In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

Transcription

1 SO WIDE, CAN T GET AROUND IT September 12, 2010, 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time I Timothy 1:12-15 Michael L. Lindvall, The Brick Presbyterian Church in the City of New York Theme: The love of God knows nothing of our human distinctions. May your word in Scripture find us wherever we ve hidden ourselves, O God. May it search us out and surprise us in our hiding places yet again this morning. And now may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable in your sight O Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. Amen. As Allston noted before she read today s Scripture passage, Paul wrote a good number of letters to entire churches but just a few to individual people. I Timothy is one of those several personal letters. In its opening chapter, Paul gets very personal. He s self-disclosing, as they say. I can t imagine that Timothy didn t know this dirt about Paul long before he got the letter. I mean, the two of them had wandered the Mediterranean world together. For better or worse, you really get to know people when you travel with them. It seems that Paul brings up his dramatic personal story yet again to make a theological point to Timothy. Paul reminds his young protégé what a jerk he, Paul, had been earlier in life a blasphemer, persecutor, and man of violence. He doesn t mention it here, but Paul the super-pharisee had held the coats of the executioners while Stephen was stoned to death. Paul hints about the fact that, armed with arrest warrants, he d been hunting down Christians when he d had his dramatic conversion experience. Paul confesses to Timothy that he acted ignorantly and in unbelief. He nominates himself the foremost of sinners, which is saying a lot. Paul s rhetorical point in dredging this up is simple enough in spite of his lamentable past personal behavior, the grace of God overflowed to him anyway. In spite of being a blasphemer, in spite of being a persecutor, in spite of being a man of violence, the love of God sought him out, found him, and made him of all people into Paul the Apostle

2 Paul waxes downright doxological in this testimony to the breadth of such a divine grace. His words will come to frame later Christian liturgy and hymnody: The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners. Erin used those words in today s Assurance of Forgiveness. Immortal, invisible, the only God The author of today s middle hymn borrowed those words. Paul is saying that he s nothing less than a living example of the old spiritual that gave me today s sermon title, a musical chestnut recorded by Elvis Presley and the Kingston Trio, a ditty I sang at summer church camp never realizing how good the theology was: So high, can t get over it; So low, can t get under it; So wide, can t get around it. The it is the love of God, of course. There is a dangerously wrong way to understand Paul s conversion. The very wrong way to see it is to assume that Paul simply switched sides in a religious battle: Paul-the-Jew who had it out for Christians switches sides and becomes Paul-the-Christian who had it out for Jews. This naïve narrative totally misunderstands Paul and what happened to him. The truth is this after he begins to follow Jesus, Paul still considers himself a Jew. Paul s magnum opus is his Letter to the Romans, 16 dense chapters wrestling with the relationship between Christianity and Judaism. The book s big question is: Does God love them both the same? The book s answer is clear: God judges all humanity alike and God loves all humanity alike. Early in that Book of Romans, at end of the Second Chapter, Paul puts the point bluntly: There will be glory and honor and peace for everyone (everyone) who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek (by Greek he means everybody else). And then Paul s clincher: For God shows no partiality. No partiality for Christians, no partiality for Jews, no partiality for any one human ethnic, racial, or religious group. Oh, Paul was pleased when other Jews opted to add Jesus to their Jewishness as he had. But the truth is this in his conversion, Paul does not exactly switch sides. He moves above the fray. He takes a wide-angle view of the grace of God, a - 2 -

3 vantage point beyond sides, and envisions a divine love that knows nothing of the endless group distinctions that human beings are forever making about themselves. There is indeed a sorry human proclivity to divide ourselves into groups. Then we other-ize all the groups, except the one we belong to. I made that word up other-ize. It s clunky, but you know exactly what I mean. Humanity is bedeviled by a perverse strain in our moral DNA that needs somebody to be others. Somebody has to be not us, on the other side from me. Entire nations do this. Foreign policies are constructed on it. Individuals do it. We need to imagine the great other, some other that we alternatively demonize, or feel superior to, somebody to pity, to fight, to hate. And their very otherness somehow grants us identity and status. The fact that there are people out there who are not us somehow bestows on me and my tribe a sense of validity, even superiority. These human distinctions need not be religious. In fact, they re usually not. They can be ethnic; they can be racial; they can be linguistic. They can be based on class, politics or simple geography the hill folks versus the valley folks. And of course, these distinctions can be religious. And here s the scary truth when this proclivity to other-ize gets religion, it goes viral! Jihadist radical Islam other-izes everybody who s not their particular kind of Muslim and justifies the wholesale murder of innocents in the name of God. Reverend Bushy Mustaches down in Florida threatens to burn the Koran in the name of God. Religion makes the human proclivity to other-ize even more toxic because it imagines that God actually blesses the human distinctions we make. Add religion, and merely human categories are absolutized and granted transcendent imprimatur. The human distinctions we make are not just what we think; they are actually what God thinks. It s OK to hate them because God hates them. We make war on them and trust that God is actually on our side. It s all right to feel partiality because God is partial to us. It s just at this point that today s story of Paul s conversion pushes back against the temptation to other-ize human beings and then enlist God on our side. As I noted, - 3 -

4 when Paul becomes a Christian, he doesn t simply switch sides in the Jewish- Christian debate and sign God up on his new Christian side. Rather, Paul says, There will be glory and honor and peace for everyone who does good, for God shows no partiality. I went to Rosh Hashanah services this last Thursday. I ve attended synagogue a number of times, but never on a high holy day. I was invited by the rabbis conducting the service, a brother and sister team who have visited Brick several times. It was not a traditional Jewish New Year service. The music ranged from rhythm and blues to black gospel, to Hasidic, to klezmer, to Broadway. It was three hours long, eclectic, memorable, often moving. It was also participatory. At one point there was a conga line in the center aisle led by the rabbi. Like I said, I don t think it was traditional Rosh Hashanah. One thread that ran through the entire service was the emphatic affirmation that to be Jewish doesn t mean God loves you more. To dramatize this point, about half way through the service, one of the rabbis asked the 500 or so people in the sanctuary to do something participatory. He said, Turn to the person on your left and say, You are a child of God. I looked to my left. There sat an older African- American woman whom I knew to be a member of Riverside Church, a Christian interloper like me. I took her hand, followed directions, and said, You are a child of God. And the black woman looked at me, the Anglo-Saxon white guy, and said, And so are you. The rabbi told us to turn to the right and do the same. To my right was seated an attractive middle-aged white woman whom I figured to be Jewish because for the last hour she had been rattling off all the Hebrew liturgical responses like a pro. I said to her, the Jew, You are a child of God. And she said, said to me, the Christian, And you are a child of God. And then, per instructions, we faced the rabbi in his thick glasses, kippa and prayer shawl and said, We are all children of God. Or as Paul put it two thousand years ago: God shows no partiality. Today s sermon take-home, the Gospel du jour is just this. In a world in which people are too ready to hate themselves and to hate others, remember that Paul once discovered that the love of God was so wide he couldn t get around it. Didn t matter what skeletons were in his closet, the grace of God took him anyway. And - 4 -

5 know this modern corollary: The love of God is so wide you can t get around it either. It doesn t matter what skeletons lurk in your closet, the love of God is too wide to get around. And not only is this true for you; it s true but for everybody else out there, all those people who aren t like us, the chunks of humanity we are so sorely prone to otherize. The love of God is so wide it reaches out to them too. It reaches out to all of them, no matter what. I don t often end sermons with a poem, but I ve got one for you today. I heard it in a sermon this summer. I asked the preacher for a copy. She said she didn t write it, that it was anonymous, and that she thought it a bit cheesy, but I was welcome to it. The poem is immodestly entitled The Best Poem in the World. You ve heard of died and went to heaven jokes. This is a died and went to heaven poem. I was shocked, confused and bewildered As I entered heaven s door, Not by the beauty of it all, Nor the lights of its décor. But it was the folks in heaven Who made me sputter and gasp The thieves, the liars, the sinners, The alcoholics and the trash. I nudged Jesus, What s the deal? I would love to hear your take. How d all these sinners get up here? God must ve made a mistake. And why s everyone so quiet, So somber give me a clue? Hush, child, he said, They re all in shock. No one thought they d be seeing you. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen