Sermon: God Our Friend

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God our Friend

By Charles Rush

August 19, 2001

edestination. I have a certain respect for people that refuse to bend before the inevitable fate that is set before them. My father tells a story of going to a PGA golf tournament, several years ago. He was following Lee Trevino around the course. Lightning and thunder were moving closer and closer to the course and the crowd was becoming more and more concerned for their safety. Trevino turned to the crowd and told them not to worry. “All you have to do in a storm is hold a one iron up in the air.” He proceeded to pull a one iron out of his bag and held it aloft. Someone yelled out, “Lee, aren't you worried that club might be a lightning rod.” “No”, he said, “Not even God can hit a one iron.”

When I first started in ministry, I was invited to a debate with an Orthodox Presbyterian minister on the subject of predestination. He was eager to debate a young liberal clergyman. I was not but I accepted the invitation not to offend. I learned quite a few things that night. The Orthodox Presbyterians left the United Presbyterian church over progressive thought, for instance. This minister unpacked the doctrine of predestination, arguing that some of us were chosen before the foundation of the earth to be God's elect and to bask in God's grace and the rest of us were damned. He went on to say that part of the joy of the afterlife for him would be watching some of these reprobates- all manner of sinners, all of his former enemies, some of his relatives, and liberal heretics- as they burned in an eternal lake of fire together.

I was pretty stunned. Nothing in my education at Wake Forest had prepared me to address this. I got up and thanked him for his vivid description of my future. Although it was disconcerting to know I would be in torment it would be helpful in my choice of wardrobe. I told him he would likely be able to recognize me in that crowd of reprobates. I would be the guy wearing the asbestos suit.

“We may profitably quote again verse 20, 21 again. “Predestined before the foundation of the world, he was made manifest in this last period of time for your sake. Through him you have come to trust God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, and so your faith and hope are fixed in God.”

William Faulkner was once asked why he was so fixated on the past and its influence on the present. He replied, “the past is never over; in fact it's not even past”. There is a disconcerting quality to the generations in his novels, particularly regarding race relations. The slave owner and slave play out a drama that seems to script the future for their grandchildren who also continue the drama as though it were of one bolt of cloth. Sometimes at the beginning of a chapter, the reader is not quite sure which generation is being described because they are so interwoven they are inseparable.

There was a tragic sense of destiny that inculcated the mindset of the Deep South of my childhood. It used the language of the Church but it was not actually Christian. It was really Roman Stoicism wrapped the paper of Christian doctrine. I say it was tragic because most often you heard it given voice at the time of death or disaster. I remember attending the funeral of a relative in Louisiana, overhearing adults talking about yet another sad death, that of a man who had been killed in a car accident when he hit another car that also killed a young girl who was a passenger in the oncoming car. The Adults were repeating the Stoic platitudes like, “I guess it was his time” and “No one understands the Lord's ways but I guess the Almighty was calling him home.” These words, so often repeated, are supposed to have a quality of consolation in the overarching Soveriegnty of God. In fact, they are double-speak for, on another level, they give voice to the deep Southern resignation to fate which one simply cannot control and simply must accept because it is just there and nothing can be done about it but to get on with our living such as it is.

The conceptual difficulties of this view of fate were never intellectually probed because they were never meant to be logical. Paradox was part and parcel of the mindset. As a child, I remember being viscerally disturbed about the innocent young girl that was also killed in the auto accident. Was it her time too? Would God need one person so much that another person could be an unfortunate by-product in fulfilling some overarching predestined plot? Could the warp and woof of destiny actually contain in it great woe? And is that what we mean by the inscrutable ‘will of God?'

There is, or there ought to be, a low-grade dread before the presence of such a god. Indeed, that is the way the Stoics originally approached the afterlife and seeing the Almighty face to face. They elevated the virtue of ‘dispassion' in the face of death because they weren't at all sure what posture was really warranted before the creator of this world. It is an understandable spiritual disposition. But that is not the claim of Christian faith.

The beginning of the funeral liturgy in the Common Book of Prayer says, speaking of the resurrection, “ After my awaking, he will raise me up; and in my body I shall see God. I myself shall see, and my eyes behold him who is my friend and not a stranger.” The affirmation of Christian faith is that ‘God is for us' which is quite different than an arbitrary destiny that sometimes works us joy, other times great woe.

It is one of the ironies of Christian history that when John Calvin originally developed his doctrine of predestination, he meant it as an assurance for Christians that were not entirely sure of the fact of their salvation. Over the years, it has become misinterpreted in popular piety to the point that it regularly produces anxiety in the face of the arbitrariness of history and a spiritual ennui.

One of the salient contributions of the theologian Karl Barth was to remind us again of the very positive notions that were meant by the doctrine of election or predestination. Barth, following passages like the one in our text today, pointed out that the Man Jesus was predestined from the foundations of the earth. That is to say that Jesus is not an accident but an unfolding of the intention of the divine will. Jesus is an expression of the Trinitarian life of God. Jesus is the outward expression of the inner love of God- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. As John 3:16 says, “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should have everlasting life.” Jesus is, part and parcel, God's love for the world. The grace that we experience in Christ could not have been other, for God has been for us from the creation of the world and will be for us in its final consummation. God wants to be in covenantal relationship with us because that is what it means for God to be God. This is the inner relationship of God- Father, Son, Holy Spirit. And that is why God keeps after us and will not let us go, will not abandon us to our own devices. God will not let us just live however we want but beckons us, cajoles us, spurns us towards righteousness, which is nothing other than being in relationship to God.

Barth was sometimes accused of being a universalist because he argued that the draw of God's grace is our destiny. What we can count on is the fact that God will not let us go. But when you think about many of the great characters in the Bible, how many of them appear to have been seized by God for a mission that they did not want to join. They almost appear to have been enlisted against their will. Abraham and Sarah were just told to get to a land ‘that I will show you.' Where in the world is that? There is no indication that either of them were particularly waiting for a divine revelation in their lives. It just happened to them. Or Moses. After God calls him to speak to the Pharoah, Moses gives God a full chapter of kvetching about why he shouldn't go. Remember that Moses begs off going right away in order to visit his family. God has to go get him after a few days and point him towards Egypt, rather like a parent after a teenager. And the people of Israel, after they are led out to their freedom, spend years kvetching about the wilderness, the food and how good it was back in Egypt. God stays after them and will not let them go.

It is good news and bad news. Barth used to say that God's judgment is mercy. We like that. We are pretty big on the idea that we worship the God of the second chance, that God will take us as we are, not fully cleaned up and full of compromise. But Barth also pointed out that God's mercy is judgment. That is to say that God is in the ‘soul transformation business' and we can fairly well count on the fact that stuff will just happen to us in our lives that challenges us to be compassionate, to forgive others, to learn how to love people that really annoy us, to figure out how to make a modicum of peace in the midst of serious conflict and violence, to go out of our way and really inconvenience ourselves for some marginal person who will never be able to repay us or even say thanks. Stuff like that just happens because God wants more out of us than we want out of ourselves.

We are pretty happy eating spiritual junk food, carrying some extra weight. We are just fine with a little spiritual entertainment, a little diversion and then a nap. Spiritually speaking, we are not prone to set the bar too high on our own. Stuff has to happen to us to startle us into action before we get going usually.

We know about that. Most of us need our spouses whining at us before we get disciplined enough to actually get moving. We need our friends, holding us to our promises before we really follow through consistently. God is our friend. That is the good news. But don't get all warm and fuzzy and comfortable. The bad news is you have some fairly serious and intense spiritual training to do to prepare for the Kingdom. Bring your work out gear. You're going to need it. And count on the Almighty to keep you moving at a rapid pace.

And in this process, there is a way of seeing God at work, in a positive way, growing us through good and ill towards a mature soul. I think that was the point of the movie Castaway, panned by our New York critics, who are inclined toward a spiritual cynicism.

Tom Hanks is an ordinary Fed Ex manager, devoted to time management, efficient structure, and discipline. He is on a plane flying over the South Pacific, headed for an assignment in Hong Kong for the company, when the plane goes down, everyone dies except him, and he is washed up on a remote island, where he lives for the next three years.

He collects everything that washes up on shore from the downed plane- lots of Fed Ex packages. Eventually, during the three years, he finds some use for every single item. When he first gets to the island, he has a number of crushing encounters in frustration because he has no survival skills, doesn't understand how the tides work, how to find fresh water. Like us, he gets horribly cut up on the coral, falls down, spends a lot of time crying, yelling and tending to his wounds. Often our profound spiritual encounters are like this initially. We are growing, but we can't see it yet. We can only see the frustration of being out of our element. We are not happy about it at all. Just crying and whining.

He collects rain water on leaves and is thirsting to death because it doesn't ever rain. One day, a flashlight washes up on shore in a collection of debris. That night a storm comes up and he decides to seek shelter in a cave he had seen. It is night, he underestimates the tides which batter him around trying to get to the cave. He is cut up, exhausted, thirsting, hungry beyond our imagining, but with the flashlight, he is brave enough to venture into a dark, foreboding cave. Up he goes, gets to a flat place, lays down so tired he can move no farther, falls asleep with the flashlight on. The audience just groans, thinking that it only has a one-time use. The battery runs out by dawn and he wakes up to discover that sad fact. But he hears a trickle and finds a small collecting pond of water in the cave. It is fresh water. And from where he is, he can see that there is enough light to find his way in an out of the cave, light he couldn't see from the entrance. The light does only have one use, but it gets him to shelter and water, and from there he figures out how to live for the next couple of years.

Over and over, this happens to him, in different ways. He learns how to take what the tides bring him. With time, he figures out how to fish. He uses a pair of ice skates that wash up on the beach to cut wood. Not real efficient but he has time. He develops a different kind of patience than he had back home. He develops different tastes, different values. He adapts to his new world. And he starts to see that one thing gets him to another and that is the way to spiritually interpret his life.

And it is for good and ill. He finally gets rescued and is brought back home to a kind of hero's welcome, big press event, big corporate event, but he could care less about all the fuss. For those three years, he had a tiny photo of his fiance and that image had kept him going and dreaming about her had given him hope and consolation and inspired him. All he cared about was seeing her. He brought back home with him one package from all the debris on the island that he could never figure out how to use. It was an art object and he had the return address from the package.

He gets home but there is a problem. Everyone had given him up for dead, so eventually his fiancé met someone else and got married and started a family and got on with her life. He has a profound sense of disappointment that is hard to put into words. She doesn't want to see him. She is just very confused and unsettled. Eventually, he just can't stand it and goes to her home. She asks him in. It is a very emotional time with very few words. He finds a collage of stories from the newspapers and photos from the stories that covered the downed plane that she had kept, a living memorial to him. He sees the pictures of her children on the refrigerator. They hug, they kiss and finally she says to him, “I'm sorry but I've moved on”. He doesn't say anything and he just leaves.

Three years alone on an island. He doesn't know what to do with himself so he gets the package that he brought back with him from the island and he decides to deliver it to the person that sent it. He drives all the way to West Texas, down a dirt road to a ranch. No one is home. He writes a note that says, “this package kept me alive. Thanks. Sorry it is so late.” And he signs his name, a name that everyone in the country knows from reading the newspapers.

He drives back to the main road, gets out his map, and is trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. Where to head? What to do? There are only two choices, left or right. He is sitting there looking at his map when a truck pulls past him heading up the dirt road to the house he just left. The truck stops, backs up. This brash, sassy, good looking young woman gets out and says, “you look lost”, just like those sassy, good looking, confident women in West Texas. They have one of those moments. She tells him how to get to the nearest highway but he doesn't really hear her because it is one of those magical moments. She smiles, gets back in her truck, drives on down the road.

He stands there for a minute. He looks left. He looks right. He looks back at her ranch.

Amen.