another sermon text: believing in a God who doesn't intervene
- 12 minutes read - 2372 wordsI’m trying to get back into the swing of blogging with the new year, and it’s been a bit tricky with lots of school cancellations (or “non-traditional instruction” days) and the subsequent disruptions to my work schedule. Even considering that, I’m still surprised to be posting essentially two sermons back-to-back.
A few hours after last week’s post (which was from a six-week old sermon), John Hamer reached out to me to ask if I might be willing to put something together quickly to fill in for an unexpectedly missing sermon in today’s service. I wound up saying yes, because I enjoy working with Beyond the Walls, the subject was interesting, and I wanted to put my skills to use from doing competitive extemporaneous and impromptu speaking in high school speech and debate (those were two distinct events, even though the words for them are near-synonyms).
That last point wasn’t terribly salient, because impromptu speaking—by definition—doesn’t use a prepared text, but Beyond the Walls does closed captioning in three languages, so it was less about putting my high school skills to use than it was about putting together a word-for-word text in a few days. The end result was a bit rougher than I would normally have liked, but I also think the constraints allowed me to be more honest about my non-theistic beliefs than I would have if I’d had more time to think about how people would have responded.
Anyway, here’s a recording of the service (with the text below), and here’s to some other blogging soon.
introduction
In the spring of 2019, I had an unexpected experience while taking the bus home from work. I got off the bus at my normal stop, I crossed the street, and I was walking up the hill toward my apartment when I realized that something was missing from my pocket. Sometime during the day, I had lost my wallet, along with my driver’s license, my credit card, my employee ID (which was also my bus pass), and perhaps most importantly for a bookworm like me, my library card.
I became angry as I kept walking up that hill. I usually took my bike to work, but what if I wanted to take the bus the next day? I could always pay my fare, but I’d lost not only all the cash I had but also the means to take out any more from the bank. Besides, was it even worth taking the bus if I couldn’t check out any new books from the library to read along the way? I didn’t even have a way to prove that I could legally drive to the library to get a new card. I knew that all of these were small inconveniences that I could resolve with a little bit of effort, but that didn’t really make me any happier.
As I continued walking, I had the sudden feeling that I should turn around, walk back to the bus stop, and look for my wallet there. This feeling was one that I associated with answers to prayers, with God intervening in my life in some way. It was a feeling that served as a sign that God cared about me and was active in my life. This might have come as a relief, but it actually just made me more angry.
Like many believers, I had many stories (and had heard many more) of God intervening to help people find wallets, keys, and other lost objects. I was familiar with the God who gives us signs by saving us from the small inconveniences of our lives.
In the Spring of 2019, though, I was becoming angry with that God. I was very aware of all the ways in which God was not intervening in the world. There were people starving in the town where I lived, racism and homophobia were targeting people all across the country, and there were people dying in conflicts in places that I could barely point to on a map.
If God wasn’t fixing any of that, I refused to even ask God to help me find a lost wallet. When the answer came to a prayer I had refused to say, when the feeling came to go back to the bus stop, I was more angry than relieved. How dare I have an experience of God intervening in my life when I deserved it so much less than so many others?
That feeling persisted, though, and I eventually turned around, went down the hill, crossed back over the street, and walked back to my normal stop, where my wallet was lying on the sidewalk, undisturbed, still containing my driver’s license, my credit card, my employee ID and bus pass, and, perhaps most importantly, my library card.
Over five years later, I am even less sure how to understand that experience. Although I consider myself a committed Christian, there are many days that I struggle to believe in God. Even on the days where I do believe in God, I just don’t like to think about God intervening in the world. In his book The Sin of Certainty, Bible scholar Pete Enns tells the story of hearing two different stories about freak accidents where walkers or joggers in a city park were killed by branches falling from trees.
Enns describes each of these events as “so bizarre, so flat-out implausible, and so very tragic, that [he] was left thinking that either God doesn’t exist or spends a lot of time napping or is simply distracted.” Like Enns, I have trouble reconciling a God who intervenes to help with small things with a God who can’t seem to be bothered when a small intervention would save someone’s life. It is easier for me to believe in a God who doesn’t intervene at all.
And yet. And yet, I have this experiences of being guided toward a lost wallet. Of—around that same time—getting car repair help from a stranger who happened to be passing by with the right tool for the job. Of—a few weeks later—receiving a message from someone I really needed to hear from that day.
today’s text
The authors of the Gospel of John are clearly more comfortable than I am with a God who intervenes. “Signs”—miraculous interventions on a much larger scale than a lost wallet—are a recurring theme in the first eleven chapters of this Gospel. Whereas people like Peter Enns or me sometimes struggle to believe in God because of the absence of interventions, these authors see these signs as solid evidence for belief in Jesus.
In John 12:37, for example, the authors bemoan that “although [Jesus] had performed so many signs in their presence, [the people] did not believe in him.” Later, in the final chapter of the Gospel, they assure us that Jesus also “did many other signs in the presence of his disciples” before explaining that these ones were included so that we can “believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God” (John 20:30-31).
Despite all of this optimism about signs and insistence that they bring about belief, our scripture passage for today shows that the authors of the Gospel of John are willing to admit that things are a little bit more complicated. In this passage, a royal official comes to Jesus, asking him to “come down and heal his son, for he was at the point of death” (John 4:47). Given the patterns that we see in this Gospel, we might expect Jesus to agree to heal the son and for the royal official to respond by believing in Jesus.
Of course, both of these things do happen in the story. But something else happens first. Jesus complains. “Unless you see signs and wonders,” he points out, “you will not believe” (John 20:48). It is less clear in English than it is in the original Greek—or the French or Spanish translations—that this is a plural you. Jesus is not just complaining about this one man (who, to be fair, is a very worried parent), he is complaining about everyone. He is complaining about all the people surrounding him and hoping to see a sign. Maybe he is even still complaining about that time his mom made him the center of attention at a wedding after all the wine ran out. Jesus is fed up with those of us who want to see signs and wonders.
We could imagine many reasons that Jesus would not want us to depend on these miraculous interventions for our own belief. Personally, I imagine Jesus warning us that these interventions won’t always be there. I know this. Peter Enns knows this. Even the authors of the Gospel of John knew this. We all know this. We live in a world where not all lost wallets get found, where not all almost-ruined weddings get saved, where not all very worried parents are spared tragedy, and where not all wars are stopped, no matter how many prayers we offer for peace. If our Christianity depends on Jesus intervening in our life, our Christianity will be fragile, because Jesus will not always intervene.
And yet. And yet, Jesus healed the boy anyway. For all of his complaining, for all of his frustration, for all his wanting to teach us that we can’t count on his interventions to come whenever we ask for them, Jesus couldn’t help himself, and he gave this very worried parent the sign and the wonder that he so desperately needed. He couldn’t respond this way each time, but he could this time.
interpretation
Jesus’s choice to heal the royal official’s son doesn’t answer all of my questions and concerns about a God who intervenes (or doesn’t!) any more than finding my wallet at a bus stop did. It doesn’t take away the pain from tragedies I feel like God could have intervened to prevent, and it doesn’t take away my worries about the evils in the world that God doesn’t seem in a hurry to stop. It certainly doesn’t give me permission to judge those who turn away from God when their prayers aren’t answered or to try to reason away their heartbreak and despair as part of some greater plan.
Jesus’s choice to heal the royal official’s son does invite me to try to recognize those moments in my life where the divine shines through, even if I don’t particularly deserve it, even if I can’t explain it, and even if I really wish it would shine through somewhere else. Changing how I think about God has helped me recognize and experience these moments instead of trying to fit them into some broader understanding that I know I will never achieve.
In his 2001 book A New Christianity for a New World, the Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong drew on religious thinkers like Paul Tillich in encouraging his readers to worship a God who “is not a supernatural entity who rides into time and space to rescue the distressed.” Instead, this God is “the source of life, the source of love, the Ground of Being.”
To see God less “as a being” who intervenes in Creation and more as “Being itself”—that is, present in all of Creation—lets us notice the divine shining through in all kinds of ways that we might miss if we are waiting for a sign or a wonder before we believe. Those who experience God in the natural world will recognize something powerful in Anglican priest William Law’s observation that “All that is sweet, delightful, and amiable in this world, in the serenity of the air, the fineness of seasons, the joy of light, the melody of sounds, the beauty of colors, the fragrancy of smells, the splendor of precious stones, is nothing else but Heaven breaking through the veil of this world.”
Of course, we too are parts of Creation, and Thomas Merton, a Catholic monk who lived at an abbey not too far from where I live, encouraged us to seek through meditative contemplation the “humble realization of our mysterious being as persons in whom God dwells, with infinite sweetness and inalienable power.”
conclusion
One day, a few months after being guided toward a lost wallet, getting car repair help from a stranger, and receiving a certain message on the same day I really needed it, I attended a Community of Christ workshop called Spirituality Along the Edges. I was struggling not just with the idea of a God who intervenes but also with many parts of my faith, and I was learning how to believe in the absence some of the signs and wonders that I had previously clung to.
As helpful as the entire workshop was, one memory in particular will always stay with me. As a group, we listened to a Community of Christ recording of our hymn Peace, Salaam, Shalom (CCS 310). After the first chorus played, I was delighted to hear the first words of the first verse being spoken in French.
I have studied and spoken French for over half of my life, and it is deeply meaningful to me in the way that the natural world is for some and that meditation is for others. (Of course, this probably makes it a bit rude that I didn’t at least try to translate my own sermon for today). As beautiful as that hymn is in any language, hearing French when I was expecting English was a transcendent experience. I don’t think it was God intervening in my life, but it was absolutely the divine shining through in my life, in a way that helped me learn to believe in new ways.
I don’t know how to make sense of a God who sometimes intervenes and sometimes doesn’t, and personally, I just can’t build my faith on the kinds of signs and wonders that get so much attention in the Gospel of John. I’ll be honest: That can make our world hard to make sense of sometimes. One thing that helps is the lesson I take from the healing of the official royal’s son: Sometimes, the divine shines through anyway, and I am trying to notice and appreciate whenever that happens.
Thank you.
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