God with us

Thus says God, the Lord,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spread out the earth and what comes from it,

who gives breath to the people upon it
and spirit to those who walk in it:

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you…

Isaiah 42:5-7

Years ago, when my wife, Natalie, was serving at the Cathedral in Dallas, she was given responsibility for officiating at the Good Friday liturgy.  One form of that liturgy involves a long series of passages from Scripture, collects or prayers to go with each one, and a brief reflection to go with each one as well.  Part way through the liturgy, a man who lived on the street near the Cathedral, made his way down a side aisle, shouting, “Church, Church, I’ve got something to tell you, Church.”

I was sitting in the congregation, and I wondered how Natalie would navigate this situation.  Wisely, she invited the man to speak to the congregation, gently reminding him not to take too long.  Stepping to the front, the man looked at us all, and began by saying, “I know that this is not a testifying church but…”  Those words hung in the air like a punch in the stomach — “I know that this is not a testifying church” — and I instantly thought to myself, “Ouch!”

He went on, however, in a deeply grateful tone, to say that the Cathedral had cared for him during difficult days, and he thanked the congregation for their witness to the love of Christ.

If there is something that Episcopalians find difficult to do, it is talking about our experience with or our relationship to Jesus.  And, in order to address that concern, our parish staff  – both lay and ordained – felt it was important for us as parish staffto speak to our own experiences.

I didn’t want to spend too much time with preliminaries.  But in order to prepare the ground for our series, I felt it was important to make a few observations that I think that all of us should bear in mind when we discuss this dimension of the Christian life:

One, we all believe that encountering the living Christ is central to the Christian faith. 

Jesus is not just a part of history, he is not just a theological subject.  He is the living, resurrected Lord of life, and he invites us into his life and into his reconciling work in the world.

Two, the nature of that relationship varies from person to person. 

There are commonalities, of course.  We believe him to be our living Lord.  We live in dependence upon his mercy, his incarnation, his death, and his resurrection.

But the way in which our journeys take shape varies, depending upon our life’s trajectory and our personalities.  Like some of our evangelical sisters and brothers, we believe that some will experience a crisis and claim Jesus as their savior in the midst of that crisis.

But, unlike our evangelical brothers and sisters, we don’t believe that every Christian has that experience.  Nor do people need to have the same experience.  Some of us were baptized as infants, brought up in the church, and never experienced the kind of alienation that some encounter.

My own experience reflects some of those basic convictions.

I grew up in the church.  I was baptized as an infant in the Methodist Church.  And – though my parents were not particularly articulate theologically – they took me to church every Sunday, along with my brother and sister.

I instinctively believed in the truth of the Apostle’s Creed, which is the Creed that the Methodist Church used, and “Holy, Holy, Holy” – which used to be “number 1” in the Methodist hymnal is etched into my brain.

But if you had asked me about my relationship with Christ, I don’t think that I would have had much to say.  I was sure that it was important to believe the Creed.  We said grace at mealtimes.  And at night, I prayed, “Now I lay me down to sleep.  I pray the Lord my soul to keep, and if I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

But – otherwise – I felt what God wanted wasn’t a relationship with me.  He wanted what my father wanted: a good son, a good student, and a good adult-in-the-making.  And as a first child with a certain bent of mind, that wasn’t hard to absorb.

I was the kid in my class who would have asked, “Can I do extra credit?”  But, truthfully, I didn’t need it.  I graduated fifth in my class behind four girls – all of whom (much to my frustration) had a 4.0 GPA and I agonized over the 3.97 I had.  At my father’s prompting, I joined the Order of DeMolay and acquired more faux French titles than you can imagine. And – because I was injured in two car accidents during my teens, I focused on academic pursuits, winning a small mountain of trophies, giving Optimist Oratorical speeches, debating, and playing chess.

Looking back on those days, I realize that my understanding of what God longed to do in my life was sharply circumscribed by my relationship with my parents (and my father, in particular).  “Work harder” seemed to be a motto that seeped into my bones and I couldn’t imagine God wanting anything else.

It was only the two car accidents and the death of my debate coach in the second of those accidents that forced me to ask, “Is that really all that God wants for me?”  Or, to put it differently, is that all God wants?”

I didn’t experience a crisis of faith.  If you want to call it a crisis, it was a crisis of definition.  But it took me years to address that question, and it was years before I could hear Isaiah’s promise:

I am the Lord, I have called you in righteousness,
I have taken you by the hand and kept you.

I couldn’t even hear what a passage like this is saying.  If I had read it back then, it would have sounded to me as if God had a moral program for me to pursue and he would take me by the hand and correct me along the way.

But the Hebrew means something very different: God doesn’t call us to righteousness.  God’s is righteous, meaning his purposes for us are good, true, and reliable. And it is out of God’s good and reliable nature that he calls us.  Then he takes us by the hand, leads us into abundant life that flows from his righteousness and protects us along the way.

When I realized that this is what God wanted for me, my life began to take a very different direction and my relationship with God became a living, breathing relationship.  Prayer became a conversation.  God became a source of mercy and grace.  And life became an unending journey, not an audition for heaven.

There are so many ways that path could have taken a different direction.  I have friends who never realized that God’s desire for them is good and merciful.  I have friends who never realized that God’s motto is not “try harder” and the effort to try harder crushed them.  I have other friends who think that God is a cosmic cop.  They resented it and their resentment hardened into alienation.  I have friends who concluded that they were unlovable, and they never stepped into that living relationship.  And – as difficult as my relationship with my father could be – I had friends whose parents were so abusive, that they could never see God for who he truly is.

If you belong to any of those groups, I hope that you will pause today to consider the possibility that your God, like the God of my adolescence, is not the God of Scripture or the God of the Christian tradition — but the distorted images in a familial and cultural mirror that cannot be trusted.

I would also urge you remember that there may be other obstacles that have nothing to do with the nature of God but lie in feelings that you have nurtured and fed.

Those who are hurt by their vision of God, by parental homes that were abusive, or by the church itself  often never find a way back to a relationship with the living God, because their hearts are fenced off by feelings that make it impossible for them to trust the love of God.  Resentment, anger, bitterness, arrogance, a sense of moral superiority – these are all characteristics that we identify with people who can be mean or condescending.  But I have lost track of the number of wounded people who adopt them as defenses against added pain.

If you are one of those people, if you are holding God at arm’s length, my prayer is that you will find a safe place to talk about those defenses and find a way to lay them down.  They do more harm than good.  They isolate those who nurture them and then they destroy the host.  And worst of all, they blind us to God’s longing for us.  And his longing for you is shaped by love.  He seeks to take you by the hand.  He longs to lead you along a reliable path.  And, if you will allow him, he will heal you.

There is no more important epiphany – discovery – to be made in life.