Note: I preach in a variety of styles, from traditional text behind a pulpit to no-notes and walking about. An intermediate style begins with a short sketch, though I often wander away from the text during delivery. The following sketch is prepared for a sermon series on Paul’s letter to the Romans.
Not so far from here, at the north end of the public property that starts with the Islip Grange, you’ll find a series of Little League fields. In just a couple of months girls and boys will start practicing for the spring season, some with our church name on their sleeves. Above them, on top of two of the light towers, will be osprey nests, and at some point fledglings.
Ospreys, like other birds of prey, use platform nests. Huge, functional, but quite chaotic, nothing neat and tidy like you might find with a swallow. In fact, platform nests often grow year after year, layers of shiny bits and decay, until they can often threaten the very tree in which they are built – too heavy, to big, especially after a storm or when battered by high winds.
I tend to think of our human collective unconscious as being a bit like one of those nests… large, unwieldy, and definitely threatening the tree of life itself. Some of the bits woven in show up again and again. If we were British, our particular nest would include the narrative of World War II, of the rise of Nazism, of the failure to recognize that rise as a threat, of the grave danger England faced as a result. That bit of the unconscious shows up again and again, as it does in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, where an evil is on the rise, one that uses fear and hatred of the other as its driving force. While few young people encounter the books as re-telling, an older reader, especially one that knows history, cannot help but see the parallels.
While the Harry Potter series adds a particular twist from the English psyche to the formula, the tale itself is formulaic. A tremendous amount of young adult literature deals with a rising evil. Sometimes the evil is personal, a singular baddie. Sometimes if is a systemic evil, as it is with Lois Lowry’s Giver series, and with Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games novels. I am sure that the dominance of certain forms of teen lit has to do with the psychological processes involved with separating from parents, of self-differentiation, and I’d love to have Jung alive today to wrestle with the subject. But I am primarily interested in a fundamental assumption, a worldview, in all of these books, written for teenagers but by adults. Every one of them, singular novels and long-running series, all take the view that there is a goodness, a vitality, a justice, in the ordering of the universe, and that that goodness, force, call it whatever… will win out.
Is this just idiotic optimism, a species survival trait that says wear the rose-colored glasses, be Pollyanna or Candide’s Pangloss? Or is there something truthful in this positive outcome oriented way of living? Is it that the Hebrew religious trajectory, in its turn from fatalism, shaped our existence and experience as a culture? Or is it that the Hebrew religious trajectory moved away from notions of Yahweh as petty and vengeful precisely because they slowly came to realize the essential goodness of creation, and logically, of creation’s creator?
For this is what is at hand in the common teaching of Jesus, speaking from completely within the Jewish context, and Paul, speaking as he does from the borderlands where Jewish and Greek thought intersect. Both Jesus, rabbi and messiah, and Paul, Pharisee and Roman citizen, tell us one very important thing. God is good. God is faithful. God is forgiving. God is like a parent, is the “abba†not only to Jews, but though Paul’s ministry, to all humans who wish to be part of that story, that novel in which, ultimately, the good guys win.
In today’s passage, Paul tells us that God is faithful. It seems like a small thing to us, but it marks a huge shift in Jewish religious thinking, just as Jesus’ insistence on God’s grace marked a change. For the previous thousand plus years, everything with God was wheeling and dealing, with God as the more generous party, but still, always a debt to be paid, and a consequence for default. Paul says, essentially, you’ve misunderstood God. God is faithful despite our fickle human ways.
Does Paul change the nature of God? Of course not! It is absurd to even ask the question. God is. It is not that God cannot change, for we claim that our God is a living God. But we believe what Jesus said, what Paul said, about the goodness of God. That doesn’t change. You can believe in a giant European man in the sky if that is what works for you. Maybe you believe in a life-giving spirit that is engaged in creativity, in holy imagination and love, but isn’t a person in the way we can understand person. I honestly don’t think it matters, how you wrap your head around God. But I think if you do not understand God as good and faithful, you are not a Christian. An arbitrary and capricious God is no god at all!
There is a force, a spirit, beyond words, a wild holy love that pours through this existence, that bends it toward life. We name that as God. Young adults, reading books that confirm for them that most adults are complete putzes, still manage to walk away with one important lesson. No matter the catastrophe, no matter the weight of human evil, good will win. Life will triumph. God is faithful. And ever will be. Amen.