A Sleeping Bag God
Sermon
ORDINARY PEOPLE, EXTRAORDINARY GOD
Sermons For Sundays After Pentecost
This is definitely not a text a minister should use if her congregation is thinking of building a new church structure or adding to an existing one. King David, well-meaning to be sure, develops pangs of conscience because he is living in his "house built of cedar" and thinks to do better by God. "Here I am living in a house built of cedar, but God's Covenant Box is kept in a tent!" (2 Samuel 7:2 TEV) So David determines to build God a temple, and initially with the prophet, Nathan's, blessing.
Misreading God
It is obviously all too easy to misread what God wants. But that is really no surprise, because often we do not do well in reading what another person really wants, either. We offer one thing, and what they want is something quite different. We offer what we think they want and what they need is light-years away. A husband offers something material, but his wife is hoping for a gift from the heart. A parent offers a child money or toys, but the child wants not gift, but parent.
Paul Tournier, in The Meaning of Gifts, tells of a husband who had a collection of pipes. Each time his wife had a birthday, he would offer her a pipe "to enrich the collection." For an unknown reason, her husband finally caught on to the truth that all those pipes were for him and not his wife. The wife remarked, "Just imagine, I just had my birthday and my husband bought me a bottle of perfume. I don't know what has come over him." (p. 17)
Little surprise, then, that we do the same with God. Throughout the history of the church we have known, thanks to Micah, that God doesn't want burnt calves, thousands of sheep, nor endless streams of olive oil. Those items change with every generation, but we still persist in offering God their correlatives, leaving justice, constant love, and true community virtually to chance.
Were Micah writing in our day, how might those words be expressed? Maybe in some fashion such as this: What shall we bring to the Lord, the God of heaven, to worship him? Shall we bring costly religious productions, carefully choreographed and videotaped, and at least put out on local cable stations? Shall we bring carefully coiffured people of faith who are of one mind on matters of doctrine, holding that its lowest common denominator is infinitely more preferential than spirited debate and the growth that can ensue from it? Shall we bring before the Lord our fawning and falderol and not, instead, our honest humanity, pimples and all?
No House for God
God doesn't want to live in a house; that God makes clear to David through Nathan. "From the time I rescued the people of Israel from Egypt until now, I have never lived in a temple; I have traveled around living in a tent." (2 Samuel 7:6 TEV)
God is disclosed not as a domesticated, but instead as a dynamic God. God cannot be cabined and caught; harnessed and held; isolated and studied. No. God is too busy for that. God is constantly on the move with his people, seen now in this event and later in quite another guise. God rejects the suggestion that he can be placed here or there, or that he can be the object of a definitive analysis. As confident as we are that God has disclosed himself in Christ Jesus, there is still truth in the words of Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
(Isaiah 55:8-9)
This story serves to remind us just how often we try, and inaccurately so, to pigeonhole and second-guess.
One thinks of the women's movement and how once we had a very restricted and truncated sense of who women were and what they could do. In the not-so-distant past it was not uncommon for people to make derogatory comments about females in the pulpit, for example. However, more and more people are coming to realize that women clergy can be quite effective in the pulpit, as well as in other pastoral roles.
Inversely, we have also tried to pigeonhole males. There is no good reason why a man cannot be as at home in the kitchen as a woman. To hold that women are better at changing diapers than men is silly and untrue.
In religion, and likewise in politics, we want to think of people in terms of labels. We want to call them liberals or conservatives, when it is infinitely more true that we are all a mix of both. On some counts we are liberal; on others, conservative.
Then clearly we sometimes pigeonhole ourselves. We set the parameters of our lives too close at hand, thinking we can never do or be something beyond those parameters. Then something happens in our lives and we -- as the saying goes -- "rise above" ourselves. We can all think of people who are doing today what they never could have envisioned themselves doing a decade ago.
Recently I had occasion to visit with old friends. When I had lived next door to these people, Mary was a rather diminutive mother of three girls. She scarcely raised her voice at them, let alone raised it for any other reason. That was fourteen years ago, and today, she runs her own day care center and in that capacity relates to a wide variety of people and circumstances in ways that she never dreamed possible fourteen years prior.
But we also pigeonhole and limit theologically.
We do that with our faith. Some treat religious doctrines and ideas as though they are cast in cement, as though they are destinations, and not vehicles of conveyance to the truth. And in this there is real danger.
For instance, a public school teacher we once knew appeared to be the very embodiment of boredom and uselessness. That proved to be a hasty conclusion. For over the months and years that followed our introduction to this person, this seemingly ineffectual teacher came to distinguish himself in a variety of ways. Our initial impression, informed though it was by an episode or two, proved to be an inaccurate one. It would have been unfair for us to hold to that notion when evidence to the contrary became consistently clear.
So, too, should it be with our religious ideas. They should always be tentatively held, pending the disclosure of future insight.
I submit that this, not a frenzied defense of orthodoxy, is the essence of trust. Such a stance is informed also by the joyful conviction that God continues to reveal truth to his children. We worship not an idea about God, but God, and it is our encounters with God and God's grace that should shape our notions. It is not our notions about God that should place us in the posture of second-guessing what our encounter with God is going to be like.
Eric Hoffer's book The True Believer is about fanaticism, and he describes the fanatic in these terms:
To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns. All questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities foreseen. The true believer is without wonder and hesitation.
(p. 71)
Religious people can take on those characteristics, and when they do, how sad and indeed faithless it is to worship a God with whom there are no unknowns and surprises and no wonder.
Then, too, we try to pigeonhole God, give God a specific place, and expect that God will be there and not somewhere else. I suppose that the most common example of this would be the expectation that God dwells in buildings we refer to as churches and perhaps at most makes guest appearances elsewhere. But God, as our story from Second Samuel discloses, will not allow himself to be so relegated. Sure, God is in his holy temples, but God also carries the temple of his presence into the near and far-off places. The surgical suite can be the temple of his presence, as can the kindergarten room or the production line. God can come like the unassuming presence of a beloved friend, but God can just as surely come as one from a far-off place who stands over against us.
Frederick Buechner has described it beautifully when he writes of his decision to embrace a ministry of writing on a mountain in western Vermont:
I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas ... There is no event too commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.
(Now & Then, p. 87)
God the House Builder
Our story begins with David wanting to build a house for God, but it ends ironically with God reminding David that God will continue to move for the establishment of David and his people: "I have gone with you wherever you have gone.... I have chosen a place for my people Israel ... I promise to keep you safe ... I will withdraw my support." (2 Samuel 7:9-16) Those are words of establishment.
Often in our work with people who have for some period been absent from the institutional church, we will hear them say, "I have to get back to church." Often implied is, "I've got to get back to God," too. People do forget God. For a time, sometimes a long time, they don't think about God, pray to God, or wonder about God. But the wonderful news of the Bible, illustrated by this story, is that God doesn't forget us. God is always an establishing God, at work whether we acknowledge that work or not, tireless in his efforts to lead us through our wildernesses into lands of milk and honey. God is, we might say, a sleeping bag God in the sense that his residence is not in one place, but in all places at all times, recognized or not, rebuffed or not, always working for the good of his people. God, our story declares, is a moving and dynamic God, out always among his people wherever their travels take them. And God is a sleeping bag God not in the sense that he sleeps as we sleep, but in the sense that he travels lightly to better serve the needs of his children.
So the psalmist's words of praise are also ours:
The protector of Israel never dozes or sleeps.
The Lord will guard you; he is by your side to protect you.
The sun will not hurt you during the day,
nor the moon during the night.
The Lord will protect you from all danger;
he will keep you safe.
He will protect you as you come and go
now and forever.
(Psalm 121:4-8 TEV)
Misreading God
It is obviously all too easy to misread what God wants. But that is really no surprise, because often we do not do well in reading what another person really wants, either. We offer one thing, and what they want is something quite different. We offer what we think they want and what they need is light-years away. A husband offers something material, but his wife is hoping for a gift from the heart. A parent offers a child money or toys, but the child wants not gift, but parent.
Paul Tournier, in The Meaning of Gifts, tells of a husband who had a collection of pipes. Each time his wife had a birthday, he would offer her a pipe "to enrich the collection." For an unknown reason, her husband finally caught on to the truth that all those pipes were for him and not his wife. The wife remarked, "Just imagine, I just had my birthday and my husband bought me a bottle of perfume. I don't know what has come over him." (p. 17)
Little surprise, then, that we do the same with God. Throughout the history of the church we have known, thanks to Micah, that God doesn't want burnt calves, thousands of sheep, nor endless streams of olive oil. Those items change with every generation, but we still persist in offering God their correlatives, leaving justice, constant love, and true community virtually to chance.
Were Micah writing in our day, how might those words be expressed? Maybe in some fashion such as this: What shall we bring to the Lord, the God of heaven, to worship him? Shall we bring costly religious productions, carefully choreographed and videotaped, and at least put out on local cable stations? Shall we bring carefully coiffured people of faith who are of one mind on matters of doctrine, holding that its lowest common denominator is infinitely more preferential than spirited debate and the growth that can ensue from it? Shall we bring before the Lord our fawning and falderol and not, instead, our honest humanity, pimples and all?
No House for God
God doesn't want to live in a house; that God makes clear to David through Nathan. "From the time I rescued the people of Israel from Egypt until now, I have never lived in a temple; I have traveled around living in a tent." (2 Samuel 7:6 TEV)
God is disclosed not as a domesticated, but instead as a dynamic God. God cannot be cabined and caught; harnessed and held; isolated and studied. No. God is too busy for that. God is constantly on the move with his people, seen now in this event and later in quite another guise. God rejects the suggestion that he can be placed here or there, or that he can be the object of a definitive analysis. As confident as we are that God has disclosed himself in Christ Jesus, there is still truth in the words of Isaiah:
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
(Isaiah 55:8-9)
This story serves to remind us just how often we try, and inaccurately so, to pigeonhole and second-guess.
One thinks of the women's movement and how once we had a very restricted and truncated sense of who women were and what they could do. In the not-so-distant past it was not uncommon for people to make derogatory comments about females in the pulpit, for example. However, more and more people are coming to realize that women clergy can be quite effective in the pulpit, as well as in other pastoral roles.
Inversely, we have also tried to pigeonhole males. There is no good reason why a man cannot be as at home in the kitchen as a woman. To hold that women are better at changing diapers than men is silly and untrue.
In religion, and likewise in politics, we want to think of people in terms of labels. We want to call them liberals or conservatives, when it is infinitely more true that we are all a mix of both. On some counts we are liberal; on others, conservative.
Then clearly we sometimes pigeonhole ourselves. We set the parameters of our lives too close at hand, thinking we can never do or be something beyond those parameters. Then something happens in our lives and we -- as the saying goes -- "rise above" ourselves. We can all think of people who are doing today what they never could have envisioned themselves doing a decade ago.
Recently I had occasion to visit with old friends. When I had lived next door to these people, Mary was a rather diminutive mother of three girls. She scarcely raised her voice at them, let alone raised it for any other reason. That was fourteen years ago, and today, she runs her own day care center and in that capacity relates to a wide variety of people and circumstances in ways that she never dreamed possible fourteen years prior.
But we also pigeonhole and limit theologically.
We do that with our faith. Some treat religious doctrines and ideas as though they are cast in cement, as though they are destinations, and not vehicles of conveyance to the truth. And in this there is real danger.
For instance, a public school teacher we once knew appeared to be the very embodiment of boredom and uselessness. That proved to be a hasty conclusion. For over the months and years that followed our introduction to this person, this seemingly ineffectual teacher came to distinguish himself in a variety of ways. Our initial impression, informed though it was by an episode or two, proved to be an inaccurate one. It would have been unfair for us to hold to that notion when evidence to the contrary became consistently clear.
So, too, should it be with our religious ideas. They should always be tentatively held, pending the disclosure of future insight.
I submit that this, not a frenzied defense of orthodoxy, is the essence of trust. Such a stance is informed also by the joyful conviction that God continues to reveal truth to his children. We worship not an idea about God, but God, and it is our encounters with God and God's grace that should shape our notions. It is not our notions about God that should place us in the posture of second-guessing what our encounter with God is going to be like.
Eric Hoffer's book The True Believer is about fanaticism, and he describes the fanatic in these terms:
To be in possession of an absolute truth is to have a net of familiarity spread over the whole of eternity. There are no surprises and no unknowns. All questions have already been answered, all decisions made, all eventualities foreseen. The true believer is without wonder and hesitation.
(p. 71)
Religious people can take on those characteristics, and when they do, how sad and indeed faithless it is to worship a God with whom there are no unknowns and surprises and no wonder.
Then, too, we try to pigeonhole God, give God a specific place, and expect that God will be there and not somewhere else. I suppose that the most common example of this would be the expectation that God dwells in buildings we refer to as churches and perhaps at most makes guest appearances elsewhere. But God, as our story from Second Samuel discloses, will not allow himself to be so relegated. Sure, God is in his holy temples, but God also carries the temple of his presence into the near and far-off places. The surgical suite can be the temple of his presence, as can the kindergarten room or the production line. God can come like the unassuming presence of a beloved friend, but God can just as surely come as one from a far-off place who stands over against us.
Frederick Buechner has described it beautifully when he writes of his decision to embrace a ministry of writing on a mountain in western Vermont:
I discovered that if you really keep your eye peeled to it and your ears open, if you really pay attention to it, even such a limited and limiting life as the one I was living on Rupert Mountain opened up onto extraordinary vistas ... There is no event too commonplace but that God is present within it, always hiddenly, always leaving you room to recognize him or not to recognize him, but all the more fascinatingly because of that, all the more compellingly and hauntingly.
(Now & Then, p. 87)
God the House Builder
Our story begins with David wanting to build a house for God, but it ends ironically with God reminding David that God will continue to move for the establishment of David and his people: "I have gone with you wherever you have gone.... I have chosen a place for my people Israel ... I promise to keep you safe ... I will withdraw my support." (2 Samuel 7:9-16) Those are words of establishment.
Often in our work with people who have for some period been absent from the institutional church, we will hear them say, "I have to get back to church." Often implied is, "I've got to get back to God," too. People do forget God. For a time, sometimes a long time, they don't think about God, pray to God, or wonder about God. But the wonderful news of the Bible, illustrated by this story, is that God doesn't forget us. God is always an establishing God, at work whether we acknowledge that work or not, tireless in his efforts to lead us through our wildernesses into lands of milk and honey. God is, we might say, a sleeping bag God in the sense that his residence is not in one place, but in all places at all times, recognized or not, rebuffed or not, always working for the good of his people. God, our story declares, is a moving and dynamic God, out always among his people wherever their travels take them. And God is a sleeping bag God not in the sense that he sleeps as we sleep, but in the sense that he travels lightly to better serve the needs of his children.
So the psalmist's words of praise are also ours:
The protector of Israel never dozes or sleeps.
The Lord will guard you; he is by your side to protect you.
The sun will not hurt you during the day,
nor the moon during the night.
The Lord will protect you from all danger;
he will keep you safe.
He will protect you as you come and go
now and forever.
(Psalm 121:4-8 TEV)
