Sermon for, May 21, 2006Is Your God too Small?4th in a series on Spirituality and The Arts By Rev. Dr. Harvey C Martz |
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Scripture: Job 38:1-5; 19-21 in the Good News Translation 1 Then out of the storm the Lord spoke to Job. 2 Who are you to question my wisdom with your ignorant, empty words? 3 Now stand up straight and answer the questions I ask you. 4 Were you there when I made the world? If you know so much, tell me about it. 5 Who decided how large it would be? Who stretched the measuring line over it? Do you know all the answers? 19 Do you know where the light comes from or what the source of darkness is? 20 Can you show them how far to go, or send them back again? 21 I am sure you can, because you're so old and were there when the world was made! God has a way of reminding us that God is bigger than we think. God is broader and larger and wider than our narrow ideas of God. The passage from Job is one reminder in the Bible of how small we think and then what happens to us when our ideas of God have to change. Job has been suffering unfairly. He has become almost a pawn. He has lost his family, his fortune, his health, and he is wondering why. His friends believe he has done something to deserve all this tragedy so their approach is to help him figure out his sin and to ask for forgiveness. They do not believe that such things could happen randomly without someone deserving all this. Job does not accept their theology and what Job wants is an explanation, an audience with God. He gets his wish. He gets his audience and it is more than he thought it would be. In some ways the book of Job is not a very satisfactory answer to the problem of suffering. Job wants to talk to God about his tragedies. God appears to Job in chapters 38-40 and what God essentially says is: Who do you think you are Job, and how dare you question me? And Job, who has been wanting to talk person to person, if you will, says to God, “Now I see. Thank you very much for your explanation.” And Job gets his fortune back and raises another family and lives happily ever after. There is another reason I chose the story to talk about how small or how large your picture is of God. What impresses me in the way God speaks to Job is that God says: Look at the creation and how magnificent it is and maybe your idea of me has been too limited and too small and too narrow. That is often what happens in the Bible. People have a little notion of God and it gets challenged or even exploded. God is bigger than you think, the Bible says. God is not just the God of people like you. God is bigger than that. When St. Paul is opening his most profound of all his letters, the letter to the congregation in Rome, he begins by saying everyone has had a chance to know God. It is not just people who have heard of Jesus. It is not just the Jews who can know God and experience God. It includes the “pagan” Greeks and gentiles and everyone. We have all had a chance to know God through God’s creation. We understand that. People say that one of the places they feel close to God is in God’s creation! There are other examples in the Bible of people thinking small about God. Jesus is talking to a woman in a Samaritan town in John’s gospel. He asks her for a drink of water. She is surprised for several reasons. They talk a while and he tells her what he knows about her and she changes the subject to religion. She says that we Samaritans worship God on Mt. Gerizim and you Jews worship God in Jerusalem. Jesus says, what is most important is not one place or the other because God is bigger than any place. God is spirit. God is bigger than you think. Even bigger than one religious group or another! How about that other place in John’s gospel where Jesus expands the idea of who belongs in the family of God? More people than you think! He says that he is the good shepherd and he knows his sheep and he has other sheep that are not yet here and we must bring them here so there can be one flock and one shepherd. Or how about when Jesus is in his hometown of Nazareth just as he begins his public ministry and tells the people in his synagogue that maybe they are the chosen people but God has been at work in other people also doing great works and even ignoring the “chosen people”. Do you remember how they respond? They are so offended and angry that they take him out of town to kill him. God is bigger than we think—bigger than our group, our party, our nation, our race, our religion. It is we who so often forget that and try to make God into something small. The two ministers from different churches were arguing about their respective faiths. One finally said, “Let’s just do this. You worship God in your way and I will worship God in God’s way.” That is just a joke but there is a tragically true quote from a denominational executive a few years back who really did say, “God does not hear the prayer of a Jew.” That must have been quite a surprise of course to Moses and Abraham and Isaiah and David the author of some Psalms. Those folks were all Jews! I heard that same narrowness in the comment recently from one of our members who said that even when she was a child a neighbor (or relative) told her and her family that they were all going to hell because they were not the right kind of religion. This sort of adoption of God for just our group or just our party or just our cause or our country was seen in American history when someone was telling President Abraham Lincoln that surely God is on the side of the Union in the Civil War, and Lincoln who was a mature and thoughtful theologian is reported to have said, “what he was concerned about was whether we were on God’s side.” And Mark Twain just a few years after Lincoln pointed to this desire to make God into a small tribal deity when in his satirical “war prayer”, he began the prayer by approaching God in a pious and humble manner and then prayed for God to help us to perform all sorts of horrible, torturous acts on our enemies, all in the name of a merciful Christ. Speaking of God and prayer and religion and war, one American scholar, Charles Kimball who teaches at Wake Forest University says in a recent book that more wars have been waged, more people killed, more evil perpetrated in the name of religion than by any other institutional force in human history. (Neil Young reminds us of that in the song we will hear in a moment) Kimball tells us that when our image of God is too small and narrow, that enormous harm and destruction can result. And in his book, “When Religion Becomes Evil”, he says religion can be a force for evil when it makes absolute truth claims, encourages blind obedience, and uses any means to justify its ends or goals. Narrow minded religion is dangerous and destructive. Small and tribal notions of God are dangerous and destructive. Jesus keeps helping us see how broad, how welcoming, how gracious, how big God is. Neil Young sings about these questions in his song from a recent album, “When God Made Me”. Let’s listen and then take these questions home with us to pray about. Was he thinkin'
about my country When God made me Was he planning only
for believers When God made me When God made me When God made me Did he give me the
gift of voice When God made me When God made me |
