“You did not choose me but I chose you.”   St.  John 15:16

It’s a privilege to be chosen.

This is going to be an interesting year not only in America but in the Anglican Communion.  Choices are being made – of a President for the next four years, of a congressman, a Senator, and an Archbishop of Canterbury.  These are choices sometimes described as choices of leadership but better described, I think, as choices of people to serve us.  Sometimes we actually mix the metaphor and talk about “serving in leadership positions.”  But the emphasis remains on choice: we choose.  We choose a Vicar or a priest or bishop or a representative or President.  We choose direction at the local level and we choose direction at a diocesan and national and even international level.  But we choose.

And I think most of us like to choose.  I think Americans generally like to choose.  We are, to begin with, people who chose to live here – unless, of course, we are African Americans, but even there, choices are made to remain here, to live in the south or north, east or west.  We or our ancestors chose to come here and live here and we choose to stay here and we get to choose people to represent us at every level of government and we even choose our church and choose our clergy – unless we are Roman Catholic or Methodist.

Do you know how unique that is?  Most Christians don’t get to choose church leadership.  The two biggest American churches, Methodist and Roman Catholic, don’t give you a choice of bishops and pastors to serve you.  Even in the Anglican Communion,  Christians don’t get to choose.  Generally in England and Africa and Asia clergy are appointed. Chosen by Queens and committees and Archbishops and higher authorities.

This, as a matter of fact, is one major reason for the tumult in the Anglican Communion:  Anglicans elsewhere don’t understand why our Presiding Bishop or diocesan bishops don’t just issue some edicts.  They don’t understand a church where people choose.  But that’s the American way and we grow up with the idea that it’s appropriate to take control of our lives and control events whether in the church or the middle east or the local school board and we do our best to control even the weather and in fact we probably do shape it by changing the climate of the earth itself.

We like to feel as if we are in charge.  And so we may not quite take it in when Jesus says to us in the gospel today:  “You did not choose me but I chose you.”  Do you really feel as if that’s the way it is?  That you are a member of God’s church not because you chose but because Jesus chose; that you are a practicing Christian not because you chose but because Jesus chose?

I sometimes think we misunderstand one of the basic Reformation ideas which now even Roman Catholics accept: that we are “saved by faith.”  I think we often interpret that as meaning that we saved by our choice:  “I choose to believe therefore I am saved.” But that’s not how it is.

I like to quote the hymn that says:

I sought the Lord, and afterwards I knew
He moved my soul to seek him, seeking me;
It was not I who found, O Savior true,
No, I was found of thee.

God seeks us.  In fact, God pursues us and we often respond by hiding, afraid that this God who chooses and pursues us will take charge of our lives.  It’s not that we are doing such a great job ourselves, but we’re brought up to think we ought to control our own lives and we’re pretty sure that if we really let go and let God control our lives we might have to make some changes.  So we resist and hide and flee.

There’s a fairly well-known poem called the Hound of Heaven written by Francis Thomas over a hundred years ago which goes even further and speaks of God not just choosing us but pursuing us:

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.

And that’s something else I think we may not really understand: the way we try to avoid that seeking God. It’s not just that we sometimes sleep in on Sunday but that we put off a deeper commitment, that we resist giving our lives the discipline and order they need to be really God-centered.  But God chooses us and even pursues us and we almost have to work at it to avoid the God who is forever coming after us and knows our hiding places and won’t let us escape.

Now, there’s a mystery here that I don’t think we will ever quite be able to think through.  It is our response God seeks, our response of faith, but that response comes, if it comes, only because God initiates and enables that response.  And if you try to separate out and prioritize my part and God’s part I don’t think we can do it.  We get hung up on questions about predestination and double predestination and Pelagianism and impenetrable theological thickets and maybe we’re better off accepting the fact that we lack God’s wisdom and that we have to make do with what seem to us like contradictory notions that are both true.

God does want our response but we can’t respond without God’s initiative.  God wants us to choose, but we can only do that because God first chooses us.  However much it may offend our American desire to be in control, we aren’t.  We are here because God has moved us to be here and the choices we seem to make will be choices in which God plays a major role.  It may be that we will choose well and thank God that we were enabled to do so.  It may be that we will choose badly and pray God to make that choice work for us in different ways than we had planned. The point the Gospel is making is that we can’t take much pride in what looks to us like our wisdom and initiative and faithfulness.

I think the flip side of that is that we can’t be too depressed at the bad choices we often make and the mess we make of things, because God can work there too.  For example, a hundred years from now, will our great-grandchildren read about the disaster we made of the middle east and the environment or will they learn about the providential way our misadventures led to critical advances in the use of renewable resources saving the world from a catastrophic global warming in the nick of time and creating a world-wide recognition of the vital necessity of working together to save the environment and at the same time forcing Christians and Muslims to understand each other and find ways to work together?  What I know is that the leadership we choose is incapable of doing what needs to be done through their wisdom and farsightedness and political courage. if we rely on the people we choose and the choices they make, we are doomed.  If we say our prayers and trust God to make better choices for us, I think we have a chance.

“You did not choose me,” Jesus said, “but I chose you.” Yes, it runs counter to some of our most basic instincts.  We have that deep-seated need to be in control whatever disasters that may cause.  But don’t worry about that; it is what it is: we are not in control and the simplest thing to do is relax and accept that situation.

So put aside the fear and doubt and insecurity and just think about the privilege of being chosen.  Do you remember childhood games where someone said, “Let’s choose up sides?”  And everyone starts screaming, “Choose me; choose me?”  I suppose most people go through most of life not being chosen first, not everyone can be chosen first, and not everyone can be first in the class or star of the team or President of the United States or Pope.  And that’s OK too; if you are wise enough you learn to pity those who are chosen and pray for them.  But even if we aren’t chosen first, we do seem to feel a need to be chosen and can we hear the joy of the promise in Jesus’ words: that he has chosen us?  Isn’t that incredible, almost unbelievable?  That God should choose us to be children of God,  chosen to know God’s love and come to God’s table and be given the gift of life?

Let me read you some words of a 17th century English priest, Thomas Traherne,  who wrote about the joy of being chosen, of knowing God has put you in this world and given it to you to enjoy, chosen you to enjoy living.  He said:

You never enjoy the world aright until every morning you awake in heaven . . . You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars and see yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world . . .Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in scepters, you never enjoy the world.

It’s that incredible delight in the knowledge of being chosen that Traherne reflects in those words: “to delight in God as misers do in gold . . .”  We are rich.  God loves us.  We need to understand that we, you and I,  in a small church in a small community have been given a gift beyond the combined powers of Donald Trump and Barack Obama and the Pope of Rome.

When I got up this morning I was thinking about this sermon and whether it really said what I wanted to say, and I remembered a poem of e.e.cummings that says some of these same things.
Do you remember e.e.cummings?  He was an early 20th century poet who never capitalized anything and ran words together in a funny way?  I think I probably read one or two of his poems in a high school English course and you remember him not so much because of what he said as because of his funny way of writing.  How does God get our attention?  Listen:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

In that poem, actually, cummings makes an exception and does capitalize ”God”and “You” referring to God.  So “God” is the word that gets your attention: whatever it is in your life that needs a capital letter.   Whatever it is that awakens the ears and opens the eyes and reminds us of “most this amazing day and life,” that’s God choosing and pursuing and calling you to pay attention and respond.  Are you listening?

Jesus Christ rose from the dead.  That is a statement about history and for the last month the Sunday readings have been exploring what that means in very concrete terms. We’ve heard about Thomas who was challenged to touch for himself. We’ve heard about the sharing of food on several occasions.  We’ve heard about the disciples encountering the risen Christ in very practical ways: touch, taste, see for your self. It’s been physical evidence we’ve been given.

Today we’re on different turf.  Today, in fact, we are back in the upper room at the Last Supper and Jesus is talking in very different terms. He says, “I am the vine; you are the branches.  . . . Abide in me as I abide in you. . . abide in my love.”  Now what’s that all about?  “Abide in me . . .”  Some other translations say, “Remain in me.” But however you put it, this is a lot different, it seems to me, from sharing a meal. “Remain WITH me” is one thing; “Remain IN me” is different.

Whatever it means, it seems to have to do with relationships, so let’s begin with relationships we know about: spouse, child, parent, close friend.  You know, we might say to anyone like that: “Stay with me; stay with me.”  And that’s a very specific, material request. But the relationships that matter to us don’t depend on that, do they?  You can be here and the one you care about in Missoula or Mongolia or Montenegro and the relationship is still as strong as ever; the distance may even make the relationship more on your mind than ever.  They are, we would say, “in our thoughts.” “in our hearts;” not with us at the moment, but in our lives in a very real way, separated from us physically but not spiritually.

This opens up, I think, one of the most basic aspects of what it is to be human.  A human being isn’t like a tree, isn’t like a dog or cat, isn’t like your house. If I’m in your house, that’s a very specific thing and it ends the minute I go out the door.  But “in your thoughts” has no location; it is wherever you are. I’m in your house or I’m not in your house. And I can’t be in it when I’m in China.  But I can be in your thoughts anytime, any place, I can, in fact, be in your thoughts even if I’m dead.  Human beings have this strange capacity to claim a reality for what we call “spiritual” things.  We seem to believe that there are realities that science can’t measure.  We can talk about courage and patience and justice and love.  Try stopping in a drug store and asking for some of that: “I’d like a bottle of courage, please; charge it to my account.” Well, you might do that in a liquor store but that’s different. Or stop at Walmart and ask for a few pounds of justice.  You can’t buy these things at a store, but do you doubt that they are real?

The fact is that we are here, yes, because of what happened on Easter Day and, yes, because of the resurrection and also for lots of very tangible reasons: friends and liturgy and building and community and lots more – but more important, I think, because of some other very real things for which we would have no adequate words at all. We use that word “spiritual” and I think we also need the word “mystical.” It’s not a word we use a lot but I think it’s a good word, a useful word, and I think there’s a bit of the mystic in all of us. We may not give it much of an opening. We may very well find it uncomfortable territory and an area of life we’d rather avoid most of the time. But it’s real, and it’s there. and the gospel today, it seems to me, asks us to explore what it might mean to remain in Jesus, live in Jesus, abide in Jesus, be aware of a relationship, a mystical reality, at the center of our lives.

So what I want to do in this sermon is to encourage you to think of yourself as a mystic.  And I’m going to give you two examples that you may not relate to very easily, but bear with me.

My first example is Julian of Norwich. You might have heard of her; she’s had kind of a revival lately. Julian was born in 1342 and at some point became an anchoress, that is, she was walled into a cell with only three windows to live in seclusion and meditation for the rest of her life.  The revelations that came to her there have been published again and again because of the beauty of the language and mystical truth they contain. Here’s a brief sample:

Our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving. I saw that He is to us everything that is good and comfortable for us: He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love, that He may never leave us; being to us all-thing that is good, as to mine understanding. . . . Also in this He shewed me a little thing, the quality of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with eye of my understanding, and thought: What may this be? And it was answered generally thus: It is all that is made. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it. And so All-thing hath Being by the love of God.  In this Little Thing I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover,—I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me.

Now, there are modern translations of that and maybe I should have used one to make it less remote – but I love the language.  All creation, Julian says, is to God like a hazel nut in the palm of your hand – yet God loves us. And here’s Julian’s way of speaking about “abiding in Christ:” that ties us into this morning’s gospel.  She says, “He is our clothing that for love wrappeth us, claspeth us, and all encloseth us for tender love,.” Jesus said, be to me like thr branches of a vine.  Julian says, God is to be to us like our clothing that wraps us, clasps us, and encloses us out of love.  We should be, as Julian puts it, “oned” with God so there is nothing at all between us.

Mysticism is the sense that we are made to be  in that sort of relationship with God. The branches that abide in the wine.  Here’s one more example: Thomas Traherne was an English priest  who was born in 1636 and died at the age of 38. He served a small parish in the west of England and no one had much heard of him  until about 1900  when a scholar picked up a collection of his writings from a push cart on the street  with other books no one wanted. Traherne also had that deep sense of the reality of an unseen world.  He wrote:

What is more easy and sweet than Meditation? . . .To think well is to serve God in the Interior Court, to have a Mind composed of Divine Thoughts . . .

And Traherne always looked to the world to turn our minds toward God.  He said,

When you are once acquainted with the world, you will find the goodness and wisdom of God so manifest therein that it was impossible another or better should be made.

He said,

You never enjoy the world aright until every morning you awake in heaven . . . You never enjoy the world aright until the sea itself flows in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars and see yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world . . .Till you can sing and rejoice and delight in God as misers do in gold and kings in scepters, you never enjoy the world.

The great advantage I have in understanding that is that I live in the Northwest Corner of Connecticut and can hardly avoid that kind of delight in creation  that notices the light green haze spreading up the mountains and notices the shad blow and apple blossoms and lilacs and lets it improve the day. Mysticism is just that simple: an awareness of beauty,  an ability to think about something  more than the next meal, the next chore;  to be aware of a larger purpose in every small task well done. To be a mystic is to be truly human, to know that life is more than what the genes make us or perhaps to know that somehow our genetic makeup, our physical self is never satisfied with physical things alone.

Let me be very specific.  Do you let the mystic in you live?      Do you encourage that part of yourself or stifle it?  You could ask your Rector for suggestions.  You could join a prayer group.  You could go to your google search slot and type in “Jesus Prayer” or “Centering Prayer.”  You could look in your Prayer Book for the short forms of prayer for morning, noon, early evening and evening.  You can make prayer and Bible reading and meditation a real part of your life, as much a routine as meal times; after all your spiritual side needs feeding and exercise as much as your physical side.

“Abide in me,” Jesus said.  Let your life be so deeply grounded in the knowledge of the love of God that it transforms who you are, transforms all that you do, and though you transforms the world God made until God is all in all.

Several years ago I got into a conversation with a retired farmer in Canaan about the relative intelligence of sheep and cows. Cows are smarter.  They know when to come home and they know their own stall. Cows are smarter.  They know when to come home and they know their own stall. He told me about a visit he had from a city friend who was surprised by the way the cows would come into the barn and go straight to their own stalls.  And the farmer told him,  “That’s why we have those plaques on each stall with each cow’s name on it, so they can find their own more easily.

Well, cows may be smart, but not that smart. But you would never think that about sheep. Sheep are not smart at all. But Jesus used them as an example because they are a lot like human beings:
they have a tendency to err and stray from their ways.  The cowherd claps his hands and calls Bossy and gets a Bossy comes.  The shepherd needs a crook to pull the sheep back from danger with a pointed end to prod the sheep and a good sheep dog if possible to run around and bark at the sheep and nip at their heels to get them moving the right way.

Jesus chose a relatively stupid animal as an illustration of God’s love for us – and it isn’t a compliment! Jesus is saying we are like sheep: wandering, without much inner guidance, with a tendency to get lost, with a tendency to get into trouble. It’s not, as I said, a compliment, but it is probably a fair assessment. Yeah, human beings are like that. I know myself well enough to recognize the appropriateness of the illustration.

But the other side of the coin is that for all of that, nevertheless, God values us.  The shepherd would not exert himself for the sheep if there weren’t some value there: wool, mutton, chops.  Very few people raise raccoons.  The sheep have a value to the shepherd. And the implication is that we have a value to God.

Is that obvious?  Probably not.  When you stop to think of the billions of people crowding the planet, living very often in conditions that no self-respecting sheep would put up with, and put that in the perspective of a span of creation in which the human lifespan is insignificant and a span of space in which this earth is a grain of sand, who could imagine that a Creator would care?  And yet, the Bible makes that claim.  It goes far beyond that: it says that we are made in the image of God; we are in some essential way like God. Sheep are not much like the shepherd; they’re a different order of being. No number of sheep can change a light bulb; they can’t even find their way home. But the Bible claims that we are like God in some essential way. And therefore God values us as we would value our own children. The Bible speaks of God as loving us, yearning for us, grieving over us and finally entering into our lives and living here among us and dying for us.

Now, what that also means is that God in some essential way is like us. It always surprises me when I have the chance to speak with a couple planning to be married and find out that they haven’t the foggiest idea what God is like.  They have some vague idea of a distant, impersonal power – what the movies call “The Force” – which is not something I much relate to:  “The Force.”  Can you fall in love with a Force or imagine a Force that sees you as anything more than an insignificant force to be absorbed or manipulated or annihilated?  We use force ourselves – sometimes well, sometimes badly – but force is a tool and our relationship with force is to control or be controlled. The Force is a tornado destroying homes, a military invasion, a cancer.

A force is many things but none of them loveable. God is not like that.  Nor did Jesus ever use language like that. God in Jesus’ teaching is sometimes a powerful king but more often a forgiving father, a careful housewife, a hen with chickens, a shepherd with sheep, one who cares for the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and knows our needs and loves us.  It’s not a particular compliment Jesus pays us in comparing us with sheep but it is a wonderful gift: God cares; God values us; God loves us.

Now that’s good to know but it’s not enough. It comes with a job to do. The Gospel speaks of other sheep who must also be brought so that finally there is one flock and one shepherd. I’ve had many a disagreement over the years with well-meaning Christians who wonder why we should spend our time worrying about foreign mission and trying to convert people to our faith when they have a perfectly good faith of their own.  Well-meaning but totally confused.  Does it make a difference to you to know God loves you? Wouldn’t it matter to someone else as well? Someone once described the church’s mission as being like that of hungry beggars who know where bread is to be found and tell others.

Is there really no difference between Christianity and Islam, between a religion of submission and a religion of freedom, between a religion of a distant God and the knowledge of a close and loving God? Yes, we have things in common: one God, a God of mercy. But also vast differences. There are people who think it’s fine to get all the marbles and keep them. There are others who know instinctively that gifts are given to be shared. The Gospel surely, is a gift to be shared.

In the early hears of the Christian Church there were people called Gnostics who believed that there was secret knowledge available only to insiders and initiates. You couldn’t be given the secret knowledge unless you proved yourself worthy over a long time of training.  Gnosticism won a good many followers for awhile; it’s nice to think you are in on a secret and that you have earned the right to special status. But Gnosticism was condemned as a heresy.  Christianity is not like that. Christianity is about a love that needs to be shared with everyone, no holds barred. It’s open and available and there for the taking and if that means that the church is filled with people who don’t seem quite nice or quite as deserving as we are – well, that’s the way Jesus and his disciples seemed to a lot of people in that time also. “Why does your master eat with publicans and sinners?”  “If this man is a prophet, how come he’s doesn’t know what kind of woman this is that he’s talking to?” That was the criticism. And Jesus accepted that criticism.  He said, “The well have no need of a doctor but only those who are sick.” Jesus told his disciples to go into all the world, not stay home where it’s safe, not keep it a secret, but go find those other sheep who are no more or less sheepish than you are; find them and bring them home to the God who loves them and wants them to know that love.

We are members of a church that works to balance the budget and has all to little left for others. It may be that we have our priorities wrong, that we need to get mission into our budget first and then see whether we have anything left for ourselves because the job isn’t done just because the doors are open on Sunday.  Jesus did not say, “I’m waiting here with the door open.” The Good Shepherd doesn’t stand there waiting for the lost sheep to come back but goes looking.  There’s work to be done and we have barely begun to do it.

So there’s good news in today’s gospel but a challenge as well: God loves us – but not just us. Our God is the Good Shepherd who loves us all and seeks to bring us all home. God calls us to help make that love known.

Many years ago, I had an assistant who was just out of seminary and one Sunday it was his turn to preach – maybe the first time he had done it. The epistle reading that morning was I Corinthians 13, the great passage about love: “Faith, hope, and love remain, but the greatest of these is love.”  So the time for the sermon came and he went to the pulpit and read it again and then he said, “That’s just so beautiful, I don’t think there’s much I can add to it, so let’s just take some time to think about it” And then he sat down and we all waited to see what would happen next and I have to admit that I didn’t think about I Corinthians 13 at all because I was trying to think of a way to move the service ahead.

I remembered that this last week when I started to think about this sermon and the readings we have just heard and was I drawn to the reading from the first epistle of John and wondered what more could be said and whether that young assistant’s approach might not have something to be said for it.  Listen again to John:

See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.  Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.

What more is there to say?  John himself runs out of words: “What we shall be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”

I’ve spent a lot of time in recent weeks talking about the difference it makes to be a Christian but I’ve been talking about it in terms of the impact we ought to make on the world around us. Today, if we pay attention to the epistle, we’re asked to think about the difference it makes in us and, really, we probably ought to think about that first because how can we make a difference in the world unless we ourselves are different?

But here’s the problem: the difference comes in two ways and one of them is beyond words. Last week John was plain and simple: “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”  But, you know, dealing with sin is the easy part. we confess and we are forgiven. Well, that’s easier to say than to do but at least you can say it and sometimes, on our good days, we can do it. But John is pointing us beyond that.  He’s saying sin and forgiveness are just a first step toward a future beyond words and beyond imagination. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.”

There are two steps there: first, “we are God’s children now.” We could sit for awhile and contemplate that. Do you take it for granted?  You shouldn’t.  I think we sometimes write it off as something that’s a “given,” as if it comes with being born: “all human beings are children of God; we’re all God’s children.” But I don’t think so.  God is the Creator and all human beings, like all cats and dolphins and red-tailed hawks are God’s creation. But not God’s children, not part of God’s family. Potentially, yes, but to become a child of God requires baptism; it’s what baptism is all about.

When we baptize a child the whole congregation joins in saying, “We receive you into the household of God.” In other words, “Welcome to the family; the family of God’s children.” We are children of God the Bible tells us, not by nature but by adoption and grace.  St Paul talks about it in the Epistle to the Galatians:

God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, in order to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!”  So you are no longer a slave but a child, and if a child then also an heir, through God.  (4:4-7)

So that’s an amazing first step toward an even more amazing future: God, the Creator of the universe, makes human beings of dust and then provides a way for us, these creatures of dust, to become God’s own children. And what John is meditating on is that this has consequences, it has to be only a first step because we earth creatures, on the surface at least, have nothing in common with the eternal God.

We say on Ash Wednesday, “You are dust and to dust you shall return.” But if so, why bother?  Potentially, at least, there seems to be something more and it’s hinted at already in the first chapter of Genesis. We looked at it briefly last week at the beginning of the Vestry meeting.   It says, “God created humankind in the image of God.”  We may be only dust but there is something in us from the very beginning capable of reflecting God. And what would that be?  How do we, in any way, resemble God?

Well, of course, what often happens is that we draw pictures of a God who resembles us. We make God in our image. Even the great artists – da Vinci, Michelangelo – picture God as an old man on a cloud: God, in the paintings, looks a lot like us. And what else can they do?  If God doesn’t look like us, what does God look like?  But the Bible actually tells us a lot about what God is like and some of it can be seen in human life: there’s justice, for example.  God is just and we are somewhat just, we aspire to be just. Maybe we know someone or know of someone who seems to be absolutely fair and just in their dealings with other people: a teacher who gives equal attention to every child, a businessman or woman who treats every employee and customer fairly,  a politician who is never influenced by money or special interests. God is like that – only more so – and God is merciful and forgiving. Above all, God is love.  And these are qualities we see in human beings and admire and we know that we all have the potential to embody these qualities more fully than we do.  We could be more like that. And we can dimly imagine someone who really is like that completely, perfectly.  Out there, somewhere, we might imagine Is one who embodies these qualities perfectly and what we see is just a pale reflection of our potential.

So in a sense God is like us, but infinitely, unimaginably more.  God’s justice and love and so on, of course, are so far beyond ours that the resemblance is only slight but we do instinctively know when we see mercy and forgiveness and self-forgetting love in a human being that that’s what we ought to be. We know instinctively that God is like that and we ought to be, ought to be and can be.

We have that potential.  And those qualities, when we see them, give us a glimpse of God. And of course that’s why the followers of Jesus Christ very soon began to say that in seeing and knowing him they had also come to know God. “God was in Christ,” said St Paul, “reconciling the world to himself.” God was in Christ showing us what God is like and drawing us back to that lost likeness, that image in which God first created us, and that we so quickly lost at the very beginning.

John says, “We are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.”  So baptism makes us the children of God by adoption and grace and starts us on the road home. But even knowing Jesus, we don’t really know what we will be. We have only seen Jesus in human form. What will he be like in glory?  We can hardly imagine. And will we be like that?  Yes, that’s what John tells us.  Yes, we can hardly imagine, but we will be like that.

I’ve been talking the last few weeks about the failures of American Christianity and maybe the greatest of all is that it sets its sights so low.  It tells us to be happy or be good or repent but John points beyond all that to something unimaginable.  He tells us we were made for glory, and that glory dazzles human eyes.  We would need new eyes to see it, new bodies to live it. But that’s what John wants us to understand: we were made for a glory so far beyond our understanding that no revelation can show us and no words contain it.  It’s not a question of keeping the commandments, not even a question of loving God and loving our neighbor. That’s all well and good and we need to be working at it, but it’s a question of growing into God and I think that’s why there’s eternity. It may well take an eternity or two even to begin to be who God made us to be.

John Donne, as usual, said it best almost 400 years ago: “Can you hope to pour the whole sea into a thimble or take the whole world into your hand?  And yet, that is easier than to comprehend the joy and glory of heaven in this life.  For this eternity, this everlastingness, is incomprehensible in this life.”  Incomprehensible, yes, but now, right now, we can make a beginning. We can remember our baptisms, the baptism that made us God’s children. We can come here to be fed at God’s table; how could we grow up without food, after all, and that food is Christ himself because we are called to grow into Christ, to be members of his body. And then we can pray and ask God’s help daily to draw us closer to that destiny for which we were made and which we will never fully understand until we are there in the presence of God and able to be at last all we are meant to be and what we can begin to be now.

Last Sunday I said some things about the new life God gives us in Christ and the failure of American churches  to exemplify that life. Then I went home to read the New York Times and found the feature article in the Sunday Review headed “Divided by God.”  It was a fascinating article and said a lot of the same things  I had said in my sermon. The article talked about the disappearance of a “Christian center” and said the result has been “division, demonization,  and polarization.”

That night I wrote a short letter to the Times.  I didn’t send it, but what I said was, “It doesn’t have to be that way”  I said that there are lots of churches like St.  Paul’s Bantam  that continue to stand  as near the middle as possible, keeping the traditional catholic ministry and sacraments  and trying to make a difference in the community.

But I think the Times is right:  there’s far too much division in American churches. And that means we all have a job to do  to find the things that unite us. I think there is a center. I think our job is to try to find ways  to draw people back  from the extremes that only divide us.  Now, last week I illustrated that  in terms of the resurrection. This week again, the readings are as good a place to start as any. The readings last week and today point to a central issue. Last week it was life.  This week it’s sin.

Let me talk about sin.  The epistle reading said: “ If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves.”  In the Gospel, Jesus said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”  So we need to talk about sin.  Sin is a big part of life. You probably have some experience with it.  We all do.  But the gospel is not only about sin, it’s also about forgiveness.

I think the extremists miss the point.  I think at one extreme they ignore sin entirely and at the other extreme  they spend too much time on it but don’t really understand it.  On the one hand, there’s a kind of Christianity out there  that hardly ever mentions sin. They don’t want to upset people. They talk about being positive and happy and emphasize feeling good.  But that’s not Christianity.  Christianity is about the love of God, yes, but it recognizes the many ways we reject that love and shut God out of our lives. There’s a lot of Christianity that skips over all that and gives you comfortable chairs and entertaining music and says, “Feel good.” But Christian faith is about facing sin  and being restored to life, forgiven, renewed, nourished, fed. It’s about being changed  and changing the world.  And it starts with forgiveness for sin.

The other extreme knows that  and puts sin at the center  as if it were all that mattered. Some preachers make it sound  as if sin is all we care about.  They ask you to admit you are a sinner, repent, confess.  And not just some.  I think all the traditional churches  have been guilty of an overemphasis on sin, pounding it in over and over  and never moving on to the joy of forgiveness and the peace that comes afterwards. There’s a lot of it especially in the Evangelical tradition.  The old New England Puritan, Jonathan Edwards, is famous still for his sermon titled,  “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Sin is still overdone in a lot of evangelical churches  and the worst part of it is that it often gets identified with sex. The Roman Church also has done that.  It’s one of the reasons why priests can’t marry and women can’t be ordained. Sin and sex get wrapped up together  and that misses the point too. It makes for a narrow kind of Christianity  that’s good at condemning but not very good at encouraging,  forgiving, renewing, strengthening, giving thanks for God’s goodness.

But sin is not just about sex or swearing or stealing  or lying – that’s the easy part. The churches that center on sin tend to center on personal failures and, of course, there’s plenty to talk about. There’s a lot to be said for private confession.  Our new Prayer Book has a form to use for private confession  and it probably ought to be used more than it is. But private confession also is often focused on private sins, personal sins,  Individual failures, and totally ignores  what may be the worst sins we’re involved in.

Sin is separation from God  and, yes, we separate ourselves from God when we cheat and lie and steal  and take God’s name in vain, but that’s mostly a private matter  and only affects ourselves. I think that maybe the worst sins  are the ones we seldom talk about in church: sins that have a social dimension:  war and unemployment and a justice system that fails to correct and an educational system that fails to educate and a health care system and economic system  that leave too many people outside. I can go down the list of the Ten Commandments  and check off making a graven image and committing adultery and murder  and feel pretty good about myself but where do wars come from  and why aren’t our schools better and why are there so many unemployed? Is no one responsible?  Does it all just happen to happen and nothing can be done about it? Does anyone think it’s God’s will?

I would think it was pretty obvious  that war and unemployment and so on result from human decisions,  but often a set of human decisions so interlinked that it’s hard to say who did it. And the truth is that no one person did it. No, lots of people did it. We all failed to be wise enough or caring enough  to make wise choices and the result is that people suffer.  Sin has a social dimension Jesus fed the hungry and healed the sick because how can you know God’s love when you’re sick and hungry  and can’t find a decent place to live? How can we come here and talk about God’s love  and not be concerned for those who are hungry and homeless and unemployed? But who’s responsible? Well, there might have been a time  when individuals could say “It’s not my fault.” But not in a democracy,  not when we choose the people who pass the laws  that either make a difference for those in need  or allow such evils to go unchecked and grow.

We may not make much use of private confession  in the Episcopal Church but hardly a week goes by that we don’t join in a General Confession  that says “we” not “I.” “We confess that we have sinned. . .”  We have failed, among other things,  to care enough for our neighbors. But the churches that talk most about sin,  as I said, are often the churches  that talk least about corporate sin. And if sin is whatever separates us from God  then there are social sins, corporate sins,  sins we act out together. And I think our society also  has created a whole new category of sin, stuff that doesn’t seem sinful  in any traditional way but separates us from God  as surely as murder and adultery. What about the organizations  that schedule events on Sunday morning? They scheduled a debate, for example,  at 11 am this morning among the Connecticut senate candidates.  You can go watch it or stay for communion.  Your choice: civic responsibility or relationship with God.  They can’t schedule it for prime time viewing, of course, because we have to watch “Dancing with the Stars” or something else more important.  And then we wonder why Congress is so incompetent!  And what about Little League; is Little League sinful?  Well, yes, if it keeps us from worship,  if it schedules its games on Sunday morning.  If it separates us from God, what else would you call it?  Somewhere someone, someones, are making decisions that keep people from God. That’s the definition of sin.

There was a day when our society  kept the Sabbath day holy. That made it a whole lot easier to be Christian.  But if society no longer takes faith for granted,  then we have a choice between going along with it, pretending it doesn’t matter, or finding ways to do what we need to do  to hold on to and build up and deepen our relationship with God. That begins, I think, with recognizing the social dimension of sin, that is more insidious just because it starts with others  and never asks us to make a conscious decision to disobey God,  just to go along and get along and pretend it doesn’t matter.

But it does matter.  Even the New York Times recognizes it.  And the churches need to recognize it as well.  The churches that carry on about abortion  are missing the point, taking the easy out. It’s much too easy to condemn someone else.  We can feel very righteous about condemning others. But the sins that beset our society  are broader and deeper and affect millions more than will ever want an abortion. They begin with us  and all the people who never let their faith inconvenience them. When was the last time I had to make any hard decisions because of my faith? When was the last time you did?  When was the last time you tried to think through the connection  between all the problems of our society and our faith?  If we say that we have no sin,  St John tells us, we deceive ourselves.

I think the New York Times was on to something.  The center isn’t there. Too many churches just ignore sin  and tell us God wants us to be happy. Well, yes, God surely does;  but we can’t happy – God can’t be happy – when so many of our neighbors are not happy. We are asked to love our neighbors as ourselves and we have too many neighbors  who aren’t experiencing love, and there’s too little being done  to create a social system  that doesn’t just feed the hungry but enables more people to find work that enables them to feed themselves.

Christianity is not about ignoring the real world,  or withdrawing from it or rising above it. Christianity is about getting into the world and loving it all as Jesus did  and working to feed and heal and help. There’s too much American Christianity  that doesn’t understand that, that focuses on feeling good  while ignoring the world’s problems.  The NY Times said, “We are all heretics.”  Well, not all, but many. It was often dissenters and rebels  who came here and it only got worse with time..  Americans invented Christian Science and Unitarianism and Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormonism and many other sects that are certainly not traditional mainstream Christianity.

The Times last Sunday said, “we’re a nation of heretics in which most people still associate themselves  with Christianity but revise its doctrines as  they see fit.” That’s exactly what I was saying last week.  And that’s why this week’s readings are so important. “We deceive ourselves,” St John tells us,  “if we say that we have no sin.” We deceive ourselves, if we fail to see the real and deep problems we face and just go along when decisions are made  that draw us away from God. We deceive ourselves  if we opt for a “feel good faith” or imagine that sin is about somebody else  or just about private matters.  Sin is corrupting and destroying our society  and most churches and Christians are looking the other way.

The Gospel calls us to recognize our sin and repent and seek remedies and that will be hard work.  But the Gospel also tells us that God’s will is forgiveness. God’s will is to love us.  God’s will is to call us together  to recognize our failures  and find forgiveness and to love God and love our neighbor and carry the new life we are given  out to a world that needs to know that love and that forgiveness.  If we know that, if we understand that,  maybe we can begin to come together and begin to solve some of our country’s problems and our own as well.  If we face the truth about ourselves, and know the truth about God’s love and forgiveness,  then, with God’s help, we can begin to make a difference.

The problem of preaching at Easter is     that you can say it all in three words:  He is risen. But if I don’t stop there, there’s no way I can say what needs to be said  about this day’s good news  in ten or fifteen minutes – or an hour -  or a week – or a year – or fifty years. I could say, “Jesus Christ is risen today”  and move on to the next thing in the service but if I don’t stop there, there’s always more that needs to be said.

This is about life – new life – eternal life. It changes everything. If you understand this day’s meaning  it changes the world.  And surely the world needs to be changed.  Surely something is missing when the churches are full  but the world seems unchanged.  I’ve said too much in recent weeks about politics  but that’s what we read about day after day and see on the evening news. And if this is, as some believe, a Christian country,  shouldn’t we see the difference that makes?

Certainly the vast majority of Americans  still call themselves Christians, so where’s the evidence?  What’s the difference?  Where would you look?  What would you expect to see? They said of the first Christians  that they had “turned the world upside down.”  What would that mean today? Would anyone say it about us?  I’ve heard it said that you should always read the newspaper with the Bible in one hand  and the newspaper in the other. I’d like to see you try it without burning yourself  and ruining the paper! But seriously,  the question we ought to be asking, it seems to me, is:  does our faith make a difference?  Does Easter make a difference? If it does, shouldn’t we see it in the news?

The center of today’s Gospel is  an empty tomb, the triumph of life over death.  The gospel is about life – new life – eternal life.  The newspaper and evening news on television are also about life – the very latest news  on life in this world today. What about health care?  Isn’t that about life? Over the centuries, the church has made more of an impact on the world by involvement in health care  than any other way. If you travel in Asia or Africa  you find good hospitals where there were none two hundred years ago  and the first ones almost always were started by missionaries as an expression of their faith, their concern for life.  In this country as well,  the first hospitals were usually begun by Christian leaders. How many hospitals are named for saints? Here in CT we have St Raphael’s, St Francis, St Mary,  St Vincent -  to say nothing of St Charlotte Hungerford.

Do you know Charlotte Hungerford’s story? Let me quote from the hospital web site: “active in almost every religious and civic activity in Torrington. This redoubtable woman was known for her courage, cheerfulness and moral strength. At age 20, she took on her husband’s two children from his first marriage and then went on to add 12 children of her own to the family. When her husband died, she “took over his business, supporting herself and her family while continuing her charitable endeavors.”  No wonder her son endowed a hospital and named it for her. That’s what I mean by making a difference, changing the world, sharing life.

But my point is,  modern health care systems began as an expression of faith,  Easter faith, faith in life. And in this most Christian country  Christians have always been deeply involved in that work,  so it’s appropriate  that we be concerned about health care.  But constructively.  Constructively.

I was interested to see on the news last week  that Republicans are beginning to worry about what to do if the Supreme Court overrules the current law because, as one of them said,  we will have to do something. Exactly.  We have to do something,  especially if we are Christians  with an Easter faith in life.  Health care is too expensive and too limited. Our lives are confined and constricted by an inadequate system instead of being opened and shared. I can’t tell you from this place  what the best solution is but I can tell you that we need solutions,  we need a way to express our concern for life, new life, risen life, eternal life. And if Christians can’t work together to find solutions to our problems we have really failed as people of faith, our faith has failed to make a difference, and we need to get down on our knees and repent and ask for help and guidance.

It’s all about life.  So is almost every issue we face.  It’s about connecting our faith  to the world out there. A faith that doesn’t connect, that doesn’t make a difference, is a useless faith.  What about abortion and the death penalty?  Isn’t that about life? I’m opposed to both myself. But I also don’t believe it’s the government’s job  to decide who should live and who should die, whether an unborn fetus or a murderer – let the government put the murderers in jail  but otherwise stay out of the way.  It’s about life, new life, unrestricted life.  Every abortion is a human failure.  But laws are not the answer. Every murder is a human failure,  but another death is not the solution. We believe in life, eternal life.  That’s what my faith says to me. You may get a different message  and that’s fine – but let’s talk about it, not fight, not slander each other.

Go on down the list: Afghanistan, illegal immigrants,  whatever it may be, it always comes back it seems to me to life. And there are no easy solutions, believe me.  God does not give us a simple black and white set of questions and answers as some like to believe. When God says “Choose life,”  what does that mean in relation to Afghanistan? So long as we are there people are dying. If we leave, people will still be dying – maybe more  than if we stayed, maybe fewer. Money spent in Afghanistan could be spent here  for life – better schools, better hospitals. But from God’s perspective, are schools here  more important than schools there? Is the life of an American soldier  more important than the life of an Afghan peasant? I know my own priorities,  but that’s not the question. The question is God’s priorities that we are called to reflect and if you have a clear insight on that,  please speak up!  I don’t have any good answers so if you do, I’d love to hear them.

But I think the answers begin  with agreement on basic principles. And I don’t hear the discussion we need to have.  I just hear people shouting at each other and that’s not helpful,  not life-giving. It’s about life, sharing life, a gift given, not earned.  So why can’t Christians work together  to find answers; not to score points but find solutions?  Why can’t we do that?

The point is life, new life, risen life, eternal life,  a gift we are given not alone for ourselves but always – always – to share with others. I see far too many so-called Christians  happily receiving God’s gift and trying to keep it for themselves. But you can’t do that and really be a Christian.  The minute you fail to share that gift you lose it and that’s what it seems to me all too many of us are doing. We go to church, we thank God for the knowledge of salvation and we go home to enjoy it ourselves and fail to make any difference  in our community. So we have the paradox of this most Christian nation  bitterly divided over life-changing issues and battling it out  in the most self-centered language imaginable  – all about MY health care, MY taxes, MY medicare, MY privacy,  But why are Christians talking that way  when the most basic principle  of the Old and New Testament alike is:  You shall love your neighbor as yourself. It’s about them, not me.

People are entitled, we are told,  to make all the money they can, unrestricted by government. Yes, they are.  And they have a perfect right     to buy as many mansions and luxury cars as they want and build themselves more mansions  and bigger mansions -  but you might remember the Beatles singing  “money can’t buy me love.” You can pile up your millions  but you can’t expect to be loved. I checked the Gallop poll list  of most admired people of the 20th century and there’s not one millionaire or Wall Street executive on the list. Instead it’s people like  1. Mother Teresa 2. Martin Luther King, Jr.  5. Helen Keller  7. Billy Graham  8. Pope John Paul II  13. Mohandas Gandhi 14. Nelson Mandela – not one of them wealthy, at least in financial terms. “It is in giving,” St Francis said, “that we receive. And in dying that we are born to eternal life.”

The message of this day is life,  abundant life, new life poured out,  more than enough for all, and it is – it’s something many of us know from long experience -  only increased by giving it away.  Charlotte Hungerford knew that.  The apostles knew that. St Francis and Mother Teresa and Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela knew that and acted on it.  You know that too. Some of you work in soup kitchens  and food pantries and health care facilities  and bring the food for others that is offered  at this altar every Sunday because you know it’s about life – sharing life – giving life  – reaching out to others  with the love God pours out on us.

It’s about life, the life we receive here at the altar. This day proclaims that life. So let’s go tell the world; yes, and show the world by living that life ourselves.

I remember reading an interview years ago with a famous Russian Jewish writer who was asked what he would do if Tolstoy or Dostoevsky moved in across the street: would he be anxious to meet him? No, he said; he had read their books  and had no need to meet them.

What would you say  if the opportunity came to meet Jesus: would you say, “No, thanks, I’ve read the Bible and that’s enough?”  Actually, I can imagine saying, “No, thanks; I’ve read the Bible and I’d be scared stiff!”

Some have said that after you die  you will first of all come face to face with Jesus. The bishop who ordained me said he had heard that, and he said, “Frankly, I’d rather be fried.”  Well, I understand that.  When you stop to think about your life – what you know Jesus called you to do  and what you actually have done – speaking for myself,  I don’t think I’m any where near ready.

And yet, on the other hand, isn’t there an enormous difference between the opportunity to meet Dostoevsky or Shakespeare or Charles Dickens  or anybody on today’s best seller list or George Washington or any other human being  – and Jesus? Meeting anyone else might satisfy my curiosity but meeting Jesus is coming face to face with the meaning of life. Christians believe it would be coming face to face with God.

For some three years, Jesus had been traveling in Palestine, primarily in Galilee. From Galilee to Jerusalem  is about the distance  from Bantam to Greenwich and in those days it would have taken about four days to walk it. So obviously news about this possible Messiah  had reached Jerusalem; Jesus himself might have been there briefly, but now he had gone there himself  and the people in Jerusalem had a chance to see for themselves  who this famous teacher, this wonder worker might be. And not just the people of Jerusalem  but thousands of other people who had gone there to keep the Passover:  Jews from all around the Mediterranean world, Jews who might never have been in Jerusalem before,  people who had come back to the city of David, the center of their faith,  to keep the Passover in Jerusalem and found it astir with excitement:  had the Messiah come?  Had God’s promise been kept?

And not only were there these Greek-speaking Jews  from around the Mediterranean world but Gentiles as well.  There were Gentiles  who had become interested in Judaism,  seeing it as much more appealing than the foolishness of the Greek and Roman gods  and maybe they had come to Jerusalem to see for themselves the place this belief in one God,  an invisible Creator, had come from: to see Jerusalem, to see the Temple,  to talk first hand  with the best known rabbis. And now there were rumors in addition to all that  that the Messiah had come. Some of them found Phillip, one of the inner circle of Jesus’ disciples,  Phillip, a disciple with a Greek name who presumably could speak their language,  and they told him, “We wish to see Jesus.”

Now that’s not just an interesting little story,  it’s a critical new stage for Jesus’ mission.  This meant contact for the first time  with the Gentile world, the rest of the world. And Jesus saw the importance of it  Now, said Jesus, now the hour has come, “now is the judgment of this world, now when I am lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.”  Now.  “We wish to see Jesus.”  Now, symbolically, the door is opening to the whole world. That’s the story in today’s Gospel:  a critical turning point  leading directly to the events of Holy Week,  leading up to crucifixion and resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit  and the beginning of the mission  that would carry the gospel out  to the rest of the world – and to us. But pay attention to those critical words:  Sir, we wish to see Jesus.

They tell the story of a rather inept preacher  who went into the pulpit week after week  and talked about one thing and another  but never seemed to focus on the Gospel, the good news about Jesus.  He went into the pulpit one Sunday morning  and found a note taped to the pulpit desk: “We wish to see Jesus.” Well, yes: that’s what it’s all about.  We are Christians, followers of Jesus. We need to know Jesus, see Jesus. And that is a radical revolution in the history of faith:  to see Jesus, to see the one who unites us to God,  to come face to face with God in human form.

Now go back.  Go back to the first chapters of Genesis with its stories of Adam and Eve  and a God who wanders in the garden in the cool of the day, Those are good stories and they make a valuable point  but God is not like that and you don’t have to go very far  – just into Exodus, the second book of the Bible to come to Moses and a deeper understanding  of who God is. Moses said, “Show me your glory, I pray.” And God said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you the name, ‘The LORD’; and I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But,” he said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”  (Ex 33 19-20)

There is, after all, a difference between human beings and God. There are areas of the world  around Chernobyl and Sendai where people may never again be able to live  because of the power of the radiant energy that has seeped into the soil. No one can go there and live.  One definition of God is pure energy, radiant energy,  life giving energy. But how safe can it be  for us mere human beings to encounter that energy face to face?

Did you ever read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe  in the Chronicles of Narnia? There’s a lion in it called Aslan who’s a stand-in for God.  There’s a point in the story at which Susan, one of the children,  has heard about Aslan and asks, “But is he safe?”  And the answer comes, “Of course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.  He’s the king, I tell you.”  So, yes, it’s a risk.  You don’t dare take God for granted. “Blessed are the pure in heart,” said Jesus  in the Sermon on the Mount, “for they shall see God.” Those who are not pure in heart  may also see God but they – I, most of us – can hope and expect to have the impurities purged out and that might be painful.

Coming face to face with God’s holiness  is not safe.  That’s why there are the commandments: You shall make no image of God;  you shall not take God’s Name in vain. Yet I hear it taken in vain all the time – OMG – even put that way I want to step back in case the lightening strikes. Good, yes, but not safe.  Not safe, but the center and source of life, the meaning and purpose of life. And God, out of love for us,  wants us to see and to know,  and comes to us in Jesus. No one can see God and live, says the Old Testament.  No one can truly live, says the New Testament, if they have not seen Jesus.

And isn’t that what we come here to do?  I often think of that unfortunate preacher  who found the note in his pulpit. I may be off target,  I’m sure I sometimes am, but I want you to see Jesus here, I want you to see what those Greek pilgrims  wanted to see. I want you, for better or worse,  to come face to face with Jesus.

John Donne, for my money, was the greatest preacher in English and he said this: “Do not therefore be strangers to this face.  See him here that you may know him there. See him in the preaching of the word.  See him in the sacrament. Look him in the face as he lay in the manger, poor,  and then do not murmur at temporal wants,  and doubt not that God has large and strange ways to supply you. Look him in the face in his father’s house,  a carpenter and only a carpenter . . . But bring him nearer and look him in the face as he looked on Good Friday when he whose face the angels desire to look on. . . was so marred, more than anyone . . . when he who bore up the heavens bowed down his head and he who gives breath to all gave up his spirit. And then look him in the face again as he looked on Easter Day, not decayed in the grave, but raised victoriously, triumphantly, to the destruction of death itself. Look him in the face in all these respects, of humiliation and of exultation too.  And then, as a picture looks at the one who looks at it, God on whom you keep your eye will keep God’s eye on you. And, as in the creation, when God commanded light out of darkness but gave you a capacity for this light, and as in your calling, when God shines in your heart, God gave you a beginning of this light, so in associating yourself to God at the last day, God will perfect, consummate, accomplish all, and give you the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.”

Yes, see him in all those places  and see him also in the poor and the suffering, see him in the evening news, see him in Trayvon Martin, and see him at the checkout counter  and in your neighborhood.

Let me tell you a story  about one time when I know I saw Jesus. I was making hospital calls one day and in a bit of a hurry because someone was waiting for me and I was walking down a corridor where there was a row of wheel chairs  with elderly and apparently senile patients. I’ve often had the experience  of such people seeing my collar and asking for a blessing, but I was in a hurry so I was trying to avoid eye contact  and I heard a voice.  The voice was inside my head but I heard it  loud and clear: “He had no beauty that we should desire him.”  It’s a familiar verse from the prophet Isaiah and often seen as a prophecy  of Jesus’ suffering and dying. He had no beauty that we should desire him. I’m sure there’s a good scientific explanation  of how a familiar verse would come to mind under the circumstances, but out loud?  All I know is  that Jesus was sitting there in a wheel chair and I was trying to avoid eye contact, trying to avoid seeing his face.

My advice to you is,  don’t ever do that. Be prepared to see Jesus today or tomorrow  and never turn away. Ask God to open your mind and heart  to see that face, to see Jesus beside you, with you, in you so truly that others will see Jesus in you.

John 3:16 is a bumper sticker.  You’ve probably seen it; maybe just the reference: John 3:16, maybe with the text which would be too small to read unless you’re closer than you ought to be to the car ahead of you.

John 3:16 is the second verse in today’s Gospel reading. I have an “Amplified Bible” that enlarges, dilates, expands on, every verse of the Bible and it puts John 3:16 this way:

For God so greatly loved and dearly prized the world that he even gave up his only be-gotten, unique Son so that whoever believes in, trusts in, clings to, relies on Him shall not perish, come to destruction, be lost but have eternal, everlasting life.

Well, OK, but what does it mean?  What difference does it make? What should I do about it?  Faith is a hard thing to pin down.  The people who put those bumper stickers on their car would probably tell you they are evangelical, born again Christians. Well, we are all born again Christians except some of us were born again when we were baptized and some weren’t.  Some people never got a good start or maybe got a good start and then drifted away and so they had to be born again later on or maybe had to be born again again and when that happens it’s often an emotional thing and some churches cater to that and make worship a dramatically emotional thing with a lot of hand waving and hallelujahs and that’s ok – maybe – sometimes.

But the trouble with emotions is that they come and go. You can get very involved emotionally in a movie or book or church service but you can’t live on emotions all day.  You can get very emotional about a new relationship but it won’t be like that for fifty years – - not every day.  You have to do the shopping and pay the bills and put food on the table and those aren’t emotional activities most of the time. You feel good briefly, but it wears off.

The churches that cater to the emotions come and go, they don’t last. The people that center their faith on their emotions very often don’t apply their faith, they leave it in church and don’t take it with them into a world that needs something more than an occasional emotional jolt. You can’t keep up March madness very far into April.  There are churches that pop up like mushrooms, build a big box on the edge of town and fill their parking lots with people provide coffee and donuts and bowling alleys and, yes, the emotional impact of a service with a rock band and power point sermon. But does it build a community? Will it still be there when a new preacher comes?

Emotional religion also tends to be a very individualistic thing.  It’s all about me; me and my feelings. There must be something about the life we live these days that makes us respond to that type of approach. The standard Episcopal Hymnal has 14 hymns that begin with the word “I.” The Renew Hymnal was 17 in half as big a book.  There’s another supplemental hymnal produced by the Episcopal Church with even more first person hymns. And surely they have a place.  We are all emotional beings, we tear up at weddings and funerals, but some of us more than others.

Emotion is also a cultural thing to some degree. The English, you know, are famous for the stiff upper lip and restrained emotions.  I spent a month many years ago in an English parish and I stood with the Rector at the door at the end of the service to greet people as they left. And they would nod slightly and say, “Good Morning, Mr Chamberlain,” and he would nod slightly and say, “Good morning, Mrs, Jones” or “Good morning, Mr Smith” but they never actually touched each other.  In the four weeks I was there I only saw one person actually shake the Rector’s hand and he was an American visitor.

Episcopalians have a good deal of that English restraint. It’s not that we aren’t emotional, we just don’t express it as openly. It’s not that one pattern is good and the other is bad.  Some of us would like a bit more emotion and some a bit less and we need to find patterns that work for all of us as well as we can. We don’t all have the same favorite hymns we don’t all have the same needs for physical contact.  God made us different and our parents made us different and our society makes us different and there’s a place for all the variety or God wouldn’t have made us as we are.

Somehow an old spiritual came to mind as I was thinking about this, one that goes, “Sometimes I fell like a motherless child, a long way from home.” Yes, sometimes – maybe more for some than for others – but probably sometimes for all of us and we need a hug, need an emotional charge to get us through whatever it is.

Our pattern of worship in the Episcopal Church is not emotional in that outward sense, not a lot of opportunity for arm waving and Hallelujahs. We do get to touch each other at the peace nowadays; we didn’t used to. But maybe a less emotional worship is more deeply satisfying, maybe more like meat and potatoes as opposed to a chocolate ice cream Sundae. We all like to indulge ourselves once in a while, but it’s not a healthy daily diet, not what you want for breakfast, not something that can sustain you long term.

So for some people John 3:16 is an emotional charge. For all of us there ought to be an emotional component. But beyond the emotions that come and go we need a faith that’s maybe less spectacular but perhaps more deeply felt as a constant transforming presence.

Nicholas Herman was a young soldier in the French army in the seventeenth century when he looked at a barren tree, one winter day, stripped of leaves and fruit, and realized it awaited the sure hope of a springtime revival and summer abundance. Gazing at the tree, he realized that even though he himself felt spiritually dead, there was hope that God had life waiting for him, and at that moment, he said, “first flashed in upon my soul the fact of God,” and a love for God that never ceased.  He left the army to join a monastic order and take the name Brother Lawrence and be assigned to work in the kitchen since he had no education and there he spent the rest of his life.  He said that never after that did he fail to know God’s presence as much in the work of the kitchen as in the monastery chapel. “I began to live,” he said, “as if there were no one save God and me in the world.”

That’s a great gift: a constant sense of God’s presence. Most of us work at it from time to time but somehow never perhaps get there, never quite satisfied. There’s always a nagging feeling that  there’s still room to grow.  But we’re all different.  For some people, a relationship with God is much more an intellectual thing, it’s a question of getting good answers to questions, understanding the Incarnation and Trinity, the sacraments, how it is that God comes to us, more knowing and less feeling.

I was at Hartford Seminary Library last week and noticed a book on John Hus and the Conciliar Movement of the 14th century and on an impulse picked it up and borrowed it. John Hus was an intellectual whose ideas about faith and reforming the church led to conflict with the pope but he said, “I would rather die than forsake the truth” and he was finally burned at the stake. So those were exciting times but the book is not a page turner. I’m about a hundred pages into it and it’s not exciting reading, I have to admit, but interesting – to me – and something I can turn to in an idle moment, when March madness gets boring, that brings me back again to an awareness of God at work in a 15th century martyr and still today, a reminder that God is still at work and calling people as different as John Hus and Nicholas Herman – and you.

So we can know God’s presence and our relationship with God through emotions and intellect but we can also know God’s presence in action.  For some people, the best way to know God or be with God is to be with others, maybe as intentionally as at a soup kitchen or food pantry or after school tutoring program or volunteer work in a hospital. Remember how Jesus said, “Inasmuch as you have done it for one of the least of these, you have done it for me.”  For some, the deepest relationship with God is a relationship with human beings in need – who need our presence  maybe even more than our help – the knowledge that they are not alone,  that somebody actually cares. And maybe we need them to remind us that Jesus is present  in other people and our relationships. Jesus is there in that activity,  that relationship, as truly as in the church service,  the Bible study, the time of prayer.

There’s a place for all these patterns of faith, these various ways of responding to God’s love. Some churches thrive by holding revival services with lots of shouting and emotion; some thrive by offering study groups and speakers to stimulate thought, and some thrive by getting deeply involved in outreach and mission whether in Torrington or Africa, and some thrive by offering a pattern of worship that offers a weekly liturgy that’s familiar and beautiful and peaceful and challenging, and God is present in all of these – and more.

I want to know God’s presence as a conscious, constant reality giving me security and peace and guidance and renewed strength and sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t. But I also know that my sense of God’s presence is constantly distracted by the business of life and the inadequacy of my devotion.  For me, a deep sense of God’s presence is a rare thing. But the sleeping child whose mother or father looks in on him or her and tucks the blankets back in place is completely unaware of the parent’s care and it doesn’t matter. God also is there for us whether we know it or feel it or act on it or not.  I need to remind myself of that as often as possible at the very least by daily prayer and weekly worship.  A bit of emotion from time to time can also be helpful, a commitment to some outreach activity is important. But John 3:16 is still true for all of us, each in the way that works best for us.

John 3:16 remains a vital text: God loved the world so much that God came into the world in Jesus Christ to bring us the gift of life, life now, life here, and life forever.

What about money?

For the last two weeks I’ve had much more to say about politics than I usually do and I will again this morning but then I really hope to drop the subject until the elections are over.  But the readings from the Bible keep giving me a place to start and I hope I can put some of our current events under the searchlight of the Bible to see them in a different perspective than the morning paper and the TV news.

Now, there are preachers out there who talk about politics all the time and take stands on political issues.  That’s not my vocation. But there are also preachers whose sermons are irrelevant, who have nothing to say about anything that matters. And I don’t want to be one of them either.  What I’ve been saying is that the Bible is full of politics. Jesus was crucified on political charges. They said he was a threat to the establishment and he was. So what would Jesus have said about our world, our country today?

The Republican primaries have been largely about sex and money.  The Bible also has a lot to say about sex and money, but not the same things the politicians say and I think we should notice that.  The gospel today, it seems to me, puts the spotlight on money. So let’s focus on that. We can deal with sex any time.

Jesus went into the temple and he found the money changers at work and he trashed their offices and threw them out. He took a controversial position.  He didn’t just preach about money, though he often did that too, but he also acted out what he believed.  Ask yourself which side Jesus would be on in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Given what the money changers have done to our society, to mortgages and to employment, which side would Jesus be on?

Now the money changers were there in the temple courtyard for good religious reasons. They weren’t right inside the temple but outside in a kind of courtyard where they were needed. The Ten Commandments forbid the making of images and the Roman money had the emperor’s image on it.  So if you wanted to make an offering in the Temple you couldn’t use Roman money and the money changers were there to provide you with temple coins free of images. They provided a public service that was useful to religious people. So what was the problem? What was Jesus up to?

If you look in the commentaries, you find a lot about “the cleansing of the temple.” They tell us that Jesus came to clear away the old and usher in the new. Well, yes, but what about the money?  The commentaries aren’t interested in that.

There was another day, you may remember, when Jesus was sitting in the temple and a poor widow came in with two mites, the smallest coins, and placed them in the alms box.  And Jesus commended her. So it wasn’t just money in the temple as if all money corrupts and none of it should be in God’s house; no, not at all.  I think the point is about putting money at the center, making money God.

Suppose you were coming to church to worship God, to recenter, refocus, your life, and they stopped you at the door to change the bills in your wallet for the Vestry-approved church money with no pictures of Lincoln or Washington, and they charge a small fee, of course, for this convenience, and suddenly your thoughts are all about that and whether they gave you the right change or cheated you and you come on in throughly distracted and in no mood to recenter your prayers.

Money can do that to us.  It can grab our attention, distract us from things that matter. Jesus said, “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” You cannot worship God and money. So who do you serve?  What is your priority? Which is first in your life? Money is not God.  That’s point one: money is not God, it is not to be worshiped, not to control our lives.

And money is not ours.  Money is a symbol of other things. It has no value in itself.  You can’t eat it or wear it. Actually you can, in a way; clothing can be a kind of display of wealth. We can convert our money into expensive clothes and cars and houses to show off our wealth. We can have possessions or money as a symbol of our possessions but the word “possession” itself is bad theology.

The Bible tells us that God created the world and everything in it and put the man and the woman in the garden as stewards to take care of what God had made. Stewards, not possessors. When Bill Gates hires a staff to take care of his house they aren’t supposed to call their friends in to see their possessions. They’re caretakers, not owners.  That’s us: caretakers, stewards. I don’t own my garden even in the eyes of the bank.  I’m a mortgage payer, not an owner. But I didn’t make the soil or the sun or rain. I can try to improve the soil and channel the rain.  But I’m a steward, a caretaker, not a possessor.

Do you remember that sentence that is often said at the Offertory: “All things come of thee, O Lord, And of thine own have we given thee”? Remember that?  Of thine own – not mine own -  have we given thee. All that we have is on loan, in temporary custody. We are stewards, not possessors. When we make a pledge to the church, we call that stewardship. It’s a recognition that whatever we have is God’s gift. We’re paying interest on a loan; acknowledging a debt; returning thanks for a gift we could never earn or deserve.

Point two is stewardship. Point One: Money is not God.  Point Two: we are God’s stewards.  Point three: money is dangerous.

Money distorts our judgment. Money is distorting our economy.  One of the candidates was asked the other day why he gave less than 2% of his money to charity and he said he had a lot of expenses for his family. So do we all. But he dresses well, eats well, lives well, has a big house in a wealthy suburb. So that raises a serious question for me about his real priorities. It’s a good principle to write the first check of the week to the church and live on what’s left. Pay the rent first and live on what’s left.  Don’t we trust God to provide? Not to indulge us but to provide.

I remember calling on an elderly lady years ago who lived with her sister and traveled to Europe every year. We aren’t rich, she told me, but we have enough. It was that word “enough” that got my attention.  It means something different in Greenwich than it means in Bantam. I could use some new shirts and I think it would be cool to have an iPad, but I don’t need them.  I have enough.  It’s all about priorities and our priorities as Americans are very different from those of a Syrian student caught in the crossfire or a Mexican farmer trying to support a family who knows there are better jobs across the border or a peasant somewhere in Africa with children to feed who sees the land drying up and his crops failing. But we get used to a certain standard of living, feel entitled, and lose perspective.

What would be “enough” for a slum-dweller in Mumbai, India?  What is “enough” for a superstar athlete or a Wall Street hedge fund manager?

What did we do to be born in America? My grandparents might have taken credit for coming here but I can’t.  It wasn’t my choice to be a secure and comfortable American nor the African peasant’s choice to live on the edge of an expanding desert, nor the Syrian student’s choice to live in a brutal dictatorship.

We take things for granted; we have enough.  But money not only distorts our judgment it also distorts our economy. You’ve seen the statistics: all that about the 1% and the rest. Why is that? Nobody thinks high unemployment is a good thing.  Some say if we tax the wealthy they won’t invest in jobs.  Some say if we don’t tax the wealthy, we won’t be able to invest in the schools and infrastructure that create jobs.  So what works?  What’s best for my neighbor? That’s the only real question and we have to decide it between now and November.

But, again, money distorts our judgment and money can be used intentionally to distort our judgment. When the wealthy can buy the airwaves and control what we see and hear, it’s hard to make sound judgments, hard to get at the truth. One candidate’s Super Pac raised 30 million dollars last year and over a third of it came from just ten contributors. Another candidate’s super pac raised over ten million from one donor.  60% of the money spent by the super pacs has come from five people. It’s not the 1%, it’s a tenth of a tenth of one percent who can control what we see and hear. Money can be used to influence, to control and that’s dangerous to our freedom.

Three points: 1) Money is not God.  2) All possessions come from God and we are stewards. 3) Money in human hands is dangerous.

Jesus came into the temple and saw people buying and selling controlling and being controlled by money and he was outraged. What would he think of us?

What was God up to when he promised to make Abraham “A father of many nations”? You have to ask, “Was that smart?”  Consider what happened: there are today “many nations” indeed in the Middle East and they look to Abraham as their ancestor and we will be lucky if we survive the battles they have with each other. Iran and Iraq and Syria and Israel and Palestine would all claim to be Abrahamic nations, descendants of Abraham, and they hate each other and don’t even get along very well with themselves.

So what did God have in mind?  Let me suggest a bigger picture than just the Middle East. I think the readings today, all three of them, might challenge us to think about the whole concept of nation.  Why do we have nations in the first place? What about America as a nation?  Do we as a nation have a place in God’s plan?  Some would say, “Yes, a very special place.” But here we are, 225 years along, and still fiercely divided over what it means to be an American and what America’s role as a nation is in the world.

They tell us that just before the Pilgrims landed they heard a sermon from their pastor saying that they, or we, should appear to other nations as a “city on a hill” a visible example to others. Some talk today about what they call “American exceptionalism.” What is God doing in this nation? And can I say something useful in a sermon about subjects so mired in politics?  It seems to me that the Bible ought to throw some light on a subject so much a part of the Bible. I pointed out last week that the Bible ends with a vision of the holy city, the new Jerusalem, and the kings of the earth bringing their glory into it. Indeed there is a picture in Revelation of a multitude from every nation and tribe gathered before God’s throne. So that’s a positive picture of nations.  And all along the way from Abraham to the apostles, Genesis to Revelation, God is at work in human history calling slaves out of Egypt to make a nation and calling the Babylonians to take the Jews back into captivity and using the Persians to set them free and using the Romans to create a peaceful Mediterranean world in which the gospel could spread easily.

So nations are always playing a major role in the Biblical story. And in post-Biblical times, when there was a need to reform the church, Martin Luther would have been quickly silenced except for the support of German princes who sided with him against the Roman power.  Lutheran churches became the established church in some of the German states and in Sweden and Norway and other nations.  And we as Anglicans would have a very different history, or maybe no history at all, if Elisabeth I had not supported a reformed, catholic church for England against the Pope and his national allies on the one hand and the extremes of Protestant reform on the other. The world-wide Anglican communion today is often described as a family of national churches and why should we think of ourselves that way unless we play a part in the national story?

Let me suggest first of all, then, that God is at work in national affairs and that we as Christians do have a role to play in our country’s life.

There was an interesting bit of by-play on this subject last week, by the way, when Republican candidate Santorum apparently heard for the first time about a speech candidate John F. Kennedy made in 1960 in which he disclaimed any influence of his church on his decisions as President. Of course, Santorum isn’t old enough to remember the context of that speech and the deep-seated suspicion about a Roman Catholic candidate for the presidency that used to exist. I’m not old enough to remember how Al Smith was defeated in 1928 by those suspicions but I do remember how real it was in 1960 and how the fact that Kennedy won changed things and made it possible for Santorum to say that of course his faith would influence his decisions. He can say that because of Al Smith and John F Kennedy, his predecessors as candidates of Roman Catholic faith. They fought that battle and he doesn’t have to. Nowadays we can even imagine a Mormon as president – something the Republican party in particular once opposed.

Nowadays I think a lot of us assume that the candidate’s faith doesn’t matter whoever it is or whatever their nominal faith and I have to wonder whether that indicates that a lot of people have never met anyone whose faith made a difference. I’m not sure that’s progress.  Why are we here this morning if faith doesn’t make a difference?  One way of looking at the Bible is that it’s the story of the difference that faith makes and maybe more in nations than individuals.  But it’s even more complicated than that because, you see, God not only created nations and not only draws us together as Americans or Russians or Chinese or or English or Irish or Norwegian but God also draws us together in churches and synagogues and mosques and just as Moses had to tell the Pharaoh that his religion set him in conflict with Pharaoh’s government so people of faith have often found themselves in conflict with their national government.

This country exists because faith does make a difference, not because it doesn’t. The Puritans came here to escape our church, the established church of England, and so they established the Congregational Church and then Roger Williams founded Rhode Island to escape the Puritans and Molly Dyer was hanged on Boston Common because of her refusal as a Quaker to obey the Puritan government of Massachusetts.  The Congregational Church was established in Connecticut until long after the Revolution because states are free to establish religion if they want to and Connecticut did. There was a tax to support the Congregational Church. Separation of church and state notwithstanding, I’m still required to conform to the laws of the state in performing a marriage.

So how and where do we draw the line in our nation between a proper and improper influence of faith?  It seems to me that a faith that doesn’t influence our national life is a useless faith. It seems to me that creating a National Holiday to honor Martin Luther King Jr is a definite affirmation of the role faith can play in national life. It seems to me that Rick Santorum has every right to let his faith influence his decisions just as Martin Luther King Jr. did.  I couldn’t respect him if he didn’t. It might be useful for the other candidates to tell us whether they have a faith that makes a difference and what that difference is.  We need to know that so we can make intelligent choices.  But to take all this seriously would mean hard work both for the candidates and for us: to study the Bible thoughtfully and carefully and listen to each other and respect other viewpoints but still make decisions that reflect our faith.

I talked last week about the abolition movement and if we can think back to that I think we can recognize that it can’t have been easy to work out a Christian response to the South’s “peculiar institution.” Yes, Moses freed the slaves, but the Hebrews themselves owned slaves later on and most of the Bible seems to accept slavery. St. Paul, our patron saint, sent Onesimus back into slavery and said, “If you are a slave, don’t worry about it; serve your master well” (1 Cor. 7:21) so he can be cited as supporting slavery but he also said, “In Christ there is no longer slave or free,” (Gal. 3:28) so he be quoted as opposed to slavery. So how do we decide?  How do we find guidance? Are there principles that can guide us on the death penalty, illegal immigrants, abortion, contraception?  What about war? Should Christians be pacifists?  Are some wars wrong and others right?

What would Jesus do? That’s a pretty good question to ask for a start.  I would love it if the candidates would engage these questions seriously on the basis of their faith.  Presidents make decisions daily that ought to be based on faith and a sense of God’s purpose in history so I’d like to know whether a candidate who wants my vote has a faith that makes a difference and if so, what difference.  How do you decide, for example, whether and when to withdraw from Afghanistan or stay involved?  A basic Christian principle, even more broadly a religious principle, is respect for human life, for justice and freedom, so you can argue that we ought to be in there working for justice and freedom in Afghanistan but we also ought to be concerned for justice and freedom in this country and the harm done to this country by expending lives and wealth elsewhere. So how do you weigh the lives of Afghans against those of American soldiers and diplomats, how can you tell whether we are actually creating greater freedom and justice overall?

There are no easy answers but we have to begin with the right questions.  For some it’s a simple question of power and money: what will make the most money for American companies? What is the most effective use of American power?  I think those are the wrong questions for Christians to ask.  I think we should always begin with our neighbor’s need, not our own. And I think, at the very least, it’s the preacher’s job to suggest the right questions and even principles and not just for individuals but for us as a society, a church, a nation. Let me be take a very specific example: suppose there’s a vote on a new school tax. I think there are two basic ways of looking at it, two kinds of questions to ask. One is, “What’s in it for me?”  And that might lead me to vote for it if I have children and against it if not but either way that would be based on purely personal grounds, on self-interest. On the other hand, I could ask, “What’s best for my neighbor?” There’s probably no more basic Biblical principle in the Old Testament and New Testament both, than to love your neighbor as yourself.  That would take into account the needs of my neighbor’s children or my neighbor’s ability to pay a new tax.  So our response could go either way, but either way it would be based on a response of faith and I think we always need to ask that kind of question and come to that kind of answer.

Now let me come back to the larger question for Americans. What about this country?  Do we have a special role in God’s purpose in human history, are we, should we be, a city on a hill, as William Bradford said, or even “a shining city on a hill” as Ronald Reagan said. I was interested to learn last week that it was Stalin who first used the term “American exceptionalism.”  He was upset by the American Communist party wanting to be treated differently. But the term has been picked up by others especially, I think, on the right.  I hope it’s an accurate term. I hope we can use it in faith, in faith that God is at work here in this country, in all of us and each of us and finds us exceptionally useful to God’s purpose. I think this is an exceptional country in many ways and I think the Christian churches have played an important part in shaping who we are and how we act and that makes me proud of this country but prouder still to be a Christian and to believe that God does call us to be sensitive to God’s purpose and to respond in a way that makes a difference not just in this country but even in world history.

Let me, then, come back to my first question: was it smart for God to use Abraham to create nations? I would answer, “Yes and No.”  Short term, No. Nations have been oppressive and aggressive. I understand why some people think the smaller the government the better.  Maybe you remember the Kingston trio singing: “They’re rioting in Africa, They’re starving in Spain,” and going on to sing: “The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles; Italians hate Yugoslavs, South Africans hate the Dutch;  And I don’t like anybody very much.”  

Human beings are like that.  Nations are like that. But nations, on the other hand, are also a giant step up from the law of the jungle and the warfare of tribes and able to provide more freedom and justice than anyone would have without them. And nations may be a step toward even larger societies like the European Union that has brought together nations that had been at each other’s throats for centuries. I’ve seen it suggested that the tides of immigration, legal and illegal, and the growing power of international corporations are making the old nation states increasingly irrelevant. The first George Bush didn’t invade Iraq without putting together an international coalition. When Libya fell apart, it was international cooperation that made the difference. Maybe we can begin to see the dim outlines of a world order beyond nations where nations work together toward common goals. The dream of the United Nations hasn’t made much progress but anything that brings warring nations together even to shout at each other seems to me a step forward, maybe at long last a step beyond Abraham toward God’s larger purpose and maybe even a step toward the Biblical vision of a new Jerusalem in which the old divisions fall away and all tribes and languages and nations are united at last in standing together before God’s throne and united in praising their Creator.