Sermon for Friends Congregational Church

“I’m Going to Count to Three”

Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon

Sunday, August 12, 2007

Psalm 33:12-22; Hosea 11:1-11; Luke 12-13-21

I’m going to count to three!  Did your parents ever say that to you?  Or you might do that now as a parent.  I’m going count to three.  There is a certain seriousness that comes with counting to three.  It’s like an ultimatum that a child cannot avoid.  If you put it in terms of Don Corleone from the Godfather, counting to three is the parent giving the child an offer he can’t refuse.

I don’t know if counting to three ever worked for you as a parent, or if, as a child, you ever responded obediently to the parental count of three.  But I’m here to tell you from fresh experience with my 2 ½-year-old pride and joy, counting to three does not always work.

Now, the parent’s hope in counting to three is that the child will hear each number as a call to reasonable decision-making.  Let me go through the hypothetical hope of a parent in counting to three.  The parent counts ‘1’.  The child thinks, “OK, the count has begun.  That means I’m doing something defiant, which is unacceptable.  Perhaps I’m exhibiting some kind of behavior that might cause me bodily harm and I should stop.  But I’m having so much fun right now.”  The parent counts ‘2’.  The child then thinks, “The count has escalated, which means it’s time for me to weigh my options.  I can either stop whatever it is that I’m doing wrong and thereby obey my parent, or I can continue in this destructive behavior and see what happens.  But I don’t know if I want to see what happens.”  The parent counts ‘3’.  And the child thinks, “OK, I give up.  Three is a serious number and I’d hate to see what would happen if my parent were to ever reach the count of four.  So, to avoid that unthinkable scenario, I will relent and obey my parent.”

It’s a nice hypothetical, but here’s what I think is going on in my son’s mind when I count three.  Let’s say it’s time for the boy to take a bath but he won’t budge from the living room rug where he’s playing with a puzzle.  I count ‘1’.  The boy thinks, “Why is he counting again?  Can’t he see that I’m working this puzzle right now?  Doesn’t he know that there is nothing more important than this puzzle?  Doesn’t he know that if I stop working this puzzle right now, the whole world will fall into deep black hole and no one will survive?”  I count ‘2’.  Then the boy thinks, “Two puzzles.  That’s a great idea.  Maybe when I’m done with this puzzle I’ll work another one.”  I then count ‘3’.  And the boy thinks, “Dad must be pretty proud of himself, counting his numbers out loud like that.  My teachers clap for me at school when I count to three.  Maybe I should clap for Daddy.  Nah, I’ll just eat a popsicle instead.”

What I want to do this morning is examine the three count and why it exists.  I’m going to count to three.  Those are big words.  We count to three because we want control.  The universal parent counts to three to call everything to order, to calm everything down, to seize attention and to reestablish a certain order of things.  But above all, the three count finds its origin in fear.  We fear a loss of control, so we say, “I’m going to count to three,” thinking that at the end of the three count, all will be well with the world. 

God is often viewed as a Divine Parent.  And in the words we hear from the Prophet Hosea this morning, we’re potently reminded of God’s role as our Divine Parent.  More importantly, from the Hosea reading, we might get that feeling that God is counting to three.

Can you imagine that?  God looking at you and me in this whole of creation and saying to us from on high, “I’m going to count to three?”  It’s pretty easy to imagine if you break it down.  God glimpses at creation from across the starry divide, and God sees a world where children are sold into slavery and prostitution, where wars are fought day in and day out in the name of God, where the orphan and the widow are seen as troublesome liabilities that should just go away, where the poor are seen as irresponsible deviants who made their own situational beds that they deserve to suffer in, and where people think of each other as dead beats, freeloaders, criminals, immoral heathens, alien leeches, societal menaces, pompous conservatives and annoying liberals before they will think of each other as human beings.  And God sees this world that God once created and called ‘good,’ and God says, “I’m going to count to three!”

The problem we run into when we imagine our God counting to three is that we think of this in our human terms.  And in our human terms, three is a finite amount.  1-2-3…that’s it.  You count to three and that’s it.  So, in our minds God isn’t saying, “I’m going to count to three.”  In our minds, God has already counted to three and that’s it.  The damage has been done.  God has lost control, and now it’s judgment time.  Our worst fears are at hand and the days of judgment are upon us.

And now that God has counted to three, we have taken it upon ourselves to act on God’s behalf in these times of judgment.  We are, in effect, little gods running around judging anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit the mold.  Our times have become daily judgments of the people who make our lives difficult in some way or another.

I can’t get to work on time because all the idiots around me drive too slow.  I can’t eat my dinner in peace because that family over there didn’t raise their child properly, and now the child is whining and ruining my peace and quiet.  I have to guard my assets properly, because the future generations of this nation are hopeless mooches who care more about video game violence and the latest youtube offering than an honest day’s work.  I’d hate for the fruits of my labor to end up in their hands.  I can’t achieve my goals because my brother is getting more of the family’s inheritance than he deserves.

Sometimes we might sound like the man who calls out to Jesus from the crowd, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the inheritance with me.”  But Jesus says, “Man, who appointed me a judge or an arbiter between you?”  Wow!  Even Jesus says that he is not worthy of being a judge.  Instead Jesus says to the man the same thing that he is saying to us this morning, “Don’t be a judge, but be on your guard!”

Don’t waste your time pigeonholing the people around you, but spend your time wisely by being on your guard.  What does that mean?  Even Jesus was so humble, the Son of Man so humble, as to remind us that he was not supposed to judge the world; rather, Jesus Christ is our champion of awareness, our great teacher who invites us to end our judgmental ways and toward a fear of God.  Jesus holds one hand open to all of us, and with the other hand, Jesus points toward God, our judge, whom we are supposed to fear.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had my problems with this theology some times—this notion that we are supposed to fear the Lord.  It’s kind of a letdown when you come to church hoping for an uplifting message and all the preacher says is “fear God.”  But that’s what Jesus is telling us, friends.

This might help us be more at ease with fearing God.  Remember a moment ago I said that we look at counting to three in terms of finitude, of limits: 1-2-3…over.  OK, well that is a human concept of time.  And the same human standards can be applied to the way we judge the world around us.

This is what I mean: If I, a human being, judge a man based on the color of his skin, then that man is doomed in my eyes no matter what he does or doesn’t do.  And moreover, it might take a lot of time and many convincing arguments and even more life-altering experiences to change my judgment of this man, because I am a human being.

I could give all kinds of examples that speak to this, but what I’m trying to point out is the human way that we judge others based on our multiple human differences.  The bottom line is that we have a human concept of judgment too, and if we apply that concept of what judgment is to our fear of God, then God can seem like a scary, fiery, wrathful deity who has counted to three and had it up to here with the likes of you and me.

But here is the Good News for us to share this morning, sisters and brothers.  Listen again to the words that God speaks to us from the prophet Hosea: “I will not carry out my fierce anger, nor will I turn and devastate you.  For I am God, and not man.  I am the Holy One among you.  I will not come in wrath.”

God is our judge, and we are invited to fear God.  But God is God, not human, and God sees everyone as a beautiful child of God who is blessed with their being.  God sees everyone as a gift that is blessed for who they are, and God sees everything about you and me—our choices we’ve made, our countless shades of skin color, our gender identity, our passions, our skills, our faults, our talents, our sexual orientation, our accents—and God calls this good.  God sees all of this and summons a love and compassion in God’s heart that our human limits can never understand in this lifetime.  Again, the words from Hosea that we hear God still speaking to us: “My heart is changed within me; all my compassion is aroused.”

So, I have no problem preaching a simple message to us this morning: fear God, people.  Fear God.  Because this is what it means to fear God: When you fear God, you place your hope in an unfailing love.  God is love.  God is unfailing love, and hear once more these words from this morning’s Psalm reading: “The eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love.”  To fear God is to place your hope in unfailing love.

Today we hear God described as a roaring lion.  That’s a frightening image.  That’s not a very uplifting message, right?  But God says that when God roars, God’s children will come trembling from the west and trembling from the east, and God will then settle them in their homes.

A parent can roar like a lion, and it really scares a child, but the child’s hopes are not crushed.  When the loving parent roars like a lion, the child comes trembling, and the child is embraced with an unfailing love that teaches the child to hope.

Many parents will tell their children that if they go out and find themselves in a difficult situation, that they should not hesitate to call home and get help.  Well, if the child goes out and makes a bad choice and abuses drugs or alcohol or both, then the child has gone against the parent’s wishes.  And the child might hear the parent roaring like a lion from far away.  But when that child comes trembling with fear to the roaring parent with a phone call that says, “I’m in trouble,” the lion will settle the child peacefully in her home.

My son, beautifully defiant and unmistakably curious as he is, might not always come trembling obediently to me when I count to three, but that’s not the last time I’m ever going to count to three for that boy.  And I am just a human being who thinks in terms of finite numbers.

Sisters and brothers, God has not counted to three once and for all.  God’s final judgment of wrath is not upon us.  God is counting to three for us again and again and again, because God is a promise of unfailing love.

And every time God looks at this beautifully defiant, unmistakably curious world, God might get agitated and count to three, but when we make the wrong choices, God will start the count over and wait for us to place our hope in that unfailing love.

When we choose to judge others with our own limited counts of three, we’re making bad choices.  When we don’t give our neighbor the unfailing love that they need because we’ve taken it upon ourselves to judge them based on our petty human assumptions about them, we are making bad choices.  And when we forget to make God a judge of us and assume that God is a judge for us, then we are making bad choices.

But every time we make a bad choice like that, every time, God starts over with the roar of a lion that we might hear in the whisper of a morning breeze, “My child, my beautifully defiant, unmistakably curious child, I’m going to count to three.”

So, that’s the message, my friends.  Fear the Lord.  And don’t let God be the judge for you, but let God be the judge of you.  When we accept Christ’s open invitation to God’s judgment, we open ourselves up to an unfailing love that can change our lives—an unfailing love that can give us the strength to hope all things, believe all things, trust all things, and endure all things.

It’s been said before that you might be the only Bible that anyone will ever read.  Well, you might be the only evidence of God’s unfailing love that anyone will ever experience.  Will we waste our time seeking God’s judgment of others, or will we spend our time being rich toward God by loving others regardless of who they are or where they come from?

Let us pray: O Lord, as surely as you love us, we fear you, but not out of a human fear of finality, but out of a human hope in your unfailing love.  As surely as you love us, let our new hopes this day pour out of this sanctuary and into your world.  Give us the humble natures to hear the roar of your abundant love so that our hearts would tremble and be changed in the name of Christ.  Yet not by our will, but by yours, O God: 1-2-3.  Amen.