1 Timothy 1:12-17
Gratitude and
Doxology
James Sledge November
14, 2021
 |
| The Conversion of St. Paul Bartolome Esteban Murillo, ca. 1675 |
At a recent staff meeting, I read a meditation by Howard Thurman as a part of our devotional time. The meditation began by speaking of a longing, an urgent seeking and searching for God. But then the meditation took a turn.
With sustained excitement, I recall what, in my own urgency, I had forgotten: God is seeking me. Blessed remembrance! God is seeking me. Wonderful assurance. God is seeking me. This is the meaning of my longing, this is the warp of my desiring, this is my point. The searching that keeps the sand hot under my feet is but my response to (God’s) seeking. Therefore, this moment, I will be still, I will quiet my reaching out, I will abide; for to know really that God is seeking me; to be aware of that NOW is to be found of (God).[1]
I had no real plans for what to do with this reading, and when I finished it, I simply sat in silence for a moment. Then a thought hit me. “When,” I asked, “have you experienced God seeking you?” No one on our Zoom meeting unmuted. It was completely quiet.
I also struggled with something to say, which I found more than a little disturbing. How could I not bring to mind some experience of God moving toward me, God reaching out to me? I had a brief, existential faith crisis. Was God not real to me? That’s certainly a possibility. I know a lot about God, about Jesus, but perhaps I don’t really know God. Or perhaps my god is the one disturbingly described by Anglican scholar N. T. Wright.
For most people in the Western world today, the word ‘god’ refers to a distant, remote being… This god may or may not intervene from time to time in the world, though he usually doesn’t. He has, in fact, left us to muddle through as best we can; which usually means looking after our own interests, carving up the world, and perhaps each other, in our own way. The cat’s asleep upstairs, and the mice — and perhaps the rats — are organizing the world downstairs.
That’s why this remote ‘god’ is the god that the Western world decided it wanted in the eighteenth century: a god to be cooly acknowledged for an hour or so on Sunday mornings, and ignored for the other hundred and sixty-seven hours in the week. No wonder, when they did a survey not long ago, the great majority of people in the United Kingdom said they believed in ‘god’, but only a small minority regularly go to church. If that’s what you believe about ‘god’ …then any sense of worship or religious celebration becomes a vague ritual, a meaningless noise, which merely makes us feel a bit better about ourselves… Can such a god really be God?[2]
The god N. T. Wright describes sounds little like the one the Apostle Paul knew. This God had appointed him for service, had showed him mercy through the love of Jesus, embraced him despite his having persecuted the church. The grace and mercy of God, the call of Jesus are so vivid for Paul that he not only overflows with gratitude, but he cannot help but burst forth in doxology. To the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
Gratitude and doxology, gratitude and worship, if you will. Our scripture reading expresses the basic response of the Christian life: gratitude for the love of God we have encountered in Jesus, and offering God our praise, our worship. But all of that assumes that we know the love of God in Jesus, that we have encountered the grace and mercy that Paul knew, that we have experienced Jesus calling us to service.
And so I ask again the question I asked in that staff meeting. When have you experienced God seeking you? Don’t worry, I don’t expect you to answer me right this moment. After all, I struggled to answer the question myself.
Not that I haven’t ever experienced God seeking me. It’s just been a while. Vivid experiences of God reaching out to me were involved in my decision to uproot my family and go to seminary. They continued for much of my time as a pastor, but in recent years, not so much. And I’ve wondered at times whether God had withdrawn from me, or if perhaps I had withdrawn from God.
I certainly didn’t mean to, but in the hecticness of life, especially life in a pandemic, I wonder if I haven’t been too busy with my own concerns to notice God. I wonder if I haven’t reimagined God more like the one N. T. Wright describes, “a god to be cooly acknowledged for an hour or so on Sunday mornings, and ignored for the other hundred and sixty-seven hours in the week.”
How about you? Is your experience of God like that in our scripture, an experience so powerful that Paul cannot help but issue forth in gratitude and worship? Or is it the distant god who gets acknowledged for an hour or so on the occasional Sunday morning?
_______________________________________________________
Like our scripture, our stewardship campaign this year speaks of gratitude and worship. It speaks of generosity born of gratitude and of the centrality of worship, including a plan to upgrade our livestreaming capability so that does not impinge on the worship experience of those attending in person, along with an upgrade of our aging sound system.
Gratitude overflowing into generosity and the doxology of worship spring forth naturally from the encounter with Jesus who accepts and welcomes us no matter who we are or what we’ve done, and who calls us to ministry. But without that encounter…
Do gratitude and doxology spring forth from your encounter with the love, grace, mercy, and call of God? Our generosity – generosity with time, money, energy, and more – is not a bad measure of that gratitude. And if that generosity isn’t there, the problem may be bigger than needing to raise the number on our estimate of giving card. It may be more of a faith problem, a distorted picture of a god who’s distant and removed, more the concept of God than the living God who comes to us in Jesus.
And so I’ll ask my question once more. When have you experienced God seeking you? If you can’t recall, is it possible you have shut God out with your constant busyness, with your certainties about what God is like, with your fears of what a living Jesus might ask of you? I’ve done all of those, but when I’ve opened myself to God, I have found that God was there all along, Jesus was calling all along. And when that happens, I cannot help but respond with gratitude, and with doxology.
To the king of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory forever and ever. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment