Donald Wacome
St. George's Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
Amos 3.1-8, Psalm 139.1-17, Matthew 4.12-23, I Corinthians 1.10-17
In today's Psalm [139], something happens that happens often in the strange new world we find in the Bible. Things turn upside down; what seems normal and natural is reversed. With a jolt, God's point of view pushes ours aside. The God we find here isn't anything like the gods of philosophies and religions. He's a God who finds us. The Psalm says it is God who knows us. Not just to know we're here, that this vast and ancient universe has given rise to us. This is no coolly removed and ultimately indifferent knowing, the sort that might seem appropriate for a God.
The God portrayed here intensely, passionately focuses his concern on human beings. He is lovingly interested in us, discerning our thoughts, acquainting himself with our ways, staying with us wherever we go. Here we have a vivid description of God placing himself into relation with us. The Psalmist acknowledges and accepts God's insistent solicitations; for him, it is pure wonder, God has created a covenant with us; our joyfully amazed response is to eagerly enter into it with him.
Even more wonderful is the fact that this has nothing to do with God needing us. He doesn't make us and find us because he's lonely. God is eternally complete and sufficient in himself, one God yet a community of loving persons, Father, Son, and Spirit. The Love who has always been shares himself with us, not out of need, but out of freely overflowing superabundance. The Christian teaching about the Holy Trinity is not a piece of abstract and empty theological theorizing. It's a claim about who God is, personally, for us.
We hear the same thing in today's reading from the book of Amos, but he puts it negatively: God and his people disconnected, not bound together by his love and their trust in him is a scenario that makes no sense; it's like a lion roaring without anything to roar at; it's like a warning trumpet sounding in the night with no one hearing it. It's an absurdity, reality out of joint. God, committing himself to us and taking responsibility for us, has created a situation where it's just crazy and self-destructive for anyone not to respond with loving trust. His commitment to us is real enough for him to let us suffer when he thinks this will bring us back to him. His commitment to us is not soft and accommodating. It has the toughness, as well as the tenderness, of genuine love.
Wonderful as this is, to be honest we have to admit that being found and known by God isn't always welcome. Speaking for God, Amos says:
You only have I known
of all the families of the earth... (3.2a)
but here the good news has a sharp edge:
Therefore I will punish you
for all your iniquities! (3.2b)
Being singled out to live in God's sight can be very uncomfortable. But God's aim isn't to make his people comfortable. His aim is to make them his. Being connected to a real God, like real love, like real life, can be painful. Secure in their wealth and political power, hedging their bets by worshipping the Baals, the fake gods of the old time religion rather than trusting their true God, the people of Israel are running away from God's choice of them. They are rejecting God's decision to put himself into intimate relationship with them. They are denying the covenant that their faithful God has created with them. They wanted to be left alone, to be just like the other nations, to be normal. Getting mixed up with God isn't necessarily comforting or consoling.
It's probably fair to say that those people to whom Amos spoke God's daunting word weren't all that different from people today. God still persistently invites us to trust him, rather than doing what seems the natural and normal thing: Trusting too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. The point isn't so much that those desires and devices are bad, as it is that if we're trusting them, then we're not trusting the God who knows us, loves us, and insists that we live in relation to him, so that faith in him becomes the theme and pattern of our whole lives.
Today's Gospel lesson also makes a strange reversal of our expectations about what's normal. It announces wondrous good news:
The people who sat in darkness
have seen a great light,
and for those who sat in the region
and shadow of death
light has dawned. (Mt. 4.16)
But this marvelous, all but too good to be true message is strangely juxtaposed with something that is at first completely unwelcome. Jesus begins the proclamation of his good news by saying:
What seems less like good news than this demand to repent?
This is the call of placard-bearing beatniks in cartoons, self-righteously
announcing that the end is nigh, the jig is up, you've had your fun and
now the party's over. Being ordered to repent seems like the epitome of
God's unwelcome intrusion into our lives. Who wants to be told to stop
doing whatever you're doing, feel bad about what you've done, and start
doing something else? Talk of repentance evokes images of hair shirts,
flagellation, or at least neurotic guilt feelings.
But like most common religious images of God, this picture
of his call to repentance is distorted. When the God who in Jesus comes
to be with us tells us to repent we're hearing good news. were being told
to stop what we're doing, realize we've been trying to go it alone and
failing, that we've been like Amos Israelites who were ready to rely on
anything except the God who wanted them to be his. Jesus tells us to change
our minds, to change direction and let God be God. Repenting is letting
God be who he wants to be -- our God, and where he wants to be -- with
us. Repenting is accepting the God who reveals himself to us in what St.
Paul calls the power of the cross (I Cor. 1.17). This is the power of God's
love for us, of God's desire to be with us and for us, and for us to put
our trust in him. Jesus on the cross is the symbol, and not just the symbol,
but the fact, of God's tenacious commitment to being with us, of taking
responsibility for us, even for what is worst in us. God made flesh, crucified,
and resurrected is the one power that defeats human folly and selfishness.
It alone destroys death itself. It even defeats our crazy avoidance of
his love, for it is the power of God inescapable, the God who wants to
be with us and among us.
Amen.
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