God-in-the-box

 ‘God-in-the-box’

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation,

the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church,

October 25th 2020

 

Image credit: By Ancient-origins.net - 

https://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-asia/first-temple-crowning-achievement-

king-solomon-and-home-legendary-ark-covenant-021683, 

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92006249

2 Samuel 7.1-17

Last Sunday was our first Sunday service held in our church building, since the coronavirus restrictions forced us to close our doors back in March.

And I think it’s fair to say that, for the 17 of us who were able to be there, it was deeply moving to be back in the sanctuary, even if the service itself was some way from what we remember or desire.

I also hear that those who joined online found it a good service, which is great, because we will need to find ways of straddling the in-person / online divide for some time to come.

And although last week was a trial run, and unless we face further restrictions, we’ll be back in our building for a service again in November.

And as I’ve been reflecting on this experience during the week, what has struck me is the sense I felt of ‘coming home’ to our building.

It was similar to the feeling I get sometimes in a cathedral, that sense that God has been worshipped in this place for so many years, and that this building has been a home for God’s people for so long, that it somehow feels easier to enter God’s presence there compared to, say, the street outside.

And it’s this idea of building a ‘house’ for God, that lies at the heart of our reading this morning from the second book of Samuel.

Here we find one of the key turning points in the Hebrew Bible, the decision to build a temple in Jerusalem.

In the end, of course, it isn’t David who actually builds God’s house, it’s his son Solomon who constructs the great first temple.

But Solomon’s project is simply the fulfilment of the dream that we find articulated here by David, who says to the prophet Nathan, "See now, I am living in a house of cedar, but the ark of God stays in a tent."

And in this one sentence, the whole history of religion shifts.

If we think back on the story so far, we can trace an evolution in the way the ancient Israelites thought about their God.

The original revelation of God to Abraham was a moment of startling insight into the nature of God.

Up until Abraham, each nation, each tribe, each household, had their own gods.

There were thousands of them, the god of the river who gave fish to eat, the god of the fields who gave grain to grow, the god of the sky who caused rain and sun, the god of my tribe, who helped me fight against your tribe, the god of my house, who I pray to every night for safety and sleep, and so on, and so on, and so on…

And to Abraham, God says that there is only one God, and that God is the Lord of the whole earth.

Abraham’s calling, for him and his descendants, is to become the people who enter into a relationship with that one true God, in order that all the earth might be blessed through their witness to this new truth.

Fast forward through Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, to God’s people in slavery in Egypt; and here we come to the next milestone, which is the story of Moses and the exodus.

Through Moses, God leads his people out of slavery, and into the wilderness, on their way to the promised land.

Forget for a minute the discussions about whether this all happened historically, because it almost certainly didn’t.

But that’s not the point.

This story of Moses and the Exodus gives us a story of how God works in human history, it reveals God as the liberator of the oppressed, and the enemy of empires.

And the image of the people of God wandering in the wilderness is a timeless example of God’s people in every age, with each generation making its pilgrimage from slavery to promised land.

And as they wander, as we wander, God travels with us - because God is the Lord of all the earth.  

But then we get to Mount Sinai, and the ten commandments, and things start to change gear, because the people start to seek certainty and stability.

The big problem with a big God is that we have very small lives, and we want to know what we should do, how we should live.

So God gives the Israelites the ten commandments, to guide them in their wandering and to help them live well as the people of God’s covenant.

Except, of course, it isn’t all that long before ten commandments become thousands, and you only have to read through the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy to see how, once you start down the path of asking God for a rulebook, things get very complicated, very quickly.

And so the process of tying God down continues, and the God of the whole earth becomes incrementally that bit smaller, that bit more parochial, that bit more controllable.

By the time we get to David, God is the God of Israel, who fights for them against the other nations, who defends their borders, and asks of them obedience and faithfulness.

And so, for David, the next logical step, is to build God a house.

There’s a bit of clever word-play here, because David says he wants to build a house of God, by which he means a temple, and God says he will build a house of David, by which he means a dynasty.

And so, through this, God gets a bit smaller again, becoming not even the God of Israel, but the God of the southern tribes of Israel, as expressed through the temple in Jerusalem, and David’s descendants as they rule in Jerusalem.

I told you this was a significant moment in the history of world religions.

Here, in the deal David does with God to build a house in exchange for a house, the great God of all the earth glimpsed by Abraham, becomes a localised deity, focussed on one city, and one family.

The Abrahamic assertion that there is only one God, which revealed the presence of God in all peoples and all places, becomes a diminished statement of territorial dominance, denying the validity of other paths to the divine.

And so God gets put in a box.

The ark of the covenant containing the ten commandments, becomes the holy of holies at the heart of a massive temple complex.

Only the high priest can go there to see God, and then only once per year, everyone else is kept at a distance.

The God who travelled with the faithful through wilderness, the God who was with them in slavery, the God who calls them to new life has become a God-in-a-box, in a bigger box called the temple, in a bigger box called the city of Jerusalem, in a bigger box called the nation of Israel.

And the family that put him there, David’s dynasty, get to control God because the story they tell of the deal David did, is one where God promises David an eternal kingdom, and a throne for all time.

And so it might have continued, except, of course, earthly dreams of perpetual power rarely run smoothly.

After all, God has already shown in Egypt that God is against all empires and it turns out that this includes those empires that have been established in God’s own divine name.

God will not stay in a box forever.

Eventually, the temple is destroyed by the Babylonians, and the Davidic monarchy, the line of David, loses its grip on power.

At which point, the promises of God to David in this story go through a process of reinterpretation and they become the hope of a future messiah, one who will re-establish the kingdom of David, and restore the power to Israel that other nations have taken away.

Which is why, when Luke tells the story of Gabriel’s appearance to Mary, he quotes from this text to help his readers understand something profound about Jesus as the revelation of God’s action in human history.

Luke 1.28, 30-33

 ²⁸ And [Gabriel] came to [Mary] and said, "Greetings, favored one! The Lord is with you." ³⁰ The angel said to her, "Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God.  ³¹ And now, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you will name him Jesus.  ³² He will be great, and will be called the Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give to him the throne of his ancestor David.  ³³ He will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end."

All the messianic hopes of David’s kingdom are put onto Jesus at his incarnation.

And then Jesus spends the rest of his life subverting them.

Jesus may be, within the Christian tradition, the fulfilment of messianic hope, but it’s a different form of Jesus consistently refuses to raise an army, he turns away from those who would enact a revolution in his name, he resists the title ‘son of David’, always calling himself simply ‘the son of man’.

Jesus refuses to seek a palace, instead claiming that ‘the son of man has nowhere to lay his head’ (Lk 9.58).

He never marries, he has no children.

The God revealed in Jesus doesn’t want a ‘house’ either in terms of a building, or a dynasty.

Instead, Jesus constantly takes people back to Abraham’s original vision of God, as the universal Lord of all creation confounding those who would use him to rebuild David’s lost lineage of power.

Jesus will not be put in a box.

So, my question for us this morning is this: what boxes do we put God in?

Do we try to build temples for our God? Why is our worship space, with its pews and stained glass windows, called the ‘sanctuary’? Why was I moved to tears last Sunday when we worshipped there again?

Do we seek to constrain God to certain worship styles, or favoured theologies?

Is God the God of us, and our people, but not the God of them, and their people?

Do we seek to constrain God’s action in our own lives, seeking settled status within ourselves instead of embracing a life of wilderness pilgrimage?

If so, then we need to beware, because God will not be constrained, and neither will God live in a box.

God is the God of the whole earth, and through Jesus and by the Spirit of Christ we are called to a vision of God that is bigger and more universal and more loving than we can ever conceive.

The eternal kingdom, that enfolds and embraces us all, is the kingdom of God.

And we build other empires at our peril.

The Passover Lamb

A sermon for Provoking Faith in a Time of Isolation, 

the online gathering of Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church, 

October 4th 2020

Exodus 12.1-13; 13.1-8

If last week’s passage found its artistic resonance

            in the musical genius of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice,

this week’s surely is all about DreamWorks’

            all-star vocal cast animation The Prince of Egypt,

or possibly if you’re of an older generation,

            Charlton Heston, Cecil B. DeMille, and The Ten Commandments.

 

The image of enslaved Israelites marking their door lintels with blood,

            as the angel of death passes over them to visit the houses of the Egyptians,

is one which is written deep into our cultural memory,

            just as it has been foundational for the central religious traditions

            of both Judaism and Christianity.

 

This is the original Passover,

            celebrated within Judaism as the revelation of God

                        as the one who delivers people from oppression.

And it is also the origin of the Lord’s Supper,

            the moment when Jesus celebrated Passover with his disciples

                        and revealed himself as the one who will bring deliverance

                        from enslavement to sin and death.

 

Our reading today gives us two stages of the story

            of the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery:

In chapter 12 we meet the story of the Passover lamb and the blood on the door lintels,

            and then in chapter 13 we hear of the institution of the Feast of Unleavened Bread;

and it is this blood and this bread

            that we will meet in the bread and the wine that we will use

            as we remember the body and blood of Jesus on the cross

            as we celebrate communion later in our service this morning.

 

We’ll come back to the idea of Jesus as the Passover lamb in a minute,

            but first I want us to consider what, for many people,

                        is a deeply troubling aspect to this story,

            and this is the divine violence that lies at the heart of it.

 

When our God-daughter was a little girl,

            her primary school did a series of assemblies on different religious traditions.

And when they came to the story of the Passover,

            she came home from school that day deeply troubled.

She had heard, time and again, her parents and her church

                        telling her that God was a God of love,

            so when she encountered the story of God sending the angel of death

                        to kill the firstborn children of the Egyptians,

            her concern was that, as a firstborn child herself,

                        if she had lived in ancient Egypt, would God have killed her?

 

Her parents decided that this was definitely a question for her God-parents,

            and so the next time we were round there,

            the question came our way…

 

Did God kill the firstborn children,

            even though they had done nothing to deserve it,

and might God do the same again under similar circumstances?

 

It’s troubling, isn’t it,

            because it takes us right to the heart of what kind of a God we actually worship.

 

Well, trying to frame an answer to the question of theodicy

            for a seven year old is never easy,

but I can remember asking our God-daughter

            how she would feel if she wasn’t an Egyptian first-born,

            but a first-born of the Israelites.

 

And together we remembered that earlier in the story,

            Pharaoh had given the order

            that every first-born male Jewish baby was to be killed,

and we imagined how it felt to be a Jewish slave in Egypt

            with no freedom, no hope, and terrible hardship.

 

And what we realised was that this story feels different,

            when it is read from the perspective of the Jewish children,

            than it does when it is read from the perspective of the Egyptian children.

 

And we reflected that as those who, in global terms at least,

            sit more at the Egyptian end of the economic and power spectrum

                        than the Israelite-slaves,

            our natural tendency was to identify with the Egyptians

                        rather than with the Israelites.

 

Well, as liberation theologians have consistently shown us,

            learning to read texts from the bottom-up,

            amplifying the voices of the oppressed that are usually silenced,

can be a way into fresh encounter with otherwise difficult stories.

 

I’m not sure that reading this text as an Israelite rather than an Egyptian

            entirely excuses God’s actions against the Egyptians,

            but it certainly takes us a step towards hearing the story more helpfully.

 

But of course, there is more to say on this

            than I was able say to our God-daughter all those years ago.

 

Because of course these stories are not first-hand accounts of ‘what God did in Egypt’,

            these are stories told a thousand or more years later,

            and written down by the Jews in exile in Babylon in the seventh century BC.

 

The question to ask of the book of Exodus is not,

            ‘why did God kill the firstborn Egyptians?’,

but rather,

            ‘why did this story emerge and evolve to say that God did?’

 

This is a question of theology, not history,

            and the answer lies in the Israelite experience of the Babylonian exile.

 

At a time when they were oppressed, enslaved, exiled in Babylon,

            they told and re-told this story from their pre-history,

to explore the question of how it might be

            that God is at work to bring release for the captives

            and judgment on those who violently cause their oppression.

 

But we’re still not quite there in excusing God’s divine violence, are we?

            We may have read the text from the perspective

                        of the Israelites rather than the Egyptians,

            and we may have contextualised the story

                        as a non-historical theological exploration

            of the Israelite experience of Babylonian exile,

but God is still a character in this story,

            and, within the story, the firstborn of the Egyptians still die.

 

Just because a story isn’t historical,

            doesn’t mean it doesn’t have to answer for its assertions.

 

And here I think we come to the heart of the issue,

            which crops up for us again and again as we read through scripture.

 

Do we accept that God is violent,

            or do we not?

 

And here we find ourselves back at the story of Jesus,

            and the events of the last supper.

 

The images of blood and bread from the Passover story

            become the blood and body of Jesus,

            soon to be broken on the cross.

 

The question of divine violence

            is as much present in the story of the cross

            as it in in the story of the Passover.

 

Does God kill Jesus on the cross,

            or is something else going on here?

 

There are certainly many Christians who would indeed assert

            that God kills Jesus.

 

The logic, known as the theory of substitutionary atonement,

            runs as follows:

                        the wages of sin is death,

                        and we all sin, so we all deserve death,

            but God wants to grant us eternal life,

                        so Jesus dies in our place

                        as God’s wrath at human sin is placed on him.

 

There was some considerable controversy a few years ago

            about one line in that otherwise magnificent hymn, ‘In Christ alone’,

which has lost its place in several hymn books,

            because of the authors unwillingness to allow a change to their text:

            ‘Till on the cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied’.

 

None other than Tom Wright, doyen of thinking evangelicals

                        and the former Bishop of Durham,

            has said that in his view this line should be changed to:

                        ‘Till on that cross as Jesus died The love of God was satisfied.’

            and indeed many congregations just sing this alternative version anyway.

 

Well, I don’t want to get into a discussion on the legalism of copyright legislation,

            but I do note that at stake here is a key question

            regarding who we think God is.

 

For my money, this view of a violent God is inadequate,

            and that the cross is not God violently killing Jesus,

it is God-in-Jesus reaching into the depths of human suffering

            to redeem all those who suffer the violence caused by human sin.

 

God did not crucify Jesus,

            the Romans did.

 

And in this we catch a glimpse of God-in-Jesus,

            whose response to suffering is to embrace those who suffer,

            and to redeem those who are enslaved.

 

And so we’re back to Babylon, and to Egypt:

            both stories from our inherited faith tradition

            that show God at work to bring release and redemption.

 

And I want to suggest one further re-reading of this story,

            where we read it not as Israelite children, nor as Jewish exiles,

            nor even as historical critics.

 

I want us to read this story through the lens of God’s revelation in Jesus.

            God-in-Jesus is never violent towards the innocent,

            and is always angry at oppression.

 

The violence in human history, by this reading,

            is always the consequence of human sin;

            and this includes the suffering of the Israelite children in Egypt.

 

Empires that oppose God’s kingdom of love

            are always destined for destruction,

and those that embrace violence in their quest for domination,

            contain within their violence the seeds of their own violent demise;

because however powerful they may become,

            they are always going to reap what they have sown.

 

Those who sow the wind, will reap the whirlwind,

            as the prophet Hosea put it (Hos. 8.7).

 

Reading the story of the Passover as a theological exploration

            of the futile efforts of human empires

            to destroy God’s in-breaking eternal kingdom,

but taking our understanding of God’s action

            from the revelation of God in Jesus,

takes us to a place of hope,

            where those who seek to destroy God’s kingdom

                        whether through enslavement of his people

                        or the execution of his son,

            are ultimately destined for failure.

 

Ultimately, I would want to suggest,

            that on the cross, as Jesus died

            the love of God was not just satisfied, but magnified.

 

And as we come towards the Lord’s Table,

            to encounter Jesus as the Passover lamb,

            through his broken body and shed blood,

let us focus our worship

            on one who came to redeem the captives,

            and bring peace to those trapped in violence.

 

Amen.