A God With Wounded Hands Up--April 16, 2021

A God With Wounded Hands Up--April 16, 2021

"For to which of the angels did God ever say, 'You are my Son; today I have begotten you'? Or again, 'I will be his Father, and he will be my Son'? And again, when he brings his firstborn into the world, he says, 'Let all God's angels worship him'." [Hebrews 1:5-6]

You know the standard joke about young children and presents--they often make a bigger fuss out of the box the present came in than the gift itself.  Sure, an handmade sweater will keep them warm and reflects hours of time, skill, and labor--but the box and the wrapping paper catch the eye and seem like toys.  There's nothing wrong or bad about the wrapping--it's just that by comparison to the gift, it's well, just the container for the real present, which often comes at a real price in money or time or both.

Nothing against angels, either, but that's basically the point the writer of Hebrews is trying to make here.  Yes, angels are a thing.  Yes, it's cool that every so often they show up in a Bible story--sometimes as mysterious strangers in white robes, and sometimes as Lovecraftian chimeras with frightening animal parts and countless staring eyes (I'm just saying--a cherub in the Bible is more like a sphinx or a creature from a monster movie than the fat baby with wings we've been sold in religious artwork).  But angels aren't the center of the gospel--they are messengers of good news, but not the good news itself.  No offense to the heavenly host, but they're like the box the real gift comes in--they bear the Word of God, but Christ himself, who actually is the Word of God, is the real beating heart of our faith.

Now, there's a part of me that wants to just stop right here and say, "Really?  Really?  We're talking about angels and what level of importance we should put on them in our books of religious doctrine and catechisms?  We're going to talk about invisible fantastical beings that most of us never give a thought to in our daily routines when the day's news is full of such real-life heartache, troubles, and sorrow?  Are we going to debate, like the old medieval scholastic theologians would, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin while mothers are grieving the deaths of Daunte Wright or Adam Toledo, or the lives killed in another mass shooting in Indianapolis overnight?  Are we going to insulate ourselves from having to deal with those brutal deaths and the cruelty of our collective apathy by puzzling over abstract theological questions on this rainy Friday morning?"

And, to be honest... I get it.  I understand the temptation to want to stay safe in the realm of religious trivia and theological minutia, talking about angels, rather than facing the real world, a world in which mothers lose their sons like this all the time, and most of the rest of us just shrug our shoulders or stare at our feet and mutter, "What a shame.  It's too bad nothing can be done to stop this sort of thing from happening."

But on second thought, maybe this is exactly the point that the writer of Hebrews is trying to make.  What sets Jesus apart from the angels, in all honesty, is that in Jesus, we have no less than God entering into the godforsaken mess of our violence, our indifference toward what happens to someone else's kid, and our collective decision to accept a certain amount of death and heartache as inevitable collateral damage.  In the storytelling, angels pop in for a moment to deliver a message and vanish into the realms of glory; Jesus, however, knows what it is to face this world in all our terrible mingling of bloodshed and apathy.  Jesus knows, in a way that angels never do, what it is to have your life cut short as the socially acceptable price of maintaining some illusion of law and order.  Jesus--struck down, empty-handed, on trumped-up charges by the authorities of religion and government--has faced the worst of our human cruelty and sin, in a way that no member of the heavenly host ever has.  That is why he is worthy of our worship.

This is a really important point to grasp, then: our worship of God is not just because God is beautiful and sparkly and lives in heaven.  Angels do that, too, and they are just the messengers, the vehicles for God to communicate.  But the reason we worship the God we have come to know in Jesus is that this God has done something infinitely more costly.  God has become both the Giver and the Gift in Christ, and has faced us at our worst when our impulse was to reject the Gift and destroy him on a cross, like we have done and keep doing to one another in the belief that such a devil's bargain keeps some of us safe at the price of leaving others terribly unsafe.  God has faced, and received, and absorbed, our terrible violence and hatred.  God knows what it is to be discarded as just one more disposable life who could be sacrificed in the name of preserving order.  God knows from experience, in the life of Jesus, us at our worst--and God has remained with us in love.

So even Hebrews, with all its talk about angels and ancient texts, will not let us off the hook for facing the rottenness of the world we keep making for ourselves, and for one another.  Even this dusty old letter from the back of our Bibles that seems so foreign and out-of-touch to us in some ways will not give us permission to ignore or shrug off the litany of names it is so easy to treat as expendable, the tally of lives we are tempted to write off as the cost of keeping things quiet in my neighborhood.  This ancient book reminds us that the only God worth worshiping is not one who pops in to leave us a sticky note before disappearing back up into celestial light, but the One whom we killed in a deadly mix of imperial ruthlessness and ordinary apathy.  And the resurrection of that same Crucified One is the evidence that the love of this real and living God is greater than even us at our worst.

So, sure, don't settle for focusing on angels... or on any other abstract bit of theology to distract yourself from facing the utterly real rottenness among us and within us.  But also, don't forget--that ours is the God who has born that rottenness, and who stands--with empty hands up and outstretched--with Adam and Daunte and George and Breonna and all those who have been told their lives were expendable.  Ours is the God who stands with all the ones who have been told their lives weren't important enough or worthy of preserving... and who raises them up in love with wounded hands.

Lord God, keep our focus on you and on the world you have spared no expense to love, even in all of our terrible rottenness.