Ocean of Divine Favor

Column for the February, 2017, Green Lake Church Gazette

It was another morning waiting for dawn. The sky was murky. Occasionally the crescent moon found a thin spot in the clouds. The brightening in the east was hesitant, timid. Still, darkness retreated. Gray warmed toward orange, then gaps in the clouds leaped to life with pinks and purples and yellows and reds and oranges. For a brief moment the sky was gloriously aflame.

As the day advanced, the clouds would thicken. This was, after all, Seattle in January. Rain would come. But I carried with me all day the vision of that golden, fiery sky and the conviction it called up in the core of my being: we live in an ocean of divine favor.

My central ambition is to imbibe as deeply as possible this blessing, to take it in and savor it, enjoy it, relish it, allow it to suffuse my entire self, and then to share it, to pass it along, to pay it forward. This is the essence of my religion. It is a hopeful, radiant vision.

Always, I dream of expressing more richly the reality of God's favor and grace. I aspire to exemplify in my own life the sweetness and generosity of the heavenly lover which means I can always imagine better, higher, purer. But since I am swimming in the ocean of divine grace, the space between what I have accomplished today and what I can imagine accomplishing does not haunt me with remorse or guilt. I have no taste of condemnation in my mouth. I simply keep alive the dream of living out ever more fully the divine favor that surrounds me.

That morning watching the dawn my enjoyment was qualified somewhat by another awareness. I know that many people who are precious to me live in an atmosphere of divine wrath. Like me, they learned from classic Christianity that all humanity is the target of a divine scowl. God hates sin. All humans are intrinsically, fundamentally sinful. So God has an essential hatred of our humanity. In this religious perspective, the default destiny of every human is damnation, a destiny that can be avoided only by mastering certain religious prescriptions. For some Protestants the requirement is believing a particular theory about the meaning of the death of Jesus. For some old time Adventists the requirement was flawless behavior, including eating a perfect diet. Old time Adventist perfectionists and American evangelicals are united in their conviction that humans live in an atmosphere of divine wrath. It is time to replace this fear of a dark and scowling God with a clear vision of God as light and life and love.

Hear the testimony of the Gospels:

Matthew

Jesus pictured God as the abundantly generous supplier of sunshine and rain. The ubiquity of these gifts of the heavens is a statement about the character of God (Matthew 5).

Jesus pictured God as an attentive parent, someone who is aware of children's needs and moving to supply them even before the kids themselves could think to ask (Matthew 6).

In Matthew 7, Jesus said the ordinary instinct of a parent to provide for the ordinary needs of their children is a reliable pointer toward the profound goodness and generosity of God.

Mark

While Jesus was preaching in the synagogue in Capernaum, a man with an “unclean spirit” disrupted the service, shouting fear and belligerence at Jesus. In response, Jesus drove out the unclean spirit and left the man whole (Mark 1).

Jesus and his disciples crossed the Sea of Galilee. In the wild country on the far side, they encountered another victim of an “unclean spirit.” Like the man in the synagogue this man raged his fear and hostility. And like Jesus in the synagogue, Jesus rescued him, giving him back his sanity and his life. Without request, without permission. That's just the way Jesus was. As Christians, we insist, that's the way God is. (Mark 5)

Luke

In just one chapter, 15, Jesus gives three pictures of God. God is a shepherd who will not rest until all sheep are safe in the fold, a woman who will not rest until all her treasures are back in her possession, a father whose door is ever open to his sons. The shepherd is not scowling while he hunts his sheep. The woman is not frowning as she sweeps her house in determined pursuit of the lost coin. The father is not a “hazard” to be crossed in pursuit of “safe-at-home.” In each of these pictures, the “lost one” has nothing to fear from wrath. Because there is no wrath. Instead we observe divine hunger for restoration and return.

A young man was being carried out for burial just as Jesus was entering the town. Jesus did not ask permission. He received no request. He stopped the procession and resurrected the young man. It seems Jesus can't help himself. It is his nature to heal and save. Indiscriminately. Prodigiously. As Christians we agree that Jesus is the best picture of God. It is the nature of God to heal and save. God is like the dawn.

I have discarded the dark doctrines of total depravity, “the close of probation,” “not one in twenty,” divine wrath, universal guilt, and “salvation only if _______.” (You can fill in the blank.) I have replaced all these gloomy conceptions of God with the Gospel picture of God as the radiant sun and vivifying rain. Let's bask in God's light. Let's marinate our souls in the heavenly rain. Let's enjoy this ocean of divine favor and pass it on.

Great

Psalm 113 (all)

Luke 22:19-20; 24-27 

Thursday afternoon, I headed east from Enumclaw on Hwy 410. The sky was gray and dark and wet. On both sides of the highway industrial forests spread out in various stages of their life cycles from current harvest to thirty-year-old woods. Snow littered the ground.

Eventually, I reached the national forest. There were fewer clear cuts. Between the cuts, the trees were larger. Still, No individual tree stood out. They were indistinguishable bits in the sea of green.

Just past the Skookum Falls viewpoint. I parked, pulled on my microspikes and headed up the Palisades Trail. As usual, I had snowshoes strapped on my pack. But if you had been there watching me, you would have noticed an additional odd item strapped on top my snowshoes. A stool!

About a mile up the trail, I dropped my pack. Set up my stool. Pulled out my stove and heated some water. Then sat down to eat a sandwich, sip my hot water, and keep company with a great tree. The greatest tree in the Dalles Creek valley, maybe the greatest tree in the entire White River drainage.

It is a huge Doug fir. Winter or summer, even when I'm running and trying to make time up the trail, when I come to this tree I stop. I take a moment to pay respect to this great citizen of the green world. It is nearly invisible, standing in a forest of large trees, its top hidden in a jungle of green overhead. It's trunk is one among thousands in the valley. It is ordinary. Until you stop and pay attention. The more attention you pay, the grander the tree becomes.

How big? Yesterday, I took a tape measure with me. It has a circumference of 21 feet. is 18 feet around. Much bigger than I had previously guessed.

I spent half an hour yesterday in the company of this tree, letting its greatness touch me, inspire me, awe me.

I let words run through my mind. Dignity. Longevity. Immense. Magnificent. Huge. Wondrous. Elegant. Quiet. Enduring. Alive.

I gave the tree my full attention, letting my eyes and mind drink in its grandeur. I traced furrows in the bark, noting their patterns. I drank in the color changes up and down and across the trunk. I used my imagination to climb higher in the tree, above where the trunk was obscured by the green, feathery canopy. In short, I practiced contemplation. Sitting on my stool, I quieted my soul and kept company with this truly great tree. I gave it intense, persistent, respectful, affectionate attention.

I contemplated its patience and endurance. Its dignity and strength. It's grandeur and beauty.

The tree's greatness is stealthy. I have passed it dozens of times. I've stopped and touched it. Paused and admired it. But yesterday I went further. I climbed the slope behind it and found places where I could see its entire height. I watched its perfect trunk climb skyward, tapering slowly. As I studied it from this distance, I could see that even among its large neighbors, this tree was unique.

I imagined having a conversation with a younger Doug fir in the forest: “Young tree, if you are looking for a model for your future, be like that tree. If you dream of being a truly great Doug fir, practice living like that one.”

But enough about trees. Let's talk about people.

A week ago I spent half an hour in the presence of a truly great person. We were standing in someone else's kitchen chitchatting and I asked about her work. Not the work she gets paid for. I already knew about her career. I asked about her other job. Being a mother.

The longer we talked the larger she grew.

I thought of all the times I walked past that Doug fir, never realizing how truly great it was until I stopped to measure it, spent time sitting beside it in contemplation, climbing the slope to survey it from different angles.

As I listened to this mother, with every paragraph she became greater and greater and greater. Yes, she benefited from the assistance of professionals. But at nearly every step, she had to fight for that help. She had to fight entire systems to get the help her child needs.

It was not the first time I've been in the presence of human greatness. A geologist friend in Colorado has cared for his son for fifty, going on sixty years now. A carpenter friend here in Washington, shaped his entire life for more than two decades around the needs of his daughters. And mothers. I cannot count the mothers I know who have loved and served and cared and hoped and fought for years and decades. With no applause. No acclaim. No obvious reward.

At some point in our conversation last week, I said to the mother, “I could never be a mother.” I was struck by her response.

“Yes, you could. You would.”

She was dismissing her heroic service as the natural, instinctual goodness that God has planted in the human heart. If your children have special needs, you become a special provider. That's the way God has made people.

And the reason God made people that way is because that's how God is. That's who God is.

When we enter the kind of service good mothers give, we are entering most deeply into greatness—human greatness and divine greatness. At least that's the way Jesus saw it.

Jesus took some bread and gave thanks to God for it. Then he broke it in pieces and gave it to the disciples, saying, "This is my body, which is given for you. Do this to remember me." After supper he took another cup of wine and said, "This cup is the new covenant between God and his people--an agreement confirmed with my blood, which is poured out as a sacrifice for you. . . .

Then they began to argue among themselves about who would be the greatest among them.

Jesus told them, "In this world the kings and great men lord it over their people, yet they call themselves 'friends of the people.' But among you it will be different. Those who are the greatest among you should take the lowest rank, and the leader should be like a servant. Who is more important, the one who sits at the table or the one who serves? The one who sits at the table, of course. But not here! For I am among you as one who serves. Luke 22:19-27

Great people serve. Great people take care of others.

Where did Jesus get this idea? Did it originate with him? Was this a brand new idea that Jesus invented? No. Jesus' idea that serving others is the highest mark of human goodness came from his vision of God—a vision rooted in the words of the Old Testament prophets and in the actual care Jesus received from Joseph.

The great tree that Jesus sat under, the tree that provided the inspiration for his magnificent moral vision was the magnificent tree of divine goodness.

In Matthew 5, Jesus noted that God sends rain to good people and to bad people, to the just and the unjust. The gifts of seasons are not pulled from heaven by worthy people, they are poured from heaven by our generous God.

In Matthew 6, Jesus pictured God as an attentive parent who is aware of children's needs before the kids themselves are.

In Matthew 7, Jesus insisted that the goodness and generosity of ordinary, decent parents is a pointer toward the profound goodness and generosity of God.

These presentations by Jesus are an echo of the Hebrew prophets. Throughout the Old Testament, over and over and over, the prophets picture God as the champion of the poor, the friend of widows and orphans. God's greatness is explicitly described as his character of providing for poor people and animals. God is not pictured as the friend of the rich. Not because the rich are bad or because God doesn't like rich people. There are plenty of good rich people in the Bible. But God does not go out of his way to announce his friendship for the rich because they do not such an intense need his friendship. They're doing all right. Life is going well for them.

Like a good mother, God gives special attention to the children who need special care. So the poor, the falsely accused, the sick, the people who can't afford a lawyer, the people who cannot buy a place at the table—these are the people specially befriended by God. At least, that's what the prophets say.

Over and over and over again.

One of the most important functions of religion is to help us pause in the race of life and pay attention to authentic greatness, especially the most magnificent greatness of all—the greatness of God.

Church is like a stool set on the trail beside the greatest Doug fir inviting passersby to pause, to stop, and spend some sweet moments in contemplation of true greatness, divine greatness.

This is why we come together in worship. Here we spend time in contemplation of the character of God. We give close, sustained, communal attention to the mightiest tree in the universe. We worship the God who sends rain on the just and the unjust. We worship a God who delights far more in reconciliation than in vengeance, a God who prefers mercy to punishment, a God who finds ways to save sinners, and restore the fallen.

Here in worship we delight in the truth of the beautiful God, the true measure of what is great.

Holy Courage

Sermon manuscript (revised) for Green Lake Church of Seventh-day Adventists 

For Sabbath, January 24, 2017

It was the end of March, spring time in Memphis, 1968. The azaleas were approaching their peak bloom. The days were gloriously warm and bright. The street we lived on was lined with massive elm trees that arched across the street. They were vivid with new baby leaves. There was one flaw in this glorious spring. The garbage was piling up by our back gate. In our neighborhood, garbage trucks drove the alleys instead of the streets. But for the last six weeks, there had been no garbage trucks in the alley. The garbage men were on strike.

This was not acceptable. If the mayor goes on vacation, nobody notices. If the garbage men miss one day, it's trouble. If they miss a week, we are in deep mess. There had been no garbage collection in Memphis for six weeks!

We were mad at the garbage men. What right did they have not to work? What business did they have demanding better pay. After all, they were mere garbage men. And on top of that, they were black. Lots of black people in Memphis were unemployed. So these garbage men were supposed to grateful for any paycheck at all. Yes. They worked in miserable, dangerous conditions. A couple of garbage men had been crushed to death in a compactor. That's what precipitated the strike. But hey, accidents happen. Get over it.

The garbage men refused to get over it. The mayor demanded they return to work. They refused. The main newspaper in town, the Commercial Appeal, cheered the mayor on as he swaggered and talked tough. The white population cheered every insult the mayor hurled at the recalcitrant strikers.

The garbage men—sanitation workers—held on. They refused to obey the mayor. They refused to agree that they deserved lower pay than the white drivers of their garbage trucks. They refused to agree that their families should live in poverty while they collected the garbage in the alleys behind large homes on tree-shaded streets.

But it was hard. All the powers were arrayed against them. The mayor. The police with their dogs and mace and billy clubs. Major local businesses. Justice hung in the balance.

Martin Luther King, Jr. came to Memphis to encourage them, arriving on Friday, March 29.

Monday and Tuesday at school, I listened to the rumors swirling among my classmates. A group of white men had bound themselves with an oath to guarantee Dr. King would not get out of town alive. Communist agents were in town to agitate the black people and provoke them to violence. The strikers were quitting their strike. Dr. King was wasting his time.

Wednesday came. Wednesday night Dr. King addressed a huge crowd. He cited the Hebrew prophets and their bold protestations against the perversion of justice by the powerful. He talked of the ultimate triumph of non-violence, about the glory and risk of that present moment in the great march of history toward justice and peace. Police violence would not win. Mace and billy clubs would not triumph. Not ultimately. Not if the people stayed united and true to their principles.

Then at the heart of his sermon, he told the story of the Good Samaritan.

A man was traveling the wild, desolate road from Jerusalem to Jericho. He was jumped by thieves and robbed and beaten. Two religious dignitaries passed the injured man. First a minister, then a deacon. They could see he needed help. They probably wanted to help. But they asked the very sensible question, “What will happen to me if I help?”

Then along came another man, a Samaritan—a Muslim in Christian America, a Black man in White America, a Mexican in Anglo America, a Jew in neo-Nazi America, a Republican in Seattle (I say this with a good-natured smile)--this other man changed the question. He did not ask what will happen to me if I help. He asked what will happen to him if I do not help?

The question asked by the religious dignitaries—what will happen to me—is a sensible question. But it was not the right question. The right question was, “What will happen to him, if I do not help?” Dr. King applied the question to the situation in Memphis. He challenged his audience, “What will happen to the strikers who have risked their families and their entire future struggling for justice if you do not help? What will happen to the children of these strikers, if we leave them to struggle alone? What will happen to this city if we fail to come to the aid of those who need us now?

What will happen to them if we do not help?

This question remains one of the most probing questions we can ask. It is the burning question facing us right now across the United States and Europe. The entire western world is being seduced by the allure of the reasonable, smart-sounding question: What will happen to us if we help? The world is richer than ever before in history. There is enough food, enough money, enough money. But we are weary with helping.

Still, the noble challenge presented so clearly by Jesus in the story of the Good Samaritan and given new voice by Martin Luther King confronts us: what will happen to them if we do not help?

What will happen to the children born in a poverty they did not earn if we do not help?

What will happen to senior citizens who spend their entire careers working in day care?

What will happen to the people who have manicured our lawns and washed the dishes in our favorite restaurants and cleaned the bathrooms in the airports we passed through on our way to our vacations in Mexico? What will happen to them when they get sick or old?

What will happen to families coping with mental illness?

What will happen to grandmothers raising grandchildren because the middle generation got lost in addictions?

What will happen if we do not help?

Across the nations that used to be Christian, there are louder and louder voices celebrating the privilege of the privileged and denouncing the need of the needy.

I am not optimistic in the short term about our ability to avoid a sharp lurch into the ditch of fear and narrow self-interest. But I am confident of this: We—the members of this family, citizens of the Beautiful City, devotees of Jesus—we will ask the right question. We will not allow the teachings of Jesus to be muted.

When Dr. King talked about asking the sensible question, “What will happen to me if I help?” it was not a theoretical exercise. The air was full of threats. He knew people wanted him dead. Men heavy with hatred and guns. Coming to Memphis was a dangerous move. Still he came because the brothers in Memphis needed help. Their struggle for justice faced deeply entrenched opposition. So Martin asked the right question, What will happen if I do not help. And he came to Memphis knowing there he was wearing a target.

Helping sometimes requires great courage, holy courage. But that is the native culture of the Beautiful City.

In our New Testament reading we heard the cynical challenge to Jesus from the religious conservatives of his day.

Some Pharisees warned Jesus that Herod was out to get him. They advised him to leave town. (They, of course, cared nothing about Jesus' well being. They were trying to scare Jesus into leaving town. They wanted to get rid of his bothersome presence.) Jesus laughed them off. Go tell that old fox that I am going to keep doing what I do. I will be casting out demons and healing people here. And three days from now I will be in Jerusalem doing the same thing. If you are going to do me in, you might as well do it in Jerusalem, that's where all good prophets go to die.

The same thing is happening today. Religious conservatives are trying to silence the annoying teachings of Jesus. A famous evangelical preacher New York recently told an interviewer, the teachings are Jesus are not the main point of Christianity. Jesus saves us from out guilt. That's the big thing. Those teachings about loving our neighbors and laying down our lives for our friends and serving the least of these—all of that is quite secondary. What matters is getting myself saved.

We do not agree. We do not believe the most important question is what will happen to me? We join Jesus and Martin and the ancient prophets, Amos and Jeremiah, in asking what will happen to them? And not just on Judgment day off in the future, but today. Here. Now.

What will happen if we do not help.

We do not wait until it is convenient to ask the question. We do not wait until we have power. We simply own the question as central to our religion as followers of Jesus. We claim this question as central to the constitution of our spiritual city: What will happen to them if we do not help?

When people threaten us with the power of the swaggering, belligerent Herod, we reply, “Tell the old fox we will continue our ministry. We will continue to do what we can to heal and help. And we will not be silent.”

It may cost us. But that is what courage is for. To pursue truth and justice.

May God help us.