| Given a Little Room
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 14, 2003, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Malachi 3:5-7 Ephesians 3:14-21
“Return to me and I will return to you, says the Lord of hosts” in the assembly of the Israelites already returned from exile. “But you say, ‘How shall we return?’” It is our question too. How shall we return from our season of ease, from lazy mornings and afternoon naps, from Sundays wherein we bowed down only long enough to retrieve the newspaper in the driveway, and paid attention at most to the questions of Tim Russert, the musings of Charles Osgood? Moreover, how shall we return to this sanctuary, to this act of corporate worship, this community continually after us for our minds or our money or our time, to this God whose reality confounds our reason, to this Savior whose love apparently has ceased to amaze us? “In a trunk in my basement,” writes Rosemary Mahoney, “I found…an old college notebook in which, nearly twenty years before, I had written, ‘I’m too forgetful to pray and I fool with religion as though it’s some kind of game to be resumed when I have the urge.’ The words,” she goes on, “surprised and unsettled me. I was thirty-eight, and that was still an accurate description of my relationship to spiritual concerns—a curious but evasive flirtation, one that burgeoned when it was convenient and died when it wasn’t.” Seemingly that is how it has gone, between God and God’s children, from the beginning: forgetful of the conversation for which we were made until we have the need; resuming religious practice when we have the urge, though with no ultimate consequences connected to our neglect, at least no consequences that we Presbyterians can readily discern! The heavens do not rage against us, lightening does not strike; we feel no need to account for our silence, our absence, our benign insolence. Convinced of God’s grace, we do not concern ourselves, like our Catholic brothers and sisters, with these missed occasions for reverence. We have paid our respects privately, we say. And God will be there when we decide to take up the game—publicly, corporately--again, waiting like the father of the prodigal, even preparing a party to celebrate our homecoming! At the outset, this was certainly the case with the Israelites, who graciously had been returned from exile in Babylon, in order to take up their life with the Lord their God in the land of Judah. Returning for them meant no longer singing the Lord’s song in a strange land but entering the temple in Jerusalem, the dwelling place of the Living God on earth. In anticipation of their return, the prophets of return and restoration had promised them a glorious messianic kingdom: On that day there shall be neither cold nor frost, neither day nor night, but continuous light; on that day living waters shall flow from out of Jerusalem…the Lord will become king over all the earth…and Jerusalem shall abide in security. With great expectations, the exiles reclaimed Jerusalem as their home, fooling with religion once again in return for God’s promised blessings. Soon a restored temple stood as a monument to their religious devotion; the fragrance of burnt offerings, albeit from bargain-basement, slightly damaged animals, wafted through the air; efforts were made to remember the covenant and to teach God’s statutes to their children. But it seems God’s blessings were not forthcoming. Fifty years passed, locusts swarmed, crops failed. The people waited. “In many respects,” writes Elizabeth Achtemeier in her commentary on Malachi, “faith, according to the Bible, consists in waiting for God to act….” But in Malachi’s time, the people “had grown tired of waiting and obeying and loving, because nothing—apparently nothing at all—was happening in [their] world…. Nothing faced Israel,” says Achtemeier, “but ‘the dailiness of life,’ obeying God’s commandments in daily relations with neighbors and friends; spending money to pay the tithes for the support of the priests; giving up prized lambs and calves to be burnt on the altar; learning religious traditions that seemed as distant as the God they portrayed; praying prayers that disappeared, unanswered, into the blue.” By and large, nothing much has changed in 2500 years of human religious history, the incarnation notwithstanding! What faces us fifty years after this sanctuary was dedicated and five years after its renovation is the dailiness of life, the command to love our neighbors as ourselves, the need to support the church’s ministry and mission with our tithes and offerings, the responsibility to teach the substance and story of faith to our children, the discipline and delight of corporate prayer and praise. Some here this morning will fool with the dailiness of religion for a while and then put it down like a toy that no longer holds their interest…because it doesn’t! The rolls of every church are filled with these. Perhaps the real surprise is that any of us return at all and stay, that we subject ourselves to the hard pews, the long sermons, the unsingable hymns and the endless cries for money Sunday after Sunday, year after year. Though the greatest surprise of all is that God, who surely must be “put out” by our curious but evasive flirtations, awaits our return and, if the biblical witness is any clue, is willing to abide our ceremonies for another season. Why? In a word, says the Lord to the people of Judah circa 460 B.C., “I have loved you.” And suddenly it occurs to us, in the midst of listening to these ancient words, that this is not about cranking out an institution: it is about a relationship with the God who has loved us, with the God who does love us with a love whose breadth and length and height and depth encompasses all our comings and goings, our quitting and resuming, our prayers forgotten and our curious but evasive flirtations. God’s enormous love has let us roam, that we may in love return. “The soul burgeons best,” wrote Mahoney this summer in the New York Times magazine, “when given a little room.” She was referring literally to the gift of a spare church sanctuary, but her remark sends us even farther afield. For you see, belief--that is to say, a lively relationship with a Living God, “is tricky [says Mahoney] when its object remains invisible, as the God of most religions tends to do. Because God won’t appear in an obvious way [because we are consigned to wait], we imagine a form for [God], build [God] a house and figuratively prop [God] up in it.” In other words, we fool endlessly with religion, when what the soul needs for the life of faith is a little room given: room enough to love God in return, to love God literally in the act of returning. God has given us that room, say the theologians, not in the form of summer vacation, but “in the beginning.” In truth, they say, that room is creation itself. Oh, not the mountains and oceans and forests that excuse us from the real conversation for flights of spiritual fancy, but the room is the act of God creating, making all things new. “For God to create,” says Robert Jensen, “is for [God] to make accommodation in [God’s] triune life for…[us]. In himself, [God] opens room, and that act is the event of creation. We call this accommodation in the triune life ‘time.’ It is an old and central insight, that creation is above all God’s taking time for us…[and with that insight]…we have arrived at God’s roominess.” In other words, with all the pathos of a parent letting go, God’s patient love, in its breadth and length and height and depth, has given us room—that is, has given us time between birth and death, time between the beginning and end of human history-to roam and to run and to return. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth…I grew up on these words,” writes James Carroll. “They nurtured me. They made me who I am. And in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit…Was I going to be another of that long line of people, good people surely, for whom belief, that belief, had become another relic of another age, a memory of childhood? …I was alone and confused and desperate for a word that would explain me to myself. But my growing awareness of the fact that the God of the past was not my God was the condition for creation, not despair.” How, then, shall we return? No doubt, we can return to the trappings of religion, to the activities of an institution, to the unquestioned rehearsal of beliefs, to the routine of corporate piety, to the necessary responsibilities of self-perpetuation, to the curious but evasive flirtation with faith, which is our life in the church as long as it is convenient. But what if, for once in our life and time, we returned because we are children who long to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge? “For any of us who return to faith,” said journalist Dan Wakefield in the midst of doing just that, “returning does not mean ‘going back’ to something, but rather, re-turning as in ‘turning again,’ for the process is continuous and lifelong, a constant renewal and discovery. It is not a comfortable excuse for hiding out in old certitudes, but rather a constant pushing forward to test one’s belief and use it, a challenge to respond to an interior pull” as life-giving as a young plant leaning toward the light…as our leaning toward Jesus Christ. Which is finally to say, his entry into created time, his making visible God’s roominess, his putting flesh on the breadth and length and height and depth of God’s love, is our way home. He has joined us in every far country and in him we come to ourselves long enough to remember where we belong and to whom. On the way to our Father’s house, we rehearse with him our confession, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your child.” But before we are able to say a word, the Word God has spoken to us in Him announces our homecoming to the God who has awaited our return for years. The balloons, my friends, are inflated, the table set, the chicken barbequed, the cake baked with your name on it. Thanks be to God who, in Jesus Christ, is our home, now and forevermore. Amen. |