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The Ultimately Interested Party Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis November 15, 2009, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Deuteronomy 8:1-10 I Peter 5:6-11
In a little book entitled Conversations with Poppi about God, our teacher for the morning Robert Jenson and his then eight-year-old granddaughter Solveig Lucia Gold discuss such heady topics as heaven, hell, Lucifer, Santa Claus, resurrection, angels, the Trinity, the crucifixion and prayer to name a few. It was Solveig’s grandmother Mimi (Jens’ beloved Blanche) who had the idea to record the conversations Solveig had with Poppi, often while Solveig was sitting on her grandfather’s lap. They are at once delightful and profound. Today it is the conversation Solveig and Jens had about the providence of God that prompts our own on the Sunday before the Sunday before Thanksgiving. “I’m sure [God] knew everything we think of,” begins Solveig with the notion of God’s foreknowledge. “I’m sure he knew way back in the twelve-hundreds there would be electricity. I’m sure he knew about calculus before there was even math.” “What would you say if I suggested this?” Poppi asks. “That undoubtedly God knew in twelve hundred that there would be electricity and that someday people would discover it.” “Right,” says Solveig, “but he didn’t know when.” “I’m sure he knew that too,” says Poppi, “but that people would discover it is something he left up to the people to do.” “He was smart to do that. He was quite smart to do that,” Solveig quips. “How so?” asks Poppi. “Well…he knew that people don’t want to be just pushed around. He knew that if he left it up to people, they could figure it out in their own strange way. If he had everything his way, he would never be interested.” At issue in the doctrine of God’s providence is our understanding of God’s real involvement in human existence and whether that involvement includes our free will or makes a mockery of it. “God’s works of providence are his most holy, wise and powerful preserving and governing of all his creatures and all their actions,” the Westminster Divines confessed. In what sense does God govern human history? How exactly does God preserve our lives day by day in life? What becomes of our free will in light of God’s sovereign will? If we begin at the beginning of the relationship between Creator and creature as the relationship unfolds in Scripture, you and I certainly are portrayed as creatures who will not be pushed around while God is portrayed as a Creator with no interest in pushing us around because God is love. As God created us in love and for love’s sake, we were made to be the sort of creatures who could choose freely to give our lives into God’s keeping…or not! The doctrine of God’s providence—of God’s upholding, directing, disposing and governing of our lives, to use the verbs of the Westminster Confession—begins in the freedom we are given to arrive at our selves. What God knows from the get-go--and we sometimes discover only on the other side of the grave--is that we will not arrive at ourselves without God. But like electricity and calculus, God leaves us free to discover that on our own, with a little help from a friend we have in Jesus. Yet this freedom to arrive at ourselves is a freedom in which not everything goes, even though about anything can happen along the way. To wit, God ultimately knew God’s people would make it through the wilderness and end up where our text places them: on the banks of the Jordon about to occupy the promised land. “Remember the long way that the Lord your God led you,” says Moses. God leads us. God governs our human existence in the sense of steering us toward a goal or a purpose. But along the way and folded into the way God has chosen to govern and preserve our lives, there are those things that seem to involve God not at all. In the first place, there are things which happen “necessarily” and commonly follow the laws of nature. “Those patterns of regularity which are to be observed in so much that takes place in the world,” writes theologian George Hendry, “and which have at times been thought to leave no room for providence [for God’s hand in things], are…cited [by the Westminster Confession] as providential arrangement, as, indeed they may well be, when it is considered how vastly they facilitate our dealings with the world.” Gravity comes first to mind. We can live in a great trust that we will not go floating off into space even as we can count on the inexorable pull of gravity evident every morning in the mirror. Likewise, each of us has been born with a set of genes that necessarily deal our bodies and minds a set of cards over the course of a lifetime. Medical science indeed can alter the consequences but, as David Brooks put it this week, “We’re all born late. We’re born into history that is well under way. We’re born into cultures, nations and languages that we didn’t choose. On top of that, we’re born with certain brain chemicals and genetic predispositions that we can’t control.” There are certain things that necessarily follow other things in our lives. God upholds and governs our lives by the things that, of necessity, follow other things and affect our dealings with the world, dealings that God [in freedom] chooses, for the most part, not to contradict. Then there are the things that happen freely: the things we choose and decide that often pit our immediate will against God’s. Along the way to the destiny toward which God’s hidden hand is steering not only us but all of human history, apparently there are things God does not know about what we will do or how we will respond. According to our text, God did not know what was in the hearts of the people, did not know if they would keep God’s commandments. I take these words to mean that “we are not puppets in the hands of an almighty manipulator; we [are creatures that] act in [our] own distinctive ways.” But these are not the only words that tell us this about ourselves in Scripture. In considering the entire sweep of the biblical narrative, minister and Old Testament scholar James Wharton maintains that determinism is not a part of the plot. Time and time again, the human will, distinctly other than God’s will, asserts itself and leaves its wounds upon human affairs. Yet, he goes on, “theological asides indicate that in whatever comes to pass, God is present as the ultimately interested party and not merely as an onlooker or a scorekeeper.” God is affected by what really goes on between God’s people even as God effects certain outcomes in the story of our salvation. So next we read that the Israelites grew hungry in the wilderness and we remember how they were thirsty as well. We recall their impatience as they waited for Moses to come down the mountain from his meeting with God and their willingness to worship anything at hand in the meantime. I think it fair to say there are times when we despise our freedom, when we rail against the absence of God’s hand, if God indeed has a hand in things, given the pieces of our lives in need of being picked up. If God is a God who preserves human existence, we rage in extremis, then we should like God to be at our beck and call. Instead, like spoilt children, we quit the God who is said to let us hunger or humbles us with tests that try our hearts. We refuse the paradoxes that make faith in this God both complex and contradictory and, in God’s place, amass an array of gods-- side by side, without inner contradiction--who can promise tangible help, a quick fix for our every problem. This penchant for multiple gods was precisely what prompted the writing of the Book of Deuteronomy in the seventh century B.C. God’s people had indeed settled in the land and eaten their fill and built fine homes. They had exalted themselves and forgotten the Lord their God who brought them out of the land of Egypt. Now in the aftermath of the fall of the Northern kingdom, Judah’s political survival had led King Hezekiah to make an alliance with Assyria that placed Assyrian gods alongside the God who once had led the Israelites in another wilderness. “If you do forget the Lord your God,” Moses warned in the story, “and follow other gods to serve and worship them, I solemnly warn you today that you shall surely perish.” If I were to say how the great God almighty acted to preserve and govern God’s people, I would say that God sent them a storyteller. You could say, of course, that it was just a story and you would be right. But, wrote David Brooks, “Among all the things we don’t control, we do have some control over our stories. We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world….The stories we select help us, in turn, to interpret the world. They guide us to pay attention to certain things and ignore other things. They lead us to see certain things as sacred and other things as disgusting. They are the frameworks that shape our desires and goals. So while story selection may seem vague and intellectual, it’s actually very powerful. The most important power we have,” Brooks concludes, “is the power to select the lens through which we see reality.” The story the Deuteronomist told the people of Israel in the seventh century was the story of the way of God’s providence. Look at your triumphs and your tribulations, he said, through the lens of God’s providence. He told of the God who “let them hunger” in order to make them understand that “one does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Like the birds of the air, he pointed out that the clothes on their backs did not wear out and their feet did not swell—and this was not their own doing but a gift from the God who preserved them. This God disciplined them for their own good in the wilderness and gave them commandments like guard rails on the steep and winding road that would eventually lead them to God’s future. God is the ultimately interested party in this story, the party whose interest is peaked because God has left us free to figure out the way to ourselves even as God effects the destiny for which we were born. Yet even in the destiny God effects—a destiny that is not a place but a person named Jesus in whom we will arrive at ourselves—God guards our freedom to cut and run. For the most part, we do and we will until that day when we shall see him face to face and when, I do believe, his grace shall be irresistible. On that day we will have left the doctrine of providence for that of salvation. God wouldn’t have created all the “planets, galaxies, stars, animals, black holes and all the things you learn about in school” said Poppi to his granddaughter, “if he were not interested in it…all that is exciting. God’s excited by it.” “Do you think God shares your excitement,” Solveig asks her grandfather. “Yes,” says Jens, “I think he is more excited than I am.” “Why?” “Because he really knows what’s going on, and…” “Yeah,” Solveig allows a little later in the conversation. “God created all of us for his own excitement, but I think that there was also some deep down reason, a reason that we’ll never know. Not because he wanted enjoyment. I think he wanted something that he couldn’t have but that we will never know about—forever, practically. What do you think?” “I think,” said Poppi, “we do know what it is. I think it is Jesus.” “So you think that’s the reason God created us—for Jesus?” “Yes,” said Poppi. |