Wrestling with God

+Now you all don’t hear me talk much about sin. Sin is one of those church words that’s been so hijacked, been so misinterpreted that it’s hard to use in conversation without being misunderstood. But today I’m diving in. After all, it’s the first Sunday in Lent, what better time to talk about sin?
Last Sunday night I had a long wrestling match with sin. I had insomnia. I tossed and turned all night, worrying about something. My brain just wouldn’t stop---it just kept running the problem over and over in my head…finally around 4 am, exhausted and no closer to a solution than I had been at 11 pm it hit me----I wasn’t giving God any room . I wasn’t turning the problem over to God…and the only explanation for this, the only explanation for holding onto this problem throughout the long sleepless night was this: I didn’t trust God to handle it. I really thought that I had to come up with the solution myself, that somehow it wasn’t worth God’s time and concern….that God couldn’t be bothered.
In other words, I failed to trust God. I failed to let God in. I SHUT GOD OUT. And right there, in those three little words is a perfect definition of sin: shutting out God.
Remember, sin means missing the mark, sin means we’ve allowed ourselves to be ruled by fear, sin suggests we’ve forgotten about God. You see sin isn’t just some laundry list of misdeeds that we need to atone for before being in God’s favor. We are ALWAYS in God’s favor, we’re always God’s beloved. But when we close the door on our relationship with God, when we shut God out, we are harming ourselves. And us being hurt? That’s what hurts God.  Closing the door on our relationship with God hurts us so in turn, God is hurt. That’s sin.
So, the heart of our Lenten journey is to do whatever we can to LET GOD IN. To let God into the whole of our lives, completely thoroughly. It’s about entering into an active and trusting relationship with God.

Faith is about relationship….it’s about our relationships with each other, it’s about our relationship to all those whom we encounter outside these doors, but above all else, it’s about the relationship we have with God and the relationship we allow God to have with us.
I’ve mentioned before my somewhat pedestrian interpretation of the German priest and author Karl Rahner’s theology. With apologies to Fr. Rahner it boils down to this:
Our life is on a continuum….every decision we make, every action moves us on this continuum. At one end is God at the other end is what some people might call the Devil, others might call darkness, still others call evil and what I call Not God.  What we do—all day, every day either moves us closer to or farther away, from God.
Are you moving toward God or away? Are your choices fueled by light and grace or by darkness and despair? Do you trust God? I mean really trust God?
Jesus in today’s Gospel trusted God. And man oh man did that tick off the forces of darkness, the evil one, the Not God in our world. Jesus and Satan have a wrestling match of their own. And guess who wins?
Remember, Jesus has just emerged from the baptismal waters of the Jordan, he’s just been anointed as God’s beloved, the chosen one, when he’s thrust into 40 days of blistering heat, endless hunger, heart wrenching loneliness and 40 nights of bitter cold, desperate sleeplessness, and terrifying visions. The Devil is throwing everything but the kitchen sink at our Lord but because Jesus refuses to shut God out, because Jesus trusts in God no matter what, the temptations of the darkness, the evil forces of this world, the pull of His humanity do not win. In today’s Gospel, light defeats dark, hope overwhelms despair, Love beats hate and the march of God’s goodness continues on its way.
Today’s Gospel gives us hope; hope that as we begin our Lenten journey, the steady drumbeat of the light of Christ given to us at Christmas and  Epiphany will fuel us.
And that’s good news because to really do up Lent right, we need that light. For it’s that light which we use to shine in all the dark corners of our lives. You know those parts of us that we hide from, those things we left undone, or those things we’ve done that we wish we could undo.
The work of Lent is opening up space for God to come in and help us with the spring cleaning of our souls. In Lent we change the rhythm of our lives not so we can say that we successfully avoided chocolate or red meat or swearing or smoking for these 40 days, no we change the rhythm of our lives so that God can slip in and show up in the most unexpected places.
And this is where it can get a little tricky… changing the rhythm of our lives makes us vulnerable. Anytime we make a change, anytime we enter uncharted waters, we are vulnerable. And when we’re vulnerable we have two choices: stay in fear and trepidation, holding on for dear life or move into trust and faith, letting Go and letting God.
In case you didn’t know already, this is way easier said than done.
At 4 am last Sunday—well Monday morning---I realized I wasn’t trusting God. But that doesn’t mean I fell into blissful sleep and awoke to a settled mind and a soothed soul. Nope my wrestling match continued….I knew that I wasn’t trusting God, but it still took another day or so before I was able to drop all my defenses and open my arms wide to let God in…..and that’s ok. You see that’s what Lent is all about, learning how to trust that God, in the end, is always the one we can turn too, that God is always the one who can feed our hungers like no one or no thing else.
So the sin of my Sunday a week ago is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to embrace, it was something to dive into because it is only in experiencing some dark nights of Not God that we can gain the courage and the trust to move fully and wholly into the bright days of Only God. +

February 3, 2013 Epiphany 4 The Greatest Gift of All

+Couple’s preparing for marriage almost always choose today’s Epistle reading for their wedding. Invariably, they choose it because they think it so clearly expresses the love they have for each other, the love which, in their mind, will be the sole focus  of the wedding ceremony they’re planning. “Oh,” they exclaim, it’s PERFECT.” But then the cranky old priest informs them that this reading isn’t about their love for one another. That it doesn’t have anything to do with them directly, that St Paul didn’t think much of marriage anyway, so their love was not even on his radar as he penned these words to his flock in Corinth.
And therein lies a big problem. This reading has been given the full Hallmark make-over—and in the process it has been relegated to the “wedding reading,” so ubiquitous, that we fail to notice the profound and earth shattering message Paul was providing. You see what Paul is saying, in short, is that without God, nothing matters. Nothing.
 That promotion you just got at work? Without God? Big deal.
That wonderful partner you just promised to love and to cherish until you are parted by death? Without God? Nothing.
The healing you’ve received from that horrible illness? Without God in the picture?  Forget about it.
Paul is telling us that all those gifts we’ve been given, all the gifts of the spirit he’s been blathering about in the previous chapter are completely and utterly worthless—they mean absolutely NOTHING if they aren’t wrapped in, infused with, and born out of Love.
Not the love of mother to child, not the love of husband to wife, not the love of partner to partner, not the love of friend to friend, but the Love from which all these loves emanate. The Love from which all of Creation pours: God.
In his very Paul way (rambling harsh and at times convoluted) Paul is telling us that GOD IS LOVE.
God is THE LOVE that puts the warmth in the sun, the sparkle in your beloved’s eye, the giggle in a  child, the blue in the sky and the hope of the world. And without it, without this Love above all other loves? Well without it our gifts, no matter how vast, no matter how amazing, no matter how cherished, end up like so many discarded toys a few days after Christmas: a bunch of twisted plastic, crumpled tissue paper, broken boxes and torn ribbons, forgotten and tossed aside.
A couple of years ago I began my Christmas Eve sermon by remembering this exchange I had with my niece Alyssa when she was a little girl:
“What’s this?” “A present for you.” “For me?” “Yes, it’s for you.” “Why?” “ Because I love you very much.”
It was either Christmas or her birthday and I was giving Alyssa a gift. Presents were kind of new to her, and she didn’t quite get that this was just for her… to keep. Forever! She was delighted beyond belief with the gift. But it wasn’t the doll or the book or the toy, it wasn’t even the thrill of receiving a gift from another. No for that little girl it was (and I might say, still is for the almost 25 year old woman she has become) the love which led me to want to give her something. That’s what gave her such a thrill. Out of her appreciation of that love, out of her love for me came her unbridled innocent response of joy: “For me? Especially for me?”
You see, little Alyssa got it right all those years ago: the REAL gift isn’t the toy or the book, or the ability to prophesy, or to heal or to preach or to do altar guild, or host coffee hour or serve on vestry—the REAL gift, the ONLY gift is Love.
We can be the greatest at what we do—the best lawyer, the best writer, the best teacher, the best nurse, the best volunteer, the best mother, the best father, the best friend, the best partner, the best the best the best—but if we do these things for our own glory and not for God’s, if we do these things for our own gain solely and not for the good of the whole, if we do these things in a vacuum oblivious to our responsibility to the world around us, then these gifts, these skills, these talents are just a noisy clanging bell signifying absolutely nothing.
The astonishing thing about this reading, the thing lost on so many of us who have heard the reading ad nauseum at weddings is this:
The Love of which Paul speaks “bears all things. Believes all things. Hopes all things.”
It. Never. Ends. Everything else—everything else—will end. All our gifts—no matter how fabulous-- all that we are and all that we have will end. It will all decay and crumble. It will all be forgotten and lost. But, not love. Not this Love that is God. Not this Love that fueled the dawn of creation. Not this Love that welled up and came to live among us in the person of Jesus Christ.
This Love, the Love beyond all understanding, the Love beyond full comprehension, the Love we can only see through a glass dimly until the Last day—this is the Love that knits us, inextricably and forever, to God. AND, it is the Love that, inextricably and forever, knits us to one other. For it is in us and through us that the Love to end all Loves, the Love that is God takes shape as the Body of Christ in this world.
So unwrap your gifts, exclaim your joy and know that this Greatest Gift of All, the Love that is God, will never end, it will never wear out and it will never ever fail us. Thanks be to God! +