Love That Sticks It Out--October 2, 2023

Love That Sticks It Out--October 2, 2023

“This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.” (Ephesians 3:11-12)

Here’s some good news: God is not George Burns. Not really.

Maybe you remember the 1977 Carl Reiner movie, Oh, God!, in which George Burns plays the Almighty as a one-liner-prone, mostly affable senior citizen, who appears to an assistant manager of a grocery store played by John Denver. Burns is always funny—I can’t deny that. And often his lines as “God” blend poignancy with their punch-lines; I’ll give him that, too.

But as Burns portrays him in the movie, God is really only rarely involved in anybody’s life, and only enters into human affairs on rare occasions, with a sort of vaguely-good-natured nonchalance at that (he says in the movie that his most recent miracle was the 1969 Mets, and before that, it was the Red Sea). He says he hears everybody’s prayers but only rarely listens, since he’s only there “for the big picture—I don’t get into details!” He only even bothers to appear to John Denver’s character to let the world know he’s “still there.” And as far as grand plans or designs, Burns’ “God” just says, “Life is a crap shoot, like the millionth customer that crosses the bridge gets to shake hands with the governor.”

Wasn’t an awful movie, but it sounds exactly like the kind of theology you’d get from 1970s American-malaise pop culture: a generically pleasant deity who means well but just doesn’t go for all that meddling, and who never really has a plan for anything beyond the next one-liner.

I hope that it’s obvious why it’s good news that, as Paul tells it, this isn’t the real and living God. Burns’ kind of God (or maybe I should just lay all my cards on the table and say “god”) doesn’t ever mean you any harm, but it hardly seems like he’s willing to do much of anything but shake his head and shrug about the messes we make, and he’s barely even willing to give anything but a pithy comeback to direct your life. After all, Burns’ deity is all about your choices, and doesn’t seem to bother with bringing about something good with the brokenness of the world. He just won’t get in the way if we decide to make the world a better place.

Great, George Burns. Thanks for the permission for us to do everything on our own, alone, without any guarantee that you are with us through the suffering of life. Thanks for telling us you’ll watch from…wherever it is you watch from… with something clever to say when we make a mess of things again. Thanks for occasionally beaming down, George Burns’ “god”, whenever it suits you, and leaving us to fend for ourselves the rest of the time, because you are so laid-back.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Because we need something more.  We need the God who endures--who sticks it out with us.  We need the God who loves, rather than just who watches casually from a distance.  Michael Spencer makes a great observation about the Christian faith. He says—and this is especially appropriate in this season as we focus on the way God came among us in a human life named Jesus—that “without the incarnation, Christianity isn’t even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. ‘Be nice to one another,’ is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.”

That’s just it. The New Testament writers tell us that God is not just watching from the sidelines cracking jokes about the foibles of our fragile lives and randomly appearing when it suits him--and then bailing out when it gets difficult or would be costly. Paul says that God has had a design from before the beginning of creation to stand with us in Christ Jesus, as one of us. And because God has taken that stand, not just to watch or comment on history with a wry zinger, but by entering our humanity in the fragile flesh of Jesus, we can have confidence, even “boldness,” as we come to God, because we know the lengths God has already gone to for our sakes. God had designed all along to enter our lives and our world in the person of Christ, and God’s plan from the beginning was to use that entry in Christ to gather in all kinds of people, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, educated and uneducated—whatever other divides you can come up with. This was God’s intention all along—to stand with us in it, and to stand with all of us. To face what we face. To endure the brokenness, not just to passively scold it.  That's what it means to say that God loves:  God endures with us. God's kind of love sticks it out with us... always.

There is a song which comes to mind for me. It is, perhaps the second-saddest song I know, but also one of the most beautiful. And today’s verses make me think of it, especially as a counterweight to the picture of God we got from George Burns in the movie. There’s a song where Ben Gibbard sings this promise to a beloved pondering the closeness of death: “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I’ll follow you into the dark.” George Burns’ picture of the deity can’t—or won’t—sing that. That movie-version of God will always stay at a distance and leave the real messes to us to figure out on our own, along with all the other false gods of history like Money, Power, Pleasure, Entertainment, and the Military-Industrial Complex. But the God we meet in Jesus, this God is willing to say over all of humanity: “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, I’ll follow you into the dark.” That’s what the cross-shaped, enduring love of God is. That has been God’s plan since the foundation of the universe—to enter into everything we fragile, mortal humans face, even including death. God was willing to go all the way into a tomb for us. How can anything keep us from that kind of love, and from that same God? Once you know that truth, all of a sudden, it seems much easier to believe that we can count on God’s presence and faithfulness through whatever else comes at us in life—because God was even willing to go through the valley of the shadow of death, “into the dark,” for us… and with us.

Go into this day, and go into the month that is just opening before us now, with that confidence. The Maker of all that is chose to face it all with you through Jesus. You can go to this God for anything... after all, in the God who wears our skin, we have met a love that will follow us into the dark.

O God our Maker and Sharer of our lives, tell us again today so that we will trust you how far you have gone and how far you will go to share our lives with us, not just in the big picture, but in the details. Let your love reach us where we are, even when we stare down the dark. Even today.