God is Good. All the Time

Sermon for SMHP, Year C, Lent III, March 24, 2019

Isaiah 55:1-9

          Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

               ⁴See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. ⁵See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, who lplphas glorified you.

               ⁶Seek the Lord while God may be found, call upon the Lord while God is near; ⁷let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that God may have mercy on them, and to our God, who will abundantly pardon. ⁸For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. ⁹For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Luke 13:1-9                         

          At that very time there were some present who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. ²He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? ³No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. ⁴Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.”

               ⁶Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. ⁷So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ ⁸He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. ⁹If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’”

          God is good… [All the time.]

          All the time… [God is good.]

            We believe that, right?  God is good?  God is powerful, strong, able to do anything?

            It’s pretty easy to believe those things about the creator of the universe, right?  It can seem formulaic to say we believe that God is good.  Christians have been doing this call and response for a while now.  And Jews have been doing it for millenia. 

            Baruch atah Adonai elohenu, melech ha-olam.

            “Blessed are you, O Lord our God, ruler of the universe.”  If you have been to a shabbat service or a bar mitzvah, or a Seder, you have heard this prayer over and over.  It is in effect, the Jewish equivalent of “God is good [all the time].”

            We believe that God is good, right?  That God is the ruler of the universe?

            We believe that God’s goodness means that God loves us, no matter what we have done, and forgives us of any and all sin, and is always ready to reach out to us in grace? That God loves all of us equally and seeks to care for us equally, no matter who we are and what we’ve done?

            Do you always believe that last part?

            If you do, you are ahead of a lot of folks. 

            It has always been difficult to believe that God’s grace is sufficient.  That God loves all of us—the wicked and the righteous.  Even for the people hanging around Jesus and listening to him talk about the grace of God—which I have no doubt he did with profound authority, still those old messages persist.  You know the ones:  wealthy and healthy means blessed by God; poor in circumstance and body means God is mad at you because you are a miserable sinner.

            In our gospel lesson for this morning, we hear Jesus calling out that thinking.  He describes two awful disasters, one man-made by mean old Pontius Pilate, and one an apparent accident.  Then he asks if the people who perished were being punished for their sins. 

            “Did this awful stuff happen to them because they were just terrible people?” Jesus asks.  “Because you know you’re thinking it.  You’re thinking that bad stuff really just happens to bad people.  And people are poor because they’re lazy, and vertical stripes make you look like a supermodel.  All the myths.

            Jesus not only asks the question, but he answers it:  “Were they worse sinners?  Of course not.  Have you not been paying attention?”

            It would be a fair question.  I mean, the prophets were telling people about God’s grace and forgiveness hundreds of years before.  See Isaiah’s words, also in our texts for this morning: 

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without

price. ²Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your

labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. ³Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.

          Biblical scholar John Hayes says that that last part is more than a reassurance of God’s promise.  The “everlasting covenant” described here is the last part of God’s expansion of the Hebrew covenant, from agreements made with individuals—Abraham and Sarah, Jacob, David—to an agreement between God and all of God’s people. 

          All of God’s people are now to share in the covenant God has made.  All of God’s people are being invited to repent and trust in God.  “⁶Seek the Lord while God may be found,” the prophet says, “call upon the Lord while God is near; ⁷let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that God may have mercy on them, and to our God, who will abundantly pardon.”

          God is good.  All the time.

          Now, just because Isaiah told the people that they were now locked into a covenant with a gracious God…that doesn’t mean they believed it, right?  I mean, we know that from the gospel text, right?

          “Are you people still locked into a belief that God is a scorekeeper?  Do you still not trust God?  What kind of amazing act would prove to you that God is good…[all the time]  Do we need a resurrection or something?

          Look, trust is hard.  You don’t have to be someone who occasionally counsels couples to know that—though it helps.  If you live long enough, you are likely to have experienced a time when you trusted someone and they betrayed that trust. 

          And when that happens, it makes it harder to trust again, doesn’t it?

          It may also have happened that we asked God for something and didn’t get it, or it didn’t happen exactly as we had hoped.  So maybe we decided, “Hmm, I don’t know if I should continue to trust that God who didn’t get me into Harvard.  Hmm.”

          Or whatever.

          Trust is hard. 

          But amazing things happen when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable enough to trust.  To trust God.  To trust others, even though it didn’t work out for us that one time.  Or maybe those four times…

          Amazing things happen when we can look past those times and still trust.

          This past Friday at 11 am, I exhaled a breath I had been holding for about two years.  I was holding my breath, but I was also doing my best to trust…to trust that God was making a way in an adoption process that didn’t always go smoothly. 

          And as you probably know, God was.  There was a way, and we got there.

          I don’t offer that as some kind of proof that God will fulfill all of our wishes.  God is not Oprah. 

          But amazing things do happen when we learn to trust God.  We learn to trust each other a little more too.  And maybe even ourselves.

          And the image we portray to the world is one of faithful people willing to be vulnerable enough to trust, to love, to believe in grace and mercy.

          And you know what they call that?

          Witness.  “By this they will know that you are my disciples,” said Jesus, “if you have love for one another.”

          Learning to let go of fear, to let go of those old notions of a vengeful God who created a bunch of vengeful and selfish humans—that letting go is a form of witness.  People know we are disciples of the one who loved with abandon, who tore down all those arbitrary walls we build.

          They will know we are Christians by our love…our trust…our reflection of the essential knowledge that God is good!

          All the time!