From the Pulpit:

 
                                                                                              Bigger than the Big Bang

Some weeks, and recently it has been pretty frequently, as I sit down to write my sermon I feel as if it’s necessary to deal with the mischief that has been done either in the name of religion or by celebrities who speak of religion with authority since last Sunday. A few weeks ago it was Anne Rice. She is a better writer than I am, but as I said then, she doesn’t get why we stay in church. Now it is Stephen Hawking who came out this week with the statement that the universe created itself out of nothing and that God is therefore unnecessary.

I suspect that Hawking has a hundred or so IQ points on me, but that does not make him a theologian. He is a scientist, a mathematician, not a preacher. It is entirely coincidental that this week I signed up to take an online course from the seminary on science and theology.The long and the short if it, to give the briefest possible response to Hawking, is that science is not asking the same questions as theology; and the reason that theology does not answer the questions of science is because it doesn’t intend to.

I personally have no problem believing in quarks and black holes that Hawking tells me are out there even though I’ll never see them. Hawking, unfortunately, does not have much use for a God who is anything other than a grand designer. If God, he might say, did not think up the Big Bang and set it off, well that proves there is no God. No. No. And no. I’ve got other fish to fry.

Look at Jesus. Some weeks he makes more trouble for me than Stephen Hawking. I’ve read lots and lots of books on evangelism and church growth and not a single one of them recommends growing the church by launching into the kind of tirade that Jesus lets loose on the crowds that are following him.

A couple of recent articles have dealt with the perceived role of the preacher. Jesus was preaching that day, but remember, he was preaching on the road to Jerusalem . He was walking into certain confrontation with the Roman Empire and the kind of radical love he was preaching was antithetical to the power of the empire. He’s doing the crowd a favor, really, by waking them up to the stark consequences of following him. This is no walk in the park. They need to know what they are getting into, and Jesus hits them over the head with the truth.

I wish there were some other way to talk about this than to digress into word translations, but the word ‘hate’ just jumps out and needs to be dealt with. It does not mean that we are to detest our families. Remember, as I said a couple of weeks ago, the Jesus who commands us to love our enemies does not want us to be hateful to our families.  Scholars suggest that the Aramaic word meant to detach from. Enough of that.

These crowds do need to know what they are getting into, and I suppose it is my responsibility to remind you that you really are getting into something when you choose to follow this path of Jesus, when you choose to join this body of Christ that is St. Alban’s. We make some radical promises when we repeat our baptismal covenant. We promise to respect the dignity of every human being. We don’t do that by hating anybody.

I read in a couple of different articles this week that the role of the preacher has morphed in our twenty-first century world. I read that people come to church to get their self-esteem boosted. They want a great big bowl of chicken soup for the soul. They want amusing stories about people like themselves. They want short sermons. They want catchy music. One author said that they don’t want the preacher to be so much a prophet as a spiritual concierge. They are looking for a spiritual path that is like a nice trip to Disney World. The author suggests that we should be careful what we say in front of seekers because they might be offended and not come back.

Well, if that’s the case, they don’t know what they’re seeking, what it is that is gnawing in the heart of us that won’t be satisfied by fast food religion.  Jesus lays before the crowd two common sense metaphors. Building a building and going to war. You just don’t take it on unless you know what it is going to cost. He’s being up front. Being a disciple is costly. It means putting Jesus first. First before your family, first before your plans, first before your stuff.

A number of our members were at the airport on Wednesday night to meet Robert and Bashra and their daughter. They are a Christian family from Iraq who have been given political asylum because Robert served as an interpreter for our government. He lived out his convictions, which put his family in danger and has resulted in their leaving behind everything. I went over to their apartment as Jill and Gene and Susan and Dave were carrying in furniture and all manner of great stuff that you all gave so that a nice home would welcome them. It looked great, and I hope they were pleased with their new, safe home, and that in time we will get to know them as our brother and sister in Christ.

Believing in God is not an intellectual exercise. It is muscular. It is emotional. We open our hearts and we act with conviction and sometimes we get clobbered by a world that doesn’t understand or that is threatened by such radical love as we try to live out. We don’t do it perfectly. Not a one of us does.

Will Willimon was the dean of the chapel at Duke University and he tells a story about a father who called him late at night and gave him a rashing over the phone. He had sent his daughter to that expensive university to get a good education and go to med school and become a nephrologist like her father and grandfather, but now she was throwing it all away and talking about spending three years serving poor people in Haiti because Willimon had taken her on a fool mission trip.

Willimon felt like he’d been punched in the stomach. “But sir,” he said, “Didn’t you take her to be baptized? Didn’t you take her to Sunday School when she was little?” The dad replied, “Well, sure we did. But we just wanted her to be a good person. We never intended for it to do this kind of damage.” (The Last Word, pp. 108-109)

We just wanted her to be a good person. A good enough person, to be just like us.

You’ve all heard the jokes that begin, “I’ve got some good news, and I’ve got some bad news.”  Jesus has more to say than this harsh little tirade, and if anybody was still around and not scared away by it they are going to hear the good news as he continues. Yes, it is costly to be Jesus’ disciple. It is not something to be done without pausing to think, but if we are willing to release out clutch on everything we hold too dear, there is a reward beyond our imagining. There is a love to experience that far surpasses just being a good person.

We are created, not as Stephen Hawking might believe, to figure out if there is a God or isn’t. We are created not to be just good enough in maintenance mode, to keep the nose of our self-esteem above water. We are created to be in relationship with the God who loves us whether or not that God is logically necessary for there to have been a Big Bang.

We are created to be transformed into the likeness of Christ, who is nothing less than the incarnation of the love of that creator. And it is going to cost us greatly. We are going to have to give up all our too small images of ourselves. We are going to have to give up our tendency to cling to things that are just stuff.

It is going to cost us greatly, but the most amazing thing is that we have been given far, far more than the price. We pay, not out of the stinginess of our own coffers but out of the infinite blessings of our father who is in heaven, which is not a place astronomers can locate.

Amen.