Astonishing

Astonishing

Acts 2:1-21; Psalm 104:24-34[1]

I don’t know about you, but I’d say that my experience with 2020 so far has been anything but “normal.” I lost a mother and gained a granddaughter. I’ve worn a mask over my face and nose in public places. As many of us have reflected, it feels like our lives have been completely upended. Of course, much of this is due to the Covid-19 pandemic. My son Derek and his wife have a collaborative game called “Pandemic.” The idea is that if you stop the pandemic, everybody wins. If you don’t, everybody loses. What a concept. It’s been an astonishing year, to say the least.

I find the language that our insurance companies use for astonishing events somewhat ironic: they call them “Acts of God.” Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes, are “Acts of God” that insurance providers may exclude from your coverage. Of course, there was a time when people believed these unprecedented catastrophes truly did come from God. There are some who still do. But now we can explain their natural causes. Much of what at one time would have been attributed to some mysterious “act of God” now has a completely rational explanation.

This also applies to the way we view our faith. One of the traits of our branch of the Christian family is an approach that seeks to explain all things spiritual in terms that everyone can understand. That’s why the sermon became the focus for Christian worship instead of the Communion table. In the Catholic Church, the whole point of the service is the miracle by which the bread and wine become Jesus’ own body and blood. It is a great mystery, not to be explained, but to be experienced. In our Reformed churches, however, the point of worship is to explain the faith reasonably.

In our lesson from Acts, which tells the story of the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the response of the people who witnessed it was not one of calm, reasonable understanding, but rather they were “bewildered,” “amazed and astonished,” and “perplexed” (Acts 2:6 ,7, 12). This event, which I would consider a real “Act of God,” was beyond their ability to comprehend or explain. It left them in a state of confusion, as the lesson puts it: “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (Acts 2:12).

Most of us don’t like what we can’t understand. We feel uncomfortable with confusion. And so some may also insist that the “miracle” of Pentecost was that the language of the Apostles was fully intelligible to people of many different dialects. This is one of the many ways we try to keep God firmly within the box of what we can explain. Unfortunately, that kind of faith doesn’t have the power to motivate us to live for the peace and justice and freedom of God’s Kingdom in a world that is so unfree and unjust.

When the Spirit comes, really comes, everything changes. We can’t remain in our comfortable ruts because the Spirit won’t let us! One of the questions I’ve received from the congregation is about the role of the Spirit in our lives. The Spirit brings the word of Scripture to life so that it calls forth our faith and love. The Spirit works in our lives constantly to shape us into the image of Christ. The Spirit empowers every aspect of our lives as Christians and everything we do as the Body of Christ. The Spirit teaches us, convicts us, equips us with gifts, calls us, and perhaps most importantly, pushes us out of our comfortable ruts. When the Spirit really comes to work in our lives, we should expect it to be astonishing.

I would have to say that one of the lessons of Pentecost is that when “God happens,” it will be something astonishing, like Pentecost itself. If we want to see God at work in our midst, we need to be prepared for some amazement, some confusion, something beyond our understanding. If we want our faith to make a difference in the way we live, if we want our church to be alive with the power of the Spirit, we have to expect that it will only happen to the extent that the God of Pentecost comes to us and shakes things up and blows things around.[2] And when that happens, we should expect to be astonished!

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[1] ©Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm, Ph. D., on 5/31/2020 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

[2] Cf. Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, “The Wind that Blows the Doors Off,” Journal for Preachers 26 no 4 (Pentecost 2003): 56, where she says, because of “This wild Spirit wind of God … everyone in that room who thought they had God all figured out and safely circumscribed in their neat and orderly theological boxes, saw the doors of those boxes completely blown off.”

Full of Glory

Full of Glory

Isaiah 6:1-8[1]

The temptation to narrow our focus to the confines of our own self-interest is one that I think we all have to face. I find that ironic, especially in this age when we have access to a broad range of information on an unprecedented scale. Our seemingly unlimited reach doesn’t necessarily result in our being more connected with the human family in all its diversity. Instead, we tend to limit our horizons to those who look like us, who talk like us, and who think like us. And the end result is that as our view of life becomes small, so our experience of life becomes small.

Our lesson from Isaiah for today takes us out of that narrow, limited view of the world and places us in the presence of the God who not only inhabits “the whole earth” (Isa. 6:3), but who is also at work among the whole human family in ways we may not even be able to imagine. The vision of our “holy, holy, holy” God whose “glory” fills the whole earth necessarily broadens our perspective on life. We cannot remain in the confines of our own self-interest when we catch a glimpse of this vision. And when the call comes, “Who will go for us?,” a broader vision of what God is doing in our world will compel us to answer, “Here am I; send me!” (Isa. 6:8).

On this Trinity Sunday, it’s important to remind ourselves that the Christian view of God as three-in-one places our understanding of who God is and what God is doing in the world in the broadest possible perspective. Trinity says that God is the one who created all things and all people, and that he made them very good. Trinity says that God entered into our struggle in the person of Jesus in order to heal our brokenness. And Trinity says that as the Spirit is always among us, working to make all things new, this is God’s doing. As a result, it only makes sense to affirm that “the whole earth is full of God’s glory” (Isa. 6:3).

This may be no big deal to you. You may take all that for granted because you’ve spent your whole life in the church. But there are many people in this world who do not have this view of God. Some think our world sort of “happened” on its own, which means that any “God” we might believe in is merely a spectator. Some may affirm that God truly created all things, but the notion that such a God would actually enter our experience to do something about it is completely foreign. Then there are those who think that God may have done some wonderful things in the past, but that was a long time ago. In other words, whatever God may be out there is basically irrelevant to real life.

As we’ve seen, Scripture articulates a far-reaching perspective of who God is and what God is doing by speaking of God’s “glory.” I realize that “glory” is a word that we don’t much use in our everyday conversations. I would say that “glory” is a word that we say only in church, and then it really doesn’t mean much to us. But in the Bible, the notion of “glory” is a wonderful image of our three-in-one God. In some contexts, the word glory seems to refer to the “beauty” of God. In others, it has the notion of God’s “majesty.” And I think that everywhere the word glory occurs, it has the implication of God’s “mystery.”

I think the best way to illustrate this is with nature. This, of course, is not original to me. That creation bears witness to God is a timeless insight. Think about a breathtaking mountain vista with its seemingly immovable firmness and crisp clarity. Imagine a vibrant sunset that re-defines the spectrum of colors from red to purple and stretches across the vast expanse of the sky. Recall a spectacular seascape that gives only a hint of the power that moves such incalculable volumes of water down to the murky depths of the oceans. Visualize the amazing beauty of a nebula in space, massive and stretching its colors over unimaginable distances.  These and many other images bear witness to God’s “glory.”

Of course, the first thing that comes to my mind in this is the beauty of it all. When the Bible speaks about God’s “glory,” it presents God as the author of beauty—all beauty. But perhaps in the same breath, when you speak of the beauty of creation, you also immediately perceive the amazing power that is behind it all. From this perspective, the Bible ascribes “glory” to God as the source and highest embodiment of the power behind all that exists. And behind the breathtaking beauty and the awe-inspiring power there is a “something more.” It is the mystery behind and through all mystery, and we perceive that this presence is what we affirm as God’s “glory.”

I hope this gives new meaning to the affirmation “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost” we sing every Sunday. When we do so, we are affirming that God’s beauty, power and mystery are all around us, all the time. At the same time, we are recognizing that our lives in this world are a part of something much larger than can be contained in our limited horizons. That means we cannot help but say “Here am I, send me!” when we hear the call to join God’s work of sustaining the beauty and life all around us. It means we will look for ways to join in the work of establishing God’s kingdom of justice, peace, and freedom, as well as God’s work of “making all things new.” And as we do so, we will recognize we and all those around us are always “full of God’s glory.”

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[1] © 2018 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 5/27/2018 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.

Beyond Imagination

Beyond Imagination

Ephesians 3:14-21[1]

Another of the challenges I think we face as a people is a lack of imagination. It seems to me that we tend to turn the task of “imagining” over to someone else. The Lego set I bought as a present to take to my granddaughter Helen is a Duplo Forest Fishing trip set, complete with a car, a boat, and three animal friends! It’s very different from the Legos I played with. Anything we wanted to create we had to do with our own imagination. But these days imagination seems a rare quality. Our young people spend their time playing video games, while we who have been around the block a few times watch TV. But we’re all doing the same thing—entertaining ourselves with someone else’s imagination portrayed electronically.

I’ve also run into a surprising lack of imagination in the church. Some people who talk about God seem to think they have it all down. It would seem that they know God so completely they can speak with total confidence about any aspect of the God’s character or actions. I find it truly baffling that any finite human being could think that they would have the capacity to comprehend the infinite so completely. And yet, the fact is that the throughout the ages there have been plenty of people who have made that assumption. I think it reflects a serious lack of imagination, to say the least. Surely the God who says “my ways are not your ways” is so far beyond us that we have to use as much imagination as possible in trying to comprehend him and his ways.

In our lesson from Ephesians, St. Paul speaks of this dimension of God’s character. In the previous verses he has elaborated on the “mystery of Christ” that “the Gentiles have become … sharers in the promise of Christ,” a “mystery hidden for ages” that he has now “carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Eph. 3:4-11).  With reference to this mysterious plan, in our lesson for today, Paul praises God as the one who “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine” (Eph. 3:20). As is often true, I like the way Gene Peterson puts it in The Message: “God can do anything, you know - far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams!”

In Paul’s mind, the work of God in redeeming all humankind and all creation is a great mystery that nobody could possibly have anticipated. In that day and time gods were either the patrons of one people—and only one people—or they did as they pleased and viewed humanity as lower than slaves, to be toyed with on a whim. Into this world the Apostle proclaimed a God who humbled himself and became human in order to reclaim and redeem all humankind (cf. Phil. 2:5-11).[2] And St. Paul reminds us here and elsewhere that this plan for the salvation of all humankind and all creation is so mind-blowing that no one could ever imagine it. It remains as it always has been: a mystery.[3]

But we who turn to religion don’t typically do so to be stumped. We come for answers. Answers that are clear-cut, with no ambiguity or need for imagination. We prefer our God in a box. We want a God we can predict and control.[4] In our quest for certainty about God I’m afraid some of the philosophers have been right: we’ve simply created a God in our own image, or at least a God according to our designs. But the God of the Holy Scriptures bursts all the bounds of any box we try to use to tame him and use him for our purposes.

That was why the great Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth believed that “religion,” all religion, and Christian faith are mutually contradictory. For Barth, religion is by definition a human effort to make God smaller than he is.[5] It’s a way for us to take what is beyond us and classify it according to our own minds. He was definitely addressing the religion of his day, but I’m not sure we’ve changed all that much in a hundred years. On the other hand, Barth insisted that any faith that is genuinely Christian must be framed in terms of the one who is infinitely beyond our ability to “ask or imagine.”[6] And since his ways are not our ways, we must expect that we will only be able to touch the hem of the garment when it comes to what God is up to in our world.

Some of us may not like this. It can be unsettling to come face to face with this aspect of God’s nature. At one point in another discussion of God’s saving work, Paul expresses his wonder by saying, “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!” (Rom. 11:33). St. Paul repeatedly emphasizes that what God is doing in this world is a mystery that nobody would have been able to guess. Nor would we believe it if it weren’t so boldly proclaimed in Scripture. God’s amazing plan for the salvation of all humankind and all creation is far more than we “could ever imagine or guess or request in our wildest dreams.”[7]

For that reason we might be tempted to think it’s all too good to be true. But our lesson for today reminds us that when we bump up against the boundaries of what we can understand, we must remember that God is the one whose ways are so far beyond us that we can never fully comprehend him. I think that means we have to use as much imagination as possible in trying to grasp the “the breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3:18) of his loving purpose for us all. We have to remember that our faith is in the God whose wondrous plans always have been and always will be far beyond our imagination.

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[1] © Alan Brehm 2015. A sermon delivered by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 7/26/2015 at Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE. An audio version is available at hickmanpresbyterian.org/sermons. 

[2] Cf. Pheme Perkins, “The Letter to the Ephesians,” New Interpreters Bible XI:417, where she reminds us that the early Christians did not have magnificent temples or cathedrals to reinforce their faith in God; in fact, it was the “pagans” who had the impressive places of worship!  She says, “It must have required extraordinary inner confidence to remain a faithful Christian with no external signs of the truth of our faith.”

[3] Cf. Cynthia A. Jarvis, “Ephesians 3:14-21, Expository Article,” Interpretation, 45 (July, 1991): 286: “The paradox held in solution in Paul's prayer is that the one who is rooted and grounded in love, who ‘knows’ the breadth and length and height and depth of that love, knows God's love cannot be contained by human knowing. The dimensions of God’s love are without limit and so defy any limits created by human claims to know.” Cf. also Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics 4.2:784; and A. T. Lincoln, Ephesians, 213.

[4] Cf. John Caputo, On Religion, 12, where he observes that we want our faith “manageable, cut to size and proportioned to our knowledge, so that we know what to do in the present situation and what to expect in the future.”

[5] Cf. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (1933), 236: “So long as religious … activities fail to draw attention to that which lies beyond them, and so long as they attempt their own self-justification, …, they are assuredly mere illusion.” Cf. also 125, 136-37, 184-86, 236, 242, 252, 266, 413-14. Cf. also ibid., 212, where he insists that “Finitum non capax infiniti” (The finite is unable to grasp the infinite), or as Barth himself puts it (p. 494), “the impossible possibility of God—which lies beyond all human possibility.” He does not spare the Church in this regard. Cf. ibid., 332: “the Church, which is situated on this side of the abyss which separates men from God, is the place where the eternity of revelation is transformed into a temporal, concrete, directly visible thing in this world. … To a greater or lesser extent, the Church is a vigorous and extensive attempt to humanize the divine, … .” See further ibid., 332-339, 366-69. He concludes (p. 413), “the whole relationship between God and man, as set forth in the Church, is a mystery.” (emphasis original)

[6] One of the major themes of Barth’s commentary on Romans is the experience of the gospel as an “impossible possibility.” He says (Romans, 231), “Grace is the impossibility which is possible only in God.” Cf. also ibid., 92, 97-99, 105, 121, 200, 211, 216, 282, 364, 381, et passim.

[7] Cf. Caputo, On Religion, 31, where he says that when we truly encounter God, “Something grander and larger than us comes along and bowls us over and dispossesses us.”

Acts of God

Acts 2:1-12[1]

Over the last several months we’ve all witnessed a wide variety of events in our world that we tend to categorize as “Acts of God.” “Acts of God” include things like hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions. At one time, the phrase would have made sense, because most people probably didn’t understand the natural causes for catastrophic events. When the Vesuvius exploded and destroyed the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, it had to be an “Act of God” because people didn’t understand the forces of geology. When an earthquake destroyed the medieval city of Lisbon in Portugal, it had to be an “Act of God” because people had no idea about the movement of tectonic plates.

In our world, most of us are familiar with the phrase “Acts of God” because insurance companies use it to describe any number of natural disasters that they exclude from your coverage. But nobody—well, perhaps I should say almost nobody—believes that these events come directly from God any more. We know that a hurricane occurs when a low pressure system hits warm water and starts spinning around. We know that a tornado is the product of warm air hitting cold air. We can basically explain the natural causes of all of these “Acts of God”—so that they really don’t seem to fit into the category of “Act of God” any more. In a very real sense, I think we could say that describes much of what has happened in our world. Much of what at one time would have been attributed to some mysterious or miraculous “act of God” now has a completely rational and natural explanation.

This shift even affected the way we practice our faith. One of the traits of the Reformed branch of the Christian family is an approach that is reasonable, seeking to explain all things spiritual in terms that everyone can understand and grasp. And so the sermon became the focus for Christian worship instead of the Communion table. In the Catholic Church, the whole point of the service is the mass, the miracle by which the material elements become Jesus’ own body and blood. It is a great mystery, not to be explained, but to be experienced. In the Reformed churches, however, the sermon became central to worship, because the point of worship is to explain all things related to faith. And yet, the audacity that presumes we can explain everything—even matters that the wisest of sages would recognize belong firmly in the realm of mystery—leaves little room for wonder, for awe, for faith, and perhaps even for God.

In our lesson from Acts, which tells the story of the outpouring of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost, the response of the people who witnessed it was not one of calm, rational understanding, but rather they were “bewildered,” “amazed and astonished,” and “perplexed” (Acts 2:6 ,7, 12). This event, which I would consider a real “Act of God,” was beyond their ability to comprehend or explain. It left them in a state of confusion, as the lesson puts it: “All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, ‘What does this mean?’” (Acts 2:12).

Most of us don’t like what we can’t understand. We feel uncomfortable with confusion. And so someone may object that the story goes on to tell us that what Peter did was precisely to “explain” this event. And you may also insist that the “miracle” of Pentecost was that the language of the Apostles was fully intelligible to people of many different dialects. I wonder if part of the problem with our churches today is that we insist on keeping God firmly within the box of what we can understand and explain. But surely we don’t want a God who keeps everything nicely and neatly in the realm of what we can explain over Sunday School refreshments? What kind of a faith is that? How in the world does that motivate us to live for the peace and justice and freedom of God’s realm in a world that is so unfree and unjust?

None of our attempts at rational explanation can change the fact that the event of Pentecost itself is something astonishing.[2] And so it seems to me that one of the lessons of Pentecost is that when “God happens,” it will be something astonishing, like Pentecost itself.[3] If we want to see some genuine “Acts of God” in our midst, we need to be prepared for some amazement, some confusion. If we want our faith to be something living, if we want our church to be alive with the power of the Spirit, we have to expect that it will only happen to the extent that the God of Pentecost comes to us and shakes things up and blows things around.[4]

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[1] © 2011 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 6/12/11 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Cf. Beverly Roberts Gaventa, “Unruly Spirit,” The Christian Century 110 no 16 (May 12, 1993): 515: “If the speech that comes forth from believers is intelligible, it is simultaneously incredible.” She goes on to observe that we tend to want to tame the “unruly Spirit” of Pentecost by either individualizing it or institutionalizing it.

[3] Cf. Jim Callaghan, “Windblown,” The Christian Century 117 no 17 (May 24-31 2000): 597.

[4] Cf. Leonora Tubbs Tisdale, “The Wind that Blows the Doors Off,” Journal for Preachers 26 no 4 (Pentecost 2003): 56, where she says, “This wild Spirit wind of God … toppled all human understandings of who is in and who is out, who is clean and who is unclean, who is worthy to proclaim the Gospel and who is not. … because of this wind, everyone in that room who thought they had God all figured out and safely circumscribed in their neat and orderly theological boxes, saw the doors of those boxes completely blown off.”

Leap of Faith

Esther 4:1-17[1]

In our study of Thomas Moore’s book Care of the Soul, we’ve been looking at various aspects of his view that the way to find true happiness in life is to embrace life as it is: good and bad, joy and sadness, pleasure and pain, fulfillment and disappointment.[2] Some of you may be convinced, but there may be others who are still skeptical. What makes anybody think that we can embrace life as it is?

Moore answers this in several ways:

• We can embrace life when we recognize the beauty all around us. The biblical view of creation is that God has filled all that is with life and beauty. That means if we look properly, we should be able to see beauty in everything and everyone.[3]

• We can embrace life when we accept our own value as individuals. If you can realize that there is something necessary to your existence in this world, that there is something that you and only you can contribute to life, then you can look at yourself in the mirror see a person whose life is important.[4]

• We can embrace life when we see what we do as sacred. When we grasp that all our work is God’s work—that we are contributing toward the well-being of all life, and thus participating in God’s ongoing creation, then we can “be good at what we’re good at” with passion and enthusiasm. [5]

•We can embrace life when we simply accept our families as they are—even if we keep our distance! In a very real sense, you can only be “comfortable in your own skin” when you come to terms with the fact that, for good or for ill, your family is the only one you’ve got!

• We can embrace life when we acknowledge our own name, with everything that goes with it. It is only when we embrace ourselves that we can embrace others in the joy of friendship and love.[6] This is especially the case when it comes to loving a significant other. We learn to love in the give and take of everyday life.

Today, we are looking at the fact that embracing life takes a “leap of faith.”[7] I think the story of Esther is a perfect way of learning about this aspect of embracing life. You probably know Esther’s story better than I—she was a young and beautiful Jewish woman living in the Persian empire with her uncle Mordecai. When the King was “in the market” for a new queen, Esther was one of the beautiful young women from all over the empire to “try out” for the position of queen. And, of course, the king was vastly more delighted with Esther than any other young woman, and she became the new Queen. But one of the King’s advisers, named Haman, hated Mordecai and all the Jewish people. So he convinced the king to sign a decree allowing Haman to execute all the Jewish people—because the King didn’t know Esther was Jewish!

When Mordecai found out, he sent a message to Esther asking her to do something about it. Now, what you have to understand is that Esther, queen or not, was subject to the whims of the king. To approach the king without being summoned meant risking death. But Esther was a courageous woman of faith—like her ancestors before her, she was willing to risk what most people would never dream of risking! And so she asked Mordecai to call a fast for three days, and after that she said “I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish” (Esther 4:16).

That’s the way of faith according to the Scriptures. Setting out on a journey without even knowing where you’re going, like Abraham and Sarah. Facing death in a furnace rather than compromising one’s commitment to God, like the three young men. Exposing oneself to ridicule and humiliation to obey God’s command, like Mary did when she agreed to bear God’s son. That’s what faith is about. It’s not about knowing exactly how everything is going to turn out. It’s about “hoping like mad in something” that may seem too good to be true—that “the kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he will reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15)! And because it seems so far-fetched the only way to take the leap of faith is to “know that we do not know”—and in fact we cannot know—how it will wind up for us.[8]

Biblical faith is not about rational arguments and scriptural “proofs” that are supposed to make us feel safe in a world that is more and more confusing. It is not about clear-cut moral codes and fixed dogmas that are supposed to protect us from the tension of not knowing, of not being sure, of not having all the answers. The faith of the Scriptures is full of questions, uncertainty, and mystery![9] It opens us up, making us vulnerable to the unpredictability of our world. It challenges us take part in an amazing journey, a pilgrimage of faith that has always been about taking the kind of risk Esther took. And because this journey takes place right in the middle of the uncertainties and anxieties of our day and time, it is a journey that takes all that we can muster in terms of faith and courage.

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[1] © 2008 Alan Brehm. A sermon preached by Rev. Dr. Alan Brehm on 11/23/08 at First Presbyterian Church, Dickinson, TX and at A Community of the Servant-Savior Presbyterian Church, Houston, TX.

[2] Thomas Moore, Care of the Soul, xii, xvi-xvii, 4, 14.

[3]Cf. Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, 48-50. Cf. Moore, Care of the Soul, 277-280.

[4] Moore, Care of the Soul, 114-15.

[5] Cf. Moore, Care of the Soul, 181-82, 199.

[6] Moore, Care of the Soul, 57.

[7] William Willimon calls it “Unspectacular Faithfulness” but recognizes that it takes a leap of faith nevertheless! See William Willimon, “Unspectacular Faithfulness,” A Sermon preached on 9/28/1997 at the Duke University Chapel; accessed at http://www.chapel.duke.edu/worship/sunday/viewsermon.aspx?id=55 .

[8] John Caputo, On Religion, 2, 19.

[9] Moore, Care of the Soul, 244-47.