Lent II – C
February 28th, AD 2010
Meadowvale Lutheran Church, Mississauga
Pastor Peter Lisinski
“THE GOD WE WORSHIP”
Our Lent sermon series on Fundamental Lutheranism – not Lutheran Fundamentalism – began last week with the question “What is the most important thing in your life?” After exploring some of life’s many important things, we came to the consensus that the most important thing for any human being is the worship of God! If that is true – and I firmly believe it is – it is vital that we know the God we worship, because the kind of God we worship shapes the kind of people we become. So that will be our focus for this second sermon in our series.
One of the most common beliefs of our multi-cultural society is that, regardless of our particular brand of faith, we all believe in one and the same God. That is not entirely untrue, at least not for believers who find the roots of our common faith in the story of Abraham and Sarah – namely, Jews, Christians and Muslims, who collectively represent about two-thirds of the world’s population. All three agree that there is only one God, who is the source of all life, the creator of all things, and the moral judge of all people.
But neither is it entirely true that these three faiths believe in one and the same God. For Jews and Muslims the central claim of Christianity – the claim that the one and only God we all believe in became part of human history in the particular human being of Jesus of Nazareth is blasphemy – which my dictionary defines as, “impious irreverence toward God”.
Of course, a complete and conclusive examination of all the differences between the three Abrahamic faiths would take a whole lifetime to conduct, and a whole world of books to catalogue. All we can hope to do today is scratch the surface in a very general, but nonetheless useful way. And in doing so we dare not make any absolute of ultimate claims – that is the arrogant prerogative of fundamentalists of all religious stripes. None of us can claim to know anything at all about God for certain. All any of us can claim for sure is what we believe about God.
I believe that all other religions, forms of spirituality, and expressions of faith fall into the general category of what Martin Luther called “works righteousness” – which basically means trying to get on God’s good side through pious rituals or moral behavior in order to enjoy a “blessed” life in this world and eternal salvation in the next. That seems to me the motive behind everything from offering child-sacrifices to buying papal indulgences; from the sexual orgies of ancient fertility cults to suicide bombers in twenty-first century Middle Eastern marketplaces! If we could sum up the long and sorry history of the human race’s relationship with God on a bumper sticker, it might say something like, “Do God’s will and God will love you”! Christianity – I believe uniquely – says the very opposite: “God loves you; therefore do God’s will”!
It is that notion of God’s unconditional and unlimited love – what Christianity calls “grace” that seems lacking in all other religions, forms of spirituality, and expressions of faith. And it is that grace of God that Christianity believes is revealed in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. In all other religions, forms of spirituality, and expressions of faith god is feared but not loved. In them God’s mercy seems to be a divine choice to reward those who are proper in their practice of faithfulness; but in Christianity – and also in Judaism – God’s grace is not a divine choice; rather, it is the very essence of God’s being, nature and character! Where Christianity and Judaism differ is over the Christian claim that God’s essential being, nature and character have been ultimately revealed in the cross of Jesus Christ!
One of the oldest beliefs about God is that by virtue of his divine being, nature, and character, God cannot suffer pain, much less die. But Christianity claims – uniquely – that the essence of God is love! And since – as each of us knows just as well as Shakespeare – love inevitably involves suffering, Christianity understands the crucifixion, death and burial of Jesus Christ as the ultimate revelation and fullest expression of God’s love.
So, the one and only God in whom Christians believe is indeed the same self-fulfilled, omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent God in whom Jews and Muslims – and, perhaps, others – also believe. But, in the cross of Jesus Christ these unanimously accepted, attributes of God are redefined.
God’s almighty power is revealed as weakness – the willingness to risk the possibility of being rejected and having to endure the heartache of unrequited love. God’s wisdom is revealed as the foolishness that puts the welfare of others ahead of personal self-interest. God’s universal presence throughout, and even beyond, the infinite cosmos, is contained within the earthly limits of time and space, and located in the particular person of one human being, whose divine power and presence are made personally available to all human beings in the sharing of his life-giving body and blood, distributed in an ordinary piece of bread and a sip of ordinary wine at the divinely appointed time and place of worship. And God’s own self-fulfillment is revealed as self-giving, self-denial, and self-sacrifice.
The God we Christians worship is Emmanuel – God with us in true and full humanity; God who, in Jesus Christ, has lived our life, died our death, and slept in our grave. The God we Christians worship is one who fulfills the infinite essence of his divine being, nature, and character within our finite, mortal life, so that we might fulfill the essence of our human being, nature, and character within the holy communion of God’s immortal and eternal life. That’s what it means, for Christians, to be created in God’s image; and the image of the God we worship is the image of God we are sent to reflect in the world – with humility, respect and courtesy – calling others to worship this God with us.