Sermon for Friends Congregational Church
“Will They Ever Get It?”
Delivered by Reverend Dan De Leon
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Amos 8:4-7; 1 Timothy 2:1-7
One night, about an hour before I had to clock in for my barbacking job, I stopped into a restaurant close by to get something to eat. I paid my tab, got up to leave and was on my way out when I noticed something in the doorway: a shiny quarter lying on the ground, just waiting for the taking. This was no penny or a nickel or even a dime, this was 25 cents, and it was wooing me to pick it up. So, I looked quickly left and right, leaned down and reached out to pick up my rich find; but, of course, the shiny quarter was glued to the floor.
I stood up twice as fast as I had knelt down, but I didn’t look around to see if anyone had noticed my ridiculous folly. I didn’t need to see the looks on people’s faces that worked at the restaurant, I could feel them. From behind me, I could feel the smirk of the employees at the host stand and the laughter of the bartender from a little farther back. I could feel these playful looks at my expense because those employees were asking a question that we ask all too often in our daily lives. When I, or any other aloof customer, knelt down to pick up that immoveable quarter, the on-looking staff of that restaurant asked in their minds, “Will they ever get it?”
It’s a question that resonates from the depths of the human condition: “Will they ever get it?” You might ask this question when you’re driving in the left-hand lane behind someone going 10 miles under the speed limit, while folks in the right lane are moving steadily along and passing you by. You look at the car in front of you, apparently driven by Mr. Magoo, and you wonder, “Will they ever get it?”
Parents wonder this question about their children from time to time. Employers wonder this about their employees. Millions of American citizens scream this question to the politicians they elect. And you might even ask this question in your mind about your favorite football team week in and week out: “Will they ever get it?”
If you read through the Hebrew Scriptures from Genesis to Malachi, you’ll find the God of the Old Testament looking at humanity and exclaiming, “Will they ever get it?” We make a mess of Creation, and treat God’s world more like hungry ants than faithful stewards. So, God, asking rhetorically, “Will they ever get it,” sends a flood to wipe out this cancerous humankind, save Noah and his righteous cronies. “That’ll teach ‘em,” says God.
From the flood to the first born children of the Egyptians being sacrificed on Passover to the destruction at Sodom and Gomorra, God seems to constantly be asking of humankind, “Will they ever get it?” And we, created in God’s image, seem to ask the same thing of each other.
Parents may wonder if their children will ever get it, but those same adolescents are asking the same question all the time of adults who either won’t listen or don’t care. Employers may wonder when their employees will ever get with it, but those same employees wonder if their bosses will ever get it. And those of us who follow domestic and international affairs with eager political appetites look across the divide to the other side of the political aisle and wonder with damning intensity, “Will they ever get it?” We ask that question so loudly that we can’t hear the other side of the aisle asking the same question about us.
OK. I’m being a little vague, I know. But that’s exactly my point. All of us, all of God’s children, are asking the same judgmental question about each other: “Will they ever get it?” But let’s make it less ambiguous. When we ask that question of our neighbors, whoever they may be, “Will they ever get it,” we’re really asking, “Will they ever get me?” Will they ever see me, understand me, empathize with me, agree with me? Will they ever get me and, therefore, come to know the truth as I see it?
It’s no different with God. When this Creator God looks at humankind and asks from on High, “Will they ever get it,” God is asking you and me and all of God’s children, “Will they ever get me?”
I had a friend once that I met through a Christian youth camp years ago, and I went to visit him one summer. We were driving around in his pickup in bountiful, scenic Lubbock, Texas, and he started talking to me about his latest girlfriend. I thought, “Here we go. He’s going to give me some song and dance about how this girl is the one. She makes me feel unlike I’ve ever felt with anyone else. I’m sure we’ll be engaged within months.” Well, I was right. He went through that same spiel, but then he said something out of the ordinary. He said, “One thing worries me though, Dan.” And I said, “Oh? What’s that?” He said, “Well, she hasn’t been saved.”
Can you hear what he was really saying in between the lines of that statement? I can hear it today as clear as I heard it in that awkward moment in the pickup truck in Lubbock 12 years ago: “Is she ever gonna get it? I worry that she’s never gonna get it.”
It’s easy to pin our deepest concerns and fears and hopes and dreams on things like family values or some political platform or even our religion, in this case our notion of Jesus: “Will she ever get it?” It’s quite another challenge to claim those concerns and fears and hopes and dreams as the very makeup of who we are: “Will she ever get me?”
The worldly truth is that we are always trying to change each other. We don’t admit it or even acknowledge it really. But think about it: Life is just our quest to change people. We want other people to get it! We want them to see the world the way we do, so that things will be simpler.
We like to say that we engage in healthy dialog, but we really just debate until someone is wrong and someone is right. We like to say that we are repairing our friendships and our relationships, but we’re really just working toward the other person giving up the fight and agreeing with us. We like to say that we are praying for people so that they will find their own health and wholeness—their own peace—but we’re really just praying for them to see the world, and even our Jesus, the way we do: “I’m worried about something: She hasn’t been saved yet.”
We all want to change people because the human condition is that we want to be understood. Will they ever get me? Friends, the church, this church, is a place where it is OK to ask that question—will they ever get me—because if the church is not always working toward being a place where everyone is understood, accepted, embraced, loved and utilized in this labor we call kingdom living, then the church is not worth the air conditioning that’s pumped into it.
Jesus says, “Love God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” It’s OK to ask that question, “Will they ever get me?” But as we love our neighbors as we love ourselves, we are trying to assure our neighbors that we want to get them, that we want to understand them, that we want to empathize with them the way God empathized with humankind in the selfless offering of Christ Jesus, the Word made flesh.
But we ask that question—will they ever get me—so that we can grow in our shared understandings. God asks that question—will they ever get me—because God, and all that God is, and all that God stands for is truth, and the truth is all that we need to know. When we come to know the truth, after all, we are set free.
Our friends at the Baptist church down the street always have different messages on their marquee, like: “People see your deeds. God sees your motives.” And I think their latest one reads, “The cross is the only ladder high enough to reach heaven.” But recently one of their messages read, “No God, no peace. Know God, know peace.”
The truth is that God is not going to stop this war. God is not going to stop the genocide in Darfur. God is not going to stop the territorial disagreements between Israelis and Palestinians and the reoccurring violence that stems from that conflict. God will not reach down from the clouds and destroy our guns or silence our bombs or send our missiles falling from the sky like doves descending on the earth. No God, no peace.
God’s not going to do that. We are. We are the ones that continue to write God’s story in this time between the already and the not yet, and God is crying out to us from on High, “Will they ever get it? Will they ever get me?”
Know God, know peace. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, “Mankind’s passion for war will be subdued by a great passion: the passion to discover God’s ways. Into a world fascinated with arrogance enter’s Isaiah’s word that swords will be beaten into plowshares, that nations will search, not for gold or power, but for God’s word.
Know God and know diversity and inclusion. Know God and know unity and wholeness. Know God and know your sister, your brother and your neighbor. Know God and know justice and mercy. Know God and know grace and peace. Know God and forget about the world as we have been led to accept that it is, and come to know only how the world could be, how the world should be, under heaven.
Friends, this morning, the Apostle Paul reminds us in his first letter to Timothy that ours is a ministry of intercession. God witnessed the brokenness of this world and couldn’t take it any more, so God interceded with the gift of Jesus Christ, and we came to know love, passionately, like we’d never experienced it before. And the resurrected Christ witnessed our cultural conflicts and doctrinal divisions and interceded with the gift of the Church, and we came to understand a calling—a ministry that strives for justice, for mercy and for peace.
Now, sisters and brothers, we look at the world in its beautiful diversity and stubborn traditionalism, and we are called to intercede. But know this: our intercession is not to make people like us or to convert people to our assimilated understanding of Jesus (as if everyone in this room has the same relationship with Christ).
No. Our intercession—our ministry—is to help the world come to know God: all that God is and all that God stands for; because it is in this knowledge that we discover truth and a shared pilgrimage that strives toward peace.
We can only accomplish that if we craft our lives around this shared knowledge of God. Know God, know peace. Know God and pray for your enemies. Know God and pray for the authorities of this world. Know God and make your life a living acceptance of God’s truth: that we are all Children of God, bound together by grace, and the more we cut ourselves off from one another, the more we cut ourselves off from God.
Jewish tradition tells us this story: When the Children of Israel were fleeing slavery, Pharoah, his heart hardening, sent his army to kill the freed slaves, only to see his soldiers drowned in the Red Sea. The angels in heaven, upon witnessing this miracle, burst into celebration, only to be rebuked by God Himself with these words: “Celebrate not, for my children are dying.”
Twenty-first century children of the eternal God, will we ever get it?