02/17/13

Mandy Smith preached the third sermon in the 9 week series on God's forgiveness and love and how we're to respond to all that. She focused on 1 John 4.7-12, especially the main point: "God loved us first." Love is God's nature and the motivation for redemption. It's difficult to comprehend God's love. It's not a scientific formula we can memorize, it's a reality that is best divulged through stories and parables. And thus she gave a parable and a story from her own life, and because I don't feel it proper to share other peoples' stories on here, no matter if they're available on podcasts, I'm narrowing down these notes to just a few take-home pointers.

We believe lies about how God sees us, so our comprehension of his love is limited, and consequently our response to his love is limited. We're in need of constant reminders, in need of quiet to sit down and actually absorb all this. God declared the Sabbath following Israel's exodus from slavery in Egypt but before the giving of the 10 Commandments on Mount Sinai. Slaves don't get a day off, but children do, and the Israelites were no longer slaves but children. Taking the Sabbath as time to face the lies about our identities, to undress our insecurities and to stand stark naked before God as children and not as slaves, is more than a good idea: just as the Israelites had been raised to see themselves as slaves, and had lived in awful slavery for 400 years (twice as long as the United States has existed, to put that time in perspective), so in our own culture we're weighed down with all sorts of fears and baggage that keep us enslaved to the lies about how God sees us. We must name and uproot those lies that skew our perceptions not only of God but also of ourselves, and though such a struggle can be wearying, stressful, and scary, in the end it's wholly liberating, and our sails are unfurled and open to the wind.

Just as Christians may have to take an intellectual "leap of faith" to believing in God's existence (though it'd be unfair to think that this was something just Christians have to do; there are great areas of mystery and ambiguity within reality, and there's a lot we're not sure about, and those who profess to believe in God leap no further than those who deny his existence), so many of us have to take a second emotional "leap of faith" to believe God's love towards us. It sounds like a fairy tale, it really does, something that's too good to be true, hence the "leap of faith". But those who do take that leap are often marked by freedom, peace, and a sense that "all is well."

The real struggle is not identifying ourselves by the lies but by what scripture tells us. The battle is to understand ourselves through the light of God's love rather than through the lenses of our baggage, fears, and doubts. Because of this, taking a Sabbath, a day to focus on the lies and insecurities, to strip them down and expose ourselves before God as his children rather than as the purveyors of lies, is more than necessary: it's the door to experiencing the freedom that really is found in Christ.

Side-note: I can't pass the opportunity to write about our western sensitivity to our own guilt before God, and the way that sensitivity erects barriers and doubts in our minds regarding God's love towards us. There's a reason we feel the way we do, a reason that we so often find ourselves striving so diligently to earn God's love and favor, and it goes straight back to early 1600s England and the great Puritan migration across the Atlantic to Norumbega (now known as New England). The Puritans were a pretty fascinating sect of Protestantism, steeped in the fancy Calvinism of the day and breaking from corrupt England to create a bible commonwealth, a new world in America, that would issue in the one-thousand-year-reign of Christ's reign. I'm simplifying it, of course, but the point is that Puritan ideals didn't die away with the Puritans. Puritan thought-patterns have become so entwined in American thought that they're understood now as "American" ideals rather than "Puritan" ones. The insistence on diligence, hard work, and pulling yourself up by your own boot-straps, the path to the American dream, lies in Puritanism. The Puritans believed in double predestination, and wrapped up in that is the idea that God arbitrarily saves some and condemns others, and there's nothing we can or cannot do to warrant God's forgiveness. Protestantism would agree with at least half that, if not more (shout-out to you Reformed folk who've done well to shy away from double predestination), and because of that, no one really has any sort of assurance of salvation. There's a sort of assurance, and that's the measure of how much your life lives up to God's calling. Thus Puritans were known for constantly working, striving, reaching in their spiritual and economic lives, both to please God and to psychologically suave the pain of not knowing whether your demise would find cosmic bliss or eternal torment. Though the Puritans are all but gone, their ideals live on, and within American churches, we find this constant torment of our inadequacies, this constant struggle to live up to our forgiveness. We have psychological baggage that goes straight back to the Puritans! And I really had no choice but to share that with you.