William H. Willimon - "An Uncontainable, yet Accessible God" (August 24, 1997)
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Transcript
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- | The third lesson is from the Gospel | 0:09 |
of John, Chapter 6. | 0:10 | |
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me | 0:13 | |
and I in them, just as the living father sent me | 0:16 | |
and I live because of the father, so whoever eats me | 0:20 | |
will live because of me. | 0:23 | |
This is the bread that came down from heaven, | 0:26 | |
not like that which our ancestors ate and they died, | 0:28 | |
but the one who eats this bread will live forever. | 0:31 | |
He said these things while he was teaching | 0:35 | |
in the synagogue at Capernaum. | 0:37 | |
When many of his disciples heard it, they said, | 0:40 | |
"This teaching is difficult. | 0:43 | |
"Who can accept it?" | 0:45 | |
But Jesus, being aware that this disciples | 0:46 | |
were complaining about it, said to them, | 0:49 | |
"Does this offend you? | 0:51 | |
"Then what if you were to see the son of man | 0:53 | |
"ascending to where he was before? | 0:56 | |
"It is the spirit that gives life. | 0:58 | |
"The flesh is useless. | 1:00 | |
"The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life, | 1:03 | |
"but among you there are some who do not believe," | 1:07 | |
for Jesus knew from the first who were the ones | 1:11 | |
that did not believe and who was the ones | 1:13 | |
that would betray him, and he said, | 1:16 | |
"For this reason, I have told you that no one can come | 1:18 | |
"to me unless it is granted by the father." | 1:22 | |
Because of this, many of his disciples turned back | 1:26 | |
and no longer went about with him, so Jesus asked | 1:28 | |
the 12, "Do you also wish to go away?" | 1:31 | |
Simon Peter answered him, "Lord, to whom can we go? | 1:35 | |
"You have the words of eternal life. | 1:41 | |
"We have come to believe and know that you | 1:43 | |
"are the holy one of God." | 1:46 | |
This is the word of the Lord. | 1:49 | |
- | Thanks be to God. | 1:51 |
- | The Gospel we have just heard read is, | 2:01 |
for my money, one of the strangest passages | 2:05 | |
in an already strange Gospel, the Gospel of John. | 2:10 | |
Jesus begins by saying, "Unless you drink my blood | 2:14 | |
"and eat my flesh, you cannot be part of me," | 2:17 | |
and his disciples speak for all of us in saying, | 2:21 | |
"Now that's a hard say." | 2:27 | |
And then Jesus says, "Well then, what would you do | 2:30 | |
"if I like, ascended to heaven from whence I came?" | 2:32 | |
And John ends by saying, "About that time, a lot of people | 2:40 | |
"stopped following Jesus." | 2:43 | |
Strange. | 2:48 | |
Jesus, elusive, enigmatic, not straightforward. | 2:50 | |
A lot of people just decided at that point | 2:56 | |
this has just gotten way too strange for me. | 2:59 | |
I'm checking out. | 3:04 | |
And here we come to this place of God to, better | 3:08 | |
to understand God, to get our faith fixed and right, | 3:13 | |
and then to lay a Gospel like that upon us, strange. | 3:19 | |
Why would Jesus do that? | 3:28 | |
Well, he grew up in a nominally Muslim home | 3:32 | |
on the south side of Chicago, and while at Duke, | 3:36 | |
he became attracted to certain aspects | 3:42 | |
of the Christian faith, and so he decided the summer | 3:45 | |
of his sophomore year when he was home, | 3:49 | |
he would find out more about the Christian faith | 3:51 | |
and he would do this by visiting in a number of Christian | 3:54 | |
churches in the Chicago area. | 3:57 | |
One Sunday, he was in a black Pentecostal church, | 4:00 | |
the next Sunday, he was in a Roman Catholic church, | 4:03 | |
then a Baptist church, then a Methodist church, | 4:05 | |
and he would observe Christians at worship | 4:07 | |
and listen in on the conversation, | 4:12 | |
and then he would decide what we were up to. | 4:14 | |
When I saw him about this time in August at the end | 4:18 | |
of this summer of church visitation, | 4:22 | |
he was a sadly confused young man. | 4:24 | |
He said, "I can't figure it out. | 4:29 | |
"There's no common theme. | 4:31 | |
"It's like it's all different," and to make matters worse, | 4:33 | |
he was majoring in Mechanical Engineering. | 4:40 | |
(congregation laughing) | 4:43 | |
And I said to him, "Yes, yes, I know, I know, | 4:46 | |
"it is a mess, but with time, you could learn to love it." | 4:49 | |
I've some of the Koran, the holy book of Muslims | 4:56 | |
and you know reading that why | 4:59 | |
there are Muslim fundamentalists. | 5:03 | |
It's like the literature just encourages | 5:06 | |
straightforward propositions and six principles | 5:09 | |
and list of dos and don'ts and definitive assertions, | 5:13 | |
but for the life of me, I can't figure out like, | 5:19 | |
reading something like the Gospel of John | 5:22 | |
how you get Christian fundamentalists because the literature | 5:25 | |
of Christians, Scripture, just doesn't seem to support | 5:30 | |
that kind of reading, it's just too complicated, it's thick. | 5:36 | |
It always needs unpacking and explaining | 5:42 | |
and hardly ever does Jesus stand aside | 5:45 | |
and say, "All right, here's three things I need you | 5:48 | |
"to believe this morning, here is the answer | 5:50 | |
"to this enigma. | 5:52 | |
"Here it is laid out for you straight." | 5:53 | |
It's a mess, but there are those of us who learn to love it. | 5:55 | |
Now King Solomon was never known for his humility. | 6:05 | |
After all, he was King David's royal son, | 6:10 | |
Solomon who became known as the wisest man | 6:14 | |
Israel ever produced. | 6:17 | |
Solomon's reign was the very pennacle of Israel's | 6:21 | |
prosperity and preimenense as an empire. | 6:24 | |
Solomon the Great they called him, and today's first lesson | 6:29 | |
is from that grand day when Solomon the Great | 6:34 | |
stood up before a massive temple which he had ordered | 6:37 | |
built in Jerusalem, and there before the whole nation, | 6:41 | |
he dedicates the great temple, a grand new house of God | 6:45 | |
built during his reign. | 6:50 | |
The king declares in his dedicatory prayer, | 6:54 | |
"This will be a place of prayer, a place of national | 6:57 | |
"unity, a comfort to the sorrowful, | 7:00 | |
"a place of divine presence," sort of conventional things | 7:03 | |
you expect politicians to say on these sort | 7:07 | |
of public gatherings, times of national self-congratulation | 7:09 | |
and royal pride. | 7:14 | |
But then King Solomon says something which surprises. | 7:18 | |
Solomon asks, "Will God indeed dwell on earth? | 7:23 | |
"Behold, heaven, even highest heaven cannot contain God. | 7:30 | |
"How much less this house which I have built?" | 7:36 | |
It's kind of an amazing thought | 7:43 | |
for a pride-filled king. | 7:47 | |
"Our temples, even so grand a temple as this," | 7:51 | |
Solomon says, "Can't contain God. | 7:55 | |
"Heaven, even the highest heaven cannot hold God in. | 7:58 | |
"How much less this house which I have built." | 8:03 | |
There is wisdom. | 8:08 | |
We call our church a house of God, but we don't literally | 8:12 | |
believe God lives here. | 8:17 | |
Rather, we are pointing to our experience that in this | 8:20 | |
place, when we have come seeking a word from God, | 8:23 | |
when we have come in pain searching for some gesture | 8:30 | |
of comfort, we have found it here. | 8:35 | |
Time and again, we have been able to explain | 8:38 | |
with our ancestor Jacob when a letter was let down | 8:42 | |
from heaven to him in the desert, we've been able to say | 8:47 | |
with Jacob, surely the Lord was in this place. | 8:50 | |
You recall that when Jacob awoke that night with a stone | 8:57 | |
for a pillow, he named that place Bethel, | 9:00 | |
Bethel, which literally means house of God. | 9:04 | |
There in that place in the desert, for Jacob | 9:08 | |
it was like a house of God. | 9:11 | |
And time and again, this place has been our Bethel. | 9:14 | |
And yet even so grand a church as this filled | 9:19 | |
with such grand music on this day is not, says Solomon | 9:22 | |
the Wise, a container for God. | 9:26 | |
Heaven, even highest heaven cannot contain God. | 9:29 | |
With God, after we have traversed the width and the depth | 9:33 | |
and the breadth of heaven, there is still not room | 9:36 | |
enough to hold God. | 9:41 | |
We mortals are caught between the necessary human | 9:47 | |
inclination to build walls, to make shrines, to declare | 9:49 | |
places holy for God and yet invariably when we get | 9:54 | |
into our houses of God and we're exposed to Scripture, | 10:00 | |
or music, or the beauty of the place, we realize | 10:04 | |
God is larger than even that. | 10:07 | |
Years ago, J.B. Phillips wrote a popular book, | 10:11 | |
Your God Is Too Small, in which Phillips mildly mock | 10:15 | |
the ways we tame and domesticate God | 10:19 | |
by our attitudes about God. | 10:23 | |
He says we turn God into the cosmic errand boy, | 10:25 | |
the cosmic policeman, the big daddy, the big mama. | 10:29 | |
"A little God is no match for the great joys | 10:34 | |
"or the great sorrows of this life," says J.B. Phillips. | 10:38 | |
Your God is too small. | 10:43 | |
Every time we say God is, there's a sense in which | 10:46 | |
we must also follow that up immediately by saying, | 10:51 | |
and yet God is not. | 10:53 | |
Have you ever found it interesting | 10:59 | |
that we have four Gospels? | 11:01 | |
We have four Gospels. | 11:05 | |
You might have thought at some point in early | 11:06 | |
Christian history, somebody would have said hey, | 11:08 | |
Matthew fairly well got it. | 11:12 | |
Why don't we all go with Matthew? | 11:16 | |
Everybody want to go with Matthew? | 11:17 | |
Let's all go with Matthew because it would just confuse | 11:18 | |
people to lay out there four Gospels. | 11:21 | |
No, we got four Gospels, we got four at sometimes | 11:24 | |
differing, unique perspectives on Jesus. | 11:30 | |
Are the four Gospels testimonial to the fact that Christians | 11:35 | |
find it hard to agree on anything or are they evidence? | 11:39 | |
Hey, Jesus is big. | 11:43 | |
This thing is thick. | 11:45 | |
Jesus is God, he is uncontainable, | 11:47 | |
large, wonderfully non-circumscribable. | 11:50 | |
This week, the university welcomes an invasion | 11:58 | |
of new students. | 12:02 | |
Some will arrive here with some understanding of | 12:03 | |
and some decision to follow Jesus, but they will worry | 12:06 | |
that maybe a course in Religion or time spent | 12:12 | |
with the Department of Philosophy, | 12:16 | |
in their words, shake my faith. | 12:17 | |
They will therefore seek ways to preserve their faith, | 12:22 | |
they will seek ways in their words to hold on | 12:25 | |
to my faith, but others of those students may come here | 12:28 | |
and see the university not as a threat to faith, | 12:32 | |
but as a challenge, as one more episode | 12:36 | |
in their life journey with God. | 12:41 | |
They may come to see that faith is not something | 12:44 | |
to which we need to hold, but rather something | 12:48 | |
by which we are held by God. | 12:51 | |
They may move from conservation to exploration | 12:57 | |
and they will find to their delight, God is large, | 13:01 | |
God is present, even here, especially here | 13:05 | |
where minds are tested and souls get stretched. | 13:09 | |
Yeah, and yet there is another side to this coin. | 13:16 | |
In our academic willingness to keep all options open, | 13:21 | |
to keep an open mind, to avoid premature closure, | 13:26 | |
to be fair to all points of view, maybe we here | 13:29 | |
are in danger of a greater peril, the danger | 13:35 | |
that we build no house for God. | 13:39 | |
We have found that if you put God in every rock | 13:47 | |
and blade of grass and tree, pantheism. | 13:50 | |
When everything is God, it gets to be eventually | 13:56 | |
that nothing is God. | 14:00 | |
If God is everywhere and in everything, God becomes | 14:02 | |
nowhere and nothing. | 14:06 | |
Pantheism invariably degenerates into atheism. | 14:09 | |
I'm talking about that modern pathology by which we flit | 14:15 | |
like honeybees from flower to flower | 14:21 | |
and we never alight anywhere. | 14:23 | |
Paul spoke of that shallow thought which is that doctrine | 14:26 | |
which is blown to and throw by every wind, | 14:30 | |
captive to nowhere in particular, and therefore slave | 14:36 | |
to every fad that blows through town, | 14:40 | |
just another lifestyle option. | 14:42 | |
This fall, this week, I was interviewed by a writer | 14:46 | |
for Good Housekeeping, a magazine I've never read, | 14:50 | |
but she was doing an interview, she was doing a study | 14:55 | |
on churches or building churches in shopping malls. | 15:01 | |
They're renting space in shopping malls | 15:06 | |
and they're opening a church there, and she said, | 15:08 | |
"What do you think about this?" | 15:12 | |
And I said, "Well, it's kind of interesting. | 15:13 | |
"Churches moving out, going where people are, | 15:14 | |
"being present there in the shopping mall." | 15:17 | |
And she said to me, "Yeah, but I'm a little bothered. | 15:20 | |
"I'm when the church is, you know, you've got Victoria's | 15:26 | |
"Secret and Barnes and Noble, and you've got Jesus." | 15:30 | |
(congregation laughing) | 15:33 | |
"I'm just bothered that church | 15:35 | |
"has become another lifestyle option, | 15:37 | |
"maybe something for you to try | 15:40 | |
"this week when you're feeling | 15:41 | |
"a little need of a little something." | 15:43 | |
I could see her point. | 15:47 | |
There is doubt which comes from honest wrestling | 15:50 | |
with this faith, and then there's doubt | 15:54 | |
which comes from intellectual sloth, | 15:57 | |
from the unwillingness to take time to investigate, | 16:01 | |
to the unwillingness to hammer out anything | 16:04 | |
more substantial than a passing spiritual mood. | 16:08 | |
Historically, the Catholic Christian has said | 16:13 | |
the church teaches, and Protestants have often said | 16:17 | |
the Bible says, and today we say well, it seems to me | 16:21 | |
at the present time. | 16:29 | |
Our much heralded openness may just be an exaggerated fear | 16:33 | |
of commitment, of risk, of failure to make a wager | 16:38 | |
to settle down anywhere and take the consequences. | 16:44 | |
Anselm called reason faith seeking understanding, | 16:50 | |
faith constantly working, and reaching, and moving. | 16:56 | |
When we, with the group, singing group U2 | 17:01 | |
complain, "I just haven't found what I'm looking for," | 17:04 | |
we've got to be asked well, how earnestly | 17:10 | |
have you sought what you're looking for? | 17:13 | |
Has there been any risk in your search? | 17:17 | |
No place, no building, not even a grand one as this | 17:21 | |
can contain God. | 17:28 | |
King Solomon knew that, but we must have a place. | 17:30 | |
We got to have some Bethel, some house were a promised | 17:39 | |
meeting is possible and there can be presence. | 17:43 | |
How many modern people who say they feel God | 17:48 | |
is absent, (speaking in foreign language) | 17:51 | |
more accurately ought to say that we are absent from God, | 17:55 | |
we have neglected those times and those places, | 18:00 | |
those practices and habits whereby God | 18:03 | |
is able to apprehend us. | 18:07 | |
I'm a Methodist and Methodist got our name | 18:14 | |
for believing that there are just some aspects | 18:17 | |
of the spiritual life too important to be left up | 18:19 | |
to when you feel like it. | 18:21 | |
There's a method. | 18:24 | |
There's something to be said for practices and habits | 18:26 | |
in the spiritual life. | 18:29 | |
I saw her with a young man in tow in Duke Gardens | 18:34 | |
last April amid the green and the flowers | 18:39 | |
and the sap rising. | 18:41 | |
"Have you fallen in love?" I ask her later. | 18:43 | |
"Me, no," she answered. | 18:47 | |
"Well then, what were you doing in the gardens in April," | 18:51 | |
I ask, "and with a young man, too?" | 18:54 | |
She said to me, "Oh, I was there because I want | 18:58 | |
"to fall in love," and I thought that was maybe a wisdom, | 19:01 | |
a Solomonic wisdom beyond her years. | 19:07 | |
You show me a marriage where a couple says, | 19:13 | |
we're just so deeply in love, we have no longer need | 19:15 | |
of those little rituals and those habits of love. | 19:19 | |
We no longer need to set aside a time to be together | 19:24 | |
or a place to share one another's company. | 19:29 | |
We're just so in love, it's just spontaneous, | 19:31 | |
and I'll show you a marriage that you can go back to | 19:36 | |
in a short time where there is no love. | 19:38 | |
Hey, we are animals. | 19:45 | |
God may be infinite, immense, and unbounded. | 19:48 | |
We are not. | 19:52 | |
We need time and we need a place, | 19:54 | |
and we need opportunity because we live not by grand | 19:56 | |
and noble ideas an ideals, we live by touch, | 20:01 | |
and taste, and place. | 20:04 | |
How wonderful then that God condescends to deal with us | 20:07 | |
in ways that bend to our need like bread and wine | 20:12 | |
at communion or the water of baptism | 20:18 | |
or this building we call church. | 20:21 | |
God stoops to our need. | 20:26 | |
I know a man, a marriage counselor who says | 20:32 | |
that when a couple comes to him saying | 20:35 | |
that there is trouble in their marriage, | 20:38 | |
he usually says to them, | 20:40 | |
all right, here's what I want you to do. | 20:41 | |
I want you to take next weekend off. | 20:44 | |
I want you to get a babysitter for the kids. | 20:46 | |
I want you to check into a nice hotel. | 20:49 | |
I want you to go out for a good dinner each night, | 20:51 | |
sleep in late, sit by the pool on Saturday. | 20:54 | |
If you still have marital problems on Monday, call me. | 20:59 | |
We are animals! | 21:06 | |
We have our limits. | 21:08 | |
We need time and place and rituals that keep relationship. | 21:09 | |
Is my marriage analogy too modest for why | 21:16 | |
you need to be here on Sunday? | 21:20 | |
I don't think so because we are modest in our abilities | 21:23 | |
and in our needs. | 21:26 | |
"I don't know anything much about art," the student said. | 21:31 | |
"I never go to art museums and I never studied the subject. | 21:36 | |
"Still, I do know what I like." | 21:41 | |
The professor responded, "You're absolutely right. | 21:44 | |
"You don't know anything about art." | 21:49 | |
(congregation laughing) | 21:52 | |
We have got our limits. | 21:54 | |
We need to build some house of God, | 21:57 | |
needing as we do place and opportunity for growth. | 21:59 | |
We need these building and these stones, this mortar, | 22:03 | |
we need some Bethel of a place whereby we can say | 22:06 | |
with Jacob, surely the Lord is in this place. | 22:09 | |
And the good news is God is. | 22:17 | |
Solomon not only prayed this prayer, "Will God indeed | 22:22 | |
"dwell on the earth? | 22:26 | |
"Behold, heaven and the highest heaven | 22:27 | |
"cannot contain thee. | 22:28 | |
"How much less this house which I have built." | 22:29 | |
God, large, uncontainable, inexpressible. | 22:32 | |
Solomon even more wisely prayed this prayer, | 22:38 | |
"And yet oh God, have regard to our prayer. | 22:43 | |
"Night and day open thine eyes toward this house, | 22:48 | |
"this place of which you say my name shall be there. | 22:53 | |
"Though God is not contained by this place | 23:01 | |
"which we have built, the name of God is here, the presence. | 23:03 | |
"God promises to come out and meet us." | 23:10 | |
God is love, God the God of Israel and the church | 23:13 | |
is not content to remain aloof and distant, uncaring. | 23:18 | |
This God, out of love stoops, seeks, searches, | 23:23 | |
and you can remember now all those stories | 23:28 | |
Jesus told about the lost sheep being searched for | 23:31 | |
by the shepherd and the lost son being waited | 23:34 | |
for by the father, seeks, searches, stoops. | 23:36 | |
I remember someone told me she was in great anguish, | 23:45 | |
suffering from a terrible illness and she told me, | 23:47 | |
"My greatest comfort in my time is my belief," | 23:52 | |
engendered in her by the Bible. | 23:56 | |
Her greatest comfort was our God is loquacious, | 24:02 | |
a big talker, just dying to start a conversation | 24:08 | |
and keep it going. | 24:13 | |
Therein is the promise that we test and we prove true | 24:18 | |
every time we enter his house. | 24:22 | |
"Oh God indeed, dwell on the earth. | 24:28 | |
"Heaven highest, heaven cannot contain thee. | 24:30 | |
"How much less this house I have built. | 24:33 | |
"Yet oh God, have regard to our prayer. | 24:36 | |
"Night and day, open thine eyes toward this house, | 24:40 | |
"this place of which it is said my name shall be there." | 24:43 |
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