Trusting God and Ourselves: A Sermon

Scriptures:     Luke 17:20-21          2 Peter 1:4              John 14:12

COVID-19 has challenged Americans more than most of us have ever been challenged before.  We have been hurt financially, psychologically, and spiritually.  Whether we have contracted the corona virus or not, our lives have been dramatically changed.

Many of us have not been able to see our extended families, or socialize with friends, or attend church or engage in our normal forms of recreation or work.  This has caused many more than usual to feel depressed, and this feeling is often expressed as anger, and a need to find someone or something to blame, something not hard to do in our society, which was polarized politically before the disease struck.

We are simply overwhelmed by our inability to feel certain about anything in the future, even life itself.

This is a new feeling for many of us older Americans who were born in the 1940s or 1950s. In our world, as Ronald Reagan told us on TV long before he entered politics, “progress is our most important product.”  Even those of us who were too young to have seen that General Electric commercial one their black and white TV screens probably accepted that idea of continuous progress as true.  Things would get better in the future; each new generation, we were told, would be better off than the previous one.  We would be prosperous, because Americans would always be able to solve ANY problem that arose.

A Spiritual Challenge

Covid-19 has changed all that!  When I said a moment ago that we have been hurt financially, emotionally (or psychologically) and spiritually, I believe that when the dust has settled, which will happen sometime next year when we hope to have a vaccine available, we will only then have time to reflect on how much we have been spiritually challenged by what has happened.

Only then will we be able to take a deep breath and realize how much trust we have lost—trust in God and in ourselves. We no longer trust that the future will bring good news.

Today’s scripture passages can address our need in this moment, but only if we are able to recognize and bring ourselves to act upon the statement made by Jesus in the gospel of Luke: “[read scripture]  Yes, “the  Kingdom of God is within you.”  This is a “heavy” statement and one that we repeat without fully understanding its significance, we “participate in the divine nature,” as 2 Peter 1:4 tells us. [read scripture] And if we really believe that, we can, as Jesus tells his disciples in the Gospel of John [read scripture] Yes, “do even greater things” than Jesus did.  We have divinity within us. Too often we discount that reality, that sense that God is incarnate within us.

We rush through and blow off these passages in scripture.   Even though this idea appears more than once, we don’t trust God and we don’t trust ourselves.

Sure, these are strong statements, and some of us, at least, dismiss them as untrustworthy because we were told as children that we were “fallen” due to the sin of Adam and Eve and that our sins were the reason Christ had to die on the cross.  When I was a child in Catholic school, a nun once told a class that “your sins helped drive the nails that put Jesus on the cross.”  Talk about being scarred for life!!   I also remember sitting in an eighth-grade classroom when the teacher (another nun) was talking about character without precisely defining it.  When she said that, by our age, our character “was pretty well set,” I felt a great fear, even sweating.

I felt doomed because I had been told in many ways by the church (and occasionally by my parents) that I often did bad or evil things, that is to say, I was SINFUL—and we know what happens to sinful people.  Now, at the tender age of twelve I was being told that I could not change my character!  Wow!  I am still not fully certain that I got over that scare!

A New Image of God

We need to back away from this image of God and recall that everything God created is described as “good” or “very good” in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.  It was only in chapter three that the bad stuff happens, and the very idea that we inherited the “original sin” of Adam and Eve was not created in Christian theology until four hundred years after the death of Jesus, by a man named Augustine of Hippo, a great but troublesome church Father. The Jews, who wrote the Old Testament, never accepted that belief.

Okay, you may be thinking: what does all this muttering about trusting God and seeing ourselves as participating in divinity have to do with our current corona virus pandemic?  In fact, you may say, doesn’t the existence of this disease and the disasters it brings with it really give us reason to question the goodness of God’s creation? 

Those are legitimate questions.  However, they reflect, I believe, an understanding that God or divinity, is something “high and all-mighty,” quite unlike us and separate from us. They assume a God who is in immediate control of all that happens and a God who is an arbitrary and angry God rather than loving one.  Yes, I know that both versions of God—God as loving protector and God as punisher—are found in the Old Testament; but why must we pick the version of God that is the most negative one?

Perhaps this is the reason:  The belief in an angry God is a belief in a God made in our image.  We get angry so God also gets angry. We are jealous, so then God is as well.  We can go on with this, but I won’t.

 What about the idea that we are made in the image of God, also found in the first chapter of Genesis? Which version of God makes the most sense?  Which is worth your time and your worship? Which God would you like to meet in Heaven?

Doing Our Part

There is another dimension to this problem that does give us a way to better understand “why bad things [like deadly diseases] happen to good people.”  If we share in some way in the divinity of Jesus, then it would be reasonable to accept the fact that we humans are co-creators with God.  The great South African Episcopal Bishop Desmond Tutu once said that, when it comes to creating the kingdom that Jesus refers to in the gospels, “without God we can’t and without us God won’t.”

That understanding of God puts a great responsibility on us. Rather than blaming our misfortunes on an external force like Satan or on God’s anger at our behavior, it gives us a way to transform whatever evil befalls us into an opportunity to co-create the Kingdom by pairing our divinity with that of our creator to create a better world.

No, I do not believe that God sent the corona virus as a punishment for our sins. Viruses, like tornados, are a part of nature, part of creation.  A pandemic does not destroy our ability to love our neighbors, even those who might be our personal or political opponents.  Bad things, even great suffering, can lead us to even greater love.  That alone can make our troubles and tensions during this time of illness and economic and emotional distress an opportunity.  We can bless ourselves and others by activating our divine partnership with God and making an extra effort to seek unity and not division with our neighbors as we work together to create a new, healthier world.

There is a trick to this, however. If we like the idea that we are not victims of a vindictive God but instead partners with a God of goodness and love, if we claim that as our faith, and wish to place our trust in that sort of Divinity, we must take one final step.

We must accept the truth that, if God is incarnate in us, if we participate in divinity and thus can “do greater things” than Jesus, as John’s gospel tells us, we must recognize that everyone else, every other human person, also participates in that divinity and is just as much a child of God as we are. 

This means, among other things, that we should “love our neighbor as ourselves.” Where have we heard that before?  This is another one of those things Jesus said that we all agree with but which we find very hard to practice, especially when we add the “love your enemies” piece to it.  Loving others can be just plain hard, especially when those we are asked to love seem to be (or in fact are) very different from us.

We find it easier to offer charity to others, and often this help makes us feel virtuous, but doesn’t really put us in the shoes of those we are helping.  I do personally enjoy working with our church team at Soup for the Soul, and at Laundry Love.  I especially like the latter because I really have to interact more with the recipients—we can even joke with each other as we try to figure out how to get the machines to do what we want them to do.  But I certainly can’t identify with their struggles, their income problems, or housing conditions.

What I can do, however, is to combine my charity or mission work with an effort to promote justice for these people, many of whom, through no (or little) fault of their own, are unable to improve their lives because of the way our society is structured or because the problems they have faced.  A high school teacher of mine, who later became a leader in the Catholic civil rights and anti-poverty movements, said that helping others involves taking two steps forward: the first was called Charity, and the important second step was called Justice.  Maybe that is why protestors against our centuries long discrimination against black and brown and yellow people, and other we find “different” find it necessary to chant “No Justice, No Peace.”

If we stop to think about it, or even go further and pray about it, it stands to reason that if we all have a bit of divinity incarnated within us, we are all linked together—all of us, all over the world—in one family, as truly brothers and sisters, children of the same God whose behavior we see in the life and teachings of Jesus.

If we could only make that notion real by first accepting it in our heads and then moving it to our hearts, where we can feel it, and sink it into our subconscious, we might have less of a problem trusting both God and the God within us.  Then loving each other, while perhaps still difficult, would at least become just a bit easier.

Think about this!   Amen.

First Presbyterian Church, Murray, KY—July 19, 2020