Reformation Sermon 4

Reformation Sunday
Sermon by GEORGE PAUL MOCKO
 -   : 

That Reformation Theme of How You Can't Find God in Head, Heart, or Hands: Something Jeremiah, Paul and Luther Agree on; Our Arrogance; How God Has to Find Us and WhatFaith is All About.

How do you find out what God is like? What he is supposed to be doing in this world? What he wants from it and us? How do you find out what God is like?

Reason, said the ancient Greeks. Apply logic and the only possible logical conclusion is that God exists. So convinced were the ancient Greeks of the unassailable nature of that conclusion, that they considered the atheist so irrational as to be categorized as insane. But what that God is like - there they got rather vague. In fact, they weren't even too sure God was moral.

Not reason, but mystical contemplation others have offered as the way to find out what God is like! A disciplined program of meditation and prayer. Certain Hindu gurus and Zen Buddhism probably carried that about as far as it can go. To them reason, logic, is not the path but the problem, the barrier. They want to jar you out of logic and into an immediate experience of God which is too grand and shaking to have anything to do with anything as puny as the logic of the human brain. The problem there is that, after you look at the variety of these experiences of God in all these gurus, it is difficult to draw lines between insight and insanity. And, if reason is not to be the judge between these, what in the world is?

I suppose to these very different ways of finding God we could add what we might call the traditionalist answer which basically says, "Accept what's taught." That traditionalist answer is reflected in such diverse and frequently heard comments as "just accept it on faith." The traditionalist answer usually blends off into the view that, if you try to lead a decent life of honesty as the best policy and general helpfulness, God will be there and take care of you.

The traditionalist answer tends to get into its trouble when tragedy strikes. "Why," the question comes, "is God not keeping his side of the bargain? I've done my part and deserve better than this from him."

In one form or another, all three of those answers were knocking around when Jeremiah wrote the words of our Old Testament lesson, when Paul wrote what he did in our lesson from Romans, and when Martin Luther, some 480 years ago today, nailed up his ninety-five theses on the door of the Castie Church in Wittenberg.

And Jeremiah, Paul and Luther would all agree that none of those answers is the path to God. Not that they didn't believe in decency; surely they did with a passion. Nor that they didn't know the transporting experience of prayer so central in mysticism; they all reported that. Not that they weren't reasonable people. All three would qualify as among the clearest and most brilliant thinkers of their particular time.

So reason, the disciplines of the mystical experience of the presence of God, decency, all were important and even necessary. But not as the way to get to God. In fact, all three would agree that our thinking that any of these is the way for us to do it is precisely the reason we fail to do it. Because Jeremiah, Paul and Luther would agree that the reality of the situation is that I can't come to God at all. God must come to me. Whenever I make it a matter of my coming to God, regardless of the method I choose, that can only result in what Paul in that lesson from Romans called "boasting," the sin of pride. and, when that sin has its grip on me, I can never know anything about God.

See how that worked in Jeremiah's time. These words about a new covenant Jeremiah wrote near the end of his life. For forty years Jeremiah had proclaimed the will and ways of God, and for forty years nobody listened. For forty years he had told them they could not go on like this, that God would reject them, bring them down to the dust, and destroy their nation.

For forty years in reponse to that, the people boasted, "We are God's favorites. We know him; we pray to him, we are not perfect, to be sure, but we surely are better than those Babylonians. Given the choice, what people can God choose but us?" We don't play a perfect game, but if God's going to choose who is trying the hardest, that's got to be us. Not a perfect game, but the best one going, that's us."

And even after the doom fell, they couldn't believe it, and pride continued to show itself. "God's been quite unfair in this," they said. "Events have proved our case. Look at the brutality of those horrible Babylonians. Doesn't it prove that we are better people than they are? God will correct this injustice. We can count on it."

This whole idea that we climb up to and reach God by our decency, by our prayers, by our mental efforts, resulted in an incredible arrogance which effectively prevented them from understanding God at all.

Luther faced the same thing 2,500 years later in Wittenberg. As Luther surveyed the church of his day, he came to the depressing conclusion that the entire institution had led the people of God off the path of God, into a wilderness of heresy and superstition. The central point of those ninety-five theses he nailed to the door is that the fundamental error, the first step off that path, was this idea that it is a matter of our making our way to God, of seeking and finding him, of climbing us to him, through our efforts of mind, of pious practices, of decency, of good works. And that, of course, is what the matter of indulgences was all about; we quite literally purchase the favor of God, put God in debt to us, with our charitable contributions.

In Jeremiah's time, that meant an arrogant nation. In Luther's time, an arrogant church. Whenever it is attempted, whenever it is conceived of that understanding and finding God is a matter of human effort and accomplishment, what results is a pride which blocks the path to God, which distorts and hides the image of God, which tears out the telephone lines by which we are supposed to receive his Word.

You can use that God-blocking arrogance whenever this is tried in its modern forms in our own day. The atheist-agnostic who says he's too smart for all those creeds is saying, "Whatever cannot be enclosed in my mind, cannot be." That arrogance can be seen in those outside the church who say, "I'm better than all those hypocrites in there." That arrogance can be seen in those inside the church who will say, "I have had that spiritual experience which enables me to know that I am going to heaven. And until you become as I am and have my kind of experience, you are not going to heaven."

Because at root there is that arrogance, that is why Jeremiah's words about the new covenant speak of the need for forgiveness. If we are to know God and what God wants from this world and from us, first, somehow, there must be that recognition of the wrongness of our direction of the problem, the barrier of our pride.

Somehow the prayer must come. "God, I'm sorry. The puny mind of this creature cannot enfold and understand you, the Creator. You are beyond me. God, I'm sorry. For me to think that I can set up some kind of spiritual ladder whereby, by my willpower, I can enter your throne room! Who do I think I am? God, to think that my life can please you to the point where you would owe me! Me, with my stupidities, my insensitivities, my self-centeredness, my selfishness, my greed, my ability to curry others when I want something from them, to cut them off when I don't! Good grief, what a list! And then my ability to rationalize every one of these and make myself a saint and think that you owe me! God, I really am pretty good at making a fool of myself."

Somehow the prayer has to come to something like that. It did so for Luther. And it was out of that that he wrote those classic words for his Small Catechism, "I believe that by my own reason or strength I cannot believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him."

How then? How do I know what God is like, what God wants from this world and me? Luther continues, "But the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with his gifts, sanctified and kept me in true faith."

The whole point, the whole open secret is that it is not a matter of my getting to God by my mental processes, my prayers, or my decency. But rather a matter of God getting his call to me, in spite of all that I do.

Not my cry, but God's call does it. Not what I study and learn, but as Jeremiah prophesied, what God writes on my heart. Not what I have reasoned out, but what God has revealed. Not my decision for God, but God's decision for me. The bumper sticker should not say, "I have found it." It should say, "He has found me." The problem is not that God has set up all these walls, is hiding behind them, but the problem is that behind all that rationalized arrogance, we are hiding from him. It is not what I determine to do, but what he determines to do. Not my willpower, but the power of his will. "You have not chosen me. I have chosen you," said Jesus (John 15:16). "Not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us," said John (1 John 4:10). "I sought the Lord and afterward I knew he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me," penned the nineteenth century hymn writer.

Thus faith is not as it is so often represented, faith in the power of faith, a self-confidence. It is faith in the power of God, a confidence in him. Faith is not an inner strength; it can only begin in knowing our inner weakness and can only end in knowing the strength of God. It is not a faith in anything I have been able to work up inside myself. It is a faith in the God who is beyond me, and works for me. Faith is not a victory over our doubts; faith is a surrender to the God who is the one certainty beyond our doubts. Faith is not the path for the seekers for God; it is simply the recognition that God has made His way to us, for we have lost the path in our wilderness. Faith is not even some last desperate hanging on to God by the fingernails; faith is that experience that God hangs on to us long after our fingernails are gone and we've got nothing to hang on with.

How do we find God? We don't. God finds us. How do we find out what he wants from us and this world? Not by figuring it out and writing in a book. God must write it on our hearts. What is it that God writes there? He writes this, "I forgive you your arrogance and claim you as my own."

GOOD GOD, WHERE IN THE WORLD ARE YOU?, GEORGE PAUL MOCKO, C.S.S. Publishing Co., 1987, 0-89536-878-1