blip : Blogging Linear Interstellar Points :

How about another sermon? I just realized that I never posted this sermon. It’s from a year ago. I think I didn’t post it because it got published in a book of sermons and I wasn’t sure if it was ok to post something here that was published in a book (I don’t like breaking rules. Except speeding. I do that more than I should). Anyhow, how about this: you can read it online, but don’t print it off. Buy the book instead (rosenberry books).
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Title: Fearful and Wonderful
Author: Isaac
Date: 9.5.04
Lectionary texts: Jer.18:1-11; Ps.139:1-6, 13-18; Lk.14:25-33

Prayer: Holy God, you met me in my angst. I heard your word of hope. May my humble words speak your life to my friends. Amen

“I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” the Psalmist says. Me, fearfully and wonderfully made? Listen to that for a second: You are fearfully and wonderfully made. How does it feel? After the warm fuzzies wear off, after the echo of those words fade away, I can’t help but ask, “Are you sure, dear Psalmist? Have you seen what I’ve seen? Or do you know what it’s like to feel what I feel? If you knew my life you couldn’t say that.”

I hear no “wonderfully made” in the way life appears to eat us up and spit us out on a whim. I mean, if we are honest with ourselves, don’t our lives seem to be determined more by chance than any cosmic reason? How random is it that my mom migrated with her family to California from Costa Rica and met my dad who came to California from Colombia. And they met at some picnic, dated, then got married and had me. How does that make me wonderfully made? Sounds more like chance, or at least impersonal fate. After all, my mom could have stayed in Costa Rica and my dad in Colombia. Then what would have happened? Nothing, that’s what. No airplane, no Isaac.

Or think about marriages. You found the one you love because you went to the same school? or for whatever reason moved to the same city? How about jobs or schools? We find ourselves in them because someone read a resume or application and said, “eh. Maybe she’ll work.” I can’t help but think of that scene in Romeo and Juliet when Romeo just misses the message that contains the plan of Juliet’s fake death. Because he misses it he kills himself at the side of Juliet who he thinks is already dead. All this just because he missed a letter? Chance is so cruel! To paraphrase William James, doesn’t it feel like we are those bubbles on the foam which coats a stormy sea? Just floating episodes, made and unmade by the forces of the wind and water—weighing nothing, determining nothing? You know, that big decision wasn’t really that big. Everything would have worked out just fine otherwise.

Doesn’t that feel right? I mean, if we are honest, doesn’t life feel like it works that way sometimes? If I really think about how all the pieces come together for this moment, this fleeting episode in my life, I have a hard time saying what this is all for: why me, why now, where to go tomorrow, or next year? If the current of world events that brought us here feels so random, how am I supposed to make any passionate decision for tomorrow? Maybe the best we can do is flip a coin. How do I keep from falling into the dark abyss of self-resignation?

But if you are like me, you never get to the point where you consider the way life feels so fleeting. Instead of feeling anything, we run. Hide in the crowd. Hook up to an IPod. MORE NOISE NOW We flee from the quiet moment when the threat of ‘chance’ creeps up on us. Instead of daring to wait in that moment of utter abandonment for any ray of hope, we quickly escape to factories of identity—social forces that give us meaning. We entrust our lives to a machine that gives us meaning by giving us something to do. We listen to voices that pacify our deep human longings so we will be satisfied with half-hearted goals that keep the machine producing.

Let’s listen to some of these voices: “If only you work longer and harder, then you will be worth something;” “If you get that job, or that house, or how about that grade;” “Maybe if you play harder, love longer, look better, run faster;” “Or if we save one more soul, serve someone a hot meal.” But, whatever I do, it’s never enough. The system is rooted in an insidious idea of progress. The carrot still floats just out of reach, seductively torturing us. We never arrive. There will always be just a little more we can do. Our best is never enough.

Can you still hear the Psalmist? Has the weight of life deafened his voice?

Let’s try to listen to his voice. In Psalm 139 we read a prayer of a child of Israel praising God for God’s gift of life: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well” (v14). The psalmist knows what it means to be created by God: “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb… When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body” (v13, 15). How can he say that? How dare he believe he’s not just foam on the sea, but that he is embraced by God’s love? How could anyone ever come to think like that?

This prayer of praise is made possible by a people who know what it means to read the story of creation and understand it as their story, an account of their own beginnings. Their lives make sense together as a people, chosen from the chaos of the nations for no other reason than that God loved them. They received the gift of life as God formed them out of dirt and breathed into their nostrils. The Psalmist, this chosen child of Israel, doesn’t escape the hard knocks of life by reaching in desperation for a safe place, a predictable life. He doesn’t dismiss the invisible God and create idols he can see, human images that are much safer than the holy One of Israel. He doesn’t run from life’s frailty in fear. Instead, in the middle of it all, he confesses the story of his creation in faith. He sunk his roots deep into the people around him who believe that the God who has faithfully walked alongside them is the One who created them and gave them meaning as God’s beloved people.

The Psalmist hears the account of creation as his story, an account of his beginnings. This story shows him that he is the wonder of God’s creativity, made to delight in God’s abundant life, to enjoy God’s wonderful gifts. Psalm 139 is a confession of faith in a God who holds together the fabric of our existence through the intimate power of the Holy Spirit—a Spirit whose intimacy with us is “too wonderful for me” (v6), as the Psalmist says.

But why would we ever want to run from this loving embrace of God’s acceptance into those other embraces—those cold metallic arms of the machine that squeeze the life right out of us? Forgive the cliché analogy, but why would we ever want to choose to live in the Matrix? You know, live in a pod where the machines feed us lies in order to pacify us while they harvest us for their food? Those machines are all around us. And they don’t care about us; they simply manufacture visions of the good life, of success, of failure, so we buy their stuff and worship their gods and play their game, as we keep the system running smoothly. Why do we do this?

Because, I think, reality is just too messy and painful, so we need something more tangible than an invisible God who tells us we are wonderfully made. We need escapes routes, lines of flight. We always want something more sure than what God has given us; we want to be in control just like God. If we set ourselves up as gods, then we don’t have to be stuck in the middle of the messiness of life, then our feet will be on solid ground. Maybe we can build a tower of Babel that reaches the throne of God and join him there?

In Jeremiah 18 we find an Israel that turned away from God as its creator and sustainer, and choose to trust in horses, chariots, and foreign armies. To somehow calm their fears of destruction at the hand of foreign nations, they ran to the arms of foreign militaries. God says to Israel in chapter 17, “Cursed is the one who trusts in humans, who depends on flesh for their strength and whose hearts turn away from the Lord” (v5). In our passage this evening God offers to re-create Israel—that is, to destroy the old pot and form another out of the same clay (18:4). Israel needs to be re-formed, created anew, in order to end their idolatry, but they refuse this hope. They say, “we will continue with our own plans” (v12). They don’t want God coming in and messing up the hope they created for themselves. They don’t want to acknowledge their frailty as God’s creation. They would rather be their own lords. They continue in the stubborn refusal of their dependency on an invisible God.

As we stubbornly refuse to acknowledge our createdness, we reveal the root of our sin. This refusal is grounded in our fear of death and pain, fear of uncontrollability and vulnerability—our fear that someone else is control of our lives. But this root is such a mystery because it grows in the waters of God’s gracious gift—the gift of being created in God’s own image. Our problem is our glory. We easily turn from the dependency that comes with gratefully receiving the gift of our glorious identity as created in God’s image, to the independence of attempting our self-glorification, assuming the role of God so we don’t need God anymore—a practical atheism of sorts. I think this is where Augustine was pointing when he named pride as the root of all sin. That pride is the original sin, in a sense. This pride is simply the exaggeration of a human tendency, our desire to exceed the boundaries of being merely “like God” and set ourselves up as our own gods, the ground of our own being. In pride, we deny our contingent existence.

When we set ourselves up as our own gods, as we try to escape from the unpredictability of life, we actually destroy ourselves. We can never become God no matter how much we try. We can’t start over. We can’t speak ourselves into existence. Our first step toward freedom from self-destruction as we keep striving to make ourselves what we aren’t and can never be, is accepting that this messy life is all we got. We can’t escape the fabric of pains and joys. We can never look at our moment and truthfully tell ourselves that we are fearfully and wonderfully made; we will never reach those images we make for ourselves. Our words, on their own, are a complex mix of truths and lies. We don’t have the power to help ourselves out of the mess. God is the one who has the words of life. Where else could we turn?

God in Jesus Christ came to re-form us, to take the clay and make a new pot, to rescue us from our pathetic attempts at self-creation. And this Jesus broke the rules of the game. This invisible God of the Psalmist became human. That’s what the gospel is all about. Our salvation is not in building a tower that can place us above all the troubles of existence. Our salvation is tied up in this God who humbled himself, who joined us in our journey—the God who became one of us. Jesus doesn’t pull us out of our troubles; he isn’t some get out of jail free card. No. Rather, Jesus made our troubles his own. Now we have a Jesus who walks with us. We have an incarnate God who knows what it’s like to feel what we feel, to see what we see, and still tell us “You are fearfully and wonderfully made. I hem you in, behind and before. I have laid my hand upon you.” Jesus, the Word of God, this human voice, shows us that we are infinitely valuable. He untwines our God-given dreams of friendship with God and service in his Kingdom from our desperate attempts to escape the frailty of life. The crucified Jesus is anything but a stranger to our human condition. And it is his cross that shows us how much we are loved and accepted.

But where do we find this Jesus now?... Here. We find him here among a people who carry crosses like Jesus did. That’s what church is about. We struggle against those forces inside and outside of us that try to define our worth in some way other than the grace of God—the voice of God that says, “You are my beautiful creation. You are wonderfully made.” But untangling our lives from the world’s systems of meaning and acceptance is no easy task. That’s why Jesus asks us to count the cost (Lk. 14:28-33). We must give up all our claims on life, all our attempts to seize control of our lives, as we follow Jesus with crosses on our backs (v27).

But we can’t do this alone. We can never know the wonder of our own createdness unless someone tells us. We hear the divine acceptance as we join our lives together in the body of Christ. How do I know that I am fearfully and wonderfully made? Because you tell me I am. You tell me that I am worth it by talking to me, praying for me, eating with me, and worshiping with me. I thank my friends here who walk with me and show me what Jesus looks like.

Maybe I don’t have the faith that some of you do. It’s hard to put my faith in what is unseen, as the writer of Hebrews says (chp.11). I need something I can see and feel. When my life feels like one of those bubbles riding on the waves of life, tossed this way and that, I need to see Jesus in you. Even though I know that now we see in a dim mirror, I need that sliver of hope shining through the cracks of our existence. That’s why I need you—you are that glimpse of hope, a sign of God’s love, an image that shows God’s continued presence. That’s why I need to join you, even though sometimes it doesn’t feel right, and learn how to sing the Psalmist’s praise: “I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.”