Giving Up the God Who Shares My Friend/Enemy List

HEBREW BIBLE READING              Genesis 12: 1-3                                   

Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. ²I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.

 ³I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

GUIDED MEDITATION, pt.1  “Giving Up The God Who Shares My Friend/Enemy List”

Sometimes the Bible disagrees with itself. In the passage we just read, we hear 2 consecutive but contrary theologies about what it means to be “blessed," and we see two different portraits of God. First we meet a God who is partial to Abram and his descendants. If you know the back story, you know God has already been playing favorites—when God preferred Abel’s offering over his brother Cain’s, for instance, and (spoiler alert for those who’ve not yet seen the movie Noah) when God saved only Noah’s family from the flood. And as the Genesis saga continues, God selects Abram and promises to make his name great while promising to “curse those who curse [Abram].”  The God we learn about in this story—this part of the story—has favorites.  The God of Abram seems to divide the world into two groups: 1) Abram’s and God’s friends , 2) Abram’s and God’s enemies.  And if we read further into Genesis, we will see that God’s favoritism will produce caustic sibling rivalries . . .  between Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his older brothers.  This particular God seems to have favorite, just as fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had favorites.  Which is good news for Abram’s descendants.  But that also means The God Who Hates My Enemies likes only some of the poor schlubs on this earth, and you’d better hope you are on God’s good list for the blessings.  At this point it may be wise to heed Anne Lamott's warning: "“You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

Does anyone else feel uncomfortable sometimes when people talk about how God has blessed them?  I cringe a bit when some folks glibly, sometimes smugly, talk about how God has blessed them—with a nice home or new car.  I hear the Flannery O’Connor character, the clueless Mrs. Turpin, bragging in the doctor’s waiting room about now God has blessed her with land and good sense, how blessed she is that she and her husband are not white trash or colored folks . . . until a girl sitting across from her in the waiting room hurls a book at Mrs. Turpin’s head.  You see, the things we label as God’s blessings don’t always seem to be evidence of God’s priorities.  (Recall our recent study of the Beatitudes to know whom Jesus blessed.) Blessed is a good word.  One of my favorites. But it can convey favoritism, tribalism, superiority.

So let’s remember whom God is favoring.  In the families of Genesis, God chooses the YOUNGER son to bless—not the oldest, as the tradition required.  Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph should not have received the birthrights of the eldest.  God upsets our notions of who needs special treatment.  You and I get to identify with the one who is blessed in Genesis only if we live on the margins of society, only if we are the little brother the family picks on, only if we are the oppressed and enslaved people who need to feel that they have not been left behind.  But if we are rich, if we live in a nation that’s become a super power, if our people have run roughshod over others, we do not get to use these stories to justify our domination of others by invoking the God of Conquest. 

For instance, it’s understandable that enslaved people in this country found hope in the Exodus story about a land God promised to those who’d escaped slavery in Egypt.  And who could condemn the early biblical writers of this narrative thread of conquest because, after all, they had been the conquered, they’d been captured and exiled to Babylon, scarred by the desolation of their home.  Who would blame THEM for telling stories in which they imagined themselves as the conquerors?  Let us allow Abram’s distant and displaced descendants, pining for their lost country, to tell a story of a God who favors THEM.  Let us sympathize with these storytellers. But let us not appropriate their story to justify a privileged people’s privilege or pride.  You get to tell the story that God loves you the best—only if it seems to all others that God has chewed you up and spit you out.

Let’s also be mindful of an alternate theme weaving through these same 3 verses.   You hear it best in the final phrase of verse 3:  God will use the chosen ones to bless “all the families of the earth.”  If that’s the case, God’s blessing of a favored one may mean tapping that someone for a difficult task in order to bless ALL of the earth.  Abram may not have won the lottery—and certainly not for his family alone.  Abram may instead have been chosen for a daunting journey.   Think of Frodo heading toward Mordor to save all of Middle Earth. Or the beleaguered Tevye, from Fiddler in the Roof, protesting to God: “I know, I know. We are Your chosen people. But, once in a while, can't You choose someone else?” Being chosen by God is not necessarily what we think of as a blessing.

I hear both theologies in these three verses. Surely there were then, as there are now, cross currents of feelings about if and how God allies with certain people.  We so need to feel that God is on our side, because we need to feel there are clear sides.  We think that God can be for US only if God is against other folks. 

But the kicker is that today this story is speaking to all the families of the earth who have journeyed far and intermarried for centuries.  We are all Abram’s children.

  

The question for us now: What is YOUR role in God’s plan to bless others through US? How have your blessings blessed others?  How might you use your blessings bless others?

First, “count your blessings”.  Think of gifts you have:  of personality, intellect, experiences, skills, material possessions, a physical body, family and friends.

Next, recall ways you have blessed others, ways your blessings blessed others.

Now consider ways you might use your capacities and resources and spiritual depth to bless others.

SILENCE

*SONG                                        “In Love You Summon”                  p. 37 in songbook

HEBREW BIBLE READING                Genesis 11:4-9                                 

⁴So Abram went, as the Lord had told him; and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. ⁵Abram took his wife Sarai and his brother’s son Lot, and all the possessions that they had gathered, and the persons whom they had acquired in Haran; and they set forth to go to the land of Canaan. When they had come to the land of Canaan, ⁶Abram passed through the land to the place at Shechem, to the oak of Moreh. At that time the Canaanites were in the land. ⁷Then the Lord appeared to Abram, and said, “To your offspring I will give this land.” So he built there an altar to the Lord, who had appeared to him. ⁸From there he moved on to the hill country on the east of Bethel, and pitched his tent, with Bethel on the west and Ai on the east; and there he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the name of the Lord. ⁹And Abram journeyed on by stages toward the Negeb.

GUIDED MEDITATION, p. 2  “Giving Up the God Who Says ‘Stay Put’”

The Lectionary assigns this story during Lent because the Lenten season is often compared to a journey—a spiritual journey. Like Abram, we journey to a new place spiritually. We often get “stuck” in our inner lives—stuck in habits, mindsets, feelings.  We may, this Lent, need to give up the God Who Tells Us To “Stay Put.” 

Like Abram, we often journey on with God “by stages” (v. 9). You’re invited to reflect on various stages of your faith journey.  To help you imagine your spiritual journey in this way, one of our means of action prayers invites you to create a “map” that represents some of the stages of your spiritual life.

INVITATION TO ENACTED PRAYERS

1.      You may prayerfully give to others from your own blessings.  As you contribute your offerings, you pray for ways to use your other (nonfinancial) blessings (of time and talents and abilities) to extend God’s blessings to others.

2.      You may receive bread for the journey and the cup of blessing.  As you take the bread and dip it in the cup, recall the life of Jesus, who gave himself for the sake of love. Give thanks.

3.      You may take paper and colored pencils back to your seat and sketch a map that symbolizes your faith journey. If you think of your life as a spiritual journey, how would you mark the twists and turns, deadends, meanderings, backtrackings, progress and INNER changes you’ve made?  You might place symbols along the way for things/people/events that have influenced or even redirected you along this spiritual road. Who’s been on this journey with you?  How have you experienced God? Have you reached Canaan yet? You’ll have the option to share this map later.

4.      You may kneel beside the pastor to share a prayer concern or ask for special prayer.  

SHARING

Giving Up the God of Power for Lent

Texts:  Genesis 2-3;  Matthew 4:1-11

If you could be a superhero, what superpower would you want? 

Invisibility? Superhuman strength? Mind control?  Would you rather be given the ability to fly or change form?  Most likely you would make your superpower choice based on which power you think would give you the greatest advantage over other people.  I mean—that’s the point of having superpowers. Of course you would use your powers solely for good.  But your powers wouldn’t be worth anything if they didn’t somehow give you the upper hand, right?

Long before Marvel Comics introduced modern Superheroes, people dreamed of ways to gain advantage over others.  In a world of winners and losers, a pecking order, hierarchy, domination, violence, unfair distribution of resources, oppression. . . we want some kind of edge. We want to have power over others—or at least to prevent others from having power over us.  And we certainly expect our God to have power over ALL.

In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is no sooner baptized and declared beloved child of God than he is tempted to take control of all the systems of civilization, as if being the beloved child of God might not be enough.  So while Jesus is wandering in the wilderness, discerning what to do with all his belovedness, the devil, so the story goes, entices Jesus with the ability to turn stones into bread, an act perhaps symbolizing power to control that agrarian-based economy.  Next the devil promises Jesus the ability to jump from the Temple without injury, representing a power over the religious power structure.  Ultimately, Satan offers Jesus authority over all the kingdoms of the world, which would mean pervasive political power.  But control over the intertwined economic, religious, and political systems is exactly what the Roman Empire maintained.  Matthew’s Gospel story of temptation is not, you see, extolling Jesus for scrupulously avoiding temptations of the flesh, as the church has often obsessively defined those fleshy sins.  Matthew, remember, is systematically developing a portrait of Jesus as the anti-king who refuses to be coopted by the empire, who refuses to rely on their methods to bring change because in doing so he would become them.  Matthew’s Jesus is countering Rome, the Super Power of his day, not with force or fear—but with simple refusal to cooperate, by rejecting economic, religious and political domination as the ultimate power.  He will not use violence to overturn a violent overlord.  He will not resort to a power grab that would simply replace one domination system with another. How tempting are the means by which the current power gained dominance.  But Jesus’s power is not OVER others. Jesus’s power is FOR others.

Let’s go back to the beginning. The very beginning. And let’s first attend to an important detail in the Genesis creation story, which I’ll preface by guessing that in many churches today the Hebrew Bible and Gospel lections produced sermons about resisting the devil’s lure to do bad things.  Some preachers no doubt enumerated particular sins that are easy for them to target and that will help most in their congregations feel that, thank the Lord, SOMEONE is holding the line on sin. Some will use the Adam and Eve story to keep women in their place because men, according to scripture, are to rule over them.

Not so. The first man and woman were created as “partners” to become “one flesh” (Gen. 2: 18, 24).  The story says it's only after a deviation from God’s plan that the man is said to rule over the woman.  Male domination, patriarchy that continues today, simply proves that we’re NOT in paradise.  We were created for equality, so inequality reveals how far we are from God’s ideal. 

Furthermore, if Jesus is truly the ultimate revealer of God, then God is not a God of power and might.

I know you’re thinking, “What good is a god who can’t or won’t do the magic stuff? What good is a god like that?” But maybe there’s a more powerful power than coercion, manipulation, and domination—a power of love, creativity, self-giving, and transformation. Yes, you grew up singing: “All hail the power of Jesus’ name. Let angels prostrate fall.  Bring forth the royal diadem and crown him Lord of all.”  But Jesus rejected all of that.  He did not, according to this story, seek or accept superhuman powers or prestige.  Yes, we assumed that the definition of deity was a super human being with super powers. We may have thought that God’s job description was to intervene in our lives by disrupting the laws of science and exercising magical powers to do our bidding. And some Bible stories portray the God of Abraham as a figure who can zap people into obedience, who can overrule the rulers of this earth (like the Egyptian pharaoh), a god who’s not above commissioning conquering armies to invade territory needed by God’s people. But let’s remember who’s telling these stories and why oppressed people experienced God in this way.

The central story of the Christian faith says that Jesus did not call on God to extricate him from the cross but instead prayed that his executioners be forgiven. This same Jesus did not teach his followers amazing tricks but instead taught them to be peacemakers and then to make more disciples who would overcome evil with goodness, hate with love.

If God uses power to heal people with cancer and prevent destructive earthquake, why doesn’t God intervene every time cancer invades a human body or earthquakes threaten human communities? If God has that kind of power, why is God not consistently using it? 

Maybe we have to at least consider that God’s power is quite powerful but not in the ways we expect, because our limited experience of power equates it with demonstrations of force, coercion, and domination. What if the God of grace wields power by cooperating with us, reconciling humanity, luring us forward in love?  What if Jesus rejected Satan’s offers because Jesus was being true to his understanding of God’s power at work through life and love?  What if we have created the God we long for: a warrior king?  Christian metaphors about prayer warriors and “the battle for souls,” for instance, give us away.

Jesus knew and reflected a different god.  In trying to dismantle the old powers, he trusted Love. We’re afraid to do that. This may be the most terrifying challenge you could hear this Lent: give up the God of Power. And replace that god with the God of Love.  

Here’s why it matters so much.  If we don’t follow Jesus in this, we ourselves will be shaped by the love of power—rather than the power of love.  We’ll be so sure of our own need and our group's need to be in control that we’ll be blind to white privilege, careless of the earth we think we own. We’ll turn every decision in our family or church into a contest of wills.  It matters very much which god we serve.

When Jesus was tempted with power, he quoted three scriptures:

The tempter first offered economic power.  Jesus replied:  “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’” In other words, “Turning stones into bread trivializes both the needs of the hungry and the necessity of spiritual food. We need our daily bread AND that which nourishes the human spirit.”

The tempter next offered religious power. Jesus replied: “Again it is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test’”—which may mean that calling on angels to catch him leaping from the Temple turns religion into stunts and God into trained circus animal.

 

The tempter finally offered political power. Jesus replied: “Away with you, Satan! for it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only THAT God.’” God rules very differently than the Roman Emperor.   

How might we be changed if we also refuse the tempting God of Power this Lent?

If we break free from the dominant perspective of domination, we might be able to imagine new strategies for improving our community—through the transformative power of love and creative option of nonviolence. As poet Audre Lorde said, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

We might be able to relinquish our need to control everyone else and instead trust in God’s love to transform our own spirits.  We can live out love, not fear.

We might expose patriarchy that still exists.  Since yesterday was International Women’s Day, and since Eve was surely maligned in many pulpits this morning, consider that the oppression of women is “the defining issue of our time,” according to The Half the Sky Movement.  A system based on raw power rather than love creates gender inequality because the domination system places high value on physical strength and fighting power, which is generally more evident in men than women. 

According to a U.N. report, “Women comprise 70 percent of the world’s poorest people and own only 1 percent of the titled land.” Further, women “suffer not only from unequal access to education and training” and disproportionate “discrimination by their employers. The majority of women earn on average about three-fourths of the pay that men receive for doing the same work, outside of the agricultural sector, in both developed and developing countries. But if greater income equality was achieved across gender lines, this could help decrease poverty through the generations. Studies have indicated that when women hold assets or gain income, the money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently their children are healthier. For every dollar a woman earns, she invests 80 cents in her family. Men, on the other hand, invest around 30 cents and are more likely to squander money on alcohol and other vices.” http://www.halftheskymovement.org/issues/economic-empowerment

    

If we give up the God of Power, we will not tolerate inequities of salaries, the exclusion of women from certain fields of endeavor, or the locker room culture that fosters disrespect.  We will teach our sons that aggression toward women— violent actions, threatening gestures, sexual assaults, sexual trafficking, domestic violence, leering looks, and abusive language—are never ever permissible.   

The Church has a special responsibility to speak about God so that maleness is not seen as normative for humanity or constitutive of divinity. The Mighty King, the Heavenly Father, and the Warrior God are not the only or best images of divine power. We also want to be especially careful about implicit values we’re teaching our children. Do we, for instance, make too much of the pretty dress one is wearing rather than asking about some activity that’s important to her or commenting on some thought she has expressed?   

  

The prevailing culture believes the only good god is the mighty god of conquest and power.  But Jesus rejected the use of force to usher in God’s kin*dom.  Maybe we, too, can give up the God of Power—and rely instead on the God of love.  After all, it is the God of Love we will see pictured on the cross this Good Friday, and it’s the God of Love, not Power, who will rise from the grave.

PRAYER:  Gentle Spirit, Kindly One, soften us in your ways.  May we stand firm with love to reject the lure of control and domination that privileges some over others. Amen.

Giving Up the Prosperity Gospel God

Text:  Matthew 6:24-34

Fat Tuesday is nearly here with Ash Wednesday close on its heels.  At the risk of dampening our Mardi Gras spirits prematurely—I’ll do that officially on Wednesday—I’m announcing our Lenten sermon theme now and giving you a little preview with this evening’s sermon.

As you know, we at Open Table don’t observe Lent with breast beating remorse. We don’t pay penance or give up guilty pleasure for 40 days to get back into God’s good graces.  If we “give up” something for Lent this year, we might do so as part of an ecumenical effort to use less carbon fuels and thus be more caring of Mother Earth.  If we give up meat, it might be out of concern for other creatures and our own good health. If we embark on a Lenten journey, we might walk a nontraditional path to the cross and beyond. So you won’t be surprised to hear that my sermonic emphasis this Lent may sound a little off-kilter.  And here it is:  I’m going to preach about giving up God for Lent—or more precisely, giving up a certain kind of God for Lent—or even more precisely, giving up certain kinds of gods for Lent.

The idea for the sermon series comes from one of those blogging pastors (does anyone NOT have their own blog these days?) who is spending this year trying out atheism in order to answer a question that recently stumped him: “What difference does God make in your life?” Maybe you’d have a ready answer for “What difference does God make in your life?” But pastor Ryan Bell needs to experiment with atheism this year in order to figure out that answer. He says he’s not (yet?) an atheist, but he’s going to try to live as if he is and see if his life is any different as a result.  (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ryan-j-bell/a-year-without-god_b_4512842.html.)

I don’t find Bell’s quest shocking.  Most pastors and most religious people probably experiment with atheism periodically.  I succumb to practical atheism whenever I give up on hope or when I become convinced of my own self-sufficiency and live as if I don’t believe in God—which, for me, is about every other Thursday.  Others may think I dabble in theoretical atheism when I don’t believe in the God THEY believe in. And I confess that at several points in my faith journey I have given up the God I used to believe in for the God I can believe in. 

But I have always exchanged the God I Used To Believe In for another God—like an upgrade on my iPhone for an improved way of connecting, learning, evolving. 

Have you ever given up God?  Or given up some version of God you’d inherited but needed to let go of before you could connect with a more authentic God?

This Lent, I’m going to suggest there may be ideas about God you might want to replace, that your current God, like your current iPhone, might be upgraded.  It can be a pain to upgrade. You have to learn how to operate differently.  You might lose some folks in your contacts list.  But you’ll be better equipped to move into the future if you do. 

Today, as we conclude our study of the Sermon on the Mount, I’m suggesting that we have sometimes been “operating” with the God of the prosperity gospel. But the Jesus we encounter in Matthew’s Gospel isn’t preaching the Prosperity Gospel and seems to be leading us away from the God who promises success and wealth and toward another God—whom we may see more clearly when our Lenten journey takes us all the way to the cross.

Now the prosperity God is a hard one to give up. You know how some spiritual overachievers give up chocolate, bread, coffee, and wine for Lent while others sacrifice only Brussels sprouts? Giving up the Prosperity God will not be for the folks who can only give up Brussels sprouts. Religions that guarantee ultimate rewards in heaven have great appeal.  Religions that promise immediate rewards in this life are even more alluring. “Send in money to my television ministry, and your cancer will be cured.” “Pray and God will find a way for you to pay all your bills.”  “Join our church and God will give your financial success (a promise maybe IMPLIED by the pastor’s big house and fine cars)." These voices say that God— the prosperity God—intends for you to prosper financially. 

I understand the appeal.  The Prosperity God is deeply embedded in American capitalism’s Gospel of bootstrap striving.  But I don’t think the Prosperity Gospel appeals only to the needy or greedy. We’re enthrall to it because we have a deep need to believe in cause and effect—lest the universe become overwhelmingly unmanageable in our minds and hearts—to the point that we often confuse correlation with causation.  But this over-reliance on causality (if we do X, then God/the Universe does Y) runs counter to spiritual truths about unfathomable mystery and our need for humility.  We want to have more control over Life.  And the Prosperity God becomes a power that I can manipulate and for whom I am the focus. That’s a powerful god—and a god worth worshiping if you believe what you need most is to be in control and look successful and have clear and simple answers to the big questions in life.

I gave up the Prosperity God for these reasons:

1)  I can’t see much evidence that this God delivers consistently. “Name it and claim it,” some preach.  Well, you know good folks who pray faithfully that their chronic illness will be healed or that a job that can pay the bills will come along—yet the illness or the debt remains. You know mean-as-snakes folks who are flourishing. This disconnect was observed as early as Job. I’m not minimizing the benefits of having a positive attitude as we attempt new things and persistent amidst challenges. I’m not denying the power of prayer, though I’d like to nuance that statement if I had time.  But I can’t believe in the God who bestows special favors on those offering the right prayers or patronizing the right preachers. The purveyors of this grace-less Gospel have a self-interest in selling it to the desperate.

2)  I also gave up the Prosperity God after seeing in the Bible conflicting evidence about this God. Sure, the Prosperity God sometimes seems to make an appearance in scriptures, as when YHWH’s promise to Abram of land and descendants is contingent on the circumcision of those descendants (Gen. 17).  I can see how prosperity preachers find enough scriptures to make their case that if you do this, God will bless you.  And that God has favorites God selects to bless. I see where they get this. But in Matthew’s Gospel, for instance, God especially loves the poor and lowly and persecuted—but blesses them not with wealth and power and prestige—but with mercy and a role to play in ushering the upside down kingdom of God. Today’s text explicitly says the God of Money and the God of Jesus are antithetical. You can’t love both God and Money.  And the way to please God is to care LESS about appearances (what clothes you wear) because it’s all about trusting God to care for you. The wildflowers in the field are our spiritual model—not televangelists hawking their wares.

3)  Finally, I found it easy to give up the prosperity God because I just don’t think I like this tit-for-tat God who plays favorites, and I don’t think this God will make me and my world better.  The Success God will lead me—will lead our congregation—into frenzy and striving and smugness and self-centeredness.  Here’s what will bring us healing and hope, love and lightness of being, according to Jesus:

·       Knowing there’s far more to life than the food we put in our stomachs and the clothes we hang on our bodies.   

·       Watching the freedom loving birds of the air, careless in the care of God, and learning from them.

·       Not being so preoccupied with getting that we can’t respond to God’s giving.

·       Relaxing into the present moment.  As we will do now, appreciating each new breath.   PAUSE.

Oh, I know. Our congregation isn’t strongly influenced by the popular versions of the prosperity Gospel.  You may be thinking I should have preached this sermon elsewhere.  But there’s a subtler Prosperity Gospel that might snare progressives.  There’s a slightly disguised prosperity God to whom I DO sometimes pay homage. It’s the Prosperity God who says it’s all up to me.  And I must do it today.  And if I do it and do it now, the Universe will be set to rights.

So again and again I come here to join you as we realign our skewed priorities before the God of grace. I will worship the God who spoke quaintly these words to the medieval mystic Julian of Norwich:

“All shall be well, all shall be well, and all manner of    thing shall be well.”

This is what the wild birds and wild flowers know.  I have given up—and have to keep giving up—the Prosperity God in order to worship the God of Grace and Mystery, the God who is with me in times of deep suffering, the God who holds the people I love even when their minds and bodies are not healing, the God who loves us even when we can’t love ourselves, the God Jesus loved and served.

PRAYER:

God who adorns the lilies and feeds the ravens, we will do what we can to clothe and feed ourselves. But we know life is more. We give up now a need to control you and others and allow you to say to us as we try to hear, without fully understanding:  All shall be well.  All shall be well.  And all manner of thing shall be well.   Amen.