A Dangerous God

"Tyrannosaurus!" by Tim Dawson, distributed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license.

Audio recording

Some years ago, well before the pandemic, I was in Chicago for a weekend, and went to church Sunday morning at St. James’ Cathedral. The service I went to was the one aimed at families, and much of the congregation was made up of small children. That morning, the priest decided it would be a good idea to solicit some of their input for his sermon. Approaching the group of children, he asked them to call out a word that describes what God is like.

“Dangerous!” a little boy cried out excitedly.

“Dangerous,” the priest repeated, flummoxed, clearly not expecting the kids to go in this direction. “Anybody else?” He did manage to get a few adjectives more suitable to the sermon he had planned, about a compassionate, merciful God, one who will never abandon us. I have no quarrel with that message. But surely the ruler of the universe who made the white-hot furnaces that power the stars, the raging oceans and their pitch-black depths, wolves, t-rexes, and cobras, cannot be altogether safe. The answer to a young soul who believes God might be dangerous is not to tell him he’s wrong or wave texts like the one we encounter this morning away. It’s to acknowledge the risk of being a small, flawed mortal trying to be in relationship with infinite and incomprehensible holiness and power.

This is the time of the liturgical year that the readings get weird. That’s probably why I was invited here today. As we reach the end of the year the lectionary forces us to confront our faith’s teaching that all of history will one day culminate in the Day of the Lord, when Jesus Christ will come again in glory, to judge the living and the dead.

The Bible’s apocalyptic texts – Revelation, Zephaniah, Daniel and other prophets, plus not a few of Jesus’s parables – take your pick – generally end with a hopeful vision of God and God’s people dwelling together in peace, what God originally planned for life in Eden. But we don’t get there without tribulation any more than Jesus got to resurrection without suffering the cross and grave.

Episcopalians aren’t really known for being big on the apocalypse. And mostly I think that’s a good thing because, fairly or not, I find the motivations of some of the people who are a bit too into these texts suspect. But their imagery shouldn’t be all that hard for us to conceptualize, really. Modern technology has brought great advances in indoor plumbing and medical treatments that make lives longer, more pleasant, and generally less smelly, than they were not so very long ago. But it has also brought us instant access to suffering on a global scale. Is there any need to dwell on Zephaniah’s image of blood being poured out like dust when the carnage in the Holy Land and Ukraine is only a doomscroll away?

Could these be signs of the end of days? Perhaps, but Christians have been looking for that since the day after Christ’s ascension. The Day of the Lord may indeed come like a thief in the night, but this thief has proved to be most patient, biding his time.

How do we live in this kind of world, with all its suffering? Learning to live in this kind of world is, I think, part of what it takes to prepare for the end to come, should it come in any of our lifetimes.

When Christ comes again in glory, the world will be made anew and God will wipe away every tear from our eyes. While we should rest in that trust, God neither expects nor desires us to be idle until the second coming. The message isn’t, “Just let God fix it.” The Gospel we heard this morning begins with the words, “it is as if.” The “it” in question is the Kingdom of God – so this well-known but confounding story is supposed to be telling us what the Kingdom of God is like. The parable of the talents is full of lots of strange little details that make a simple allegorical reading impossible, but one thing we can be sure of is that we are to participate in the upbuilding and growth of the Kingdom of God even as we look expectantly for the Lord’s return.

The economic imagery Jesus uses makes this parable easy to visualize, if not understand, but Zephaniah’s violent prophecy stands counter to any interpretation that would find here an apologetic or justification for profit generation as a virtue in and of itself. Here there is God’s chilling vow to stalk the lanes of Jerusalem after nightfall, lamp in hand, plundering the wealth and razing the homes of those who think God is complacent and distant, and that their silver and gold is all the protection they need from discomfort, accountability, or the paroxysms of history.

Taking the Gospel and Zephaniah together, then, the holy scripture admonishes against seeing productivity itself as a virtue; it is only when it is done for love of God’s perfect Kingdom and all its inhabitants, as we await its full bursting forth, like labor pains come upon a pregnant woman, for the salvation of this imperfect world.

In this business of waiting and working and resting and praying and striving to be about the business of the Kingdom it is not good for us to be alone. Writing an encouraging letter to the discouraged flock in Thessalonica, whose people feared for their fellow believers who had died before Christ’s return, Paul urged the church, which can’t help observing the times and the seasons, he says, to stick together, to build one another up. “As indeed you are doing,” he acknowledges, 1,980 years ago. “As indeed you are doing,” he says to you today.

Last weekend was our annual diocesan convention, and in her keynote address, author Cole Arthur Riley observed that lamentation is a form of hope, because the complaint, “this is not what the world is supposed to be like” rests on a foundation, perhaps a deeply buried one, of a vision of the just and peaceful world God really intends. Apocalyptic texts are like that, too; their power is not in their violence but in their promise of justice for those who never received it in their lifetimes, and a brighter world to come.

We have no shortage of things to lament in these days, but when have we ever? These are troubling, disorienting, even frightening times, but has it ever been otherwise? There’s no promise I or anyone else can make that things won’t get worse from here. But God does promise us that in the fullness of time, they will get better, that things will be made right.

Zephaniah, whose prophecy begins with wrath and distress and anguish brought on by a dangerous God whose holiness simultaneously pulses with the heat of the sun and the cold of the fathomless deep, ends like this:

I will save the lame
    and gather the outcast,
and I will change their shame into praise
    and renown in all the earth.
At that time I will bring you home,
    at the time when I gather you;
for I will make you renowned and praised
    among all the peoples of the earth,
when I restore your fortunes
    before your eyes, says the Lord.

That day will come. Until then, take heart, pray, and wait.

The Kingdom of God is like this: it is as if a people who long for their savior’s return use the gifts God has bestowed on them to do the works of the Kingdom by behaving as if it were already here, even amid the turmoil of history and the struggle of daily life. That looks like some of the things we pray for - giving rest to the weary, pitying the afflicted, shielding the joyous, soothing the suffering, blessing the dying. No matter what trouble may come, know that no work done by your hands and hearts in the service of God and neighbor will ever be wasted, only grafted at the end into the radiance of God’s true and everlasting reign.

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Sermon preached at St. John's Episcopal Church, Crawfordsville, IN

November 19, 2023

Readings: Zeph. 1:7, 12-18; Ps. 90; 1 Thess. 5:1-11; Matt. 25:14-30

Blessed are You

Good morning. I know many of you, but many of your faces are new to me. I’m Brendan O’Sullivan-Hale, and I serve on Bishop Jennifer’s staff as canon to the ordinary for administration and evangelism. It’s my honor to be with you here at Nativity today.

Today we as a church are going to try to observe three joyful occasions simultaneously, with each given its due regard. Today we welcome three children, Logan, Micah, and Noah, into the household of God through the waters of baptism. Through baptism we bring them into the unity of the church across space and time, life and death, through the communion of all God’s faithful, which we celebrate in the Feast of All Saints. And it is the day this church has chosen as its first Consecration Sunday, when each of you will prayerfully consider renewal of your commitment to God through your gifts of money in this church.

The contemplation of the mystical communion of saints and the sacrament of baptism may seem to be at odds with the contemplation of our bank accounts. But what is baptism but the very means by which the communion of saints is knit together? And what are saints but those who have faithfully used all of the gifts entrusted to them by God to leave a legacy of holiness, and among those gifts was their money? So, church, I’m confident we can do this.

About the saints – I’m going to talk briefly about three of them – none of them lived in poverty, but each lived more modestly than their means would have allowed, out of an obligation to something greater than themselves. Princess Elizabeth of Hungary (a princess!) used the wealth afforded by her position to distribute alms throughout her realm, and after being widowed at the age of 20, used her money to build a hospital. Nicholas of Myra, better known to us as Santa Claus, delivered three young women from the threat of a life of prostitution by anonymously tossing bags of coins over their garden wall, allowing them to better position themselves on the marriage market. Omobono Tucenghi, who you’ve probably never heard of, responded to a call from God to a lucrative career as a cloth merchant, specifically so that he could give his earnings away.

All these things happened nearly a thousand years – or more – ago, but before we talk any more about them, I want to take you back maybe a decade or so. Then, I was invited to a wedding of two students at the Episcopal Campus Ministry at Indiana University. I didn’t know them at all – in fact I wouldn’t even recognize them if they were in the room today (so if you are here – I’m sorry), let alone remember their names. But I had made the guest list because one member of the couple was Chinese, and they wanted one of the lessons to be read in her native language. The campus chaplain, who had baptized me when I was a senior at IU, remembered that Chinese had been my major.

Now in point of fact by that time my Chinese was so rusty that to say I spoke it would have been a lie – but I could still pronounce it. So I wrote the text out phonetically, and at the appointed time in the service, I stood up and recited the gospel in a language most of the congregation – including me – couldn’t understand.

And yet the meaning of the text, I learned, got through. At the reception guests excitedly told me that they had correctly guessed what I was reading. Because it turns out that in whatever language you read the Beatitudes, the repetitive sentence structure Jesus uses pulses like a drumbeat: 有福了, 有福了, 有福了 – blessed, blessed, blessed.

Of course there’s another text with a repetitive sentence structure I could have been reading. But how many of you had the ten commandments read at your wedding? Right, I didn’t think so.

Still, the ten commandments and the Beatitudes are often mentioned in the same breath. Sometimes the Beatitudes are treated as a kinder, gentler catalog of good behavior. But that perspective both misapprehends the grace chiseled into the tablets at Sinai, and misunderstands what the Beatitudes really are.

Because these are not edicts or commands nor even advice for good living. They are assertions that the downtrodden, the meek, the merciful, the mourning, and the persecuted, whatever their misery or sorrow, are beheld, beloved, and blessed, by God. The people who are treated as of little account by the world are infinitely precious to the world’s creator. Most of us can find ourselves in one of the categories Jesus declares blessed some days, if not every day. And among the inventory of injustices and desolations there are indeed some things to strive for – being pure of heart, being one who makes peace and dispenses mercy.

But if we treat the Beatitudes as an alternative 10 commandments – new and improved, and now there are only eight of them! – then that would mean that Jesus wants us to be persecuted or poor in spirit so we can get to the kingdom of heaven, that he wants us to mourn in pursuit of comfort, that he wants us to be reviled as the price of a great reward in heaven.

Friends, Jesus knows we’re going to experience these things, but he doesn’t want that for us. Part of the gift of the incarnation is that God knows what it’s like to be one of us, not only as an idea, but as an experience, and what Jesus is assuring us in these eight great blessings is that there is no high point and even more - no low point, where we are separated from the love of God. Blessed are you, whoever or wherever you are, for God hates nothing that God has made. The Beatitudes aren’t a thing to do, but a statement of who we are, at our best and our worst, the blessed children of God most high. We can walk through the valley of the shadow of death without fear of evil, for Jesus assures us that for those who believe, the kingdom of God is never far.

Among those who believe are the three saints I mentioned earlier – Elizabeth of Hungary, Nicholas of Myra, and Omobono Tucenghi. It is because of what they did with their money that they are remembered as saints by the church – and one of them became a pop cultural icon. What they did is worthy of admiration and emulation, but more important this morning is the question of why they did what they did.

I suppose one possibility is that they were trying to buy God’s favor. But are these saints blessed because they were generous with their money in pursuit of reward – is holiness saintly when it’s transactional?

“See what love [God] has given us,” John writes in the segment of his first letter that we heard this morning, “that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are.” True generosity is born of the understanding that as a child of God you have already been richly blessed, and that blessedness compels you to a response. John goes on to write that, “we will be like God, because we will see God as he is.” And part of being like God, who gives us our bodies, our breath, and eternal hope through the life, death and resurrection of God’s son, is to be inspired by God’s generosity to us.

The biblical guidance for that response, at least as far as finances are concerned, is an offering of 10% of your income. Father Ben spoke about that last week, and he also pointed out that there may be good reasons for you to give a greater or lesser percentage. I won’t belabor that point. But in a little while you will receive your pledge cards, make your prayerful financial commitment for the coming year, and bring that commitment to the altar.

Moments after that, as Micah, Logan, and Noah are about to be baptized, you will be asked, “Will you who witness these vows do all in your power to support these persons in their life in Christ?” Presuming you all answer, “We will,” you will be faithful to that assent by being examples of what a life committed to following Jesus looks like. If you’re not sure how to approach fulfilling either of these commitments, you could do far worse than to look to the saints. They don’t have to be the three I’ve listed this morning. Think of your own favorites, in fact, better yet, the saints in your life who have shown you what it is to truly follow Jesus – surely these are numbered among the countless throngs gathered in the presence of God around the heavenly throne.

God’s gift to us in the saints is a spiritual ancestry whose bequest to us is a legacy of prayer, service, study, sacrifice, and even miracles. Above all their legacy to us is the faith in Christ they have passed down through 100 generations, a faith that has traversed wars, famines, disasters, golden ages, busts, and booms, even the agony in the Holy Land today, with the steady assurance passing through all time and into eternity, “Blessed are you.”

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Preached at the Episcopal Church of the Nativity, Indianapolis

November 5, 2023

Readings: Rev 7:9-17; Ps. 34:1-10, 22; 1 Jn 3:1-3; Matt.5:1-12