First Church in Cambridge, Congregational UCC
1 August 2004
How Can I Give You Up?
I never flatter myself to think that the sermons I preach each Sunday make a difference in the lives of every person who hears them. Whether they make a difference for anyone's life doesn't depend on me. Preaching is like playing roulette with the Holy Spirit. I spin the big wheel, and the Spirit makes the little ball stop someplace. It could come to rest in the hearts of everybody in the pews, only a few, or no one at all.
You never know for whom the Holy Spirit intends your words. You may think that your message is tailor-made for particular people or groups in the congregation who really need to hear it, but it could turn out that others hear it instead. Sometimes what you say and what people hear you say is not the same either. I have often had the experience of having someone tell me that my message really helped them, that it was an arrow of God aimed directly at them, but when they play back to me what it was I said, I think, "But I didn't say that!" and I wonder if while I was preaching my body was invaded by an alien sent to deliver another message using my lips!
Preaching is a mysterious hit or miss enterprise in which your most profound sermons can be forgotten by the second cookie of coffee hour, and your stink bombs can end up changing a person's life. This is God's doing, and like I said, you never know. So it's probably useless, given the Spirit's weirdness, to try to aim today's sermon at particular people in the congregation. Nonetheless, that's what I want to do—deliver a message that is not meant for all of you, but only for some. (Don't look so nervous!) And if you turn out to be among the ones for whom it is not meant, it's OK to tune out and plan your week. (As if you need my permission!)
To whom is the message addressed? My message today will be for you if you were brought up to believe that God loves you only if and when you behave. It's aimed at you if you grew up thinking that God sets the bar very high and that if you miss it once, well, God will understand, and that if you miss it twice, that may still be OK; but repeated failures will make God mad—really mad, mad enough to cause you trouble. I'm talking to you who may have in your head a God who is awfully hard to please, who is waiting for you to fail, and who may abandon you if you fail too much.
I am aiming this message today only at people who feel guilty pretty much all the time—a free-form sort of guilt unattached to anything concrete, a feeling that you don't measure up in a generic sort of way. You haven't done enough, it says to your gut—never have and never will, even if you feed every refugee in the Sudan and build a million units of low-income housing out of your own pocket. There are still people you haven't helped, causes you haven't championed, depths of compassion you haven't plumbed. The message today is for you if you have been trying for a long time now to satisfy this perpetual unspoken demand, this constraint that won't let you have a moment's rest until God is—I don't know—appeased? Placated? Bought off? (Like that's going to happen...)
My message is for you if you think religion is a reciprocal affair in which you get peace if you can be perfect. Your heads knows it's ridiculous to try to be perfect, but your heart accuses you when you fail. You think God accuses you too, and you resent and maybe even hate God for being so unspeakably unfair to have created us finite and then to demand infinite things of us, but since you know that hating God is not the done thing, you try to convince yourself that God really isn't perverse, but really and truly good, only in a strange sort of way, and that you're the one you should despise.
Today's message is also for anyone here who really has done something bad to feel guilty about. I'm talking to you, then, if you are ashamed of something that you did, or have come to loathe yourself for your viciousness or betrayal, your carelessness or narcissism or whatever is corroding you, and you have a need of judgment and forgiveness and healing but can't admit your sin or your addiction or your adrift and despairing condition, can't ask for help for your heart-sickness because you have so much at stake in maintaining your external good-person image. Or maybe you can't be honest because you suspect that if you go there, you will be completely shattered, and you don't know if your pieces will ever be put back together. And so you are stuck, badly stalled out, preferring the suffering self you know to the healed self you don't. This message is for you if you expect to be punished or disowned or even to go to hell some day, when the other shoe drops, the boom is lowered, the hammer comes down, the last chapter of the expose is written, and who you really are meets the light of day.
Now, you people I am not talking to—you who were not brought up this way, with God looking over your shoulder; you who never learned the perverse old Christian doctrine that the more miserable you are the happier God is, never internalized the drive to justify your existence to a God who always has the upper hand; you who have avoided serious sin and managed to keep your weaknesses from hurting others and have never had life deal you body blows that damage the heart and leave it incapacitated for giving and receiving; you people I am not talking to, who recognize yourselves in none of the above, please, please do not think that the people I am talking to, the folks who do have iron bands wrapped around their souls, are just superficial or theologically-unsophisticated or stupid or warped or something dismissive like that. If you have never felt the pain of this sort of thing, at least believe me when I tell you that the anguish is real. People suffer life-long debilitating consequences because the God they are supposed to love and want to love is a God they can't believe actually loves them, or loves them too unpredictably, unreliably, with calculation and a hint of threat.
And please don't think that it must be only the visitors who have these spiritual issues, who struggle with this awful image of a demanding and punishing God. Don't assume that First Church people are beyond all that nonsense, being members of the UCC in which the idea of impossible divine demand and swift divine retribution was placed in the museum of quaint religious ideas a long, long time ago. Trust me—I hear about the pain of dragging around a nasty version of God and a calculating life of faith more times a month than I can stomach, and from people with PhD's and 30 years in the church. Friends, I'm one of them. The message I want to deliver to you this morning is the same one I preach to myself to help the Holy Spirit save me from the futility of agonizing over my own unworthiness and the quality of my relationship with God.
Now, the message I want to preach to a few people here today is c0ming up fast now, so if it is not for you, as I said before, please tune out and now to plan your week. Or perhaps you could be praying for the rest of us, praying that today the ball I am about to set in motion on the wheel will stop at the soul of someone in need of healing. Pray that it will finally close some hole in the heart, finally make all the difference, because it really is the foundation of everything. It really is the goal of everything. It is the meaning of everything. It is the truth, the gospel, quite literally our salvation.
OK, now you know the intended audience. The message, then...
When you were a child, God says, I chose you. Yes, you. Didn't need a reason. I just loved you. I taught you to walk, I carried you in my arms, I lifted you like and infant to my cheek, I bent down to you and fed you. I called you to me, called you out of captivity.
But the more I called, the more you wandered away. And gave yourself to idols.
You will say that I should leave you to your on devices, punish you severely because of your sins, abandon you to the death you are contriving for yourself. I have considered it, believe me.
But how could I give you up? How can I hand you over? It makes me sick just to think of it. I am so in love with you, so full of compassion for you. So I will not be angry, I will not punish. I will love you no matter what, for I am unlike anyone you know.
Who can separate you from my love? Hardship? Distress? Persecution? Famine? Nakedness? Peril? Sword? Your sin? Your guilt? Your despair? Your just being you? No, neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything in all creation can separate you from my love.
Beloved friends, these words are true. There is no going back on them. They are God's. There is nothing you can be or do that will make them otherwise. So if they are not for you and you don't need to hear them, plan your week However, if they are for you, believe them... and live.
© 2004, J Mary Luti