July 13, A Generous God Matthew 13:1-9

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1 July 13, 2014 A Generous God Matthew 13:1-9 Why did Jesus tell parables? Here s a clue: The kingdom of God is like. The parables deal with one basic question: What is God like? Everyone has opinions about God. Even the atheists write books describing the God in whom they don t believe. Conservative evangelicals fill the television and the media outlets with their version of what God is like. On and on this preaching goes, this belligerent God talk, this toxic message that demeans and wrecks the reputation of God. And we, the people who actually possess an alternative view of God, we are God s silent ones. If we were to start speaking, it would be as if mimes had started talking. Freaky! I m sure you ve heard people say, You can say anything you want about me, but don t you talk about my mother! As soon as someone says something negative about my family, I bow up and join the fray. Listen, God is our father and our mother, and when someone besmirches God s reputation, we have to say a word or two or three. Let me add that if I m wrong, if the awful things conservative evangelicals say about God are in any way true, I still object to the constant playing of that one key of the piano, the constant pounding as if their way is the only way to talk about God. After all, the piano has 88 keys. If Debbie played one key over and over, how long would you be able to sit and listen? It is the music of the entire piano produced by the pianist that makes beautiful music. WHAT IS GOD LIKE? God is like a farmer planting seed and throwing them wildly everywhere. The parable of the sower is a parable about parables how they work, what they do. The Greek word for parable means to cast beyond, and suggests casting seeds onto soils or words onto souls. The meaning of the parable is quite literally the audience s problem. Those who have ears to hear let them hear. Our task is not to control

2 outcomes, but to cast the seeds. Jesus did not give answers in 3 points and a poem; Jesus provoked creative thought that led to a change of the mind. What is God like? God, the good sower, doesn t seem to care whether anyone listens or not. God doesn t have hot prospect lists. God, having sent Jesus to reconcile the world to herself, doesn t seem much concerned about declining baptisms and counting the number who get saved as if they were scalps. WHAT IS GOD LIKE? God celebrates waste and extravagance in grace and mercy. And the most wasteful act of all is the son of God dying for every living creature, most of whom will not accept, appreciate, or even know of the gift. This celebration of waste disrupts reality for go-by-the-book people. The nose-out-of-joint, pursed-lipped little Puritan that lives deep in all our hearts would have expelled this farmer from the community faster than they drove Roger Williams into the bitter winter. In this cold world created by Christians, it is all tit for tat, an eye for an eye. Keep the books and go by the book. Business math was never Jesus best subject. In fact, Jesus Math is rather strange. There is no expectation of results, but there is a promise of results. Other parables use the same math and it is not base 10 math. A woman has 10 coins and loses 1. What cost-benefit analysis would predict that someone would take greater joy in one coin than in nine? A shepherd has 100 sheep and loses 1. No decent shepherd would leave 99 stupid sheep alone in the wilderness to go searching for one stupid sheep. A manager hires workers and at the end of the day, one-hour workers get the same pay as all-day workers. A wasteful, bankrupt son comes home and his father wastes resources to throw him a party. WHAT IS GOD LIKE? God is like that woman, that shepherd, that Father. THERE IS NO CONDEMNATION IN JESUS CHRIST!

3 We need to get the word out: God is generous beyond our imagining. As in Adam, all humans die, so in Jesus all persons live. Instead of celebrating God s goodness and grace, the churches are becoming the religious version of the Stepford Wives! Churches should change their names. Instead of denominational names adorning church signs, they should self-identify: The First Church of Anti-Gay, Anti-Abortion, Anti-Immigration, The Holy Angel Church of Republicans, The Church of Elderly White People, The All Right Baptist Church, The Special People of God Church, The Repent or Go To Hell Church, The We Are Mad and We Are Not Going to Take It Any More Church, The I m Just Waiting for the Rapture Church, The Church of the Angry God, The Church of God Hates Muslims, The Church of God and Guns, The Church of God Is Going to Get You for That, The Church of the Democratic Savior, and The Church of America. Some folks may discover that their moral high ground is sinking sand. John Durham Peters has an excellent take on the parable of the sower in Speaking into the Air; I want to thank Sue Trollinger for telling me about the book. Peters compares Jesus and Socrates, Plato s Phaedrus and the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to Peters, Plato promotes dialogue, intimate, one-on-one dialogue while Jesus promotes dissemination without any sense of control. There is one Christian interpretation, favored by conservative evangelicals of a certain stripe, which shows God as stingy, as a lofty Almighty who allows human holocausts and deadly natural disasters, a callous Judge offering his favorites a place in heaven while casting the damned into everlasting hell. I have always thought that if a church ever fired me it would be because I don t believe in hell, predestination, the rapture, or a literal Bible. None of these fears have ever come to pass but now it seems that the one thing that might get me is the color of the carpet. Well, I am just a humble servant of our Lord. Do with me as you will! There is a different, an alternative Christian view, that shows God as generous, gentle, and gracious. If you want to know more about this view of God, read Doug Frank s, A Gentler God, for a powerful response to the portrayal of God as mean and ugly. God doesn t go around the universe stirring up killer hurricanes. God doesn t send people to hell or kill people. Jesus is not coming back to rapture the church because the rapture is a fiction, a hoax, a made-up story that has managed to use gorilla glue to stick together unrelated, out of context scripture verses to give the illusion of a rapture. Those rapture movies should be entitled, The Revenge of the

4 Angry Christians. When will we have enough of this foolish preaching? Look, if you discover that something is not true, you should stop believing it, no matter how emotionally satisfying it is. God, having created the universe, has no agenda for the destruction of creation. God is generous beyond our imagining. God has reconciled the universe through Jesus. When I am 100 years old and mumbling in my rocking chair at the nursing home, I hope I am repeating over and over, God has reconciled the world in Jesus! There is no book with all our sins written down. There is no book that has to be balanced in exact reciprocity. An episode of my favorite sit com, The Big Bang explores this idea when Penny tells Sheldon that she has gotten him a Christmas present. Unable to decide on the appropriate gift because he doesn t know the value of Penny s gift to him, he buys an array of gift baskets and hides them in his room. Well, Penny gives Sheldon a napkin signed by, To Sheldon, Leonard Nimoy. Sheldon loves Spock and he is so overwhelmed by the generosity, the grandness of the gift that he rushes to his room and brings out all the gift baskets and showers them on Penny. With gift baskets falling all over the floor, Sheldon cries, I know, I know, it s not enough is it? God is not like Sheldon. God disseminates gifts in embarrassing abundance. I sent an asking you why you thought Christians had trouble sharing the faith. I received a lot of thoughtful answers: Afraid. Not sure what to say. Ridicule. Religion is a private subject. Might offend someone. Don t want to be mistaken for a right-wing Christian, and being Christian already gives me enough problems. Fear of being embarrassed. Expressing faith non-verbally is more effective for me. I don t like people imposing rather than sharing faith with me. One person wrote that she had been the recipient of ill-mannered, pushy Christians. She said she was having surgery and her secretary, a Bible-wielding, born again believer sent her a note of encouragement. The note said, I am worried about your soul and hell is real for all eternity. Another said: I don t like to be preached at. And, I know mostly Christians. And: I believe more people are open to talking about faith than what we may think.

5 Somebody has to stand up to these alleged experts flinging their verses of Scripture around like swords. I invite you to join the conversation to change God s bad reputation. I am not asking you to start asking strangers to get saved. I am asking you to engage in positive God talk. Yes, character and conduct matter a lot, but the words that speak for the goodness and love of God are critical as well. Now do we get it? The Good News is not that God is a big, bad scary celestial version of Christian fundamentalism. The Good News is that the kingdom of God has come in the person and message of Jesus, and reconciled the world. The Good News is not that we need to get saved; the Good News is that salvation has come in Jesus! When someone says that God is going to send unbelievers to hell, you can gently say, Excuse me, but you must not know God that well. I m a member of God s family and God is not like that at all. Or you can say, I disagree. Pushy Christians can be allergic to pushback even if it s gentle. You can do this! Be not afraid! Speak a good word! Rodney Wallace Kennedy Lead Pastor First Baptist Church Dayton 111 West Monument Avenue Dayton, OH