2 Corinthians
3:17-18 (NRSV)
Now the Lord
is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all
of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in
a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to
another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.
Last Sunday, as we were being blessed by Dr. Fulbright, I
realized I needed to change what I was planning on doing this week. Actually,
what I was planning for today, I will do next week, but what I planned for next
week, will just have to wait.
As Dr. Fulbright talked (and remember, I had the opportunity
to hear her twice) I was struck by a thought.
One of the things that keeps us
bound is our perception of God.
And my hunch is --- for most of us --- our God is way too
small!
In Genesis we are told:
God created humanity in God’s own
image,
in the divine image God created them,
male and female God created them.
Genesis
1:27 (CEB)
And while I trust that to be true --- I think that we have in
reality turned that phrase on its head.
Humanity
created God in their own image
In
our personal image we created God
Too often, without even realizing it --- we have substituted
a paltry and puny God for the great and gracious God made known in Jesus.
We’ve manufactured a god from our fears who is limited,
narrow and tame – a little god who does nothing saving, surprising or amazing.
This small god we have made diminishes our souls and shrinks
our world because this meager god is strictly local.
The little god is stingy with mercy; there is only enough
for our kind of people – our nation or tribe or race or family or social class
or religious group.
There is not enough love in this god to go around
This diminutive god doesn’t have the capacity to change
anything in our world or in us;
the best we can hope for from such
a god is sympathy and advice.
This tiny, tin god is a totem for the status quo, so we hope
less and less for the justice and peace that would transform and change everything.
What many of us need is to recover, or maybe even to
discover for the first time --- is a sense of wonder at the mystery and
absolute magnificence of God.
The God revealed in the life, death and resurrection of
Jesus the Christ is vast beyond our comprehension, beautiful beyond our
appreciation and wonderful beyond our imagination.
God encompasses everything we understand and fail to
understand
what we have discovered and what
remains hidden
what is near and what is far
God is above and beyond
among and within
high and holy
close and compassionate.
And God’s love is breathtakingly all-embracing.
Paul captures this well in this powerful prayer from the
Letter to the Ephesians:
I ask that he will strengthen you
in your inner selves from the riches of his glory through the Spirit. I ask that Christ will live in your hearts
through faith. As a result of having strong roots in love, I ask that you’ll have the power to grasp love’s width and length,
height and depth, together with all believers. I ask
that you’ll know the love of Christ that is beyond knowledge so that you
will be filled entirely with the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:16-19)
In 1952, J. B. Phillips wrote a small but provocative book
entitled Your God Is Too Small.
The idea behind this book is that we have many notions of
God which are simply inadequate for God.
Since our ideas about God are flawed, our behavior toward
God is often equally flawed.
·
If we see God as a benevolent grandfather, we
tend to take God’s mercy for granted and overlook God’s judgment.
·
If we think of God primarily as a stern and
harsh disciplinarian, we are likely to emphasize God’s punishment and overlook God’s
grace.
Perhaps the greatest problem Phillips addressed was our
tendency to make God into a bigger version of ourselves
we try to create God in our own
image.
We make God think like us --- and react like us --- and feel
like us.
Thus, not surprisingly our perception of god has the same
biases, and prejudices that we have.
Too often, we become the yardstick against which the
character of God is measured.
Our worship of this kind of "god" quickly
degenerates into a worship of ourselves.
But that is a
discussion for another day.
In order to live out our Wesleyan understanding of grace ---
we must have a BIG God
Do you understand what I mean by our Wesleyan understanding
of grace?
What makes us unique as United Methodists is our
understanding of how God operates in the world.
While someone from the reform tradition believes that a
person must seek out God --- and invite God into their lives
We believe
that God comes to us FIRST
We call this PREVENIENT GRACE
Prevenient grace refers to the
grace of God in a person's life that precedes conversion (or salvation).
The word "prevenient,"
considered an archaic term today, was common in the King James English and
simply means to "go before" or "precede.
What makes this important is that we believe that this is
true in EVERY PERSONS life.
It is not just some people whom God seeks out --- it is
EVERYONE
In order to trust that --- you must have a BIG God
A God who is
bigger than our rules
A God who is
bigger than United Methodism
A God who is
bigger than even Christianity
That probably got some of you uncomfortable
But are you
limiting God?
When we start putting constraints on whom God’s grace can
touch we need to recognize that we are limiting God
Timothy Jones in Finding
Freedom through the Intoxicating Joy of Irresistible Grace shares a story
about taking his daughter to Disney World.
Our middle daughter had been
previously adopted by another family. I am sure this couple had the best of
intentions, but they never quite integrated the adopted child into their family
of biological children. After a couple of rough years, they dissolved the
adoption, and we ended up welcoming an eight-year-old girl into our home.
For one reason or another, whenever
our daughter’s previous family vacationed at Disney World, they took their
biological children with them, but they left their adopted daughter with a family
friend. Usually — at least in the child’s mind — this happened because she did
something wrong that precluded her presence on the trip.
And so, by the time we adopted our
daughter, she had seen many pictures of Disney World and she had heard about
the rides and the characters and the parades. But when it came to passing
through the gates of the Magic Kingdom, she had always been the one left on the
outside.
I thought I had mastered the Disney
World drill. I knew from previous experiences that the prospect of seeing cast
members in freakishly oversized mouse and duck costumes somehow turns children
into squirming bundles of emotional instability. What I didn’t expect was that
the prospect of visiting this dreamworld would produce a stream of downright devilish
behavior in our newest daughter. In the month leading up to our trip to the
Magic Kingdom, she stole food when a simple request would have gained her a
snack. She lied when it would have been easier to tell the truth. She whispered
insults that were carefully crafted to hurt her older sister as deeply as
possible — and, as the days on the calendar moved closer to the trip, her
mutinies multiplied.
A couple of days before our family
headed to Florida, I pulled our daughter into my lap to talk through her latest
escapade. “I know what you’re going to do,” she stated flatly. “You’re not
going to take me to Disney World, are you?”
In retrospect, I’m embarrassed to
admit that, in that moment, I was tempted to turn her fear to my own advantage.
The easiest response would have been, “If you don’t start behaving better,
you’re right, we won’t take you” — but, by God’s grace, I didn’t. Instead, I
asked her, “Is this trip something we’re doing as a family?”
She nodded, brown eyes wide and
tear-rimmed.
“Are you part of this family?”
She nodded again.
“Then you’re going with us.”
I’d like to say that her behaviors
grew better after that moment. They didn’t. Her choices pretty much spiraled
out of control at every hotel and rest stop. Still, we headed to Disney World
on the day we had promised.
In our hotel room that evening, a
very different child emerged. She was exhausted, pensive, and a little weepy at
times, but her month-long facade of rebellion had faded. When bedtime rolled
around, I prayed with her, held her, and asked, “So how was your first day at
Disney World?”
She closed her eyes and snuggled
down into her stuffed unicorn. After a few moments, she opened her eyes ever so
slightly. “Daddy,” she said, “I finally got to go to Disney World. But it
wasn’t because I was good; it’s because I’m yours.”
It wasn’t because I was good; it’s
because I’m yours.
That’s the message of outrageous grace --- but it takes
trust in a BIG God to believe that could be true.
The challenge is to trust in a God that is greater than we
can even fathom
A God that
has way more love and compassion than we could ever dream of
JB Philips suggests:
[God] must not be limited to
religious matters or even to the “religious” interpretation of life. [God] must
not be confined to one particular section of time nor must we imagine [God] as
the local god of this planet or even only of the Universe that astronomical
survey has so far discovered.
But putting our trust --- our faith --- in a God that loves
so large is dangerous.
Because this same God wants us to love the same way.
What would it look like if we sought to live our lives with
the same kind of love as God.
The truth is -- we do --- we just need to let our hearts see
the fullness of God's love and quite trying to make God into our own image.
No comments:
Post a Comment