Father John E. McGinn, Rector
Saint John’s Episcopal Church
Sandwich, Massachusetts 02563
April 29, 2007 Easter
4
The lesson used for the
sermon is from the book of Revelation, chapter 7, verses 9-17.
I would guess that some of
you remember a couple of humorous films a few years ago in which the late
comedian, George Burns, played God. Oh
God, Parts I & II were not great movies but they did allow us to reflect on what God is really like.
A priest was trying to
explain to a child about God. The priest
said, “God is everywhere.” “Everywhere?”
asked the little boy. “Everywhere,” said
the priest. And the boy went home and
told his mother, “God is everywhere; the priest said so! “Yes, I know,” said the mother. “You mean he is even in the cupboard?” “Yes,” said the mother. “In the refrigerator, even when we close the
door, and the light goes out?” the little boy asked in amazement. “Yes, said the mother. “Even in the sugar bowl?” the lad asked as he
took the lid off. “Yes,” said the
mother, “God is even in the sugar bowl.
And the boy slammed down the lid, and said, “Now I’ve got it.”
Now that is a silly little
joke, but also, I think, thought provoking.
So often people think they capture God.
They believe they know exactly what God is like.
I read in a magazine recently
an interesting piece concerning people’s thoughts about God. It was based on a survey by the Gallop
organization for Baylor University.
Americans were asked to describe how they conceived of the deity. What they discovered is that Americans
worship four distinct Gods. The most
popular God, backed by thirty-one percent, is an authoritarian father figure
who takes a hands-on approach to his demands.
Like Yahweh in the Old Testament, he rewards the faithful with good
fortune, and smites the sinful with tsunamis and terrorist attacks and dread
diseases. Another twenty-three percent
envision God as essentially benevolent: a loving spirit who provides help and
guidance when asked. For sixteen
percent, God presides over the universe like a stern, unapproachable judge,
letting events unfold without interference, tallying up sins and virtue, and
rendering a verdict when people die.
Finally, twenty-four percent see God as a mysterious prime mover who
engineered the big bang in evolution, who wrote E=MC2, and all those other nifty cosmic laws; then backed
off to watch how it would all come out.
Now, here’s what I think is
interesting: These different conceptions
of God are ultimately more important to people’s political and social views,
than their party registrations or church affiliations. How you think about God affects how you think
about life. That explains a lot about
our political environment, I think, today.
Where would you place yourself in the spectrum of ideas about God: authoritarian; benevolent; stern,
unapproachable judge or prime mover?
Truthfully, there are only a
few things we can say for certain about God.
We can’t capture God in a
sugar bowl. God is beyond space and
time; far beyond human understanding. If
we could capture God with our tiny human brains, God would not be God. The only thing we can know about God for
sure, is what God chooses to reveal to us.
The way God chooses to reveal himself to us is through a man: Jesus of Nazareth. Only Jesus can show us what God is like, and
what Jesus tells us about God is something very extraordinary.
Now, the last book in the
Bible is the book of Revelation. We read
that today; Jack Hubert just finished reading the epistle from the book of
Revelation. We don’t read the book of
Revelation very much in the Episcopal church, because some people look at the
book of Revelation as the ultimate picture of an angry and vindictive God. But that is not what it says to me. It is speaking of the last days; and here’s
what it clearly says in today’s epistle:
“After this, I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no
one could count from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing
before the throne and in front of the lamb.
They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their
hands. And he said, “These are they who
have come out of the great tribulation.” They have washed their robes and made
them white in the blood of the lamb.
Therefore, they are before the throne of God and serve Him day and night
in His temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over
them. Never again will they hunger,
never again will they thirst. The sun
will not beat upon them, nor any scorching heat; for the lamb at the center of
the throne will be their shepherd, and he will lead them to springs of living
water. God will wipe away every tear
from their eyes.”
Can you get that final image
in your mind’s eye? And God will wipe away
every tear from their eyes. And here is
the God, I think, that Jesus showed us:
a loving parent bending down and personally wiping the tears out of his
child’s eyes. Here is comfort for the
grieving, healing for the bruised and battered, and hope for the despairing.
There is a God who is aware
of our heartaches, our frustrations, our fears who personally longs to bow down
before us and wipe the tears from our eyes.
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like good news to me.
God is an intimate and loving
God. That is what I believe Jesus taught
us and even showed us. God is very
close. God knows each of us better than our
best friend knows us. God cares about
our problems.
Last week I mentioned a Bette
Midler tune, The Rose. You’ll
remember another of her tunes, From a Distance. The chorus phrase that is repeated over
and over again: God is watching us, God
is watching us, God is watching us from a distance. The implication seems to be that God is a somewhat
disinterested observer of our lives; and God is watching us from a
distance. That is not the picture of God
that the New Testament teaches or the vision that I have of God.
It is like the story of a
group of children lined up in a cafeteria of a religious school for lunch. At the head of the table is a large pile of
apples, and the teacher has made a note:
“Take only one, God is watching.”
At the other end of the table is a large pile of chocolate chip cookies;
and Charlie, a young boy, looks back at the note by the apples and decides to
write his own note to place by the cookies.
“Take all you want,” his note reads, “God is watching the apples.”
That is the picture of God
that many people have. God is watching
from a distance, probably trying to catch you doing something wrong. I believe that the God that Jesus revealed to
us is the God that is Abba, daddy. The
God that is gracious and loving and always concerned about our best good. I know you have heard that thousand of times,
but when will you embrace that truth and make it your own? You don’t need to be full of anxieties and
insecurities and anger and fearfulness.
The God who created this wonderful universe, and everything in it, is a
God who kneels down and wipes the tears from his children’s eyes.
Dr. Elizabeth Kubler Ross,
when she was working with the dying, was a guest speaker at my seminary. She showed all of us, as she was speaking, a
drawing that a child had made. The child,
she said, had a terminal cancer but refused to talk to anyone; withdrawing behind
a wall of silence. The only
communication offered by the child was through his drawings. This particular drawing that she showed to us
had a beautiful little cottage set off to the side of the paper; and above the
cottage was a bright, brilliant sun shining, and surrounding the cottage was a
beautiful lawn with flowers and tress.
In front of the cottage was a family of four: a mother, a father and two children at play. In the center of the paper, however, stood a
tiny figure facing a large Army tank which was bearing down upon it, and was
about the run him down. And, honestly,
the tiny figure represented the dying child who saw himself helpless before a
gigantic force which was about to destroy him.
Dr. Kubler Ross asked all of
us, “How could you help this child communicate his fears; how could you offer
this child comfort?” And one of my
colleagues drew a picture of a figure holding a stop sign in front of the tank,
but this did nothing to sooth the child when it was shown to him. However, a second seminarian then drew
another person in the picture; and the person was doing nothing more, nothing
less, than simply standing by the little child who was facing the gigantic
force, and holding the hand of the child.
And that broke the wall of silence and enabled the child finally to pour
out all of his pent up feelings.
We have a God who stands
beside us. We have a God who holds our
hand. We have a God who gently wipes
tears from our eyes.
About seventeen years ago, I
had one of the most difficult things happen to me in my ministry. I had really come to love a young girl named,
Zida. Zida had come from Ecuador, and in
Ecuador she was a bright child, but she came here at the age of twelve. She was an immigrant; her parents didn’t
speak much English, so she had to learn English in school, and she did. She became a wonderful student, she got all A’s
in school. Not only did she obviously
master Spanish, but she mastered French and Latin and English, and she hoped to
be a lawyer some day and go back to Ecuador to help her people. And she found her way, she was Roman
Catholic, but she found her way to our church and somehow in our church there
were a number of people who befriended her, particularly a young woman named,
Gloria. Gloria was from Columbia. Gloria had come from Columbia some thirty
years ago, and she had really enjoyed the United States; but she also had a
feeling for Zida who had come from a country where they only spoke Spanish,
where the Roman Catholic church was the most alive church in that particular
country. And so she befriended Zida, and
Zida became very popular in our church and in high school; and everyone loved
this young woman.
At age fifteen when she was
out with a friend, she was sitting in the front seat, and there was a car
accident. Zida was killed
instantly. And I’ll never forget doing
her service, we had the former bishop of Kentucky come to help me with the
service. He could speak Spanish
fluently, so the service was conducted in Spanish as well as English. My friend, Gloria, who was there with me,
translated my sermon that day for the family and other relatives and friends of
Zida. The whole church was filled with
high school students and other members of the parish. It was a very, very difficult time.
As I went through that, I
found that I had to somehow find out who God was for me. My friend, Gloria said, “Does God really help
a person in a time of trouble?” She
asked me that straight out. Zida’s death
had been an unspeakably draining experience, and I found myself stretched in
every way: physically exhausted,
emotionally dissipated - my faith itself changed as never before. And it was just at this moment that my
friend, Gloria, thrust her question before me.
She was full of intensity as she looked me in the eye and said, “Give it
to me straight. I am not asking you this
as a preacher, as a priest. I am asking
you as an honest human being. Was there anybody or anything down there at the
bottom when you were with Zida’s family and all those around her. When the chips were really down, does this
thing we call God really make a difference?”
She was too good a friend, and the situation was far to serious for me
to attempt to put up a front, or to trod out one of my patented theological
answers. The only thing appropriate for that moment was honest reporting. I thought for a long time, and then said
quietly, “Yes, I can honestly say there was something down there in the
darkness of Zida’s death. The mystery of
Godness was present. I was given help. No ecstasy, no great energy; just the gift of
endurance. And that was all that met me
in the depths of darkness. And by the
grace of God, somehow I stayed on my feet through that couple of weeks that we
dealt with Zida’s death. I did not blow
up in presumptive bitterness, and neither did I give up in hopeless
despair. I was given the gift just to
stand and to hold on.
Now this is not a Pollyanna
faith that I am espousing this morning.
It does not say that we will avoid tears; far from it. What it says is this, I think: There is one who wipes tears from his
children’s eyes. We can stand and hold
on. Someone stands beside us, someone
holds our hand.
Amen