Broadway Christian Church · Columbia, Missouri
The Worship of God · October 25, 2009
Litany of Praise and Invocation
From Psalm 34
We will bless the Lord at all times!
God’s praise shall continually be in our mouths!
Our souls make their boast in God!
O magnify the Lord
and let us exalt God’s name together.
I sought the Lord and was answered;
I was delivered from all my fears.
Look to the Spirit of Life and be radiant!
Let us pray:
We taste and see that you are good, our God.
We seek you and lack no good thing. Amen.
Old Testament Lesson
Jeremiah 31:31-34
The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, form the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.
Message
Inside—Out
Tim Carson
Does the Divine Spirit have noble experiments that have gone awry? Like the human experiment, for instance? Does God have the freedom to change direction when necessary? Does God change, because the universe is changing? As Sallie McFague has said, “The universe is God’s body.”
If you read the text from Jeremiah, on the surface, it sounds that way. The first covenants God made with God’s people had bad endings, not because God didn’t keep God’s end of the bargain, or even because human kind is rebellious and always finding their way to hell. However, that may be true; this story from Jeremiah points us in a different direction. Israel has been cast into exile. They have been languishing there. Strangely enough, in the story, at least, God is saying that the way we’ve done business in the past has not been sufficient, it hasn’t worked, and we need a new way.
That’s a strange thing for us to hear, God reinventing God’s self. After all, most of us grew up with the “Omnis” – God is omnipresent (all present), omnipotent (all powerful), omniscient (all knowing) … all everything. And God is permanent in God’s own eternal state, the unmoved mover, – a kind of static God; once in place, always in place.
But the Hebrew Scriptures just have more fluidity than that. There is always plenty of give and take between the divine actor and the human characters. More than once, they bargained with one another. And more than once, God changed course – either at the encouragement of the faithful or just because God wanted to.
This is a good place to stop and say that there is a difference between the nature of God and our concept of God. And the kind of deity that is presented is more often than not shaped by our ideas about that deity. For instance, think of how many times we’ve tried to bargain with God: “God, if you’ll only let her live, I’ll give half my income to the poor.” Or something like that. Do we really have a bargaining God? That image of God – a bargaining God – is our creation, our hope that there is some cosmic parent figure that we can manipulate, just like we did our parents when we were young. Is that an image we hope for, because we need it so badly?
That is to simply say that so many of our images of God – from ancient to modern – come from our own projections and wishes about God. So, as we go through the Bible and find these many turn-abouts on the part of God, that’s how people thought about God, or hoped that God was. It was their present concept of God at work. Is it really that God is changing, or is it that our ideas about God have been changing?
In the same way that our understandings of God and the universe change as we grow and mature, so the images of God in the Bible – this collection of witnesses over many centuries – also changed. And the first covenants with Adam, Noah, Abraham, and Moses – represented humanity at different stages of spiritual evolution. You and I and our whole culture are now somewhere else on that continuum of spiritual development. I think you could make the case, developmentally speaking, that we find our own personal spiritual evolution in the evolution of all these God images scattered throughout Scripture. From the kind of trusting innocence one might find in the Garden of Eden, where God is pictured almost as a big person walking in the garden, a sort of dreaming innocence of childhood, to the God of Joshua seizing the land. That was sort of a tribal God that flies with our banner. To later the God of Isaiah that is universal. And then the God of Jesus with the kingdom of God that is everywhere and within you. It is an evolving sense of what God is. Don’t we all pass through that in our own faith, from a child-like view of what God might be, like a parent yet large in the cosmos, to something much deeper and something more mysterious?
And the story before us is a turning point. It is a turning point in all of Scripture. If it is not about the intentions of God or how God is changing his business plan, then it is certainly about human consciousness and how we experience the sacred differently.
In the story, God says (this is Tim’s paraphrase), “Remember the other covenants I made with you? Well, they ended badly. Those didn’t work so well, or you outgrew them, or I asked you to subscribe to some external list of laws or a code, when the thing that really mattered all along was our relationship, heart- to- heart. That’s the thing that really matters, and the law-based system I first offered you – you do this and I’ll do that – were meant to be descriptions of what takes place, love of God and love of neighbor, when the heart is in the right place. Beginning today, that’s where I’m putting all my divine eggs in one basket, and that is that my will, my intentions, my love for you, is all going to dwell in the house of your hearts. And when we get there, you won’t have to teach people, because they’ll already know it, from the inside-out. That’s the new covenant I want with you.”
And there you have it, God’s about-face or our about-face in understanding the essence of spiritual life. We learn slowly, and we’re still learning today.
When you think about it, this is what Jesus was contending with. He was surrounded by people living from the outside-in rather than the inside-out, and all his teachings tried to lead people toward the kingdom of God that is coming and is in you at the same time. He healed on the Sabbath even though it was against the rules. Why? Because, sometimes, you have to break the rules to do the right thing. It’s from the inside-out, not from the outside-in. In fact, Jesus threw the hypocrisy of religious leaders in their faces, because they crossed every t and dotted every i while missing the essence, the substance, of the way of faith – to love justice and mercy. In his last supper, he said it again in a different way when he offered his disciples a new covenant, a covenant of the heart, sealed with bread and wine. In one way or another, he said that every time they ate, they would know that he was as close as breaking bread; that his life was poured out for them, not as some external force, but in internal divine love. It is a matter of the heart.
The apostle Paul said the same kind of thing when he insisted that the law doesn’t give life but only grace does. You can’t keep the law in perfection to begin with, and even that is missing the point. It is about grace first that manifests itself in the things we do. “You’ll do plenty of things,” says Paul, “but not because you have a to-do list, but because your heart is in the right place.”
And do you know what? The place we often end up when we follow that inner divine compass is the same place as we find in Scripture. But… we get there by a different way. We own it. It’s a part of us. It comes from our inside, and so it lasts and multiples and grows.
But we lapse into bad habits. I think you could make a very good case for saying that Jesus came proclaiming the kingdom of God, and Paul came preaching the gospel of grace, and what we got, instead, was the church.
Now, the church isn’t a bad thing, unless it becomes a substitute for God, and we start to worship it. That it takes the place of the covenant of the heart. If the church, as it developed over Christian centuries, becomes a law-based, rule-based, outside-in based organization that somehow guarantees salvation if people will comply, then we are in trouble. If you think about it, we come around to the place where we began when God said to Jeremiah, “You know, we need to turn a corner here. I will write my law in their hearts, and I will love them, and they will love me back, and we are together.”
Almost every Christian reformation through the centuries has something to do with this, a peeling away of the container to get back at the contents we have forgotten. When you lose track of the driving spirit of your faith, then you tend to focus on the container, the outside of things, like buildings, mechanisms, structures, and rules, and they inevitably become your little idol. We absolutely major in these things in the church. We so easily lapse into container worship, a focus on the outsides, the surface of things, judging everything by appearance. Let there be no question about it: religion is a human invention, the human response to the mystery of God. When we start worshipping what we’ve created more than what brings us to wonder in the first place, then we’re in trouble.
It’s like one person said: “When you see a finger pointing at the moon make sure you don’t confuse the finger with the moon.” The church points to God; make sure you don’t confuse one with the other.
Jesus said, you can’t pour new wine into old wineskins, because the old containers can’t hold the new wine without springing a leak. It’s about moving beyond external structures and instead cultivating the relationship of the heart, of new wine poured out over and again.
I like the way Augustine put it: “Love God and then do whatever you want; because what you want will be what God wants.”
This changes how we might approach our spiritual formation; doesn’t it? If you’re looking for an inside-out relationship with God, then you ought to start there, recognizing that the God you seek is not outside but inside. And our instruction with children would be focused on finding what they already have by virtue of being a child of God.
One time Marcus Borg told a story about a kindergartener turned to her Dad and said, “Daddy, will you please tell me about God again; I’m starting to forget.”
Children already know, but they forget, like we forget. The child comes bundled with the divine software, already installed. But somehow, on the life journey, it gets obscured, or gets covered up, or gets crowded out, it gets sidelined. We lose track of it. That is the point about coming together in community, and teaching, and telling the story over and over again in the church, because we are aiming at reminding people about what they already know. We help people dust off the heart so they find what’s already written there: “You are a child of God, beloved and the apple of my eye. I want for you what I want for every creature, a life of fullness, peace, purpose, and joy. And together we’ll find that.”
One of the Desert Fathers once said, “Our job is to lay the Word of God on top of a person’s heart, so that when their heart breaks, it will fall in.”
At Broadway, we talk about practicing the Eight Keys of Discipleship. You know them: worship, prayer, Bible study, service, giving, keeping Sabbath, sharing our faith, and growing spiritual life in small groups. If we understand these spiritual practices as some external religious to-do list, we’ve lost the game before we start. If, on the other hand, we know them as time-tested pathways to growing the faith, then we live out of our hearts as we practice them. Those are two different ways of following God.
As we move away from a rule-based, external authority model of spirituality to a heart-based, internal relationship model of spirituality, it changes how we do business with God, and it really changes how the church exists and acts.
As the church moves away from being the surface of things, a rule-based conveyer of external expectations to a heart-based community of pilgrims, everything changes. A fellowship of heart-based travelers becomes preoccupied with reminding one another about the heart and what dwells there. We don’t worship because we’re sinning when we don’t; we worship because all the hearts are gladly gathering around the heart of God. We don’t serve because we’re trying to prove our righteousness, but rather because our hearts break whenever God’s heart is breaking for the suffering of the world. We don’t strive for unity in the whole church or with people of other faiths because we have to or because we’re racking up brownie points in heaven, but rather because we are receiving the gift of unity that’s already there but as of yet unfulfilled.
Years ago, Robert Herrick wrote a haunting poem called The Best of Rooms. And it goes,
Christ, He requires still
Wheresoere he comes
to room or lodge, to have the best of rooms.
Give him the choice,
Give Him the noblest place in all the house,
All’s the heart.
This is where we can go as we grow out of our religious adolescence, the way of a new covenant, the journey into the heart of hearts, the noblest place in all the house, in the community of the heart-pilgrims, where the mystery of God is written not on tablets, but rather on the fabric of love.
Thanks be to God, Amen.
Benediction
Now may the Lord bless you and keep you. May his face shine upon you, and his countenance give radiance in your life. Go forth with the love of Christ in heart and soul into the world that God has loved into being. Amen.
