Month: June 2022

Sit! Stay! Play Dead! – god the pet

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It seems that we humans have tried to domesticate God for as long as we have recognized something greater than ourselves. After all, a tamed and housebroken god is much easier  to live with. We would prefer to think that God can be trained to obey our simple commands. God can’t! The fact is: God is wild, unpredictable – always coming up with new, surprising and unexpected (according to our way of seeing)  actions.

God cannot be tamed. God doesn’t depend on our care and feeding. And God certainly requires more than to be taken our for a walk, or run, now and then. We cannot put a cute, little red bow on God. Just try to put a leash, or a bit and bridle, on God!

We can’t have it both ways. Either God is Sovereign, or is not God. Either God takes the lead, or we do. We can see how well we’ve done as a species by looking at human history. To the extent that we’ve lived as God desires, the world has been a better place. Whenever we’ve chosen to do it our way, pain, destruction and suffering have increased. Which divine being do we choose? Caged, or free range? I prefer God: who doesn’t fit in a carrier, the front seat of our car, a trailer. or even our whole house. This God, beyond our imagining, has been trying forever to teach us to be wild – wildly loving.

The Merciless Trap of Perfection

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How much harm has come from taking this statement from the Gospel of Matthew literally, and out of context! “You must be perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48). This powerful sentence is part of Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, where he has brought together all sorts of sayings of Jesus in an extended teaching on what it means to follow the Way of Jesus. It comes at the end of a very challenging section where Jesus lays out how extreme is the love and commitment he is calling for. We are to love our enemies. Pray for those who mistreat and oppose us. We are to be like Abba-God, who shares abundant goodness with all, good, bad, unjust, just – and with everyone of us who is a mix of all of this.  

Good people strive mightily to be perfect. Many good people give up trying. What’s the use! It’s impossible! We torture ourselves with our efforts to achieve perfection (Jesus told us to!), yet we know, only too well, in our heart of hearts, how imperfect we are. People who misread this line live lives of misery. Is this what Jesus meant? Would God sadistically demand something that, in no way, we can do?

The answer lies in the parallel text from the Gospel of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:36). “You are to be merciful as your Heavenly Father is merciful. The perfection God invites, and challenges us to pursue, is one of mercy, of love. God does not require or expect that we embody divine perfection. God is happy with us, perfectly imperfect human beings. Jesus is just asking us to become all that we can, embodying Abba-God’s abundant compassion for everyone (including our selves) with the help of God’s abundant grace.

 

You Are God’s Beloved

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In the very first section of the very first chapter of the Gospel of Mark (where the action never stops!), Jesus comes from up North (Galilee) seeking out John the Baptizer who is preaching along the Jordan River. Jesus is moved to be baptized by John. And then Jesus has some kind of mystical experience that seems to be life-changing for him (and for us!). He senses the heavens being torn open and is aware of the Holy Spirit descending on him – something like a dove hovering over him. Then Jesus hears a voice coming from above that affirms, “You are my beloved son with whom I am very pleased.” 

What could this whole experience possibly mean for him, for his life? How can Jesus sort it all out? Before he can act, or even think it through, Jesus feels himself impelled by the Spirit to go out into the wilderness, to some deserted place where he makes a forty-day retreat. If he is the beloved child of God, what responsibility does he have? If God is well-pleased with him, as he is, what does that free up inside of him? Jesus wrestles with the big temptations that come with this revelation. Will he act as his ego demands? Will he let himself be guided by subtle forces that would have him use his gifts to satisfy himself, or to accomplish “great things”? Will he choose to be led only by that loving voice whispering within? We know that Jesus did not choose the easy path, and, in the end, he experienced the eternal loving embrace of Abba-God.

It would be a major mistake to think that the revelation given to Jesus at the Jordan River was meant for him alone. Every human being is offered the exact same message  – You are my beloved child. I am very pleased with you, as you are, and all that you can become. Sadly, too many of us are denied the possibility to hear this wonderful, beautiful truth. Too many lives are taken up with raw survival, bombarded by horrific lies, subjected to unimaginable abuses. All this noise pollution drowns out the loving affirmation of God. You are my beloved child. I am very well-pleased with you.

For those of us who are able to listen to the whisper of God within, and hear who we are from God’s perspective, what is our response? What is our responsibility? What does this mean for how we choose to live?

In Whose Image and Likeness?

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The God of the great Israelite prophets, and the God revealed in and by Jesus, is a God of unexpected (by us) reversals. This God delights in turning our preconceptions and favorite biases on their heads. We like to imagine that those who parade around pretending as if they have it all together are the ones God favors. Not so! We tend to see those with wealth and positions of power as being on top. Not so – according to God (Luke 1:50-53). The Way offered by Jesus is the direct opposite of climbing the ladder of success. If we have God’s love, we don’t need to grasp for the prevailing societal goals.We don’t need to let ourselves be swayed by every new wave. We can find peace and happiness (even joy) by placing ourselves at the service of others (like Jesus kneeling to wash his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper) not trying to climb over each other like a litter of piglets to get ahead (wherever that is).

We human beings are not foreigners to the dynamic of reversal. It seems to have started early in our existence. In the first two chapters of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, is the wonderful teaching story of creation. In Genesis 1:27, there is the amazing statement that God makes us in the divine image and likeness. Believe it or not, when we look at one another, with eyes of love – like God does – we can see God reflected! We can see Goodness, Beauty, Gracefulness. But how quickly do we try to do unto God what God has done to us. We try to remake God according to our own image and likeness. This never goes well.

We too often reduce God to the size of our egos, or to the shape of our fears. We re-imagine God, not out of our sense of wonder or our deepest desires, but out of our shallowest childhood wishes. We try to shove God into conveniently controllable boxes that we construct. We dress God up in our clothing, yet fail to see how ridiculous this god looks – something like stuffing Goliath into an extra small tuxedo. Not a pretty sight!

And how does God respond to our foolishness? Like a wise and loving parent who knows all our silly games of make-believe. Can you imagine a divine smile? A chuckle? At times, a divine tear? God is God – beyond our imaging, beyond our futile attempts at manipulation, beyond the limits of the image and likeness we prefer to project. We don’t need to puff ourselves up all out of proportion. Let God be God.  We don’t need to be.