God of all purpose and all meaning,
We come together because we need you
And we need each other,
And we need to hear your word.
And if we hear it here, may we be so possessed by it
That we become servants of it out in your world.
In the name of Christ who was and is and is to come,
Amen.
[Before commencing with the text below, I asked the acolyte to come down from the choir to the floor where I was speaking. I offered her the choice of a 1$ bill or a 10$ dollar bill. She chose the 10. I asked her why, she said it’s worth more. I asked her if she really believed people would give her more for the 10 than the 1 and she nodded yes.]
So, right here it says “In God we Trust,” which is the official motto of the United States of America. It really is official—made so by an act of Congress in 1954. There have been protests against this, because the Establishment clause of the Constitution says that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion’ and the the most common defenseis something like, well it’s not the Christian God, it’s just whatever higher power, if any, you happen to acknowledge.Which begs a bunch of other questions which don’t belong in a sermon, except one, which is that if it does not refer to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, referred to by Muslims as Al-Lah, ‘the God,’ then the inscription on the currency is, at best, an example of ceremonial Deism (‘nature’s God’ or ‘Our Creator’in the Declaration of Independence). Or if it does refer to the biblical Jehovah, then besides being unconstitutional, perhaps it can be understood as ‘cultural Christianity’ in the pejorative sense, or even “cheap grace” as Dietrich Bonhoeffer described lip service to the redemptive roadbed under the Way of Christ. The phrase In God We Trust appeals to an a la carte spiritual life, very American— in which what you believe is up to you, and I’m ok, and you’re ok, and we’re all ok. To which GK Chesterton would say that you can no more choose your own personal God than can choose your own personal sun and moon—which is a brilliant formulation, because it distills a central truth about our relation to the forces around us that are incalculably stronger than we are. However, it says nothing definitive about the nature of the God the US Government says we trust, which a huge subject, and I will come back to it in a minute. In the meantime, we might look for some clarity in the other parts of the extraordinary statement that’s on every dollar bill.
In God We Trust. Who is ‘we?’ Americans perhaps, as the act of Congress would suggest, but that’s pretty presumptuous claim to make on behalf of several hundred million people from all over everywhere. And of course In God We Trust is a meaningless claim to anyone who’s not American, who uses a dollar because they trust not God but the broad and frankly mysterious agreement by which the piece of paper can be traded for things and services that are actually useful. But even if we allow the claim that “We” refers to us—to each of us individually-- the question remains of whether we, whoever we are, really trust?We certainly trust that the 10$ bill will get us a decent cup of coffee, maybe two. Most of us trust that the water will come out of the spigot when we turn the knob; most of us even trust that most drivers will stop when the light turns red. We trust that at 10 o’clock on Sunday morning there will be a liturgy of some sort at Trinity Episcopal Church. But honestly—do we trust God even that much? Honestly?
We trust those ordinary things, because the evidence of our senses argues in favor of trusting them. In that sense, we are in the exact position of Peter, James, and John in this morning’s gospel. According to Luke, Jesus tells them to cast their net on the other side of the boat, and they are clearly, if politely,dubious—c’mon we tried that a gazillion times and got nothing. But they know their teacher is not one to take no for an answer, so they do as he suggested, and they pull up more fish than they can handle. The evidence of their senses was overwhelming. At this point Peter, in particular, was swamped with shame. ”Go away from me Lord, because I am a sinful man.” Go away from me Lord, so I don’t have to face myself and God and the worldknowing how powerless and inadequate I am.
And Jesus says “Don’t be afraid.” Don’t be afraid. Before he calls them to his Way, he assures them that they don’t have to be afraid. That they can trust the Way he will lead them. And they go. I’m not convinced that they weren’t still afraid, but they trust the evidence of their eyes and their aching muscles, and they go.
God in Luke’s gospel, of course, is different than the water from the spigot and the traffic at the red light and our gathering here on Sunday mornings. God does not function by physics, or by laws, or by anyone’s custom. God is everywhere all the time, like the sun and the moon, and like the sun and the moon God is not visible a lot of the time, not just when the Universe puts objects in our way, but also and most particularly when we put things in the way, when we shut God out, when we close the curtains or put on our polarized scratch resistant mirrored godglasses and say ‘Go away from me Lord because I am a sinful man.’ Isaiah, by the way, has the same reaction in this morning’s reading from the Old Testament. He encounters God with his own senses and says "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!" God is not visible because we are so afraid that our capacity for trust, already eroded by the mirage of earthly comforts, fails us altogether.
Note here that this fear is expressed by depriving ourselves of the very sensory evidence that proves the existence of the sun and its trustworthiness as a source of warmth and light and power. So also with Peter’s fear, and Isaiah’s fear, and the nature of God, the source of all creation, of all warmth and light and power, an understanding of God which satisfies almost all cosmologies. Our humanity gets in the way.
But here’s the key point of this morning’s gospel, as I read it. As professed Christians we place a special emphasis on the earthly manifestation of God in Christ. Our entire religious practice is predicated on the conviction that God demonstrated and definedhis agenda, within reach of our senses in the life of Jesus of Nazareth. Our Scriptures remind us that the Way of Christ, when we choose it, is a sensory experience. Even with that vivid fact that God breaks through, at times we find it hard to trust, because somehow we think of God as “the management” and that we have to stay on the boss’s good side to keep our positions. But that’s not it at all. Rowan Williams defines faith as a ‘readiness to trust.’ If God is the source, the creator, whose purpose in clear, in the light of Christ and in the sun that shinesand the rain which falls on all of us, without judgement or discrimination; that is the love of God which we are called to trust and to share. The disciples from that time to our time, including the person sitting next to you, have recognized, on the evidence of their senses and of their aching muscles and their aching hearts, like Peter and James and John and Isaiah, that redemptive action by us here and now in this world-- that peaceand mercy and wholeness in this world-- are God’s purposes. And we say this again and again and again in our worship. Here again the reading from Isaiah reinforces this. Confronted by God and his own shame, Isaiah nonetheless hears the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And [he says], "Here am I; send me!" The action of Peter and James and John and Isaiah is invoked in our prayer of thanksgiving,when we declare that we will answer the call to love and be loved “not only with our lips, but in our lives.” That we will trust our senses and trust the source of our sensations.
When you hear that call, if you are ready to trust the evidence of your senses and your heart, you will know. And you may have to tiptoe at first, but don’t be afraid. Just go.
Amen.
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