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Making the Missionary Bargain May 7, 2000 Suzanne Luper North Raleigh United Church It’s a little daunting for me to be standing here in front of you today. And I’ve noticed more nervousness on my part about preaching for you than I have in the past. I get asked to preach several times a year, but in the past, always to people I didn’t know, who didn’t know me. And so I would always comfort myself by saying, “Oh well, if I bomb, they just won’t ask me back.” But this is my home, and a place I am learning to love, and I want to come back! I want to tell you a story about a bargain I tried to make with God. I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I was riding my bicycle very fast -- wind in my face, arms stretched out (not holding the handle bars!), having a hellova time. All of a sudden I realized that I was coming up to a steep cliff with a sharp drop off, and that I was going way too fast to stop. In that moment of sheer terror, this prayer flashed across my brain: “Oh God, if You’ll keep me from going over this cliff, I’ll go to Africa and be a missionary for the rest of my life!” What an intriguing bargain to try to strike with God. And why would I promise such a thing as that? Especially since I could not think of anything I would rather do LESS than spend my life in Africa being a missionary. (Now missions had been an important thing in my family, and it was quite a bold and wonderful calling for revered older members of my family, but it was definitely not for me.) I believe that my bargain with God serves up two very interesting notions about how we relate to God, and how we think God relates to us. The fact that I said this prayer, at age 9 or 10, without even thinking about it, also suggests that I had really absorbed a common theology about God. I’d like to look at these two notions with you, and see whether they seem as familiar to you as they were to me. And I’d like to suggest that these are not helpful ideas about God, they are not accurate, and they may actually stand in the way of our knowing God. The first notion: We do not find it easy to believe that God wants us to be happy. I’ll tell you how my bargain points to this. As I’ve said, I didn’t want to be a missionary to Africa. Didn’t then, still don’t. But I was secretly fearful that, if I gave my life completely over to God, then somehow my life would no longer be my own. God would want me to serve in ways that would make me miserable, do jobs for which I had no gifts or talents. (Man, I would have done more damage to the cause of Christ; I would have set back Christendom in Africa by 100’s of years if I’d gone over there.) I believed I would have no choice, and it would be forever. A kind of death sentence. This notion is still powerfully with us, so familiar that we hardly even notice it. We say that something is “sinfully delicious.” We warn people, “Don’t have too much fun!” “ You can’t trust happiness!” I hear clients say, “Things are going so well, I’m just waiting for the bomb to drop.” We have inherited a powerful remnant of traditional Orthodox Christianity, coming out of ancient Platonic and Stoic beliefs, about a kind of mind/body split. The mind was seen as spiritual, and was to transcend the body, which was the source of carnal pleasure and therefore provided the occasion for sin. The Puritans, our ancestors, were particularly captivated by this view, and so we Americans got a double dose. The second notion: That God’s role in our lives is to be either rescuer or punisher, or both. In my childish bargain I thought that God might swoop down and keep me from falling off that cliff. And if He had, would I have been rewarded for my faith by being sent to Africa? That’s what I would have said in my testimony, knowing all the while that it was actually a punishment for some terrible sin. Isn’t it odd that we stay in that kind of childlike position as we relate to God? As children, we naturally see our parents as sources of rescue and punishment, and rightly so. But that changes as we grow older. Hopefully we begin to take on more responsibility, we become empowered as adults, and we finally shed those old views of our parents. We begin to want something that looks more like friendship, a sharing of concern and support, a real partnership. It hurts to stay locked into a position of hoping for a rescue or expecting a punishment. I have a client -- I’ll call him Greg. Greg had a nervous breakdown 5 years ago. After several years of escalating manic-depressive disorder, Greg climbed 10 flights of stairs to the top of an office building. He then went out on the roof, walked over to the edge, and began yelling to the people down below that he was going to fly. Today he has good medications which keep him very stable, but he wonders if that breakdown was God’s way of punishing him for his homosexuality. Another client -- I’ll call her Debbie, is an intelligent, highly respected woman. She has a great career and a happy marriage. She and her husband have a son who is severely autistic. Most of the time this capable woman believes that his condition is the result of complex genetic and biological factors over which she had no control. She even lectures to parents of autistic children. But in the middle of the night, when she’s exhausted and discouraged, she privately wonders if this is God’s way of punishing her and her husband for the abortion they had before they were married. So many clients over the years who have lived in terror that they will burn in hell for being gay. So many clients and friends who have wondered if the tragedy in their lives is God’s way of trying to teach them or reprimand them. But also so many people over the years who believe without a doubt that their good fortune (a big bank account, good health, new car, whatever) is a direct reward from God for their goodness. And so we wonder, what role does God play ? How does God want to relate to us? Well, Jesus specifically rejects the notion that God inflicts punishment on the earth for supposed sin. (Lk.13; Jn.9:2-3) He also suggests, in several stories and parables, that goodness is its own reward. I chose the scripture for today, the story of the Prodigal Son, because I think it might provide the best glimpse into how God really acts towards us. Jesus tells the story of a father whose heart is torn apart when his younger son demands to have his share of the inheritance early, so that he can run away from home and live high on the hog. After the boy has spent all the money, he finally comes home, tail between his legs, and asks if he can be treated as one of his Dad’s servants. There’s a big surprise in store here, because Dad doesn’t punish the boy, but welcomes him with open arms and plans a huge celebration. (It is extremely important to note here that Dad did not go out to rescue the boy. He waited and he hoped, and I believe he looked out over that horizon every day with intense longing. But it was always the boy’s choice to come home or not.) The older brother in the story, the one who stayed by his father’s side and worked hard on the farm, is confounded by this. “Now wait just a minute! He broke your heart, and all of the rules! And I have been here, all this time, doing what you wanted! Where’s my reward?” The boys are thinking as we think: the younger one expects punishment and the older one expects reward. But the father thinks as God thinks: “No need for punishment (the boy created his own hell), no need for reward (the reward has been there all along in our good partnership), and no need for rescue (because if he were brought home by my power, he couldn’t choose to become a man and come home by his own power). And so, I didn’t go over that cliff 35 years ago. I must not have totally believed in my own bargain. Obviously I didn’t test it. I’m real glad that I didn’t go sailing out over the cliff, because I don’t think God would have agreed to my bargain, no matter how much I believed. I must have braked real hard and allowed the bike to slide out from underneath me. Probab ly went home with some scraped elbows and bloody knees. But I also went home with something so much more valuable than a miracle rescue. I went home with my freedom. If God had reached out some giant hand and caught me and my bicycle and lifted us back up to solid earth, it would have been a powerful moment. But then -- just think of it -- I would have Had to go to Africa. Or, (and I’m very serious about this), I would have had to reject God in order to find and follow my bliss. It wasn’t until I reached my thirties that I began to imagine that God might actually want me to be as happy as I could be. That God might be supportive of my yearnings, excited about my pleasure, ready to help me pursue those things that make me feel whole and alive. Not interested in punishing me, but so interested in restoring me. St. Iranaeus is remembered for saying, “The glory of God is the human being fully alive.” I’m coming to believe that too. Thanks be to God. |
Contact Doug Long at (919) 844-6661 or
send e-mail to: doug@northraleighunited.org |