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The Rev. Laura Matarazzo
September 16, 2007 --- Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost
So, my questions for
this morning is “Which is it? Is God this angry, vengeful overlord who
heaps devastation and desolation upon us because we cannot help but turn
away and follow other gods? Or is God the one who loves us so much that
he simply cannot let go; WILL NOT let go of a single one of us, no
matter how far we may stray. Does God throw up his arms and rain down
destruction at our faithlessness ….or does God bow down, come down…
become one of us, to collect us from the darkness that separates us
from him? In Jeremiah’s prophecy, it seems as though all are lost; in
Luke’s gospel, not one of us is.
Which is it? And is it
either or? Do we get to choose, or must we live with both?
Sunday after Sunday, we
are presented with scriptures that portray God in this seemingly
absolute dichotomy. As Christians and as Episcopalians, we claim these
holy writings as one of the key components of our faith, and their daily
reading is commended to us. What are we to DO with these distinct and
different images of God? How are we to live in relationship with one who
seems to have multiple personalities? Perhaps this is not an issue for
you but I must confess that I am sometimes frustrated by it. Sometimes I
simply dismiss the one I do not like, the one with whom I do not want to
play, as it were. Sometimes, I will chalk this inscrutable contrast up
to “mystery,” but that’s a convenient cop-out clothed in theological
language. We could define Jeremiah’s prophesy as a description of the
devastation wrought by Babylonian occupation and the exile of the
people, but that does not address the issue of God’s harmful intention,
the divine wrath that brings down destruction. I have heard people take
care of their discomfort with, “Oh, that’s the Old Testament God,”
attributing a limited understanding to our dull ancestors’ misconception
that every human experience is dictated by God who punishes sinners and
rewards the righteous. With such reasoning, I can attribute to MY
God—that is, the one I know in all my 21st century
wisdom--goodness and truth and mercy and peace and provision and honor
and love. Is that how it is with you? Don’t we all want to choose the
God we will worship?
“Not so fast,” I hear
from somewhere out there, or in here. Beware of that conventional wisdom
Chris talked about last week—the so-called wisdom that is comfortable
and comforting that we claim as truth. We are a people whose history is
bound up with this God of Jeremiah. We may not like him, but we cannot
simply ignore him, or his relationship with the people through whom we
know God and God’s child, Jesus.
We cannot ignore him,
not the least because we live in a world where human beings who
recognize the one God comprehend him so differently and take so many
different paths to reach him. A recent encounter may be why I was so
sensitive to this reality as I read these scriptures. Last week, Matty
and I attended a rehearsal dinner preceding a family wedding. We were
seated with a delightful couple—Morris and Georgia--from Rochester, NY.
In the regular course of our conversation, they learned that I am an
Episcopal priest and Matty a farmer and wine-maker and we learned that
Morris is a professor at the University of Rochester and Georgia a
retired teacher. We also learned that Morris and Georgia are atheists,
and they wondered, aloud, if the husband of an Episcopal priest who was
a farmer and wine-maker was as “religious” as she. Matty began to
describe how tilling the soil season after season gave him a deep
appreciation for the fruitfulness of the fields and the beauty of the
forest, all of which he attributed to God, and Georgia murmured quietly,
“but then there are droughts and hailstorms and bad years.” We
acknowledged her quiet challenge with the same gentleness in which it
was presented and then we all simply changed the subject. But, of
course, they have a point, don’t they? If we believe that good weather
and fruitful harvests come from God, then doesn’t it follow that
droughts and hail and floods come from God as well?
And what’s to keep
someone from attributing the natural destruction that harms crops and
livestock and people to a God who is angry with his creation? It’s right
here in our text and we have heard it from our Christian brothers and
sisters about the AIDS epidemic and about the awful tsunamis in
Indonesia. And I have no doubt that Morris and Georgia are horrified, as
am I, by those who take the next step in that path of perception, making
themselves agents of God’s wrath by destroying a portion of creation
that is rebelling against their “true” God.
Earlier this week, when
I read these words from Jeremiah, “I looked on the earth, and lo, it was
waste and void, the mountains quaking, the fruitful land a desert, and
the cities laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger,” I
thought of the World Trade Center 6 years ago this week, and I thought
of Israel and the everpresent conflict that defines that region; I
thought of the years of violence in northern Ireland which, hopefully,
may be drawing to a close. I thought of the way in which some persons’
understanding of God leads to unspeakable violence. All around us, at
this very moment and since time immemorial, we humans destroy each other
and this earth in the name of God.
And while we distance
ourselves from such self-righteous extremists, we still cannot dismiss
the angry God in whose steps they claim to walk—the God who, like the
potter in our reading from Jeremiah last week, has “the power to rework
us anytime we do not measure up.” Indeed, many of us have felt pushed
down and remolded at times in our lives—not a pleasant experience. Many
of us have known a personal desert, or a very real condition of
spiritual desolation; a frightening emptiness that seems permanent until
new life springs forth out of the parched landscape of our souls. These
pictures that Jeremiah paints are not, after all, so strange. Some of us
have been there, or are there this very moment, or will be.
And if we are honest
with ourselves, we cannot deny God’s assessment of us in this reading
from Jeremiah. We are foolish from time to time and we do not
always know God, because we do not seek God. We do go after other
gods all the time—after money and status and the admiration of others.
We flee the challenges of serving God and neighbor, remaining snug and
smug in the comfort and security of our tightly knit circles of
colleagues, family and friends. Which one of us would leave that warm
flock and risk the dark night and probe the wilderness for one who was
lost?
We often will not,
although we are called to do so. But Jesus will. In Christ, is our hope
for redemption, for ongoing life. That means that as we listen to his
words and contemplate his life we can choose to hear him, to
follow him, to model ourselves on his human example. We can choose to
make our relationship with God the primary relationship in our lives;
and we can seek Christ in all persons, loving them as ourselves. And we
will not be lost. When we stray, Christ will find us, lift us up, and
carry us back into the fold of loving community and relationship with
God. We need only cry out like a lamb, acknowledge our need, and ask for
help. We need only turn to the one who will save us and we will be saved
from the wilderness of separation from God.
Finally, this is the
face of the God whom we seek—the loving countenance in whose light we
will live. For some, God is still the one whose wrath executes
vengeance. For that matter, God, for some, is still the Great Spirit in
whom all creation is related. For some, God is still many gods,
manifesting attributes of good and evil. For some, God is a state of
being free of all that binds us to this world. For us, God is still the
one who came to us, in the flesh, to show us a way of justice, mercy,
and love. For us God is still the one who died that we might know his
unfailing love reaches us in the darkest wilderness of our human
experience and brings us, finally, to life eternal with him.
My new friends from
Rochester might not understand how I can worship a God who, as scripture
tells us, “makes rain to fall on the just and the unjust alike.” To
them, it may make no sense to emulate the life of a first century
carpenter, to weekly memorialize him in a shared meal, or to surrender
myself to the will of a God I cannot see—a God whom others “see” so
differently. Just the same, this is the path I choose and to which I am
drawn by the grace of God. I hope and pray that I am walking in the way
of Christ, with Christ’s help and in your company, my dear friends.
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