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