Scriptures: 1 Kings 19:1-12; 2 Corinthians 5:1-5
Before I say anything else today, I need to say thank you…
To all those in the Sojourners community for flowers, and food, and prayers, and hugs, and all the expressions of sympathy you have been sending my way. It is all very deeply appreciated.
To Lee for leading the service last week without much lead time. As she said, she and I had talked about some of the themes that were going to be part of the service and she was able to conduct a service that was different, and yet completely in tune with what had been planned. What a great comfort it is to have someone say to you: just don’t even think about it. I’ll take care of it. We’ll take care of it. So thank you to Lee for the thoughtfulness and the skills she brought to the morning, and to all of you who helped to make the service a communal event.
Some of what I have to say today will be what I had intended to say last week before death intervened. At the same time I can’t just pick up where I left off last week, because death did intervene. I am not wanting to use the sermon this morning as a kind of personal catharsis, but at the same time, no word I say this morning will have any truth to it if the death of my father is not part of it. The only truth any of us have to speak is a truth that wells up from within our own experience and is filtered through that experience. And without that, our words are both truthless and lifeless. So while my father is not the subject of the sermon today, I cannot pretend to speak as though his death were not on my heart.
I was going to speak last week about my experience of God—another one of those sermon topics that it’s completely and ridiculously impossible to talk about in twenty minutes. I was going to reflect in general about experiencing God, but again in the belief that we always have to be personal when speaking of such things, I was going to try to tell you at least a little something about my experiences of God.
Instead, as it turned out, Lee created the opportunity for all of us to share something of our experiences of God, as different ones of us rose and said out loud who God is for us. Not just names we might choose to attach to God but how we experience God because of who we are and what we know to be real in our lives. One after another many of us said, “God is my…”
I was not prepared to be one of those who stood and spoke last week. But I did have something I would have said if I could have. I would have said, “God is… one who mourns—with me, over me sometimes, on my behalf. God is one who mourns. That was true for me last week, is still true for me this week, and truth be told it has always been and I think always will be one of the important ways I understand and experience God.
I carried that thought away from worship with me last week, and it led me to remember a sermon I read many years ago by Rev. William Sloan Coffin, one time chaplain at Yale University and at the time of the sermon I’m referring to pastor of Riverside Church in New York. Rev. Coffin was well known for the social and political stands he took on behalf of racial justice, opposition to the Vietnam War, U.S. policy in Latin America, and the nuclear arms race. He was outspoken on such things to say the least. The sermon I’m remembering though was one he gave shortly after his son, Alex, had died in a car accident at the age of 24. Alex had been driving in an extremely heavy storm, and for a reason no one knew for sure the car had veered off a road, ended up in Boston harbor, and the young man had drowned.
I don’t remember the sermon in every detail. But there is part of it that I do remember. Rev. Coffin told of an incident that took place at his sister’s house where people were coming to express their sympathies. One of the people was carrying a casserole, and as she headed for the kitchen (as I recall Dr. Coffin telling the story) she shook her head sort of in his direction and said, “I really don’t understand God’s will.” This comment, by his own admission, caused the Rev. Dr. William Sloan Coffin to “lose it”. He began shouting at the woman, though I’m guessing he was really shouting at the whole house, or the whole universe. No, he reported himself as saying, you really don’t understand God’s will, not if you think that God’s will had anything to do with Alex’s death. “Do you think,” he said, “that it was God’s will that the wipers on the car were not fixed, or that Alex may have been driving too fast, or that he may have had too much to drink, or that the storm came up so suddenly and was so severe, or that there were no street lights or guard rails on that stretch of road?” Rev. Coffin’s answer to all those questions of course was no, and he went on to say in his sermon, much more reflectively, that “the one thing we should never say when someone dies is ‘It is the will of God’. Never do we know enough to say that,” he said. And he went on: “My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.”
This was not a completely new thought to me, the idea that God could be one who mourns alongside of me, maybe is the one who mourns first of all and most of all, is one whose own heart breaks wherever human hearts are breaking. This was not a new thought to me at the time, but it was a thought that I was not completely comfortable with. It was a thought that I maybe had some confusion about, that was giving me somewhat confused ideas and feelings about God. It was a thought that I felt somewhat lonely with and that I mostly kept to myself. The Rev. Dr. Coffin may have been rather uncharitable to that woman who made the remark about not understanding God’s will. She was after all well-meaning and grasping for words in a situation where she was at a loss, quite literally at a loss. But in his clarity that God did not will his son’s death, that God was not an accomplice, that God was not implicated in this event—in his clarity, Rev. Coffin not only found consolation for himself, but helped me to trust in a much deeper way than I had before, my own experience of God. This is another “thank you” I have in my heart today.
The experience of God that I have learned to trust, and that I trust today, is not of a God who visits death on us, but of a God who brings life. The God I know in my own experience is not a God of power, but a God of love. But once upon a time I think I felt guilty about this. Once upon a time I think I thought that I was supposed to believe in, and know personally, a God who was all powerful. After all, I sang the words in “The Messiah”, “the Lord God omnipotent reigneth”. I joined in singing praise to “God the Omnipotent” and “…the Lord is king, let the heavens ring, God reigns: let the earth be glad.” The language of the omnipotent God is all around us, and besides how can God be anything less than all-powerful? Isn’t a being who is less than all-powerful also less than God?
The problem for me was that this was not a God I could relate to very well. I wasn’t sure I even believed in such a God, and I knew that insofar as I had any direct experience of God, it was not this powerful God I knew, but a God of love. And furthermore the God I knew was not some all-powerful God who chose to show his loving side fairly often. The God I came to know, have come to know more and more, is a God whose very nature is not power but love.
I do not know a God, I do not believe in a God, who wills harm or death upon sons or fathers, mothers or daughters, neighbors or friends. I do know a God whose heart breaks along with mine, whose aching for others does not fail the way mine so often does, who weeps over this wounded world more deeply than we could begin to. And I have many times experienced a God who, in the midst of death, brings life…who is life that lives in the midst of death.
I chose the passage from 1 Kings about Elijah for last week. I honestly don’t think I can retrieve most of what I had in mind to say about that passage, but I know the passage occurred to me because my experiences of God resonate with Elijah’s experience of God as it’s described in this passage.
I don’t have time to go back over Elijah’s whole career as a prophet this morning. I’ll just say that it had been a successful career. Elijah had done everything that God asked him to do. He not only did it, he did it well. He had done amazing and heroic things, stood up to King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, stood up for people who were powerless, spoken our for God and for justice. And what he got for all this was not a contract for $10 million to write his life story, but instead a contract that was out on his life. Here he was in hiding, feeling like all his efforts had been wasted and fearing that he himself was about to be wasted.
Elijah wasn’t dead—not literally, physically dead. But of course we all know that there are many kinds of dead, and I think Elijah was probably experiencing one of them. In his own eyes, Elijah’s life had become worthless. He maybe just wanted to shrivel up into nothing, because that’s the way he felt. And he had come to this cave that was in one sense a place of safety, but in another sense was like being buried alive. It was like living in a tomb.
God did not cause him to be there. But God met him there. God followed him there, was with him all along the journey, and then met him there, first with a question. “What are you doing here Elijah?” Elijah explained why he had come there, but the Holy One already knew all that. The question was not: how did you come to be here, but do you really think this is where you belong? And then the voice said that God was about to pass by. And so we know that there was a great wind, so strong that it was splitting mountains and breaking rocks in pieces, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind, an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake, a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” Or as other translations have it, the sound of a still small voice.
A week ago I wanted to try to say as best I could that this was something like how I experience God too—not as a God of great and wondrous power, not as some overwhelming force from the outside that seeks to impose her will on me, not as someone who lets me know from the beginning who’s going to win if we have a battle of the wills, but as a still, small voice—or even a voice of sheer silence—that wells up from within and somehow lets me know, somehow convicts me of such things as where I belong, and with whom I belong, and what some of the things are that are left for me to do, and who I am—child of mystery, child of the Holy One, child of love.
A week later all of that has again been confirmed in my own experience. The God I do experience is not a god of power. The God I experience does not will death, nor display his power to decide when to allow it or when to prevent it. God does not will death, but is present wherever death is, mourning with me, telling me wordlessly but truly where I belong, with whom I belong, and who I am.
God does not will death, not death of any kind. But God does meet us at the mouth of the cave, as she met Elijah, as our story says he met the women on a Sunday morning at the mouth of the cave where Jesus had been buried. And there God takes us by the hand and leads us to the places we need to be and the tasks that remain for us, until one day we too, like those who have gone before, will be swallowed up by life. Or perhaps I can say, to paraphrase Paul just slightly, that one day we, like those who have gone before, will be swallowed up by God, who is Life. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 12, 2001