Sermons - Pleasant View Mennonite Church

Sisters and brothers -- fellow ministers,

Regular lives of regular people have plenty of ups and downs. People don't suffer the same amount -- not even close -- but most people go through plenty of hard times of different kinds.

I'm going to describe someone I know. This sort of life I'm describing could be most anyone's. She isn't someone who, if you met her, would seem to have had a hard life. And really, she hasn't. Just the hard stuff that plenty of people experience.

She grew up in a broken household, mostly during the Depression. Her mother was only home sometimes. Other times, her mother'd be gone for a long time -- as in months. One time, her mother came home pregnant. Then she disappeared again. Eventually she left for good.

This woman got married at around twenty. She had three children. One of her sons had bad health problems and then he died shortly after finishing high school. The way he died, it was never clear if it was an accident or if he committed suicide.

Her daughters did fine for themselves, though one of her grand daughters has had a pretty rough time of it -- and this granddaughter's also had a few kids who've had a pretty rough time of it as little kids.

On the other hand, this woman has had a lifelong marriage to a man who is genuinely her friend. In her fifties, this woman was also able to go back to college and get the degree she'd never gotten before because she'd married so young.

Ups and downs in life. Two children doing well, one child dead. A good long marriage, a mother who more or less abandoned her.

Knowing this person now -- in her 80's -- she's very kindhearted, but she also wouldn't claim to have much in the way of belief in God.

I obviously haven't known her all her life, but my guess is that if you'd talked with her at various times during her life and asked her what her thoughts were on God, it would have depended on which time in her life it was. The time when her children were born would probably have brought a different answer from the time her youngest child died.

And if you asked her now, she'd probably say that there have been so many downs as well as ups that it's hard to say.

For you, how have your life experiences shaped what you think God's probably like?

Would it have mattered when in your life we'd have asked you?

Our Scripture reading this morning comes from about 500 years before Jesus was born. So this would have been about 2500 years ago. It was a particular time in the lives of a whole group of peoples. In terms of ups and downs, this was a serious, horrible down time for most of them.

Here's the background:

There had been a whole country of people who had considered themselves to be God's people, in a special way. God had rescued their ancestors from slavery. God had led their ancestors into a new land. God had also spoken more or less directly to their ancestors through people called prophets. The first prophet, and the greatest one, had been a guy named Moses. Through him, God had given their ancestors a lot of the details about how God wanted them to live in the world.

God also sort of lived among them. Now, if you'd asked them, most of these folks would have said that God is everywhere. But God also symbolically lived among them in a way God didn't live in other places. For a few hundred years, they had what they called the tabernacle. It was like God's tent. And it was in the tabernacle that special things were done to worship God -- special sacrifices and that sort of thing. And a few times a year, all the people would come and camp out around the tabernacle to remember the great things God had done for their ancestors in the past.

And then eventually, the people got rid of the tabernacle and build a spectacular temple. The tabernacle had been a big tent. The temple was a big building. They built it in their capital city, Jerusalem. And it symbolized that God was with them. This was in about 1000 B.C..

But not long after the people built the temple for God -- God's house, as they saw it -- God seems to have become dissatisfied with the whole arrangement. The people were called Israel in those days. But while they thought of themselves as God's special people, they'd pretty much become just like other countries.

Every country back then had a special God and built temples to their God. Israel had some political conflicts that split it into two countries, a northern one and a southern one. Then the northern one was invaded by a powerful army and destroyed. The southern part of Israel managed to cut some deals to stay in existence.

But then, around 600 years ago, a new powerful nation arose nearby. This new nation was called Babylon. And it tried to take over pretty much all the other countries nearby. And it did. And that included the southern part of Israel, which was known as Judah -- because that was the largest tribe of Israel in the south.

So Babylon took over Judah, and then some of the leaders of Judah tried some things to resist. That didn't go well at all, so the Babylonian army just arrested everybody and destroyed the country. They carted off the people in chains to the land of Babylon. And as for the city of Jerusalem and the temple which was God's house among the people -- the Babylonian army burned them down.

God's temple. The stone tablets on which Moses had written God's commands. The whole city of Jerusalem. Totally destroyed. A lot of the people of Judah were killed, and the rest were arrested and taken away to Babylon.

It was in Babylon that these people from Judah first became known as ``Jews'' -- which just meant, ``people from Judah.''

And by and large, these Jews -- these people from Judah -- they found the whole experience devastating.

For one thing, of course, they'd seen large numbers of their friends and family die in the Babylonian invasion. And they'd been forced to leave their homeland -- the land on which their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years. So now they were in a strange new land, with different weather and different customs and a different language. And a different religion.

And so they wondered, ``Where is God in all this?''

One of their poems from this time made it into the collection of psalms. It asks, ``How could we see songs of praise to God so far from Jerusalem, the city of God? Instead of playing our harps, we hung them on tree branches by the Babylon River.''

They didn't feel just sad. They felt confused. They felt empty. They felt like, given all that had happened, they didn't know who God really was. They felt like God was far away, didn't care.

God didn't seem close. God seemed hidden.

And it was out of all that confusion and sadness and emptiness -- out of all that came our Scripture reading for today. It comes from just that time -- the time of the Jews in Babylon.

Speaking not just for himself but all the people, the prophet cried out for the true God to break into the world -- to break through the clouds and show his face.

Now by this time, most of what we call the Old Testament was already out there. These folks already knew most of the Bible stories from the time before Jesus. They already knew the laws that God had given through Moses. And yet, in the midst of intense suffering, they felt that all that they had failed to show God to them. To these folks who had most the Old Testament part of the Bible and who had lived the rest, what they had didn't feel like it showed them God. Despite their Scriptures and their history and their experiences, God seemed hidden.

What do you think? How much can you relate to that feeling?

This Scripture reading from 500 years before Jesus' birth expresses how these folks were seeing God at that point in their life. God to them seemed pretty hidden and mysterious. How is God to you right now? How clear and in focus at this point in your life?

And they based their confusion on the ups and downs that their ancestors had experienced and, especially, on the major ``down'' they were in the midst of experiencing. Right now in your life, how clear is it where God is?

There would have been times in the past during which the ancestors of those Jews would felt pretty certain that they saw God accurately. But then a lot of that turned out to be wrong. So thinking we see God clearly and actually seeing God clearly aren't the same thing. Sometimes what people see very clearly turns out, on closer inspection, not to be God much at all.

So if we take into account our own experiences in life and then add in the experiences of everyone else, what picture would we have of God? How clear?

The picture might be blurry. Or we might not even know which way to look.

I've had the experience of looking through a telescope at the night sky. And a person who knows what they're doing is guiding me. And she focuses the telescope and then tells me what I'm going to be looking at. Mars maybe. And I look and say, ``Oh yeah, I can tell that's Mars. Cool.'' And then she looks through again and says, ``Hmmm. That's not Mars. You must have bumped the telescope.''

So just because what I was looking at was in focus doesn't mean that it was what I thought I was looking at. Just because someone seems certain that they're seeing God clearly doesn't mean that what they see clearly is actually God. In fact, there's know it could be for everyone, because so many different people are so sure they see God clearly, yet they don't all see the same thing.

So God is hidden even from some who think they see God clearly.

And as for making sense of God from looking around at the world and people's experiences, if we do that, we may well end up where the author of the book of Ecclesiastes did. Ecclesiastes is one of the Old Testament writings. It's hard to tell when it was written or who wrote it. But it doesn't claim to be a message from God. It's just a person's attempt to make sense of things from looking at the world.

And the author of that writing says that, after a long life studying the world and reflecting on it, there's not much sense to make. It's all meaningless, he says. People who do the right thing suffer just as much as those who do evil. Those who hurt others prosper at least as much as those who care for others. There seems to be no way to predict how long a person will live. It's just a crapshoot, a role of the dice.

Yep, that's in the Bible.

To the author of the book of Ecclesiastes, looking around at things didn't settle much. Some people point to the beauty of nature as something that points to who God is. But just as much as nature includes glorious sunsets, it also includes hurricanes and earthquakes that kill lots of people. Just as much as nature includes the beauty of swans and whales, it also includes the germs that kill millions of people every week.

And really, that's a legitimate point of view. If you look around at people's lives, there doesn't seem to be a pattern in people getting what they deserve. Maybe sometimes it seems like they do. But just as often, it goes the other direction -- and those who should be blessed end up suffering greatly. Chance. Luck. Unfairness. Or even meaninglessness.

How does it seem to you? Like it seemed to the author of the book of Ecclesiastes? He would have said that God seemed hidden.

And so the Jewish people in Babylon 2500 years ago felt that way. And they cried out for God to show who God really is in the face of such messed up stuff in the world.

And then, before too long, God did. God entered the world God's self -- as a person in the world. The face of Jesus was the face of God. And in the things he said and did, Jesus wasn't God in disguise. He was what God really looks like.

In our Scripture reading of people before the time of Jesus, these folks prayed for God to speak from the clouds. Well, when Jesus walked the earth, God did. Twice. The first time, it was when Jesus was baptized. And a voice from the clouds said, ``This is my beloved Son, in whom I'm pleased.'' And the second time was during a situation that's sometimes remembered as the Transfiguration -- when Jesus appeared shining like light in front of a few of his followers. And God spoke to them from the clouds saying, ``This is my Son. Listen to him!''

So God has spoken from the clouds -- to direct people toward Jesus.

And God has more the spoken from the clouds -- God has come into the world as Jesus to show us the truth. According to the Gospel of John, one of Jesus' followers once asked Jesus, ``Will you show us the Father?''

And Jesus replied, ``Haven't you figured it out yet? If you've seen me, you've seen the Father.''

All the things Jesus said and all the things he did -- his priorities, the things he cared about -- all that was a removal of God's hiddenness.

There are all these claims out there about God. You've heard a lot of them. Some people present God as mostly angry and punishing. Some people present God as compassionate and forgiving. Some people present God as distant -- at most kind of watching over things but not really involved. Some people present God as very involved in things -- as the cause of everything that happens, whether good or bad.

Let's just look at those questions. We'll do scales of one to ten.

So on a scale of one to ten, with one being compassionate and forgiving and ten being angry and punishing, where do you see God being?

On a scale of one to ten, with one being that God controls everything that happens and ten being that God controls nothing that happens, where would you see God being?

There are a lot of different answers out there -- a wide range. And among people who call themselves ``Christians,'' the range is almost as wide.

I've heard talk about things like ``the Christian view of God'' and ``a Christian lifestyle,'' and I have almost no idea what they mean by those things until I ask them more -- because people who call themselves Christians don't agree on much. In my experience, the label ``Christian'' is not helpful in getting a sense of what a person believes about God and about life.

So among Christians, you have all these different views of God out there.

Apart from the teachings and actions of Jesus, God is at least partially hidden. Apart from what God made known through Jesus, God is at least partially hidden.

All other ways to see God are imperfect. They may show some things that are true about God, but they may also just as easily show something very different from God and yet call it God.

The teachings and actions of Jesus are the way to see God as God really is. The only sure way.

In the coming Sundays, up to Christmas, I'll be talking more specifically about what we see of God through what Jesus said and did.

Here's the real short version: God is committed with absolute love to every person, no matter what. To you, to everyone. God is crazy about every person. And God is with us through all things.

So the God we can see through Jesus' teachings and actions is accepting and compassionate and merciful and generous and with all people through all things, no matter what.

Jesus ended the hiddenness of God, to the extent we're willing to see God through his life and through his teachings.

Who is God? God is the overwhelmingly gracious one revealed through the life and teachings of Jesus.