Beyond Imagining

Sunday, August 24, 2008
Preacher: Pastor Gary Johnson

Readings:
Isaiah 51:1-6
Romans 12:1-8
Matthew 16:13-20

Audio sermon link: http://fileresource.sitepro.com/filemanager/74/filecollections/422/1BBF417E-A28C-D7DE-9158-F454AA2C43F2.mp3

Pastor Johnson admitted finding this week’s texts terribly disconnected. Today’s Gospel lessons needs to be seen in the context of the events leading to it and those subsequent to it. That said, we are left with the two terribly important questions. Who do people say Jesus is and “who do you (presumably meaning the disciples) say that I am?”. One of the key insights Pastor Johnson offers us is that Jesus is, perhaps, not addressing the disciples (only). He is addressing all of us when he asks, “Who do you say that I am?”

And Peter gets the answer right! And then Jesus tells him to not tell anyone. Right! You get 100 on the test and you need to keep it to yourself?! Pastor Johnson shared with us what we know – that we humans all share a need to put God in a box that makes sense to us. We need to package God in a way to which we can relate.

But Jesus knows the truth – that no human can fathom the depth and meaning of what God truly is. Isaiah implores us to “look to the rock from which we are hewn, and to the quarry from which we were dug”.

Pastor Johnson just returned from vacationing in Canada where he stood on 15,000 year old granite boulders. Geologic babies – compared with the 1 million year old granite that dots the plane we call home. When you stand on those baby rocks, you are in awe of the vastness of God’s universe and creation. You are humbled.

Many treatises on science quote Sir Arthur Eddington who said of our cosmos:

“Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine; it is stranger than we can imagine ..."

If we equate the cosmos with the God who created it and strangeness implies that we have difficulty imagining, we can apply these very words to today’s lesson. God is not only more than we do imagine, He is more than we are capable of imagining. We want God to look and act just like us so He can understand us and give us what we want when we need it, what we need when we want it. As much as we may want to, we cannot put Him in a box, or in our brains.

The Olympics were a reminder in our own living rooms that the world is much bigger than 53213, 53226, or 53XXX. The planet is much more diverse than we ever often stop to imagine. It is all shades of black, tan, yellow, red. It is more than Wauwatosa, more than the small world we allow ourselves to be limited to living in. God is more than a white guy from the Midwest, He is not Democrat or Republican. He defies categorization or characterization as we attempt these. The diversity of creation, the vastness of the cosmos remind us we have no right to be smug or self-righteous.

Paul gets it. He gets that God is more than the law. We need for God to be more than the law. We need grace and mercy – and this is why Jesus comes to offer us what we have not the muster to imagine. Paul struggles with this for 11 chapters and in chapter 12, he reasons that God’s mercy and grace are not something “we can get or understand”.

And for all the struggling, Paul comes up with this, a two-part suggestion:

Present your bodies, yourselves as a living sacrifice. Paul’s “a temple guy”, he gets sacrifice and what it entails. He suggests that “we kill ourselves” – that we empty ourselves, let go of our egos, our demands, our preconceptions; empty ourselves so that we can fill ourselves up with God. Paul was sent with the message that we “empty the well”.

We are, each of us individually, only a part of a greater whole. We are, each of us, only ever endowed with special, unique gifts not to be measured by their size, but by their necessity as part of a whole. We all bring 2 saltines to the mix and together God uses us all to feed the 5000. All of our gifts together are as awesome as the 15,000 year old baby rocks beneath our feet.

But this need to get over ourselves, and recognize our part in a greater whole are both lessons that the world will seldom teach us – in fact, it often espouses pretty much the opposite. You won’t learn much about Paul’s suggestions by watching a world that is not about emptying, bu about winning, about accumulating, about medal counts and gold trumps silver trumps bronze trumps a twelfth place personal best.

If you watch that world, you don’t have to look hard to see what Rabbi Harold Kushner saw – a billboard on the highway in Massachusetts before the 1996 Atlanta Olympics that read “You don’t win the silver – you lose the gold.” If you watch the world, you saw what I saw when the USA pole vaulting silver medalist in Beijing, Jennifer Stuczynski, a woman barely vaulting four years place second behind the reigning world champion from Russia. Upon "winning silver", she was crudely and callously chided by her coach on international television for taking “only the silver” … looking at her with disdain in her moment of personal triumph and best, offering only “What can you do? It’s a silver.”

Pastor Johnson was reminded of this by watching the coverage in Canada where stories of athletes performing their personal best were perhaps more compelling than the national coverage in America, stacked as it is around daily medal counts and its obsession with gold and supremacy and superlatives.

In the topsy-turvy world of Jesus, we are offered a different notion:

Be not conformed to this world, but instead be transformed.

There are not enough rules in the cosmos to help you.

Empty yourself … and then ask “God, is there anything I can do for you?”

For most of us (who are not Mother Theresa), this will be something ordinary, something simple – a small but not insignificant kindness, patience in the heat of happenings, forgiveness for a wrong done to you, a moment of not judging someone. It will be a kind word, a thought, a touch or a smile.

Our gifts are not spectacular, they’re not gold medals. God asks of us our 2nd place, our 5th place, our 89th place finish. Why? Because we can.

And He will use your thread as just one among many in the greatest of tapestries, one we may often be too close to see as it is seen from afar, one beyond our imagining, or our ability to imagine, but not beyond God’s making.