Sermon 1: "God’s New Thing"
Text: Isaiah 43:14-21

This week I was at a clergy meeting where one of the pastors talked about his "evaluation." It was more like a firing squad. Eight people in his church sat facing him in a row firing accusations at him. The first one said this: "After you saw my mother in the hospital and she went home, you didn’t visit her again for 70 days."

"Did you let me or anyone know you wanted me to visit?" he asked.

"No. But she’s lonely. You should have known that," the daughter replied.

"Didn’t the church folks come by and sing Christmas carols to your mother, and didn’t the Deacons send a card saying they were thinking of her?" asked the minister.

"Yes, but she expected a call from the pastor."

This little interaction reveals a world of assumptions about what it means to be a Christian, what it means to be the church, and how we humans relate to God. Let me illustrate.

(As the boldface objects that follow are named, they are drawn into the illustration. Click on the illustration to enlarge.)

The woman’s operating assumption is that being a Christian primarily means belonging to a church (A).

When you belong to a church, you share a set of beliefs, a history, and relationships with the other members (B).

But central to the life of the church is the pastor (C), ideally a male authority figure, who serves as the main intermediary between the people and God. God (D) is "The Man upstairs." He’s in heaven somewhere looking down on us, but we can’t see Him or experience Him very directly. But we can see and experience the minister, so the minister plays the role of a godly person--a little higher than humans, dressed up in a robe, preaching down from the pulpit on Sundays. What the preacher preaches about is the Word, and the Word of God is found in between the covers of the Bible (E), which is understood primarily as a book of laws, rules, and blueprints for godly living. If we follow God’s rules and laws, we will fulfill our ultimate purpose, which is to live with God in heaven some day. According to this theology, Jesus’ death on the cross (F) makes salvation and heaven possible. God is so holy and righteous that our humanness and sin are detestable to Him. God’s righteousness demands that we die and burn in hell (G) forever for our sins. So Jesus’ death is seen as satisfying God’s demand for punishment. Because Jesus died for our sins, we don’t have to. Though we are filled with sin, Jesus presents us as blameless before the heavenly throne of judgment. According to this understanding, faith consists in believing that Jesus has paid the price for our sins. The primary proper attitude of a true Christian is guilt and shame. Because nothing we can do can ever make up for the suffering Jesus endured for our sins, and because we always have sin in us, we can never really feel enough shame or repent enough. But living a godly, pure and righteous life shows that we are being cleansed of our sin. Those who fail to uphold standards of godliness or who show too much freedom in their lives are looked on as unrepentant sinners.

The pastor’s job in this model is to impart this knowledge and faith to the people through preaching and teaching, administering the sacraments, and calling on the sick and bereaved and lonely to keep their connection to God alive. The people’s job is to support the church through their contributions and through their work on boards and committees.

But the people aren’t powerless. They exercise their power as control of the resources. They control the money and budget. They control the building (and the sacred cows that never get thrown away or changed). They control the people--who is really made to feel welcome, and who is ignored or gossiped about. And they ultimately control the pastor, by their votes or by their cooperation or opposition.

Mission is seen as setting up new churches (H) in non-Christian lands, beginning with a pastor and a building, using the same basic model.

If you grew up in the 1950's or before, this will all sound very familiar to you, and in some ways very comfortable. In this confusing world of relativism, hedonism and secularism, this understanding of reality is reassuringly straightforward, simple and orderly. It’s easy to find our place in it and it clearly spells out what’s right and wrong, who’s in and who’s out with God.

I am not saying this picture is wrong or untrue. But it sets limits on God and limits on us that can leave us feeling empty, shallow and dry. The limits come not from the Bible, but from interpreting the Bible through the rationalism and patriarchal mind set of the European culture of the past. This mind set separates and structures reality into distinct, hierarchical entities.

It separates the pastor from the people as a different species of person, it separates us from the loving, creative part of ourselves that God created in God’s own image, and it separates us from people whose beliefs or morality or life view is different from ours.

It is the same mind set of separation that allows us to rape and plunder the very earth that sustains us, to divide the world into haves and have nots, to enrich our pockets while impoverishing our very souls.

Listen again to the Word of God that came to Isaiah:

Do not remember the former things,
or consider the things of old.
I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert. . . .
to give drink to my chosen people . . .
so that they might declare my praise.

God has been doing a new thing. The living waters of renewal have been springing forth, even right here in our church.

One way that new life began springing forth was that we began to perceive God differently. It seems like God came out of heaven, where God loomed stern and distant, and began appearing to us up close and personal, in our own longings and hopes, in our own private places of pain and need, in our own deep stirrings of gratitude and generosity, in our mysterious connections to other creatures and to creation. Author and healer Stephen Levine expressed it this way:

There is in all our striving a profound homesickness for God. When we touch another we touch God. When we look at a flower, the radiance, the fragrance, the stillness is another moment’s experience of something deeper within. When we hold a baby, when we hear extraordinary music, when we look into the eyes of a great saint, what draws us is that deep homesickness for our true nature, for the peace and healing that is our birthright. This homesickness for God directs us toward the healing we took birth for, the coming into pure being that out of a poverty of language we describe as God. . . .

However, in a sense there is no such thing as "going home to God." We are already in the living room. All we need do is sit comfortably in the chair that awaits us. Or, as my wife, Ondrea, put it, "The arms of the mother are always around you. All you need do is put your head on her shoulder."

This experience of the closeness of God was anticipated 2000 years ago in the book of Revelation. In John’s vision, he said,

I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,
"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes. . . ."
And the one who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new. . . .I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life" (Rev. 21:3-6).

So the living waters of God’s new thing began to flow as God showed us that in the essence of things, we are not separated from God (I) at all. God is not only infinitely beyond us, but also deeply within us. God permeates all of creation. God is not just the authoritative Father, but also the life-birthing Mother.

We have realized that our calling is not to fear God as much as to trust God in all things. God showed us that our most essential nature is not original sin, but original blessedness, because God has created us in the divine image and endowed us with the divine capacity for love, wisdom, and creative power. We have discovered that our sin does not cause God to seek our shame and punishment as much as our repentance, healing and growth. Our flesh and our feelings are not evil, but gifts, when the totality of our being is humbly brought into submission to the rule of love.

Hell is not so much a barbecue pit of eternal torture, as the state of being separated from God, from our true selves, from our deep purpose, and from our capacity for Love. Jesus’ death on the cross saves us from our sinfulness, not because he died in our place, but because his death graphically shows us the sacrificial, suffering, persistent, and gracious love of God, and breaks our hearts open to receive that love, so that we can embody that love for each other. So in the Cross (J) we see both the infinite height and depth and breadth of divine love that embraces all creation and suffers for its sinfulness.

We began to see that the Bible (K) is not so much a book of rules and blueprints, as a sacred story of God working in human history, creating, calling, redeeming, and renewing humanity. The story that is depicted in the Bible is a story that continues (L) to this day.

The Church (M) is a community of people who meet at the heart of the cross, where their need for God and God’s love intersect. The people in this church don’t strive to demonstrate a super-human righteousness and purity. They come as they are, with their hungers, doubts, their failures, and their sins. But as they open their hearts and their lives to the redeeming love of God revealed in the life and death of Jesus Christ, they find their story in the ongoing story of God’s work of calling, redeeming and renewing humanity. Little by little, they let their identities and lives be shaped by this love. They help unwrap each others’ gifts and discern God’s purpose for their lives. And they find God’s Spirit (N) mysteriously present, uniting them, embracing them, empowering them. They find that they are living in the kin-dom of God.

The pastor (O) is not a superhuman person who somehow embodies godliness, as much as a facilitator who helps the people discover for themselves the power and reality of God’s Holy Spirit.

Mission and ministry is not something we pay someone else to do, but something that we do as we embody Christ’s truth and love and carry them (P) into our homes and work places and communities. We realize that when we pray "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," we are an essential part of the answer to that prayer. When we become partners with God in extending God’s realm into the world. John’s vision in the book of Revelation is indeed fulfilled:

"See, the home of God is among mortals.
He will dwell with them as their God;
they will be his peoples,
and God himself will be with them;
he will wipe every tear from their eyes. . . ."
And the one who was seated on the throne said, "Behold, I make all things new. . . .I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life" (Rev. 21:3-6).

God is indeed doing a new thing, even now, even here, even in us! Let us become God’s powerful partners in making all things new as we sing the prayer that Jesus, our example and our guide, taught us.

(The Lord’s Prayer is sung.)