God Believes in You
February 04, 2007
Texts: Isaiah 8:1-6; Luke 5:1-11
Excuses, excuses! The University Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has collected the following actual excuses sent in to schools to explain student absences:
“My son is under a doctor's care and should not take P.E. today.
Please execute him.
Dear School: Please ekscuse John being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30,
31, 32, and also 33.
Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.
I kept Billie home because she had to go Christmas shopping because I don't know what size she wear.
Please excuse Jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday.”
Both Isaiah and Peter, when facing the call, came up with excuses – interestingly, both related to their sense of unworthiness. Apparently self-esteem issues are not purely a product of the modern advertising industry.
A couple of years ago, while my regular dentist was out of town, I had a dental emergency. So I went to my dentist’s backup, and since to him, I was a new patient, he had me fill out some paperwork, and one of the questions was, “Do you like your smile?” And I realized that many people probably don’t – we are so harsh in our judgment of ourselves that we don’t even like our own smiles. If we don’t even like our own smiles, how can we feel good enough about ourselves to feel that we can serve God?
And yet, repeatedly throughout human history, God has called ordinary humans, and through them, transformed the world. Think of some of the heroes in the Bible: Moses, David, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Peter…. You may not know the stories of all of these, but every single one of them was called by God to a great task, and they all resisted the call. Moses said he couldn’t lead because his speech was inadequate and no one would listen to him. David – actually, in David’s case, it was others who resisted. Who him? He’s just a young shepherd boy. He can’t slay Goliath or become king….. Esther doubted that she should become queen, but her mentor reminded her that it might be for such a time as this that she was born, that she had this opportunity, and that she could save her people. For such a time as this…. Isaiah protested that he was unclean; Jeremiah (we heard last week) said that he was too young; Jonah – well, Jonah didn’t actually protest…he just ran the other way, and had to be (let’s say) persuaded to serve God; and finally Peter, who recognized that he was a sinner, but accepted Christ’s invitation to serve with him after all.
All of these were ordinary men and women who were called in the middle of their ordinary lives – many of them (Moses, David, Peter at least) while at work. And they didn’t want to change their lives, and they didn’t believe that God could do something big through them.
There have been other ordinary men and women who have allowed God to change their lives, and through them, to change the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, realized that he had to resist Hitler, and that such resistance could cost him a great deal…it ended up costing him his life. How many other Germans turned away from the horrors of Nazism, and allowed Hitler to build a machine of genocide?
And in our time…how many issues have we heard about and thought, yes, that’s REALLY important, but how could I make a difference??
Darfur? The world AIDS pandemic? And finally, the global climate crisis.
I was at a conference last week, and on Friday, one of the speakers, Professor Mark Wallace from Swarthmore College, said, “This era is objectively apocalyptic.” Wallace wasn’t talking about the rapture or other ideas from the Left Behind series – he is a Presbyterian minister and the rapture, Left Behind and other gloom and doom scenarios are not consistent with the way Presbyterians understand the future. He was talking about global warming, when he said, “This era is objectively apocalyptic.” In other words, in our time, there are conditions that may lead to disaster, widespread destruction and devastation.
Friday was Groundhog Day, and instead of a furry little mammal coming out of his hole and seeing his shadow – we all were forced to come into the light and face the frightening facts when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their report. As today’s New York Times says, “This is not a report compiled by a bunch of activists or alarmists. It is a consensus document, the inherently conservative product of three years of study and debate among mainstream scientists from 150 countries with often competing agendas. And in its modesty, it is alarming enough.” Yes, it is alarming enough – at least, I hope it is. I hope it is alarming enough so that we finally hear the call to action.
Most of us don’t hear God’s call the way that Isaiah and Peter did – most of us hear it as we recognize that in order to be faithful, we must act. And this is such a time for Christians. For too long, Christians and environmentalists have been in separate, and often opposing camps. There have been too few places such as Frame, where being Christian means being green. But for all of us, it is becoming time when recycling isn’t enough.
Yet, most of us probably feel that this problem is too big for us to tackle – to paraphrase a bumper sticker, if we don’t feel overwhelmed, we’re not paying attention. And yet, throughout the ages, men and women have faced overwhelming challenges, and persisted, and prevailed.
In perfecting the incandescent lamp, Thomas Edison experienced ten thousand failures before he finally succeeded. A friend of Edison's chanced to remark that ten thousand failures were a lot of failures, to which Edison replied: "I didn't fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that wouldn't work." His friend Henry Ford was right when he said that failure was the “opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
One of my favorite ads from a Superbowl a couple of years ago was the one which had many of the coaches and players who had failed to make the game singing the song from Annie: “Tomorrow” – the ad ended with the remark, “As of tomorrow morning, every team is undefeated again.”
One of the lessons we see again and again in the Bible is the lesson of resurrection: God is always able to create a new beginning out of the most hopeless circumstances. Last fall, as we observed a Season of Creation here at Frame, you may remember that we spent six weeks looking at the created world as a means of understanding God. And on the week when we studied trees, I shared with you my wonder at what I grew to understand theologically from learning about trees. Eric Singsass had shared with me his observation that, “…the #1 cool thing about trees is that they are literally made from air. Invisible CO2 enters the leaves, is made into sugars, and woven into cellulose (another type of sugar). Invisible “air” turns into something as massive as a white pine or redwood tree. They are useful for food and shelter for us as well as lots of other creatures.” I shared with you then my understanding that we begin to learn from trees that transformation is integral to the way God’s world works. And we begin to learn that the miraculous is part of the ordinary in God’s world. As I continued to think about this, I wondered if perhaps the resurrection was not the unique break with the past that we have usually understood it to be, but instead the revelation of how the world really is.
In other words, perhaps the resurrection isn’t unique. Maybe instead it’s archetypical. Maybe God was revealing to us in the resurrection the way the world can be – that transformation is part of the ordinary cycle of life in God’s creation.
Jesus reminded us again and again that God can change human hearts. But, we have to be willing to change. At the workshop with Professor Wallace last week, he said (as President Bush did in his 2006 State of the Union address) that the United State is addicted to oil. Actually, Wallace said fossil fuels, but close enough. The United States is leading the world in an international addiction to materialism fueled by fossil fuels. Although the world medical community may be right to anticipate a flu pandemic, we are all already suffering from what author John de Graaf called Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, defined as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s not only our energy consumption – it’s our consumption of stuff that fuels the energy consumption, and as one wise person said once, “we can never get enough of that which we don’t really need.” So we want more and more and more. During Lent, we’ll be watching a video series on Affluenza, and perhaps as we watch, we will discover ways to reshape our hearts and lives.
We are culturally addicted to consumption. And so, as Wallace reminded us at the conference, “If this is truly an addiction, then it is not primarily a ‘head-problem’, it’s a heart problem and a spirit problem.” And thus, the Christian community has a unique ability to speak and act prophetically in this crisis. Because not only do we understand creation as sacred, having a holiness beyond its utilitarian function, but we also understand resurrection. We understand that God has built transformation into the way the world works, and that God is in the heart-changing business. We understand that repentance can really lead to a new beginning. And so perhaps, as for Esther, so also for us: perhaps it was for such a time as this that we are here: perhaps learning how to be Green Christians is how we are called.
Jesus called Peter to take the boat out to the deep and cast the nets. In the Bible, the deep, referring to water, is often a symbol for mystery, the unknown, the place where our fears reside. Jesus called Peter to engage the unknown, to walk into that place where he no longer was in control, the place of fear, and over time, Peter experienced real transformation. If we are to truly engage the global climate crisis, we are going to have to not be satisfied with small changes but are going to have to engage the possibility of deconstructing our lifestyle, and remaking it, in a way that will sustain life. We will have to engage the unknown, go beyond our current experience, and let God remake us into people who can help lead our culture out of slavery to stuff and into harmony with creation. We have to go deep – deep into the realization of the interdependence of all life, deep into dependence on God instead of on stuff, deep into change.
And as we learn to live with significant change, we might face changes such as: giving up most jet travel: for me, not only would that mean engaging in different kinds of professional learning, but not seeing my family. Perhaps as we adapt to the needs of the earth, we will find ourselves less scattered from our loved ones. Perhaps we will see more families sharing homes with other families: either in multigenerational living together, or multiple families becoming one household. Clearly, deep change will include less driving and so with shared vehicles, more walking and bicycling. Perhaps among the changes will be more buying locally. As we look at all of these changes together, we see the possibility of a life that looks more regionally and neighborhood-oriented. Perhaps we will find ourselves having to give up rushing, overcrowding our lives with stuff and activity. Perhaps we might discover that a lifestyle that is more sustainable for earth and all its species, will also be more sustainable for us. Who knows what new discoveries we might make as we venture into the deep? Perhaps, like Peter, we will find our lives much changed, and yet overflowing in different ways. We may feel that we can’t do it, but perhaps it’s finally time to say, we can’t fail to do it.
It makes little difference to who God is whether we believe in him or not – God is God no matter what we think. Yet we anguish and puzzle over his existence as if we are the gods who determine his life. How much more impact it has on OUR lives once we realize that God believes in us.
God believed in Moses when Moses did not know himself to be a leader and a liberator.
God believed in Jeremiah when Jeremiah only saw himself as a boy. God saw him as one who would carry God’s words to peoples and kings, one who would build up and tear down….
God believe in Isaiah when Isaiah could only see himself as unclean. God already saw Isaiah as a prophet.
Jesus believed in Peter when Peter could only see himself as a fisherman who had failed. Jesus saw one who would bring in more than could be imagined, who would be fishing for people, upon whom he would build his church.
God believes in the older people of our community who can assure younger generations that life can be full without some of what we have come to see as essential.
God believes in my generation, the Boomers, who are comfortable, to a fault perhaps, with looking within, and so may be able to lead our culture to genuine repentance of the lifestyle we demanded.
God believes in Generation X who are capable of imagining the possibilities that technology provides.
And God believes in the Millenials, who will bear the impact of our choices more than any of the rest of our community, and who are proving to be more public-service and community-minded than any generation since the World War II generation, according to generation-scholars. God believes in us.
God believes in Frame, who has been a leader in this community, who is able to think greenly and faithfully at the same time, and who is able to act.
For too long, we have made our faith a matter of deciding whether or not we believe in God. But to experience God, we have to move beyond thinking of God as an intellectual proposition to be decided upon and engage with the God. We need to go deep. For the earth’s sake, for our children’s sake, for Christ’s sake let’s realize that God believes in us, and indeed, relies on us. No more excuses, it’s time to answer the call. Amen.
Excuses, excuses! The University Texas Medical Branch at Galveston has collected the following actual excuses sent in to schools to explain student absences:
“My son is under a doctor's care and should not take P.E. today.
Please execute him.
Dear School: Please ekscuse John being absent on Jan. 28, 29, 30,
31, 32, and also 33.
Please excuse Jimmy for being. It was his father's fault.
I kept Billie home because she had to go Christmas shopping because I don't know what size she wear.
Please excuse Jennifer for missing school yesterday. We forgot to get the Sunday paper off the porch, and when we found it Monday, we thought it was Sunday.”
Both Isaiah and Peter, when facing the call, came up with excuses – interestingly, both related to their sense of unworthiness. Apparently self-esteem issues are not purely a product of the modern advertising industry.
A couple of years ago, while my regular dentist was out of town, I had a dental emergency. So I went to my dentist’s backup, and since to him, I was a new patient, he had me fill out some paperwork, and one of the questions was, “Do you like your smile?” And I realized that many people probably don’t – we are so harsh in our judgment of ourselves that we don’t even like our own smiles. If we don’t even like our own smiles, how can we feel good enough about ourselves to feel that we can serve God?
And yet, repeatedly throughout human history, God has called ordinary humans, and through them, transformed the world. Think of some of the heroes in the Bible: Moses, David, Esther, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah, Peter…. You may not know the stories of all of these, but every single one of them was called by God to a great task, and they all resisted the call. Moses said he couldn’t lead because his speech was inadequate and no one would listen to him. David – actually, in David’s case, it was others who resisted. Who him? He’s just a young shepherd boy. He can’t slay Goliath or become king….. Esther doubted that she should become queen, but her mentor reminded her that it might be for such a time as this that she was born, that she had this opportunity, and that she could save her people. For such a time as this…. Isaiah protested that he was unclean; Jeremiah (we heard last week) said that he was too young; Jonah – well, Jonah didn’t actually protest…he just ran the other way, and had to be (let’s say) persuaded to serve God; and finally Peter, who recognized that he was a sinner, but accepted Christ’s invitation to serve with him after all.
All of these were ordinary men and women who were called in the middle of their ordinary lives – many of them (Moses, David, Peter at least) while at work. And they didn’t want to change their lives, and they didn’t believe that God could do something big through them.
There have been other ordinary men and women who have allowed God to change their lives, and through them, to change the world. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, one of the most influential theologians of the 20th century, realized that he had to resist Hitler, and that such resistance could cost him a great deal…it ended up costing him his life. How many other Germans turned away from the horrors of Nazism, and allowed Hitler to build a machine of genocide?
And in our time…how many issues have we heard about and thought, yes, that’s REALLY important, but how could I make a difference??
Darfur? The world AIDS pandemic? And finally, the global climate crisis.
I was at a conference last week, and on Friday, one of the speakers, Professor Mark Wallace from Swarthmore College, said, “This era is objectively apocalyptic.” Wallace wasn’t talking about the rapture or other ideas from the Left Behind series – he is a Presbyterian minister and the rapture, Left Behind and other gloom and doom scenarios are not consistent with the way Presbyterians understand the future. He was talking about global warming, when he said, “This era is objectively apocalyptic.” In other words, in our time, there are conditions that may lead to disaster, widespread destruction and devastation.
Friday was Groundhog Day, and instead of a furry little mammal coming out of his hole and seeing his shadow – we all were forced to come into the light and face the frightening facts when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released their report. As today’s New York Times says, “This is not a report compiled by a bunch of activists or alarmists. It is a consensus document, the inherently conservative product of three years of study and debate among mainstream scientists from 150 countries with often competing agendas. And in its modesty, it is alarming enough.” Yes, it is alarming enough – at least, I hope it is. I hope it is alarming enough so that we finally hear the call to action.
Most of us don’t hear God’s call the way that Isaiah and Peter did – most of us hear it as we recognize that in order to be faithful, we must act. And this is such a time for Christians. For too long, Christians and environmentalists have been in separate, and often opposing camps. There have been too few places such as Frame, where being Christian means being green. But for all of us, it is becoming time when recycling isn’t enough.
Yet, most of us probably feel that this problem is too big for us to tackle – to paraphrase a bumper sticker, if we don’t feel overwhelmed, we’re not paying attention. And yet, throughout the ages, men and women have faced overwhelming challenges, and persisted, and prevailed.
In perfecting the incandescent lamp, Thomas Edison experienced ten thousand failures before he finally succeeded. A friend of Edison's chanced to remark that ten thousand failures were a lot of failures, to which Edison replied: "I didn't fail ten thousand times. I successfully eliminated, ten thousand times, materials and combinations that wouldn't work." His friend Henry Ford was right when he said that failure was the “opportunity to begin again, more intelligently.”
One of my favorite ads from a Superbowl a couple of years ago was the one which had many of the coaches and players who had failed to make the game singing the song from Annie: “Tomorrow” – the ad ended with the remark, “As of tomorrow morning, every team is undefeated again.”
One of the lessons we see again and again in the Bible is the lesson of resurrection: God is always able to create a new beginning out of the most hopeless circumstances. Last fall, as we observed a Season of Creation here at Frame, you may remember that we spent six weeks looking at the created world as a means of understanding God. And on the week when we studied trees, I shared with you my wonder at what I grew to understand theologically from learning about trees. Eric Singsass had shared with me his observation that, “…the #1 cool thing about trees is that they are literally made from air. Invisible CO2 enters the leaves, is made into sugars, and woven into cellulose (another type of sugar). Invisible “air” turns into something as massive as a white pine or redwood tree. They are useful for food and shelter for us as well as lots of other creatures.” I shared with you then my understanding that we begin to learn from trees that transformation is integral to the way God’s world works. And we begin to learn that the miraculous is part of the ordinary in God’s world. As I continued to think about this, I wondered if perhaps the resurrection was not the unique break with the past that we have usually understood it to be, but instead the revelation of how the world really is.
In other words, perhaps the resurrection isn’t unique. Maybe instead it’s archetypical. Maybe God was revealing to us in the resurrection the way the world can be – that transformation is part of the ordinary cycle of life in God’s creation.
Jesus reminded us again and again that God can change human hearts. But, we have to be willing to change. At the workshop with Professor Wallace last week, he said (as President Bush did in his 2006 State of the Union address) that the United State is addicted to oil. Actually, Wallace said fossil fuels, but close enough. The United States is leading the world in an international addiction to materialism fueled by fossil fuels. Although the world medical community may be right to anticipate a flu pandemic, we are all already suffering from what author John de Graaf called Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic, defined as “a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety, and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.” It’s not only our energy consumption – it’s our consumption of stuff that fuels the energy consumption, and as one wise person said once, “we can never get enough of that which we don’t really need.” So we want more and more and more. During Lent, we’ll be watching a video series on Affluenza, and perhaps as we watch, we will discover ways to reshape our hearts and lives.
We are culturally addicted to consumption. And so, as Wallace reminded us at the conference, “If this is truly an addiction, then it is not primarily a ‘head-problem’, it’s a heart problem and a spirit problem.” And thus, the Christian community has a unique ability to speak and act prophetically in this crisis. Because not only do we understand creation as sacred, having a holiness beyond its utilitarian function, but we also understand resurrection. We understand that God has built transformation into the way the world works, and that God is in the heart-changing business. We understand that repentance can really lead to a new beginning. And so perhaps, as for Esther, so also for us: perhaps it was for such a time as this that we are here: perhaps learning how to be Green Christians is how we are called.
Jesus called Peter to take the boat out to the deep and cast the nets. In the Bible, the deep, referring to water, is often a symbol for mystery, the unknown, the place where our fears reside. Jesus called Peter to engage the unknown, to walk into that place where he no longer was in control, the place of fear, and over time, Peter experienced real transformation. If we are to truly engage the global climate crisis, we are going to have to not be satisfied with small changes but are going to have to engage the possibility of deconstructing our lifestyle, and remaking it, in a way that will sustain life. We will have to engage the unknown, go beyond our current experience, and let God remake us into people who can help lead our culture out of slavery to stuff and into harmony with creation. We have to go deep – deep into the realization of the interdependence of all life, deep into dependence on God instead of on stuff, deep into change.
And as we learn to live with significant change, we might face changes such as: giving up most jet travel: for me, not only would that mean engaging in different kinds of professional learning, but not seeing my family. Perhaps as we adapt to the needs of the earth, we will find ourselves less scattered from our loved ones. Perhaps we will see more families sharing homes with other families: either in multigenerational living together, or multiple families becoming one household. Clearly, deep change will include less driving and so with shared vehicles, more walking and bicycling. Perhaps among the changes will be more buying locally. As we look at all of these changes together, we see the possibility of a life that looks more regionally and neighborhood-oriented. Perhaps we will find ourselves having to give up rushing, overcrowding our lives with stuff and activity. Perhaps we might discover that a lifestyle that is more sustainable for earth and all its species, will also be more sustainable for us. Who knows what new discoveries we might make as we venture into the deep? Perhaps, like Peter, we will find our lives much changed, and yet overflowing in different ways. We may feel that we can’t do it, but perhaps it’s finally time to say, we can’t fail to do it.
It makes little difference to who God is whether we believe in him or not – God is God no matter what we think. Yet we anguish and puzzle over his existence as if we are the gods who determine his life. How much more impact it has on OUR lives once we realize that God believes in us.
God believed in Moses when Moses did not know himself to be a leader and a liberator.
God believed in Jeremiah when Jeremiah only saw himself as a boy. God saw him as one who would carry God’s words to peoples and kings, one who would build up and tear down….
God believe in Isaiah when Isaiah could only see himself as unclean. God already saw Isaiah as a prophet.
Jesus believed in Peter when Peter could only see himself as a fisherman who had failed. Jesus saw one who would bring in more than could be imagined, who would be fishing for people, upon whom he would build his church.
God believes in the older people of our community who can assure younger generations that life can be full without some of what we have come to see as essential.
God believes in my generation, the Boomers, who are comfortable, to a fault perhaps, with looking within, and so may be able to lead our culture to genuine repentance of the lifestyle we demanded.
God believes in Generation X who are capable of imagining the possibilities that technology provides.
And God believes in the Millenials, who will bear the impact of our choices more than any of the rest of our community, and who are proving to be more public-service and community-minded than any generation since the World War II generation, according to generation-scholars. God believes in us.
God believes in Frame, who has been a leader in this community, who is able to think greenly and faithfully at the same time, and who is able to act.
For too long, we have made our faith a matter of deciding whether or not we believe in God. But to experience God, we have to move beyond thinking of God as an intellectual proposition to be decided upon and engage with the God. We need to go deep. For the earth’s sake, for our children’s sake, for Christ’s sake let’s realize that God believes in us, and indeed, relies on us. No more excuses, it’s time to answer the call. Amen.