Perhaps you are thinking right now that you have never heard God speak to you. Well, I promise you, the preacher intoned with absolute conviction, you will hear God speak to you this morning.
I envy him his certainty. And his guts, frankly. That’s quite a promise to make on someone else’s behalf, two someone’s actually, God and the folks sitting in his pews. What if God’s not in the mood to chat up the congregation? What if the congregation and its several members are not in the mood to listen? Scripture and the witness of the saints certainly seem to suggest that God, on occasion, is silent. And that humankind frequently tunes God out.
I’m choosing to believe that what the preacher meant to say was that Scripture, understood in the Reformed tradition to be the Word of God written, would be read from the pulpit that morning and that, in the reading, we would hear God speak. Still, I didn’t hear a whole lot of the Scripture reading as I was preoccupied with the promise that I WOULD hear God speak. To me. That morning. In that place.
I do envy the preacher his certainty, especially when it was offered with such grace and compassion for those who sat under his preaching that Sunday. I envy it, but I don’t like it. That certainty makes me deeply uncomfortable. It implies, doesn’t it, that the preacher knows, absolutely knows what God will do. Which implies that the preacher also knows absolutely what God won’t do. Which implies that the preacher also probably knows other God stuff, too, like who God loves, who God hates, and what God eats for breakfast, and why God feels like that about the ones he loves and the ones he hates.
Certainty is how we end up with a high-profile preacher proclaiming that “God isn’t an open borders kind of guy.” Certainty is how we end up with another high-profile preacher stating as fact that 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina were God’s judgement on an unbelieving nation. Certainty is just exactly what brings us the faux doctrinal Nashville Statement, a whole bunch of high profile preachers getting together to inform an unbelieving world that God not only rejects same sex relationships as sinful depravity, not only rejects those who live and love in the way they believe that God has made them to do, but rejects also those who love and affirm and support their LGBTQ+ sisters and brothers in their loving walk with one another.
And yet we are shocked that an unbelieving world thinks that the Christian God is at the beck and call of the rich and the powerful and the privileged against the poor and the dispossessed. We can’t understand why an unbelieving world would think that the Christian God sanctifies wars and walls and whiteness. We are deeply grieved to discover that unbelieving world is certain that the Christian God is not love after all, but hate and condemnation and exclusion and rejection and that that same unbelieving world wants absolutely nothing to do with this Christian God of whom they have heard.
A few years ago, two women came to me and asked me to officiate their wedding. They didn’t need my approval or my blessing. They were going to get married. God had placed this on their hearts, of that they were certain. But they wanted the church’s blessing on their love and commitment. They wanted the church to pronounce God’s blessing on their life together and they wanted to hear it said out loud “in front of God and everyone.” So I did. We all did. Loudly and with a lot of holy hugs, as I remember it.
The older I get, the less I know for sure. But of this I am certain. God is love. And God’s son Jesus asks us to be love, too, to love one another as he has loved us, to love one another sacrificially. What do you suppose an unbelieving world might think of our God if those high-profile preachers preached that?
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