December 24, 2011

What if God is like Jesus?

Luke 2:8-20

 

You know, Christmas is kind of weird. What other time of the year do we sit around a dead tree and eat candy out of a sock? I mean, think about it! Christmas is also weird because it upsets almost all of our normal routines. Tonight and tomorrow is the apex of that weirdness. We’ve spent the last few weeks building up to it, and we will spend about another week in this weird holiday mood and then things will get back to normal once again.

One reason why the holiday season is such a routine-buster is because many people do a lot of traveling. This year is unusual for me because I’m not traveling. That in itself gives me an odd feeling. I feel like I should be packing my bags, changing my oil, and hitting the highway like I did last year when my son and I took off for Texas after the 11 o’clock Christmas Eve service in order to beat an approaching ice storm.

Whether we are traveling or not, the holidays do a good job of breaking us out of our normal routines. This is what happened on what we might call the first Christmas.

A group of shepherds were busy tending to their flock, one of the most mundane jobs anyone could ever imagine. Seriously, shepherding was mind-numbingly boring. A shepherd worked 24/7, usually with very little human companionship. At least there was more than one shepherd in the group in question when an “angel,” a word that means “messenger,” appeared in their midst. Talk about breaking up the routine! Without a doubt the angel broke up an exciting shekel ante poker game.

The angel told them that the Messiah had been born in Bethlehem, known as the city of David. We don’t know how far away from Bethlehem they were encamped, but Luke says they were “in the neighborhood.” The distance must have been close enough for them to feel comfortable leaving their sheep because Luke says they ran to Bethlehem as fast as they could. Let’s hope they left at least one shepherd behind to take care of the sheep.

Before they left, however, a “huge angelic choir” appeared with the original angel singing a praise song. I’m sure all of us have seen at least one Christmas card depicting this improbable scene. I would be running too! Anyway, they came, they saw, and they went back and “told everyone they met what the angels had said about this child.” So much for a quiet boring routine starlit evening tending to the sheep and playing shekel ante poker!

This scene depicted in Luke 2 is very weird … but not just because an angel and “choir” lit up the night sky with God’s blazing glory, and not just because a group of rough and dirty shepherds left their sheep behind to go see a baby. This story is weird because a whole lot of things changed. The face of God, the reputation of God, the mission of God, would forever change. People often talk about how the baby Jesus changed history, but I say that the baby Jesus changed God, or at least our understanding of God.

I’m not the only one who thinks this. Nadia Bolz-Weber is a heavily pierced and tattooed middle-aged pastor from the House for All Sinners and Saints Lutheran church in Denver, Colorado. Nadia is about as “different” as they come in terms of clergypersons. The writer, Phyllis Tickle, said, “Nadia Bolz-Weber has probably done more than any other pastor in recent times to poke therapeutic fun at the misdemeanors and flaws of overly-churched Christianity and Christians.” Immediately I knew that I liked her when I read this. I believe Nadia is one of the most interesting and provocative communicators of theology since Joan Osbourne’s 1991 song, “What if God was one of us,” where Osbourne asks whether God is “just a slob like one of us.”

In my attempts to add to the weirdness of your Christmas ritual of gathering around a dead tree and eating candy from a sock, let me share from a sermon Nadia Bolz-Weber preached last Easter to a crowd of, well, sinners and saints …

 

Once upon a time, the God of the Universe was basically fed up with being on the receiving end of all our human projections, tired of being nothing more to us than what we thought God should be: angry, show-offy, defensive, insecure, in short, the vengeance-seeking tyrant we would be if we were God. So, at that time, over 2,000 years ago, God’s loving desire to really be known overflowed the heavens and was made manifest in the rapidly dividing cells within the womb of an insignificant peasant girl named Mary. And when the time came for her to give birth … there was no room in our expectations—no room in any impressive or spiffy or safe place. So this (child) was born in straw and dirt. He grew up, this Jesus of Nazareth, left his home, and found some, let’s be honest, rather unimpressive characters to follow him. Fishermen, Tax collectors, prostitutes, homeless women with no teeth, (people from Harlan County Kentucky), Ann Coulter and Charlie Sheen. If you think I’m kidding … read it for yourselves. These people were questionable. So, with his little band of misfits Jesus went about the countryside turning water to wine, eating with all the wrong people, angering the religious establishment and insisting that in him the kingdom of God had come near, that through him the world according to God was coming right to us. He touched the unclean and used spit and dirt to heal the blind and said crazy destabilizing things like the first shall be last and the last shall be first, and sell all you have and give it to the poor. And the thing that really cooked people’s noodles wasn’t the question ‘is Jesus like God’ it was ‘what if God is like Jesus’. What if God is not who we thought? What if the most reliable way to know God is not through religion, not through a sin and punishment program, but through a person? What if the most reliable way to know God is to look at how God chose to reveal God’s self in Jesus?”

At the 8 o’clock service I talked about how weird Christmas is. Not only because we gather around a dead tree and eat candy from a sock. Not only because we put out milk and cookies for an already too large man to eat after he has somehow managed to keep his bright red suit clean and not get stuck in a dirty chimney. The reason Christmas is weird, the reason it breaks us out of our normal routine, is because it forces us to re-think how we understand God. Even if we don’t realize what is happening to us, the Christmas story is like electroconvulsive or electroshock therapy to our souls. It induces a seizure of our theology.

It forces us to see God in a different light. For example, rather than see God through the eyes of Abraham, who almost sacrificed his first born son to a tyrannical god, or through the eyes of Noah, who built a giant ark in order to escape a species-ending flood, or through the eyes of an Old Testament prophet like Jonah, who was spewed out of a giant fish in order to preach to people who needed to “turn or burn,” we are persuaded to see God through the eyes of poor, tired, dirty shepherds who gazed into the eyes of a newborn infant and somehow saw the depths of God’s love. If we think about this without our preconceived culturally formed understanding of God, we have to admit that getting a glimpse of divinity in a newborn baby is one of the strangest stories in the history of religion itself. Babies are too vulnerable, too helpless and powerless, too sweet to portray divinity.

Babies change our view of reality in all kinds of ways, do they not? I remember when my first child was born the attending nurse said to me as we walked down the hall to the birthing room, “The birth of a baby will make you believe in God.” I smiled and took for granted what she said, but since then I have come to understand that seeing the birth of my first-born child not only compelled me to believe in God, it compelled me to believe in God differently. This was the softer side of God, the Charmin side of God, if you will.

Speaking of seeing God differently let me share again the quote I offered at the 8 o’clock service from Nadia Bolz-Weber. Nadia is a heavily pierced and tattooed middle-aged pastor from the House for All Sinners and Saints Lutheran church in Denver, Colorado. She obviously gets how the Christmas story changes our understanding of God … (read the earlier quote)

            Indeed, what if God is like Jesus, rather than the other way around? I’d like to offer an answer to that question. Without Jesus, specifically the baby Jesus, God’s power is coercive. Think about all the stories in the Old Testament where God exercises power over people. Going back to the three stories I just mentioned, Abraham almost sacrifices his son because he felt coerced to do so. Noah is compelled to build an ark. Jonah is forced to preach to the Ninevites. God is a coercive God, without Jesus.

With Jesus, God’s power is exercised in a different way. The Christmas story introduces us to the notion that God’s power is persuasive rather than coercive. God persuades the world through the gentleness and warm fuzzies of a little baby. Again, the softer side—the Charmin side—of God. (By the way, if I’m offending anyone by comparing God to toilet paper, I apologize profusely!) A lot of people, of course, don’t like this softer, almost weaker understanding of God. A lot of people will always feel the need to equate God with coercive, strong, dominant, unilateral, adult power. But again, the Christmas story “shocks” us out of that perspective, or it should, because in the Christmas story God comes to us in the soft skin of a baby, diaper rash and all, a weakened, vulnerable, crying, dependent infant.

What if God is like Jesus, this Jesus, the baby Jesus? How would that change the way we treat one another, the way we treat our enemies, the way we treat the weak and the vulnerable? Wouldn’t we lose our power, lose control, lose our competitive edge over other religions, other philosophies, other worldviews? Think about that the next you gather around a dead tree and eat candy out of a sock.