Tell me ALL your thoughts on God (practicing resurrection continues...)

NOTE: Here are this week's worship notes for Sunday, January 30, 2011. This will be our 248th annual meeting as a congregation, too! After worship, we'll move to another room to discuss our commitments to mission and ministry in the upcoming year - and then feast together with food and prayer and community. Please join us.

Fifteen years ago, there was a very sweet song that was all over the radio – Counting Blue Cars – by the American band Dishwalla: do you know it? It begins something like this…

Must of been mid afternoon I could tell by how far the child's shadow stretched out; He walked with a purpose in his sneakers, down the street
He had many questions like children often do. He said: "Tell me all your thoughts on God…
Cuz I really want to meet her! Tell me am I very far?"

The kids in my youth group in Arizona couldn’t get enough of this song and we used to do in worship a lot. Because, you see, it evoked a truth that St. Paul addressed in the beginning of Ephesians when he starts to tell us all of his thoughts on God.

• Our “lesson” for today is really just one 201 word sentence that speaks of Paul’s joyous, over-the-top, mind blowing, ecstatic and life-changing encounter with God’s blessing – and he can’t help himself from telling us all of his thoughts on God.

• His world has been turned upside down: like the Prodigal Son he once was lost but now he’s found – like Lazarus he, too, had died but now lives to the stunning glory of the Lord – and like countless wounded souls in Christ’s ministry, Paul had come to experience what once he had been blind, but now he sees.

Man, this cat is the incarnational embodiment of the hymn: Amazing Grace, right?

Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found – was blind but now I see

And that’s why Paul is so important – and why we give him a measure of authority in the church – he is one of those rare souls who has been boldly embraced by the love of God and found words to describe it. Not everybody meets God this way, right? Not everyone has a Damascus Road experience where you are knocked down and hung-up wet to dry only to awaken with your vision and heart turned upside down.

Some of us, for example, have known something of God’s tender love all of our lives. Some of us have found the Lord in nature – or music – or in serving others – or in peace-making. Some of us have had small epiphanies, too, that we’re stringing together – connecting the dots – so that cumulatively we sense that there is a love bigger than ourselves at work in creation even if we have tons of questions.

And some of us just have the questions – a gnawing sense that we don’t get it – and that, too, is a way of encountering the Lord. Spiritually it is known as the Via Negativa – the quiet or obscure path to God – that lets our longing and emptiness serve as a reminder of God’s living presence. I know I’ve share the poem by Rumi about this with you before but it couldn’t hurt to be reminded. Coleman Barks calls it “Love Dogs” and it says:

One night a man was crying Allah! Allah! His lips grew sweet with praising,
until a cynic said, “So! I’ve heard you calling our, but have you ever
gotten any response?”The man had no answer to that.
He quit praying and fell into a confused sleep.
He dreamed he saw Khidr, the guide of souls, in a thick, green foliage.
“Why did you stop praising?” “Because I’ve never heard anything back” he said.
“This longing you express is the return message.” The grief you cry out from
draws you toward union. Your pure sadness that wants help
is the secret cup. Listen to the moan of a dog for its master.
That whining is the connection. There are love dogs no one knows the names of.
Give your life to be one of them.

Are you with me? Jesus tells us something similar in John’s gospel when he says, “Look, in my Father’s mansion are many rooms.” That is, not everyone is the same nor is everybody’s path to the Holy alike. There is light and there is darkness, there is experience and there is wisdom, there is fullness and there is emptiness and all roads lead to God.

So what I’m trying to say is that not everyone needs to come to faith like brother Paul – and that is not only a beautiful thing, it is also part of God’s plan – we have different gifts and different experiences and ALL of them are needed within the living body of Christ. And at the same time – and listen carefully here – and it is also always helpful for us as Christ’s disciples to have someone around like St. Paul who has really been blown away – filled with the Spirit – convicted and empowered from the inside out in ways that are visible and compelling so that we have some evidence and encouragement, right?

I know that’s true for me: sometimes I just need to hear some good Black gospel music. My soul needs it – my heart hungers for it – because it is so compelling.

• Now I love me some Gregorian chant – I’m one of the 7% of Americans who still listen to and enjoy classical organ music, too – and I regularly sing the good old hymns of our tradition to myself in prayer.

• But sometimes I need some of that sweet soul music of gospel that just grabs me by the heart and dances with me until I feel the blessings.

And that’s what Paul’s words in today’s letter from Ephesians are all about: they are the sweet, soul music of the New Testament pointing towards the blessings of God.

How blessed is God and what a blessing is the Lord as well! He's the Father of our Master, Jesus Christ, and takes us to the high places of blessing in him. Long before he laid down earth's foundations, he had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love. Long, long ago he decided to adopt us into his family through Jesus Christ. (What pleasure he took in planning this!) Because he wanted us to enter into the celebration of his lavish gift-giving by the hand of his beloved Son.

Do you hear Paul’s gospel song in these words? Like the rock and roll band Dishwalla he’s telling us that from before the beginning of time, God has wanted us to live a life filled with celebration, integrity and peace – even in the shadows and our sneakers we have been called into the Jesus life – and the Lord has been using everything to lead us into this blessing: our pain, our problems, our loves, our work, our music, our fears, our shadows – everything – it is all calling us into the blessings of the Jesus life if we have ears to hear.

You see, Paul wants us to know what he has encountered about God – not in any abstract way – and not in remote theological language. That’s why in this wild 201 word sentence he gives us seven words to better grasp the heart of our Living God – and these seven words are not accidental. Not on your life: there are seven, of course, to evoke the Hebrew sense of perfection and Sabbath, right? In six days the Lord created heaven and earth and on the seventh… God rested and called everything good!

Well, it is from within the perfection of God that Paul shares these seven insights so that we might both trust God and do our part to grow up in our faith. What he wants for us is a way to grasp the magnitude of God’s grace – a way to stretch our hearts and minds into the vastness of God’s love – a path into the essence of God’s love. So using the wisdom of Eugene Peterson’s book, Practice Resurrection, let me share Paul’s words with you and then we’ll see if there are any questions.

• First the way of God and the essence of the Lord is BLESSED Paul tells us – meaning that God is always reaching out to us no matter what our circumstances to bring us integrity, hope and peace – God is blessed. It is important that he starts with blessed – not judgmental, not punitive, not conditional – but first God is blessed.

• Second God has CHOSEN us – you and me and all people – so that no one will be ignored or pushed to the sidelines. Everyone, like Jesus at his baptism, shall be called “the beloved of the Lord.” What’s more, to be chosen and embraced by God means that there is intimacy with God, too.

• Third, Paul wants us to know that our lives are CONNECTED to God’s in a way that isn’t random: they are destined to be a part of God’s grace – and we can neither comprehend nor control this destiny – because we aren’t God. This makes a lot of people crazy – we must simply receive God’s grace rather than try to earn it – but that’s just how it is.

• Fourth, God BESTOWS upon us this grace – it is a gift – a delight – not a passive happening but an active and conscious treasure intentionally shared.

• Fifth, this grace is LAVISHED on us – nothing cheap or stingy here – and Paul loves to us the word lavish in all its excess to speak of God’s grace. It reminds me of the prophet who speaks of coming to the banquet table of the Lord in Isaiah 55 as: Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and all without money, come, buy and eat. Come and be filled with wine and milk beyond measure as you feast and delight upon the fatness – the bounty – of the Lord.

• Sixth there is the expression God has MADE KNOWN – there are no secrets here – no mystery religions – and clearly no membership in a clandestine club – because grace is about bringing coherence to our lives rather than fragmentation or the alienation of fear and sin.

• And seventh God’s grace GATHERS US UP – connects us to Christ who is the head of the body – so that we live and move and have our being in the Jesus life – not random acts or even stumbling in the darkness. In Christ there is… light.

Seven words that both describe the love of God in action and the way of the Jesus life for you and me – blessed, chosen, destined, bestowed, lavished, made known and gathered up – so tell me what you get from these words and insights?

• What do you learn about God and God’s calling from these words?

• What do they suggest for how we live together in covenant?

One of the good things that religion is supposed to accomplish is the creation of a common vocabulary is that it connects us again – or gives us a way to consider again – that which is truly important in life. St. Paul – like the prophet Micah and Jesus – is very clear that without a higher calling the culture around us or our own wounds will begin to define the world we live in.

If it is the culture, then we will become like the culture: too busy, obsessed and addicted to consumption and violence, shallow and often mean-spirited even when we know better. And if it is ourselves that becomes the ultimate measure of life’s meaning… well, let’s just say there is a reason our Roman friends make certain that even the Pope has a confessor, ok?

To reconnect us with God rather than just the culture or our wounded selves, the prophet Micah was inspired to say that the road back to God’s grace is always paved with right relations between people, a commitment to compassion and the practice of humility before the Lord.

Hebrew Bible scholar Walter Brueggeman put it like this:

God's response to our questions is simplicity itself, calling Israel back to covenantal faithfulness in three concise statements: "Do justice: (that is)be actively engaged in the redistribution of power in the world to correct the systemic inequalities that marginalize some for the excessive enhancement of others. Love covenant loyalty – which is much more than mere 'kindness' – for the word hesed means to reorder life into a community of enduring relations of fidelity. And then walk humbly with God by abandoning all self-sufficiency, to acknowledge in daily attitude and act that life is indeed derived from the reality of God" (Brueggeman et al, Texts for Preaching Year A).

Jesus just amplifies the prophet’s inspired wisdom when he says: You are closest to God – or blessed - when you're at the end of your rope because with less of you there is more of God and God’s rule. (Matthew 5: 3)

Paul wants us to know that we have been called by God to become our best selves – to live in a way that is holy and healing for ourselves and the world – and this takes practice and trust. We can’t do it all by ourselves. We not only need helpers and teachers, we also need friends to help keep us accountable and maturing in the practice of resurrection.

That is why God gave birth to the church – to help us practice and mature – ok? And here's the thing: unless the Church helps us become compassionate and connected and more interested in the common good and right relations between God's people... it AIN'T the church! It may be a club - or a cult - or a burial society, but it AIN'T the church of Jesus Christ.

So, on the occasion of our 248th annual meting, a history that is older than our nation, we have to ask ourselves:

+ Does our faith - and our church - make us more likely to forgive and to reconcile, to be patient and self-sacrificing, to put our own house in order before trying to rearrange the rest of the world's furniture? Are we agents of God's incredible grace and blessings.

+ Or are we stingy, fear-filled accountants who want to measure out love and compassion according to our atrophied sacred imaginations? Or worse yet, according to our self-centered sense of right and wrong that excuses the log in our own eyes while razing hell about the speck in the eye of a sister or brother?

I'm serious: unless our church is about maturing in Christ and practicing resurrection, we don't need to exist. Paul has encouraged us to live into a calling by telling us all HIS thoughts on God - and they are beautiful and grace filled. Let US accept nothing less. For this is the good news for those who have ears to hear.