Why God?

This is the sermon I gave at First Congregational Church of Maltby on Sunday, August 28, 2016.

Why God?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

August 28, 2016

Scripture: Jeremiah 4:4-13

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

You know, sometimes when I read the lectionary selections for a particular Sunday my first reaction is to ask: "Who dealt this mess?" Well, that wasn't my reaction to this passage we just heard from Jeremiah, although some of my colleagues at the lectionary study group I attend thought it should be. So sure, the Jeremiah text comes to us from a very long time ago, around the year 586 BCE during the final Babylonian siege of Jerusalem that led to the Babylonian exile of the Hebrew people. Sure, it speaks of the biblical history of people quite different from us, and that history is even older than the setting of the verse itself in the sixth century BCE. Sure, it speaks of what our English translation calls "the LORD," by which it means not Jesus but the god the Hebrew people called Yahweh. It speaks of that god freeing the people and settling them in Canaan. It speaks of those people turning away from Yahweh and worshiping a Canaanite god named Baal instead. And of course I know perfectly well that God hasn't led me or us out of Egypt, at least not literally. I've never lived in Canaan, at least not literally. I've never worshiped Baal, at least not literally. None of those things applies to me and I assume not to you, at least not literally. Still, this passage spoke to me this week. How it did is what I want to talk to you about this morning.

Our passage from Jeremiah begins with that god Yahweh saying to the people: "What fault did your fathers find in me, that they strayed so far from me?" (NIV) I can just hear God groaning: What did I ever do to drive them away? I brought them up out of slavery in Egypt. I kept them alive through the wilderness. I gave them a rich land to live in. Yet they turned from me. Their leaders don't know me and have rebelled against me. They turned to that false god Baal instead. My people have turned from me, the spring of living water, and turned to vessels that will not serve. What in my name did I ever do to them to deserve this? Nothing, that's what. Oy! These people! Whatever am I going to do with them? Well, very nearly wipe them out is what the people decided God did with them, but we'll leave that part of the story for another day.

Now I can hear some of you, or maybe I just hear myself, asking: What does all of that have to do with us? Well, I think it has a lot to do with us, or at least it raises an important issue for us. See, I don't think most people today are all that different from those people back in Jeremiah's day who turned away from God though God had never given them any reason to do it. We live in a highly secular age. We live in an age when untold numbers of people have turned away from God. All the research shows it. The fastest growing group of respondents to surveys about religious faith is the "Nones," the people who say they follow no religious tradition, that they have no particular religious faith. We live in an age of radical scientific rationalism in which our culture says that only facts are true and that if you can't prove it scientifically it isn't true at all. People just don't believe in God the way people used to.

Now, we can sit here and bemoan that reality, but doing that won't change it. It won't really help us do anything. I think a far better approach to that reality than bemoaning it is to try to understand it and how we might respond to it. It results, I think, from two different but in some ways related phenomena. The first is that rationalistic, scientific, fact-based culture that I just mentioned. There really is little or no room for God in that culture. That's a big part of the problem, but there's another part of it too.

See, God has given these people no real reason not to believe in God, but the churches have given people far more than ample reasons not to believe in God. For reasons I can only guess at, the Christian churches have done a bang up job of making both God and the Christian faith appear utterly unconvincing and even repugnant to huge numbers of people today. They have made God and the Christian faith that claims to speak for God rigid, legalistic, judgmental, exclusionary, and even bigoted. They have made Christianity radically anti-intellectual, rejecting the truths of science and ignoring the best theology that is available to them. They condemn people of other faiths. They relegate women to second-class status in the church, the economy, and the culture generally. They call for discrimination against non-Christians. They call for discrimination against people of whose humanity they don't approve. That used to be people of color, and in some circles it still is. Today however it is mostly LGBT people. These nominal Christians reduce the Bible to mere fact and insist that everything in it is factually true. Doing that makes the Bible not just unbelievable but in many aspects abhorrent, but they do it anyway. They condone violence, at least violence of which they approve, which is mostly violence against non-Christian people. They make the faith be all about how you get to heaven when you die rather than about how you live a whole, faithful, meaningful life in this life. If I thought that God were who most Christians make God out to be, I'd have nothing to do with that God. If I thought Christianity were what most Christians make it out to be, I'd have nothing to do with it. I sure wouldn't have devoted my life to it the way I have for nearly the last twenty years.

But see, here's the thing. There are other truths, better truths, that drive in the opposite direction from all of that. The God we know in Jesus Christ is actually nothing like how the most vocal Christians today make God out to be. God may judge like they claim, but God's judgment is always tempered with mercy, compassion, forgiveness, and love. God is love. God doesn't hate anyone. God loves all of God's people. Each and every one of them. God loves Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Baha'i people, secular people, atheistic people, all people. God loves good people and bad people. God is there for everyone. God drives no one away. People turn from God, but God never turns from people--any people.

Jesus isn't who Christianity makes him out to be either. He didn't come to get everyone in the world to believe in him. He came to reveal God's nature and will as love, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. He came to teach us and to show us how God wants us to live. He came to show us that God is with us in unshakable solidarity with us in everything that happens in life, in the good and much more importantly in the bad. Jesus is not someone to whom to give intellectual assent. He is a model of divine life on earth. What a blessing Jesus could be if we would come to see him as the radical voice of God that he actually was rather than the bastion of ordinary culture and ordinary thinking that Christianity so often turns him into.

And there's even more. People today may turn their backs on God, but humans, all of them, need God whether they know it or not. God is the ground of our being and the center of our being. God is the center of the universe and center of each and every person living in it. God is the ultimate reality. God is the only reality that can give life meaning, and we humans are always looking for meaning in our lives and creating it one way or another. Turning to God in worship and prayer grounds us. It centers us. It orients us. It directs us in life and as we approach death. People may turn from God, but they never lose their need for God. They try to fill the void that abandoning God leaves. They fill it with material possessions, drugs, alcohol, wild entertainments, anything that they think will dull the pain and at least cover the hole; and it doesn't work. Only God can do those things for people even when the people don't know it and refuse to recognize the truth of it. Yet our denial blocks God and keeps us from living in the gifts of the Spirit that God always offers.

So why God? Because only God is the source of all goodness, of all good news, of all good thoughts, of all good feelings. Because we need God. We are never truly at peace without God. St. Augustine famously said that our hearts are restless until they rest in God, and he was absolutely right about that. The great tragedy of faith in our time is that God has never given anyone any reason to turn from God, but so many of the people who claim to speak for God have. We can do better. We must do better. We must proclaim Gospel, Good News, not religiosity. We must proclaim love not hate. We must proclaim freedom no legalism. Our faith must give our lives meaning and not just be about what happens when we die. If we will do that, our faith will survive. If we won't, it will die, and it will deserve to die. Can we do it? Will we do it? Time will tell. Amen.