VI Easter – May 29, 2011 – Year A (RCL)
As I think I’ve mentioned before, I grew up a Methodist, and, as I think I’ve also mentioned before, if I were preaching in a Methodist church, this morning’s sermon would have a title, and the title would be posted in big metal letters on a signboard out front (if we thought we could afford it) and in the bulletin, and the title would be “Is God Into Doing Extreme Makeovers?”
This title came to me (actually, hit me over the head), as I was ruminating over a remark a Bedford, Indiana teenager made to her father after one of the storms last Wednesday leveled his place of business: “Dad, God just remodeled for you,” is what she said.
The reporter who covered the story in Friday’s Indianapolis Star was of the opinion that the girl had “put the damage in perspective”.
I’m not so sure.
“God just remodeled for you.”
Some perspective!
Does it do justice to the “dozens of houses, trailers, garages, autos and sheds [that were “damaged or destroyed”] in several southern Indiana communities” a few days ago, not to mention the havoc wreaked in Joplin, Missouri, and the chaos wrought along the lower Mississippi last week?
Of course, our young would-be theologian was, like her father, suffering from shock at the sight of the devastation that lay before them the morning after and doing her daughterly best to comfort him, as he steeled himself to start picking up the pieces.
It was a hug—a loving hug in words, one might say—when her father most needed one, and any father could not help but be eternally grateful.
“God just remodeled for you.”
It does put things in a perspective of sorts.
But does that perspective do justice to the magnitude of the loss of life and property this country has experienced over these past few weeks?
And more importantly does that perspective do justice to a loving and faithful God?
Does concluding that God is some kind of extreme makeover artist give us a fair picture of who God is and what God does?
It’s certainly not the picture that Jesus and the theologians who wrote about Jesus in the Gospels and in the Epistles labored to give us of who God is and what God does.
In this week’s Gospel lesson from John Jesus speaks of God as one who can be depended upon to provide us with “advocates”.
Jesus says, “…I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.”
“…another Advocate.”—literally, “someone else, who will speak (up) on your behalf, someone else, who will come to your defense”.
(Hardly an “ulterior redecorator”!)
Jesus obviously thought of himself, at least as he is depicted in the Gospel according to John, as an advocate, as someone you could depend on to come through for you in an emergency or at any other time, for that matter, and he thought of God, the Father, as someone whose fondest hope was that everyone should have an advocate to rely on.
“This is the Spirit of truth,” Jesus says to his disciples, referring not only to himself, but also to God’s spirit, who dwelt within Jesus and whom God, the Father, would send to dwell within the disciples and within the disciples’ disciples, once Jesus was no longer with them.
“You know him,” Jesus tells them, “because he abides with you, and he will be in you.”
Catherine Marshall, the wife of Peter Marshall, that great Presbyterian preacher, preferred to call God’s Holy Spirit, living in Jesus and given to us at Jesus’ request to live in us, “The Helper”.
God’s Holy Spirit, we are reminded elsewhere in John’s Gospel, is like the wind, blowing where it wills; the notion that the deliberate destruction of the source of someone’s livelihood could reflect in any way the will of a God whose sworn objective is to be of help to all in need is pretty wrongheaded to say the least.
Not that a vision of God as a “rogue remodeler” is the only instance of the human tendency to blame God for our misfortunes that I could cite.
I don’t know how many times over the years I’ve had to bite my tongue to keep from setting someone straight who has landed in the hospital and stoically insists on saying “God isn’t going to give me more than I can handle.”
Sometimes the best way to be of help in a situation like that is to just nod your head and change the subject as soon as possible.
Jesus himself would seem to have had a healthier perspective on how much God has to do with illness—you may recall Jesus in a Gospel lesson we encountered earlier this year dismissing the notion that the blindness of a man he was on the verge of healing had anything to do with who had sinned or who hadn’t—or on how much influence God may have over natural disasters, though I will admit that in the latter case I had to dig a bit to find what I think is Jesus’ point of view in the matter.
“…those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem?” Jesus remarks to some concerned citizens, who have gathered to hear what he thinks. (Luke 13:4)
True, he kind of muddies the waters by going on to say, “No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”
Of course, he wants to press his case while he has their attention, but I still glean from what is essentially an aside on his part that Jesus would be reluctant to equate a natural disaster like a tower falling on eighteen innocent people (most likely the result of an earthquake or of unsound construction) or to equate the leveling of part of a town by some monstrous windstorm in any way with the carrying out of God’s will.
“I will not leave you orphaned,” says Jesus—better put: “I will not leave you defenseless; I am coming to you,” he promises his disciples, as he promised all who would come after them, assuring us that “those who love [him] will be loved by [God, his] Father.”
It helps us to know that this passage from John’s Gospel is written from the perspective of Christians who had either witnessed Jesus’ death and resurrection firsthand or been told of it by those who had, and, thanks to the Father’s sending of the promised Advocate, knew what it meant to be in Christ and for Christ to be in them.
I don’t know if the man who lost his small engine shop to the fury of the storm or if any other victims of the severe weather this country has experienced in the past few weeks for that matter ever seriously entertained the notion that God was behind the grim forces that were unleashed instead of by their side every moment to strengthen them at every turn.
I trust not, or I trust that anyone who may have been led to such a mistaken conclusion, wherever they are, has had the benefit of a wiser, gentler voice to set them straight, a wiser, gentler voice inspired by the wisest, gentlest voice of all—the “Helper”—God’s Holy Spirit as revealed in Jesus Christ, the Advocate who has promised you and me and everybody else: “I will never leave your side.”
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