| Sermon for Sunday, January 30, 2005 IS GOD UP THERE OR HERE WITH US?4th in a series on The Heart of Christianity; What is the Christian Life All About? By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz 1st service in new building Scripture: John 4:7-24 A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink." 8 (His disciples had gone to the city to buy food.) 9 The Samaritan woman said to him, "How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?" (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus answered her, "If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, "Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water." 11 The woman said to him, "Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water? 12 Are you greater than our ancestor Jacob, who gave us the well, and with his sons and his flocks drank from it?" 13 Jesus said to her, "Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, 14 but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life." 15 The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water." 16 Jesus said to her, "Go, call your husband, and come back." 17 The woman answered him, "I have no husband." Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, "I have no husband'; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" 19 The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." 21 Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." We received an interesting inquiry last Monday from our web site. A woman wrote us asking if we could send her our church’s statement of faith. That desire for a creed or statement of faith has been a curious question for Methodist people for over 200 years ever since old John Wesley started this renewal movement called Methodism. He would hear from many people that same desire to put together a system of doctrine, a creed or statement of beliefs and Wesley always, always refused and would point them to the ancient statements of the early church – The Apostle’s Creed or the Nicene Creed, both of which are in the back of your hymnal. And interestingly enough, they are in the hymnal along with several other creeds and belief statements. What this means is that we are not a creedal church and that after the basic affirmations common to all Christians, Father Wesley believed in letting people think and let think, have the freedom of conscience, and he was much more interested in whether people were being changed by their relationship with God – being born again – and becoming passionate disciples of Christ than in whether people all had the same beliefs and the right doctrines. Wesley also was willing to let people have questions as they explored the Christian life and was able to let people be seekers and even have some doubts because for Methodists, doubt is not an enemy of faith but part of our process of making our faith our own. I am reading a recent book by Phil Yancey, an evangelical writer who has left the rigid faith he was raised with and is able to affirm the heart of his evangelical faith and still have openness and flexibility. He says in his book about God that the church should never treat doubt as an enemy and that once he was asked, as a writer, to sign a statement of faith from a publication that he writes for often-Christianity Today. He was asked to sign that statement “without doubt or equivocation”. He wrote them back saying he could barely sign his own name without doubt or equivocation!! We could say that part of our Methodist approach is that questions are always welcomed in our spiritual journey and we will hear that again in the music from the Men’s Quartet when the Ken Medema song says that this has to be a place for questions as well as for laughter and tears and all of our human feelings. I felt in some dilemma last Monday in offering an appropriate response to the e-mail inquiry so what we did was to send a copy of the first sermon in our current series – copies of these are still available on the foyer table – and to send a little pamphlet done by Dr. Jim Moore of one of our large churches in Texas that says three things about the Methodist people: 1) We are a church that touches the heart and stretches the mind. 2) We are a church that accepts people as they are yet challenges us to be better. 3) We are a church that gathers to worship and then scatters to serve. I did that because we were in a rush this week and also because, I must confess, my experience has been that folks who want to nail down a church’s exact doctrines have a really different view of the Christian life than Methodists do, namely that being a Christian is a matter of believing and assenting to the right things instead of living the transformed life that Christ came to offer us. Now I hope what I just said sounds familiar to you because this is exactly what our discussion has been over the past few weeks as we have looked at the theme in this best selling book on the Heart of Christianity that has 600 people reading this book right now and 450 of them in small groups meeting weekly for dialogue and study and prayer – a phenomenon that would make father Wesley VERY, VERY proud of this congregation! What I could have done with the e-mail inquiry if I had more time this past week would have been to say what Dr. Borg says so far in our reading (the books are available on the book rack if you have not had a chance to get one yet): there are several things that all Christians have in common whether they are in the right wing of the theological spectrum or toward the center or progressive end of the theological spectrum: those common elements are that the Bible is central for all of us— we talked more last week about how mainline Christians differ from Biblical literalism. Another core affirmation is that Jesus is central for us and that we are engaged in being transformed and reborn by our relationship to Christ. That is the topic for next weeks sermon so I won’t say much now except that the Jesus I am passionate about is not the warrior Jesus of the Left Behind books or the otherworldly, the meek and mild Jesus of some traditions that has little basis in scripture, but the subversive Jesus who is teacher and healer and risen savior and who still challenges people’s conventional, shallow religion just as he did 2000 years ago. And of course the third core element of our faith has to do with our relationship to God. There are probably as many different notions of God here today as there are people in the room. Many of us have been more influenced by the philosophers’ picture of God than we have by some of the Bible images of God. It is the god of philosophy that is the unmoved mover, the one who knows all and sees all and is unchanging and all-powerful. But when we read the Bible carefully we see some differences. We see a God who says in Genesis 6 after being upset about the bad behavior of God’s creatures, ”If I had known it would turn out this way, I never would have created these folks. I think I will just start over.” So this God starts over by choosing a righteous man whose name was Noah to build an ark and escape the approaching flood. And the God of the Bible is really engaged with God’s people and is willing to argue with Abraham and with Moses and this God is willing to negotiate in those arguments and change an opinion or a plan based on those passionate arguments. But the key theme in this chapter we are looking at is whether we think God is some supernatural person, male person, who lives far away from us somewhere up in space/heaven, or whether we see God as a spirit who is more than a being but who is the “one in whom we live and move and have our being”. That phrase about God is directly from the Bible and we will look at it more closely in a moment. The question about God can be like this: is there something larger than just us and our world, one who has brought all of us into being and from whom we come and to whom we return and to whom we are accountable and one who wants the best for us and is at work often through us, to bring about good and hope and light and peace? Is that closer to your notion of God? Or do you see God as a finger-shaking judge? Or do you see God as writer Ann Lamott did – a scowling high school principal who is constantly going through your school files looking for mistakes – or God as a middle school teacher giving out grades based on your misbehavior? Do you see God as the bearded old man in the sky painted by Michelangelo who started all this universe into motion and has left us on our own? Do you see God as a cosmic puppeteer who looks at the creation and decides who he will send cancer to this day, or where he should plan for the next Tsunami to strike? Dr. Borg tells about the ideas of God that many Christians no longer believe in and he says that often a student in his religion classes at Oregon State University will tell him with an embarrassed pause that he or she does not believe in God and Borg will say, “Tell me about the god you do not believe in and it is probably the god that I don’t believe in also.” What we mean when we talk about God is the loving, seeking parent figure that Jesus shows best to us, and one American minister said it this way: “God is defined by Jesus but God is not confined to Jesus.” We get nudges and evidence of God in many ways – most of them subtle and gradual instead of lightning bolt experiences, though if you have had lightning bolt experiences I am happy for you. Poet T S Eliot said it this way:
When have you had some of those hints and guesses and nudges in your life – experiences when you felt closer to God, or as Dr. Borg says, even times when you felt addressed by God? This is a risky thing to talk about because the popular notion of people who have heard God “speak” to them is that they are a little wacky and we are suspicious of them. I can talk about a few times like that. One was my first time in Jerusalem about seven years ago. We have been in the city three days and I was just in awe. It was late May and the weather was very hot and we all carried our large water bottles with us everywhere we went. Still I found myself thirsty all the time. On that third day we had walked on a stone path to the remains of the high priest’s residence where Jesus would have been taken for a mock trial before he was executed. The path was the original one and was the place where he likely would have walked. We had also gone to the western wall of the temple mount, the original foundation that some today call the “wailing wall”. It is the wall that Jesus would have seen 2000 years ago. And we had gone onto the Temple Mount itself where the Jewish Temple would have been that Jesus would have known. That building was destroyed 40 years after Jesus died and what stands there now is a mosque called the Dome of the Rock, but the site is the same and the temple Jesus would have worshiped in was on that same site. During the night after that important day, I woke up and could not get back to sleep and thought to read in my Bible for a bit. I did something that I never recommend people do –I opened the Bible to wherever it fell and read the first thing I saw and what I saw was Psalm 63, which begins:
I did not have to read much more to be persuaded of God’s incredible presence and that Psalm has become very important for me ever since then. I can think of another time during the night when I felt close to God –and this is a risky thing to talk about also because in a dream once I heard some words that woke me up and stayed with me. It is a phrase that I had heard before but it seemed this time like an address from God. The phrase is “Nothing can happen through you that is not happening to you.” It means that you and I cannot be instruments of God’s peace and love for others unless we are always open to God ourselves. It means for every Christian and especially for spiritual leaders that unless we are taking time for prayer and worship and study in our own lives, that we cannot be channels of God – “instruments of God’s peace” to quote St Francis, for other people. I can tell about the birth of each of my children as a time when we felt we were on holy ground – times when we felt especially close to God. I can talk about the death of each of my parents as a time when I felt God’s presence and God’s close guidance in my life. And I can tell about the last five weeks or so in this congregation as a time when I have just felt the spirit of God on the move, when the energy and momentum, the enthusiasm are higher and more tangible than in any other church I have ever been in during my 35 years of ministry. I feel like God is really at work not only in our move but in the phenomenon of so many people studying and conversing and growing and praying together about what is at the heart of Christianity. And I felt close to God last Sunday as 500 of us walked from our old building to this building and over 700 of you gathered to pray and sing and read scripture to bless this place. Many of you have felt that also because you have told us. What I mean by God is the spirit we have been feeling together and the openness and excitement that are so real and visible in our midst. And this is so true to one of the other ways the Bible talks about God. God often, very, very often becomes known to us through other people. This is how it was for father Abraham who found that when he entertained two strangers that he was in the presence of angels representing God. And we can be agents of God’s spirit also if we open our lives to the spirit of God. This is what we ask for every Sunday, isn’t it? We ask in our benediction for God’s light to be present in us, for God’s spirit to shine through us and our deeds and relationships, so that others who see us will not just see us but will see God in us. There are two other Bible stories that tell us about the God that is more than just up there somewhere. In the story from John’s gospel, Jesus is having a conversation with a woman at the well in Samaria. He is talking about her life and when he gets a little too honest with her she changes the subject as we often do when something gets a little close. She wants to talk about God and where the Jews and Samaritans each worship God – each group worships in a different place. Jesus says something important for us on our first Sunday in a new space. He says, God can be worshiped anywhere, that God is not confined to one space or another, and that God is spirit, not confined to one place or the other – or, implied in this conversation with a Samaritan to one religion or another!! The last story that is important for us is about the other most influential leader in the early church, Paul the apostle. Paul on his second missionary journey to Greece and Turkey he finds himself in Athens. He is walking around the city and seeing all the altars and statues dedicated to all the Greek gods and goddesses. He is asked by the Athenians to speak to them because, the book of Acts says, the Greeks were always interested in hearing about the latest idea and the latest fad! Paul tells them he sees that they are very religious because he has seen all the various altars around the city. He has seen one that was dedicated to an unknown god and he says he wants to talk with them about that God. And then he says something that this chapter in Dr. Borg’s book just echoes loudly: Paul says God does not live in buildings or shrines made by us; God is bigger than that. And God has created us so we want to search for God and when we search we find that God is not far away at all, that God is very close. In fact, it is in God “that we live and move and have our being”. Paul says to them and to us, do you want to see God? Just look around you. God is here. Look at each other. Look at God’s creation. Just look, and you will see God. Amen. |
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