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February 22, 2003
God’s Precarious Presence
God’s Precarious Presence
I Samuel 7: 1-8 / Acts 19: 21-28
February 22nd, 2004
I might have titled my remarks this morning something else. I might have called this message, “The Domestication of God”.
Last Sunday I spread before you matters that have been heavy on my mind since returning from Colombia two weeks ago about the power of God’s presence. Months before I went there I selected two passages, one from the Old and one from the New Testament to preach on for last Sunday. Both of these passages described the present power of God.
I little knew how impressed I would be with intimations of God’s life-changing power I saw happening in the Bellavista Prison in Medellin, Colombia. It’s one thing to think about God’s power in nature, or in some grand sense as Lord of history, but quite another to see evidence that God is rearranging the lives of one person after another. I’m convinced the hardest job God has in this world is changing the attitude, the will, the character, that is, the LIFE of people.
Part of what I proposed last week was that it is odd to pray, asking God to change all sorts of things out there in the world around us, while our own attitudes, our own will, our own character remain God’s biggest impediment. How very much of God’s power lurks in what He is permitted to do through a consecrated person’s attitude. History demonstrates this odd phenomenon: very often the spectacular saints are very ordinary people, sometimes, in fact, less than ordinary. Their genius lies in the consecration of their wills to God. It is no secret what God can do through a person thoroughly submitted to Him, but religion seems to have so little effect in producing this submission to God.
There is something very strange about our kind of religion, when you come right down to it. We sometimes sing a stanza that is part of a hymn I always sing apprehensively, “Take my will and make it Thine, it shall be no longer mine.” Really? And how do I go about submitting my will to God? If we ask this, probably we don’t intend to do it. You have to do it to realize it’s happening.
“Take my will” is a prayer God has a lot of trouble answering because you and I have a virtually unconquerable attitude. We live in a religious culture where songs are sung, and prayers are spoken freely. Meanwhile there is one domain off-limits to the critical scrutiny of anyone, even God—my attitude, my will.
One result of this unfair contest that God allows to go on with us tiny little people is that we reduce the God to whom we say our prayers and sing our songs. We define for ourselves, or choose among the many alternative definitions of God, the one to whom we pray. This will be a God who “understands” the disclaimers at the footnotes of our prayers.
We have been suckered in to breaking the Second Commandment, “You shall not make for yourself any graven image. You shall not bow down to it or serve it.” The God to whom we should pray is one before Whom your life and mine is like a vapor, a breath, a wisp of smoke.
A needful corrective to the problem we have of thinking of God and life is to recover a sense of the precarious situation of being in God’s presence. When we are in God’s bailiwick, we are out of our league.
When we have become comfortable with the God we imagine, we have domesticated Him. We are apt to want this God to serve us rather than to serve Him.
The prophet, Malachi, asked a question we love to hear sung at Christmas, “Who can endure the day of His coming? Who can stand when He appears?” Indeed, who can?
The two biblical passages we read this morning describe two aspects of the human attitude to the presence of God. In I Samuel 7 we read of the prophet, Samuel, gathering the people of Israel to Mizpah, a place holy in their history. Why was Mizpah so special?
Mizpah developed this special aura after a moment when the patriarch, Jacob, and his uncle, Laban, parted company uneasily. Neither one trusted the other at all. Each had behaved treacherously to the other as though God could not see what the other one couldn’t see. They stood before a sacred stack of stones where Laban reminded Jacob that God would see if he was faithful to his daughters, who were now Jacob’s wives.
A new perception of the presence of God came to Israel as they remembered what happened at Mizpah. Laban said to their Patriarch, the one whose name they carried as “children of Israel,” “May the Lord watch between me and thee while we are absent one from the other.” I’ve heard this “Mizpah benediction” repeated at the close of a women’s circle meeting as a sort of mutual blessing.
But it was not a sweet farewell Laban spoke to Jacob. It was a reminder to Jacob that God knew what he was up to. Before this it seems they thought of God as someone who directed their ways, but didn’t watch too carefully their way of life. Somehow, Laban, though he was a treacherous man, perceived that this God whom they worshipped noticed the bad behavior at least of his nephew, Jacob. Jacob probably replied, “Yes, God is watching you too, Uncle Laban.” But Mizpah became a special place for Israel as a reminder that God is present with us and observes how we live.
It was this Mizpah to which Samuel gathered folk. We did not read this morning what precedes these verses. When Israel got back the Ark of the Covenant from the Philistines, they treated it casually. Curiosity got the better of their sense of the Holy. They opened the lid of the Ark and looked inside. Again I have images created by Steven Spielberg in the movie “The Raiders of the Lost Ark.” He must have been informed by Malachi’s awesome question, “Who can stand before His presence?” In the movie those who look into the ark melt and are no more.
It seems seventy men were in on this sacrilege and seventy men died. So, rather than rejoicing to have the Ark of the Covenant again, and rather than confessing the cavalier way they had treated God, they pointed pouting fingers at God. “Who is able to stand before the Lord, this holy God?” It was as though they were complaining, “God is picking on us.”
They sent word to another town, asking them to take the Ark. It stayed there twenty years. These were good years because the people in Kiriath-jearim treated God with reverence. Later on we read that after the Ark went to that other town, God blessed the home in which it was stored.
But it was otherwise here at Beth-shemesh. They blamed God for the effects of their own impiety. Samuel said to them, “If you are returning to the Lord with all your heart, then put away the foreign gods and the Astaroth from among you, and direct your heart to the Lord, and serve him only, and he will deliver you out of the hand of the Philistines.” So they said they would, and they did, for a while.
But apparently they didn’t trust their own capacity for faithfulness. It was a re-directed way of life that Samuel called them to, while they had in mind a more immediate and temporary act of devotion. Sacrifices and worship services have always been easier than a steady life of faithfulness. Realizing this, Samuel drew them to this memorable spot, to Mizpah, the place where the Patriarch Jacob had been reminded severely that God saw his every act. Here Samuel led them in holy ceremonies, some we don’t understand. They poured out “holy water” on the ground there and fasted, confessing their sins to God––at a place that stood for God’s all-seeing eye.
We don’t understand what the pouring out of water meant, but fasting we know about, and the confession of sin. Samuel wanted them to formally acknowledge that it was God that delivered them from the Philistines, and now they must continue to live holy lives before this delivering God.
But they didn’t trust their own intentions, on which so much depended. They implored Samuel not to stop praying for God’s aid. How hopeless Samuel must have felt to hear them plead with him, as though his prayer could overcome their neglect to re-order their lives. They had in mind a God whom Samuel could keep pacified by his prayers. It would have to be this because they had no intentions of following the way of life God demanded of them.
One big lesson of Israel’s history is that we cannot domesticate God. It won’t work for long.
In the Book of Acts we read of another kind of attempt at domesticating deity. To us who do not worship statues the Ephesians’ worship of Artemis seems pretty foolish. Artemis is better known, I think, as Diana. When Paul made clear this statue of a woman was not a deity at all, it hurt the business of the silversmiths. To make the statue seem more “god-like,” the artisans made her with a suggestive physical deformity. It worked. They sold lots of statues. The silversmith got rich. This financial matter was the crux of theological problem in Ephesus.
The scandal of the idolatry in Ephesus was twofold. On the one hand, it was tragic that intelligent people should look to a non-entity and call it their deity. On the other hand it was larceny that Demetrius and other silversmiths should make a financial killing from selling statues whose attraction was their supposed deity.
It was the anticipated spiritual value of these grotesque images that made people buy them. When Paul made plain that they were nothing but powerless silver figurines, rather than accepting the evidence, the people responded with passionate words, “Great is Diana of the Ephesians.” It was like the empty shouting that takes place at political rallies of candidates who anticipate losing an election.
They had received certain myths about her that they loved to remember. In Homer’s Iliad she was called “Mistress of the animals.” It was a beloved motif showing a goddess, often with wings, a Mistress of the whole of wild nature, of the fish, the birds, of lions and stags, goats and hares. She was wild and uncanny, gracious to playful cubs of fierce lions, but a huntress who killed her prey with a bow and arrow. What charming fantasy gathered around Diana for the Ephesians!
For Paul to call Diana a humbug-deity was for them like casting aspersions on the American flag for us. Diana was a powerful symbol for the Ephesians.
It is possible for us in our love for our country to forget the line that must be clear between God and country. We do not worship an American god, but the Creator of Heaven and Earth, of seas and skies, of every nation, every planet, every galaxy. We run the risk of doing as Ephesus did, claiming Great is the God of our Country! forgetting that this God has created the dividing lines between every nation on earth. And it is His intention to bless all whom He has made, and not just one favored nation, fortunate for a time in wealth and power.
How gradually the inclination develops among people to domesticate God. It is very hard to remember that the God with whom we have to do is one who cannot be reduced to proportions that we describe. And if we have a god in mind with whom we feel comfortable, we can be sure it’s probably not the God of the Bible, not the God who was made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth—the One who died for our sins on the cross.
I am concerned that today when Mel Gibson has produced a movie that fascinates us all with the image of Jesus’ suffering, that we may forget that God never asked us to pity the suffering Jesus. God does not call us to feel strong emotions, to weep at all the physical pain Jesus endured before and as He died on the cross. Jesus told all who would be His disciples, “You are my friends if you do what I have commanded you.” How much less insistent this simple, all demanding remark of Jesus can seem than the powerful emotions that can be evoked by graphic images of how much it hurt to be beaten to a pulp, then crucified. Our emotions can rage inside us, leaving us sobbing for a while. But Jesus calls us to a life, a way of life of following Him. We run the risk of calling strong emotions “life changing,” a term that means very little if it does not describe lives that are changed.
If you can come away from seeing this movie and find yourself saying with utterest sincerity, “Take my will and make it Thine, it will be no longer mine,” then the event was for you life-changing. The demonstration of the good effect awaits the unfolding of your life. I suspect Jesus isn’t impressed with momentary strong emotions. He is very impressed to see a life given to following Him. Don’t make the mistake of domesticating Jesus, reducing Him to a brutalized man who allowed this brutality to happen to Him because He loved the world so much. He did not say, “You are my friends if you weep at images of my agonizing end.” He said, “You are my friends if you DO what I command you.”
There is quite a project before us as Christians. How in a society dominated by various styles of Christianity can we sort through all the styles and see God made flesh, a holy God made flesh. He was in the beginning with God and He was God—this One who was made flesh and dwelt among us.
When the Apostle John saw this One in a vision on the Isle of Patmos, he fell at his feet as though he was a dead man. He did as Isaiah did when he saw the Lord high and lifted up, his glory filling the Temple. Do not lose the awareness that this is still the nature of the God we worship. His son, Jesus, shares His awesome majesty. Bow before Him. Be quiet before Him. Remember it is He who made us. Remember it was for us that this One died, a scandalous thing to imagine. Jesus never asked us to imagine this. But He did say, “You are my friends if you do what I command you.” Do you respect Jesus enough to make this the project of your life? Let these truths govern how you think of Jesus, our Lord and our God.
Let us pray: O Lord God, Creator of all things, sustainer of all things, Lord of all life, graciously preserve in us who call on You the sense of Your holiness, Your Otherness, that we may not desecrate You in our hearts. And help us to know how to be Your friends in deed, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Stuart D. Robertson
Faith Presbyterian Church
West Lafayette, Indiana
Posted by faithpres at 09:30 AM | Comments (0)