First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
29 February 2004
Obviously, You Couldn't Be Bothered...
Did you see this cartoon (in a recent New Yorker, I believe)? A middle-aged man is praying on his knees at his bedside. Looking upward, he says, "I've asked you many times as nicely as I possibly could to make me a better person, but obviously you couldn't be bothered."
That cartoon contains several sermons. There's one in there, for example, about "asking nicely", as if God were touchy about our tone, answering only prayers preceded by "please." There's another one in there about blaming God for our imperfections, as if the fact that we are stubborn, greedy, irritable and dishonest were the direct result of a divine dereliction of duty.
But we have time today for only one of the many sermons this cartoon suggests, and it is about the man's repeated prayer to become "a better person." The man on his knees is right about God when it comes to that. God really can't be bothered. No matter how nicely he asks, or how often, it is unlikely that his prayer will ever get God's attention because "becoming better persons" has so little to do with the divine project laid out in the Scriptures.
To be sure, in the Bible there are commandments and rules that people are supposed to live by. There is also plenty of praise for the blameless and the upright, and plenty of condemnation for the wicked and the lawless. But there is also the persistent acknowledgement that no one, no matter how observant of God's commandments, no matter how good, can claim moral perfection in God's sight. Even more, everywhere you look in Scripture there is a paradoxical undercutting of even God's own command to keep the commandments.
Some of the people who sin most often and most flagrantly in the Biblical record are, unaccountably, people after God's own heart whose sins seem only to bind them closer to God. The great sins of King David come to mind, of course, but David is not alone. The Scriptures as a whole simply will not let us regard our lives or our God solely through the lens of morality. It seems that God has better things to do with us than to make us good, and much, much better things to do with us than to make us good according to our ideas of what it means to be "a better person."
Makeovers are the hot new thing on TV. In case you haven't seen them (I, of course, have not!), these are shows on which people who are massively unhappy with their bodies go away from their family and friends for months on end and get tens of thousands of dollars' worth of facelifts and nose jobs and tummy tucks and dental veneers. They return home to a grand "reveal"—and, they suppose, to the end of their problems, and a truly new life.
If it were up to the man in the cartoon, and if it were up to many of us, we would like God fully-employed in the business of moral makeovers. Somehow we have come to believe that the answer to our problems, to the human dilemma generally, and to the world's sad mess is for all of us to become "better persons." A lot of us don't know what to think about the fact that some of the greatest saints of our tradition—ancient and modern—were and are, frankly, moral messes.
Because Lent is a time of repentance and conversion, we have been taught that it is also be an opportune time to try to become a better person. Many people treat Lent as a time to re-make their failed New Year's resolutions to quit smoking, eat less, spend more time with the family, or take on some extra benevolence, some good deed. If the turn of the calendar page to the Lenten season serves as a jump start for self-improvement projects, so be it. But if the Scriptures are any indication, God will not be bothered to be of very much help to us, as long as our sights remain so low and our expectations so small as to confine ourselves to becoming better persons.
What else is there, then? What is the larger horizon, the deeper quest? The thing that makes for sinning saints, for giants of God who were not always giants of virtue? What other prayer can we make by our bedsides, if not the prayer of the man in the cartoon "to become a better person?"
We could ask God, to paraphrase Eugene Peterson, to be made forever unable and unwilling to be the subjects of our own little life projects and to let ourselves instead be participants in who God is and what God is doing in us and for the world.
We could ask to be given the grace to step away from the center of our own self-preoccupied universes, even our religious ones, and to be drawn instead into the mystery of divine action in, for, with and through us.
We could ask to be drawn helpless into a place empty of landmarks—a wilderness filled not only with wild beasts and rampant devils, a place not only of disorientation, temptation and moral danger, but also, as Scripture attests in many foundational stories, a place of clarity and undreamed possibility, a place of the most profound re-making of a different kind, a time and a space for God to speak through uncluttered air not so much to our behaviors as to our hearts.
We could pray in this Lenten season of conversion to become not better persons, but more like Jesus. He comes up out of the waters of the Jordan, having been baptized by John and confirmed in his identity by the voice from a cloud. Then the Spirit leads him in the wilderness for forty days, where he is tested by Satan. He is tested to see what sort of "Son of God" we have here; whether a Son of God will accept the vocation to be fully and dangerously transparent to the life of the God who loves him, whom he loves, and by whose moving Spirit he lives and acts.
Out there Jesus successfully counters the devil's lie that he, and by extension, any of us can seek and make for ourselves a deeper, more meaningful, more successful and happier life—including a religious life—by our own ways and means, without being immersed in the only true life there is, the life of God.
Jesus victory was not a victory of moral virtue. To be sure, our traditions teach us that Jesus was a sinless man, but it is not because he was sinless that he triumphed. In the end, even though he is the protagonist, the story is not even about him at all, not Jesus the tower or strength, anyway. It is about Jesus-in-God and God-in-Jesus. It is about the way Jesus has for forty days had his heart enraptured and refined so that it is fixed on God and God's concerns in such a way that when the devil tempts, all it can say in reply to every blandishment is "God"—we live by God's word, we worship God alone, God is not to be tested.
The story is about God who is not responsible either for our sins or for our earnest acquisition of virtues, who is in fact not in the business of moral makeovers, but in the business of love and its cascades and cataclysms. It is about God who does not want us so much to be better as to be lost—lost without a compass in the wilderness of God, disoriented to ourselves and reoriented to the One who is all in all.
So if you want to pray by your bedside for something this Lent, pray for this: to become less, so that God might become more.
© 2004, Mary Luti