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We don’t need
much convincing that it’s a big, bad world out there with myriad problems,
many of which seem so intractable. We see them on the TV news
and we read about them in the newspaper. We ask ourselves and one
another somewhat despairing questions: “What will it take to solve these
conflicts? Will we ever learn that ethnicity and nationhood are no reason to
hate? Why, when there are plenty of natural resources to go around, do so many
still have nothing?”
And being honest, when we zoom into our own lives, we have to admit that we
too have our problems. Even the best of marriages have minefields;
those places where if we tread, we risk an
explosion. Even the warmest parent-child relationships are strained in one
way or another over feelings of being denied having our way or not being the
favorite child. Even healthy congregations have weak links that diffuse
vitality and hope. Even our community has cracks through which people fall.
Faced with all this, a person can get discouraged.
There is just so much to do and so few resources.
Can one person make a difference? Sure, we confess that God has
called us, and blessed us, and God guides us, and works through us.
But on a day-to-day basis, it is sometimes
impossible to imagine that we can really make a difference.
I know all of you well enough to know that even as you do the right thing
today and gather together to worship God, you are well aware not just of
your strengths, but of your inadequacies when it
comes to being instruments of God’s peace. How can we possibly share the
story of God’s love for the world, when we grumble over the choice of Sunday
school curriculum? How can we possibly share the story of God’s reconciling
love when we squabble over the color of the Sanctuary carpet?
I want to encourage all of us to make two revisions to
Our Story
– the story we have about God so that we might be better able to share God’s
love in the world.
Revision Number 1 is about gaining a better view of the diversity and
complexity of God’s world in which we live. I am grateful to J.B. Queen for
emailing me a reminder of some figures I had seen before about our world: If
we could reduce the world’s population to a village of precisely 100 people,
with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would
look something like this: 60 Asians, 12 Europeans, five
US Americans and Canadians, eight Latin Americans,
14 Africans and one person from the South Pacific.
49 would be female and 51 would be male. 30 would
be children and 70 would be adults. 82 would be
non-white and 18 white. 89 heterosexual
and 11 homosexual. 33 would be Christians, 21 would be Moslem, 15
would be Hindu, six would be Buddhist,
five would be Animist, six
would believe in other religions and 14 would be
without any religion or atheist. 15 would speak Mandarin
Chinese, seven English,
six Hindi, six Spanish,
five Russian, four Arabic,
three Bengali and
three Portuguese. The other would speak
Indonesian, Japanese, German, French or some other language.
Five would control 32% of the entire world’s
wealth, and all of them would be US citizens. 80 would live in substandard
housing. 24 would not have any electricity, And of
the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.
20 are undernourished and one
is dying of starvation, while 15 are overweight. Of the energy of this
village, 20 people consume 80%, and 80 people share the remaining 20%. 20
have no clean, safe water to drink. 56 have access to sanitation,
which means 44 do not! 67 would be unable to read.
One (only one) would have a college education.
One would have HIV, one
near death and two would
be near birth.
The first Revision we need to make to
Our Story
requires that we come to a different and a more accurate view of the changed
and changing world in which we live. The real world, the world God made and
sees, is very different from our immediate
locality. The world in which we are called to serve God is a world where
power and opportunity belong only to the few,
including all of us, while there is a great and
growing disparity in people’s economic and educational opportunities. The
world God sees is full of hurt and pain, yet also chock full of lasting
potential. No, we cannot fix every problem in the world today, but we must
embrace the world as it is,
not as we might wish it was.
Revision Number 2 requires us to have a clearer appreciation of all that God
has done for us in Jesus Christ and the consequences of this for how we are
to live. To do this, we need to pay close
attention to one of the verses we heard in
Romans 8
today where we read that God has called us, named us, claimed us and now
asks us to live so that we make a difference in God’s world. “You did not
receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a
spirit of adoption.” (15)
As Saul the persecutor, and Paul the Apostle, this man lived passionately,
but the aims and the meaning and the trajectory of these two passionate
lives were very different. As Saul, he knew the spirit of slavery. Thinking
he was about God’s work, Saul worked to eliminate
the upstart Christian faith, to see it destroyed. As Saul,
he was a slave to his masters’ stories. He did not see himself in the story.
He saw no way in which he could or would influence
the story. Expressing the fear and prejudice and hatred of his masters’
story, Saul imprisoned and murdered.
As Paul, he knew the spirit of adoption. On the
Damascus Road, Saul becomes Paul and adopts a whole new perspective, a new
set of priorities and a new outlook on life. Paul
is claimed by a new story all together, the story of love and grace in Jesus
Christ – a story in which he realizes that he, but not only he, has been
adopted and welcomed into the fellowship of. Paul is a changed person, and
he does not withdraw in embarrassment to the edges and live out his life in
anonymity. Instead,
Paul becomes as vigorous a proponent of his new “home” as he had been of his
old ideology.
On that road to Damascus, in the vision that both
blinded him and opened his eyes, Paul discovered
that fear is not the response of faith. He came to see that faith in God is
not about protecting ourselves or our favored standing. That we do not have
to fight for our place in the family of God, that there is no need for us to
elbow each other out of the road so we can get to the front of the line,
that we should never seek to exclude anyone to make be room for us. The
spirit of adoption, the offer of God’s grace, the life, death and
resurrection of Jesus means that God, God has room for all God calls, all
God calls. “You did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into
fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption.” (15).
Saul knew that slaves had no place other than the one given to them by their
masters. They had no family, no family name, no family history, no family
future; no heirs, nothing to leave or pass on.
Their only story was the story of their masters, not their own. And so Saul
acted out of fear. Paul came to see what it meant to belong, to be part of a
family. He came to see that he did not need to grasp for or contend for the
story. Rather, he had to
let the story, the promise of God’s grace and goodness, fill him. And as he
did this, he found the freedom that God had
intended for God’s people all along. In doing so, the story became his
story, and he gained a family name, a history, and a future. In doing so,
the story lived on. This story can not be lost.
Now, then what about us, you and me, in our intractable times? Do we live in
fear that the story will be lost? Are there times when we imagine that if we
fail the whole thing will come crashing down around us? If we are honest
with ourselves, then yes, we do. But need we? Honestly?
No!
For this story, God’s story, is our story. We have been
adopted. Our God has
embraced us and named us and claimed us. In our yearning to be God’s, our
spirit joins God’s yearning for us, we are adopted. Signed, sealed,
delivered – “God we’re yours!” It is done already.
We belong to God.
We have a place, a name, a history and a future.
From our place in this story we can go forth to challenge and change the
world that it might better reflect God’s story. As characters in God’s story,
we are expected to care deeply about God’s world, doing what we can and all
we can, using all the insight and all the gifts we have been given, to make
a difference in the world. Since this story lives in each and all of us,
we are asked to make our contribution,. Each and every one of us will
influence the story and give it that twist which will enable more and more
people to come to see that they too can have a share in this story for
themselves.
When we do this, you will sometimes look odd, different, out of step from
many others as you live out God’s story. When you practice hope in an
intractable world, some will think you are crazy!
When you are passionate about beauty and truth and justice in a world that
seems so much more interested in profit and getting ahead and
end-of-the-year bonuses, some will say that you
are out of touch or unrealistic! When you offer love and share forgiveness
when you see hate or indifference, some will say
you are a loser! When you offer your life in whole or even in part for the
sale of another person, some will say there is no
place for you in this winner take all world and they will nail you to a
tree. When you devote your time to Angel Food, or Safe Havens, or Bible
Study or Worship, when you speak up for the weak
and the oppressed, when you volunteer your time to work with children or
youth, when you sing in the choir, when you accept the call to serve as an
Officer, when you live for Jesus Christ, it does
not matter what other people do or say.
You are living God’s story.
The story is Yours!
God’s story is yours and
it is mine – the story of God’s redemption through Jesus; the story of
limitless love and acceptance; the story of life overcoming death. This is a
story worth telling no matter what distracts us. This is a story that
confirms our worth and worthiness. This is a story that invites us into
life. Brothers and sisters in Christ, you are welcome to this family, and as
part of the family we have a life to live as we share
Our
Story, our newly
revised story! Amen. |
