What is the purpose of religion, anyway? Where is this God we are always talking
about? How do we know that God cares
about us? And how do we go to where God
is? How can we get what God has to
give? What does God want us to do?
This is a line of questioning that the world in which we live
has pretty much abandoned. It has
decided that there are other, more pressing problems, problems mostly having to
do with money and the things that money will buy. Next month, the citizens of the United States
of America will choose between candidates for President. And the nominees of the two most powerful
parties tell us that we face a fateful choice, between two fundamentally
different approaches to the nation’s problems.
But the truth is that they agree perfectly on many of the most
fundamental things. They may differ as
to who is entitled to more money, and who should be content with less. They may disagree about how much money the
government should take, or how much it should spend, but neither would think
for a moment to publicly question the assumption that the whole purpose of our
life in society, insofar as we can talk anymore about any shared and universal
values, is to get money.
But these politicians aren’t working in a vacuum. They are speaking on our behalf, and nobody challenges
them to speak or think differently, because they are only saying what leaders
in business, in the media, in academia, and the arts, and more than a few
leaders in religion have also said.
There is really only one place left in society where you can
consistently find a different worldview, one that proceeds on the basis of an
entirely different set of assumptions, and that is here. In a church, or a synagogue, a mosque, or an
ashram. We arrive here every Sunday,
thoroughly conditioned by the values of a materialistic society, and if it were
left up to us, we might just come together and sing some pretty songs, and hear
some positive uplifting words that help us relax a little and feel a touch of
grace. And we would draw strength from
one another to go out of here to resume our pursuit of money and the things
that money can buy.
But instead we do something kind of strange. We invite a visitor into our midst every week
and we listen to his voice. It is
sometimes comforting, but often it is disturbing. It keeps us unsettled and unsure of ourselves. It keeps us wondering if there isn’t
something else going on in the world, something nobody is talking about, but
that we really should be paying attention to.
We don’t always like what that voice says, but we take turns being its
mouthpiece and when we’ve done speaking we say “the Word of the Lord,” and
everyone says “Thanks be to God!” whether they feel like it or not.
This morning as we listen to this voice we hear it asking
difficult questions, the kinds of questions with which I began my sermon. They are the kind of questions that we are
not supposed to ask, either because we’ve accepted the popular premise that God
is irrelevant, or because we’ve identified as religious, which popularly means
we’re not supposed to entertain any doubts.
But the readings raise a lot of doubts.
Job says, “Oh, that I knew where I might find him, that I might come
even to his dwelling.” He describes
himself as like a man blundering about in a pitch-black night or a dense
fog. He turns this way and that, but God
is nowhere to be found. And at the same time
Job senses that God sees him, naked
and alone, and that thought brings terror, and the longing to be covered and to
hide the darkness.
The Letter to the Hebrews says the word of God is sharper
than a two-edged sword, cutting through all pretense and ambivalence and laying
the human heart open to the eyes of the one with whom all must ultimately
settle accounts. And that must be what
it was like for that nice fellow in the Gospel of Mark, the one who spoke to
Jesus so politely and asked what he must do to inherit eternal life. You can see his enthusiasm mounting as Jesus
rattles off the commandments, and he says, “I have kept them all since I was
young.” But then Jesus, looking at him
with that long, loving, penetrating gaze, speaks the word that sends him away
crushed: "Go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you
will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me."
Eternal life is not another possession to be added to our
hoard. It isn’t something Jesus can just
pass on to us, like a family heirloom. He
prefers to talk about it as a space you have to enter. You have to leave behind the place where you
are. You have to leave everything you
have there, and move over into another place, the kingdom of God. From the outside, it doesn’t look like
anything. Most people don’t even believe
that it’s real. But from the inside, it
is the so-called “real world,” the world of money and the things that money can
buy, that seems like a strange, surreal dream.
It’s not that that world is bad—actually it was all made by God, who
loves it. It just doesn’t mean what we
think it does, and the things in it that we think matter the most really don’t
matter very much at all.
The church is that funny place in that world where the
kingdom of God keeps showing up as a topic of conversation. It doesn’t mean we’ve moved there. Even in the church we care a little more than
we ought to about money and the things that money can buy. But we keep inviting the living word of God
into our midst, to cut through our cravings and our confusion, to lay us open
to deeper inspection. We ask for eternal
life for ourselves, and the incarnate word points us toward our neighbor who is
poor. But even though we can’t avoid the
little problem of our disobedience, we keep holding open the questions that the
world keeps wanting to close once and for all.
And we also make a
very big deal about things that the world considers worthless, things that
speak to us of the goodness that is God’s alone—some water and oil on a baby’s
head; prayers for peace, for the sick and the dead; a morsel of bread and a sip
of wine. Week by week, year by year, we
carry on our conversation about the hard questions, we share our little
worthless things, in community, and by-and-by something strange and kind of
wonderful can happen. Those hard,
possibly irrelevant questions—Where is God? Does God love us? How do we get to where God is? How can we receive what God has to give? What does God want to do?—by some kind of
economics that world can’t begin to understand, these questions start to find
their own answers.
They are answers that are not given so much as they are
lived. Maybe they come down from above,
and maybe they come out from within, and maybe it’s a little bit of both, and
the best thing about them is that they take us deeper into the questions, so
that the questions themselves overflow with grace, like water from an inexhaustible
spring.
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