Thing Three: At hand
Religion considers itself a journey to
come closer to God. In reality, it usually works to keep God far away. Or at
least within the limitations of what we are willing to accept as God’s realm.
We desire to be close to God after
this life is over, to reside in his heavenly city with its streets of gold. We
would like God to be near us in times of need, to protect us from threats and
dangers, to provide for us in times of need, to lend his healing power when we
are sick, and to fill our hearts with hope and joy when we are down. When we
look at the brokenness of the world, we blame atheists and secularists who have
driven God from our homes and our schools and our public life. Let God back in,
we say, and all will be well.
As long as it’s the God we worship.
We worship a God who reigns from on
high, who keeps track of rights and wrongs and properly assigns rewards and
punishments. We have built a system that we call religion to keep God in his
proper place, doling out rewards and punishments as required by law, giving
mercy and the occasional miracle just to keep the game interesting. We know
that Jesus talks a lot about love and healing sick people and giving money to
the poor, nice things to be sure, but we know deep in our hearts that God is ultimately
concerned about spiritual and moral matters. In that way, religion remains a
private, personal concern. A choice. You’d think Americans invented it.
We didn’t. This was the church of the
Middle Ages. Religion permeated every aspect of medieval life, if sometimes
with a heavy hand. For most of the population, life without the church was simply
not conceivable. For people whose lives were filled with hardship and
constantly overshadowed by death, church was not just another activity, it was a
necessity for survival. Despite our modern skepticism about the medieval
church, most people were truly devout, and practiced their faith fervently, even
hopefully. Yet in all of this God remained distant, aloof, seated on his
heavenly throne watching over his creation with righteousness and
(occasionally) benevolence. Any relationship with such a God was by definition transactional,
blessings received for true faith and good works, acts of penance made to
compensate for sins great and small. There were lots of sins that demanded
compensation.
Some, actually, could be paid for with
cash. A dedicated mass, a gift given in adoration of an ancient relic, an
offering made for a special occasion dedicated by the Pope that could resolve
some, if not all, of a person or their loved one’s sin, erasing thousands upon
thousands of year of purgatorial punishment. Until Luther came along. The
church complained that Luther endangered the religious well-being of the laity
by destroying practices that kept them close to God. Luther attacked Indulgences,
and later the whole array of common religious acts, because in fact they
distanced people from a real relationship with God. These religious acts turned
believers back to themselves, to their sorrow, to their fear. God remained in
heaven afar, bound by the same rules and procedures that governed the life of
the faithful, no more free than they were.
Luther dreamed of a different life of
faith, where penance was not resolved by praxis or ritual, but experienced deep
in the heart of the believer who found solace in the mercy of God in Jesus
Christ. He wrote longingly of faith that was profound, powerful enough to cast
out actual demons that haunted consciences and not merely the cartoon devils
conceived to motivate recalcitrant sinners. He yearned for faith that amended
hearts and redirected lives and rebuilt worlds. His writings often reveal a
deep emotion and passion in his own spirituality, his struggle to find peace in
his anfectung, to fully experience a God of grace. What changed his life
was the realization that God was not waiting for him to pass his religious
test, but was actively transforming his very being and his every act through
the power of the grace bestowed in baptism, the promise fulfilled in the death
and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
For
Luther, God was not seated on some distant heavenly throne, the keeper of law,
waiting for him to accomplish his own salvation. God was hard at work in Luther
and in the world creating a new Adam, bringing to life a new Kingdom. Right here.
Right now.
That
is the other important part of this equation. Religion keeps God at bay by assigning
religious fufillment to a distant event in the chronological future, at the end
of life, at the end of time. For religion, in the middle ages and now, the work
of faith is given as a downpayment on some (hopefully) heavenly tomorrow. The
potential for a different ending, one filled with heat and pain and torment, is
a powerful deterrent to sin. Supposedly. As the modern age comes to a close it
seems that cynicism has got the best of the devil, until even the threat of the
fires of hell have little or no impact on the choices of most humans. As
attention spans shorten and immediate gratification becomes a defining lifestyle,
a religion dependent on the appeal of investing in some mystical post-life
scenario is less and less meaningful. And less faithful.
How
did we reach this point? This is not following the path of a Jesus who came
spending grace like it was going out of style, like it was burning a hole in
his pocket. He confronted the need that was immediately in front of him, feeding
the hungry, healing the sick, touching the untouchable, crossing boundaries
geographic and social. And he did it in real, hands-on physical acts. He spat
into the eyes of the blind, hugged children, broke bread with friends and
lifted drowning disciples from the lake. He told stories about farmers and
fathers, shepherds and servants. Real people. And in the end he hurt and bled
and died, as any of us might. His instructions to his disciples for their
ministry was the same. “Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast
out demons.” (Matthew 10:8 NRSV) And those instructions were to be an enactment
of their proclamation: “The kingdom of heaven has come near.” (Matthew 10:7
NRSV)
To
come near, to approach, to be in the vicinity, close by. It is a word that
describes the historical turning point of Jesus arrival, the immanence of the
destruction of Jerusalem, the hour of destiny that is Jesus’ true mission. Its
best translation is “at hand,” a baton passed in relay, a help up from a deep
pit, the touch of a beloved at bedside. It is anticipation in the moment of
fulfillment, the bright flash on the horizon at dawn. This is Jesus’ schedule,
not a distant and abstract someday, but an extant, if unrecognized, reality
that can no longer be ignored.
Jesus
didn’t invent this idea, by the way. Jesus comes to announce what was always
true for God’s people. The soul of the Torah is its immediacy, its pertinence.
“The word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to
observe.” (Deuteronomy 30:14 NRSV) The prophets did not come to predict events
beyond the veil of time, they spoke to the present brokenness of Israel and its
immediate consequence. While we rummage through the pages of the prophets for
the keys to unlock a mysterious future like a gambler perusing the daily racing
form for a hot tip on a longshot, the truth stares us in the face and dares us
to attend to it. Salvation is not waiting for us. It is here. Why are we still waiting?
That
is what we do in a quarantine of course. We wait. We sit in the safety of our
homes and we wait for the plague to pass, for the demonstrators to go home and
the streets to clear, for a vaccine to be developed and distributed, for
leaders to lead, for a sign to come and show us the way. We yearn for the day
when this all will be over and we will be free.
We
have forgotten: we are free right now.
And the world is waiting for us to do
something with our God-given freedom.
The great failure of the church is its
willful ignorance of the immediacy of its calling, its procrastination in Christ’s
mission to the detriment of the neighbor. Perhaps we have watched the cycles of
history for too long and so we assume that this day will just pass as well. The
world has been through so much already and just kept on going without really
changing. There is still a generation among us who has lived through world-wide
financial depression and war. There has been social unrest before, there have
been sickness and disease. We are comfortable in the assumption that this too
will pass, won’t it?
The problem, of course, is that, for
the most part time does pass, problems come and go and then things return to
their previous undisturbed state. We think that a blessing. After all, change is
frightening and difficult. Better the devil we know, a cliché that depends on
our willful obliviousness to the devil in our midst. Privilege creates a
myopathy that shelters us from suffering in the world and our neighbor behind
the facade of our own real and imagined travails. Wrapped up in our own needs,
our heart is closed off and our faith is defeated. And the mission of the
Kingdom of God is denied.
In the misery of the Babylonian exile
God gave a powerful vision of redemption to the Israelites. But the image is not
a conquering hero who would overcome their enemies, it is a figure who suffers
too. The Savior will be “despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering
and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces.” (Isaiah
53:3 NRSV) God would redeem their pain and grief by binding himself to the pain
and grief of the world. Instead of the same old cycle of ignoring the
brokenness of our lives and our world, God invites us to move into the deep
experiences of all that hurts to find him. To find ourselves. To find truth. Facing
up to who we are and what we have done is the beginning and the end of change, the
start of what is new.
Isaiah introduced the figure of the
Suffering Servant in the context of that great promise: “Thus says God, the LORD, who created the
heavens and stretched them out, see, the former things have come to pass, and
new things I now declare; before they spring forth, I tell you of them.” (Isaiah
42:9 NRSV) The joining of the divine to the mortal, the coming of the Son into midst
of injustice and peace is the new thing that creates new things. Breaking us
away from our narcissistic self-involvements and opening us up to see the world
around us is the moment when the Kingdom of God dawns in our eyes and in our
hearts. Here, in the poverty and oppression of our neighbor is purpose and
identity. Here, in the fear and helplessness of our neighbor is strength and
healing. Here, in a lost and wandering world is the signpost of the day that is
becoming in our midst.
Now,
more than two millennia later, these words reach out to us in the midst of the
darkness of 2020. We have been exiled from everything we consider normal,
usual, important. We are suffering. We are waiting for this moment to pass, we
are looking for the calendar page to turn and take us to some other place, to
any other place than this. But God is bringing in his Kingdom right here, right
now, and dares us to stay where we are this time, to open our eyes and our
hearts to this moment, to have courage and hope and faith, to discover that our
salvation is bound to the salvation of our neighbor and the whole world. And
our neighbor and the whole world can’t wait for us any longer. Martin Luther
King Jr. said it this way:
With all due deference to Dr. King, let’s
not say this is a time. Let us instead embrace the promise: this is the
time. This is God’s time, and so it must be our time too. We have been burdened
for too long with bad theology and false leadership and horrible teaching and
corrupted institutions and every other manner of human brokenness, but that
need not stop us any longer. We have learned something during these months of
quarantine, during this time of disorder and unrest. We have been opened to acts
of faith long avoided and possibilities long unheeded. The Kingdom is here. The
Kingdom is now. It has come for us. This is the day that the Lord has made, let
us enter it with joy and thanksgiving!
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