupy the High School mind.

When we all went to the same college, our friendship and our conversations continued.  After college, though, our paths went separate ways.  Tim and I both went into Brethren Volunteer Service.  Ryan went out to do his Mormon mission.

 

Let me be clear that I had and have no judgmental feelings about the Church of Latter Day Saints.  I have known many members of that faith, and I have found them to be good people for the most part.  If they are different from the rest of us, in my experience it is only because on the whole they tend to be kinder and healthier than the average American.
 

If you have met Mormons on mission, I am sure that it has probably been when you have answered your door and unsuspectingly found two young men dressed in black pants and white shirts with name tags on their chest, questions in their eyes, and backpacks full of The Book of Mormon.  These young men spend a year walking the streets of cities and town across the country knocking on doors, sharing their faith, and inviting others to join them.  At least that is how it is supposed to work.  Typically, I expect, they spend a good deal more time walking and knocking and less time sharing since many people prefer not to answer the door when they see who it is.

Ryan’s experience was somewhat different.  He did his mission in Korea, and in preparation he through nine months of intensive study, learning language and customs and delving more deeply into the teachings of the church.  Thus equipped, he spent two years in Korea where he walked the streets, knocked on doors, and shared his faith.

The first Christmas after he returned, the three of us got together to catch up.  As usual, we feel back into each other’s company easily, and we chatted easily about the past.  Eventually, we got around to sharing stories of the past few years, and that’s when I noticed the change.  Ryan was much more guarded than he had been about his thoughts.  As he shared, we discovered that he had exchanged up his long-held political aspirations for a desire to return to less developed world and join in his church’s development and assistance work.  Visiting so many different homes, experiencing a different kind of hospitality, and seeing so many different kinds of need had birthed a new passion in his heart.  He had, as he put it, “woken up and seen the light.”  It had changed him … changed the meaning of his life, and he was committed to following where the light led.

 

Three other men who followed a light are celebrated around the world every year on this Sunday.  The official name of the day is Epiphany – a celebration of the revelation of Christ to the world.  In many places it’s called Three Kings Day – a much more direct name for recognizing the gift-bearing visitors from the East.

The holiday includes all different kinds of traditions ranging from small shoes placed outside the door for treats to special cakes with prizes baked right in to parades with elaborate floats.  However the day is marked, it focuses on the arrival of the three kings (or, more accurately, three wise men) who traveled for years to find and worship the new king that was born in Bethlehem.  We honor them and remember their gifts, and then we leave them behind as we move on out of the Christmas season and into the new year.

I have been wondering this year how their lives changed.  Here were three wise men who watched the skies and read prophesies and noticed that something big was happening.  That doesn’t make them particularly notable though … nothing worth the celebrations they receive each year.  There were many, many other such men scattered around the ancient world – men who were very learned and whose knowledge had earned them fame and riches.  They were part of a group that practiced an art that was ancient before the time of Moses – a group that studied prophesies and the movements of the heavens in order to divine the future, and there would have been others who would have read the same signs and reached the same conclusions as these three. 

No, it wasn’t their knowledge or insight that made them special.  It was the fact that they made the journey.  None of the others packed up and trekked off to Bethlehem, but these three did.  Something shook them out of their everyday lives.  Something woke them up to the great transformation that was coming into the world, and they dropped everything else that they were doing.  They left behind all their other work.  They left behind their homes and their families (perhaps even their kingdoms if they really were kings).  And they followed the star rising in the West. 

I have trouble understanding how or why they would have done that.  It seems unbelievable that they would have left so much behind simply to discover if their predictions were true – even when those predictions pointed to an event that might transform the world.  I don’t think I would have done it, not without a greater sense of certainty.  But then again, my passion lies with my family, the needs close at hand, and our lives together.  Perhaps their passions had a greater scope and that’s what led them to undertake their quest.

Whatever their reasons, these three extraordinary men followed the light of the star and discovered the baby Jesus … and wonder.  I can’t imagine that they went back to their homes unchanged.  They had traveled for years.  They had been invited into the humble home of the greatest king to walk the earth.  They had heard the voice of God speaking to them.  Their lives must have been different … richer.  I imagine that as they looked around them with a sense of fresh wonder in their wise old eyes, as they saw the world in a new and different way, I imagine they felt like they had finally woken up.

 

We don’t have a star to wake us up.  We don’t need one.  That time is over and gone, and the light shining over Christ’s birth has faded away.  But the light of Christ’s life and teachings still shines into the world, calling us to live differently.  Calling us to love our enemies and forgive.  Calling us to care for the poor, the sick, and those around us living on the edge.  Calling us to a different set of passions and priorities – to a different way of living than is taught by the world around us.

Many of us have lived our entire lives bathed in that light.  We have heard the stories of Jesus life again and again.  We have listened to Sunday School teachers and preachers talk about the teachings of Christ every Sunday.  We have been encouraged over and over to leave behind the habits of the world and follow the call to live differently.  And it has all become unremarkable – become no more than the background of our lives – because it has always been there.  Living in the light of the good news – immersed in the promise of Christ’s love – we don’t see the wonder of it all very well.

We move in and out of Christmas, celebrating the coming of the light of life, but we are not moved by it all very often.  We enjoy the gatherings of family and friends … the sharing of gifts … the singing of hymns in candlelight.  And then we put away the decorations and return to our day-to-day living without much having changed.

I think that we (all of us) could use something of a “wake up call” – something to retune our senses so that we can see the light anew.  Or maybe we don’t need anything to wake us up.  Maybe we just need to rediscover a sense of passion. 

Passion called the wise men to the journey. 
 

Passion moved Ryan to embrace the needs of people living half a world away.
 

Passion once inspired each of us to embrace the commitment of discipleship.

Let us make a resolution this year – each one of us … and all of us together.  Let us recommit ourselves to fully embracing the promise of Christ’s new way of living … to exploring what it really means for our lives … to taking it in and living it out.  Maybe, in the process, we’ll find ourselves kneeling before the Christ child and we will arise changed and awakened to joy and wonder.