Is God Really Like Jesus?

 Luke 13:1-9

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What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives.  When I say believe, I don’t mean our confession of faith – the doctrinal idea stuff we throw around about God.  Rather, I mean the deep down been programmed into me since I was a baby kind of feelings about God.  There’s the God we say we believe in and then there’s the God we really believe in.  Who is that God?  I’m fond of a book by Bradley Jersak entitled A More Christlike God: a More Beautiful Gospel in which he points out several different deep down beliefs that we project on to God that aren’t Christian.

First, he talks about God the doting grandfather. This is the God who spoils us with whatever we want while ignoring our misbehaviour. This is the God who gives you whatever you ask for, if you just believe he’s so good and wonderful.  Like the Easter bunny he always comes around with a basket of chocolate for his little snookum who can’t do anything wrong.  He’s the Santa Claus who doesn’t have a naughty list and blesses you with everything privilege can provide.  The doting grandfather God image works until tragedy hits and you find your prayers aren’t being answered the way you feel they’re supposed to be.  Then we must ask how God can allow suffering to happen.

The second projection that Jersak defines is God the deadbeat dad or God the absentee landlord. This is the God who abandoned me, the dad who walked out shirking his responsibilities. This is the God who created the universe and gave it laws to govern how it functions, but then left it to fend for itself. This God leaves us feeling like orphans.  He’s simply not there when we need him.

A third common image that we project upon God is that of the punishing judge, the God who gets us when we’re bad.  He is a “meticulous micromanager” of our behaviour and a harsh taskmaster.  God has given us the law and we must obey it or else. He seems to like us best when we are feeling guilt or regret about our behaviour; penitent.  We try to tell ourselves that he “hates the sin, but loves the sinner” yet there’s no escaping the pervasive feeling that if he hates the sin, he hates us too and will only accept us if we can find some way to make ourselves right with him, some way to appease him and avert his angry wrath.

Jersak’s last un-Christ-like image that we project onto God is that of the Santa Claus Blend.  This is the doting grandfather blended with that punitive judge.  Like the doting grandfather it’s, “Ask me for anything and I will give it to you…as long as your good.”  And, like the punitive judge he’s keeping a list of everything we do so don’t let your naughty list grow longer than your nice.  Blended Santa falls apart when the nice get only socks that they didn’t ask for and the naughty get the ponies.  There’s also nothing called grace here because it is all about how good or bad we have been and what we deserve, but nobody gets what they deserve. 

Although these examples my seem a bit trite in my portrayal of them, I think we can all raise our hands and say those sound a lot like the god that I grew up with.  We can confess God as Trinity, as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has made us participants in their loving communion.  But, what we really mean when we say God is: God is God the Father, the punitive Santa who when held accountable for the cold hard fact of suffering in the world turns out to be just a deadbeat dad who, although his only begotten Son died to appease his anger towards us, he is still ready to pour that wrath out on us because no matter how hard we try we only keep discovering we’re not good enough.  

I’ve also said nothing about the Holy Spirit in this description of the way God is not but we seem to believe he is because talk of the Holy Spirit or the personal presence of God with us is generally left by us to the fanatics and for us it’s just easier to say we’ve been touched by an angel when something maybe experiential involving God may have happened.  This is the God we functionally serve.  This is why guilt is the number one motivator for church participation.  If you want something done around the church, just find the person who will feel guilty if it doesn’t get done and that’s your bunny…your Easter bunny.

So, my point is that our deep-down beliefs about who God is ain’t necessarily the true God revealed to us in, through, and as Jesus as presented to us in the Bible and sensed by us through his presence with us.  And so, we come to Luke, and this morning’s passage which is admittedly a very difficult passage to swallow. It seems here that Jesus is making God out to be that punitive judge we met earlier. It seems he is saying get yourself right with God, repent, or God will to get you just like he did them.  

But, that’s not what’s going on here.  I think Jesus is actually exposing a false image of God that was common in his day.  I think this because twice he uses the phrase “do you think” which can also mean “do you suppose” or “do you believe”.   With this conjectural kind of questioning, it seems to me that he is pushing into their belief system to expose a false idea of God.  “Do you really believe that’s the way God is?” would be his question.

A predominant belief back in Jesus’ day was that God punishes sinners and the worse sinner that you are, God will get you all the more.  Birth defects, accidents, horrible deaths, diseases – they believed things like these were punishment from God for sins committed in secret or out in the open.  Therefore, those Galileans spoken of here had to have been really bad for Pilate to have massacred them and mixed their blood with sacrifices; so also, the Jerusalemites upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell.  God was getting them good.

If I were to paraphrase a bit and read a bit between the lines here, I think Jesus is saying “Do you believe these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans (and we all know that all Galileans are dreadfully sinful).  Is it because they were especially bad sinners that God punished them in such a way?  Is this the God you believe in?”  Jesus answers his own question with an emphatic “No!”  No, they were faithful people on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship God rightly and for some reason of Pilate’s whim they died a horrible death.  Sometimes bad things happen to even the most faithful of people.”  

Jesus continues.  “Those eighteen Jerusalemites who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Tower of Siloam fell, do you really believe they were worse sinners than anybody else in Jerusalem (and we all know Jerusalemites are so good and pure) so that God would punished them by wasting their lives with such a haphazard death?  Is this the God you believe in?  If so, you better get yourselves right with God because he’s going to get you too just like he got them.  Tell me, really; is that what you believe God is really like?”

Jesus then tells them a parable in which he contrasts their false image of God and with one that is more Christ-like.  Their false image of God is like the vineyard owner.  He is like a blend between God the punitive judge and God the deadbeat Dad.  He planted a fig tree in his vineyard and left it to grow on its own only to come back at harvest time when there was supposed to be something on it for him only to find that the tree bore no fruit.  Since he couldn’t have a tree wasting his good soil, he wanted it cut down.  But you know, the vineyard owner was at much at fault here as the tree itself for their being no fruit.  You just don’t plant a fruit tree and go off and leave it.  They require a lot of maintenance. Sp also4, why plant a fig tree in a vineyard?  The grapevines were probably too much competition for it with respect to the nutrients in the soil.  You can’t punish something for your own neglect.  That’s not the way God is…is he?  No!

God is like the Gardener in this parable.  The Gardener won’t cut the tree down.  He knows better.  He knows it needs tending.  He sees that the tree needs some fertilizer and gets his hands dirty with poo to make the tree able to bear fruit.  This is the God we see in Jesus.  Jesus, God the Son, got right into the poo of what it is to be human and suffered as we do in every way.  He shared our every weakness.  Though innocent of any crime, he was condemned to death for treason.  His closest friends abandoned him and denied knowing him.  He died a horribly painful death after being tortured by Roman soldiers who were probably histories best at that game.  Yet, God the Father did not pour wrath out on humanity for this ultimate crime against God…No!  He raised Jesus from the dead and then poured the Holy Spirit out upon us, that we may participate in his very life.  God is like this Gardener.  He makes us able to bear the fruit expected of us by pouring himself into us.  The Holy Spirit, God’s very self, is the fertilizer that seeps into us through our roots and restores vitality to us and makes us able to bear the fruits expected of those bearing the image of God in his good creation.

Well, I bring up all these images of God because as I said at the very beginning what we believe about God has a very profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith.  Unless we repent of our misplaced faithfulness to these false images of God that we project onto God and serve instead of the True God, we will perish within the confines of a bankrupt religion.  

The Greek word for repentance is “metanoia”.  “Meta” means “with” and “noia” means “mind”.  It is to be “with-minded”, “with-minded” with Jesus.  It means to think, and pursue the things that he thinks and pursues which are adoration of and faithfulness to God his Father that expresses itself in the humility of suffering servants.  Paul tells as at 1 Corinthians 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ which means we have the Holy Spirit in us helping us and empowering us to choose and live by means of the way of the cross.  The Holy Spirit makes us able to live together as a community of disciples who love each other as the Trinity loves us and who relate to our surrounding community with compassion and the utmost hospitality.  If we persist in clinging to the false images of God that we project onto him we will quench the work of the Holy Spirit in us and we will not be Christ-like but something rather sinister that claims to be (something like a voting bloc).  So, what do you think?  Do you think God is really like Jesus?  Amen.

 

Be With-Minded

Luke 13:1-9
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The insurance industry has a term for when disaster strikes – act of God.  Your barn gets struck by lighting and burns to the ground at no fault of your own.  They call it an act of God.  A meteorite slams into you while you’re asleep in bed.  They also call that an act of God.  It’s amazing that the insurance lingo for a disaster is an “act of God.”  You break both legs while jumping out a second floor window singing “I believe I can fly.”  That’s not an act of God.  That’s a Darwin Award nomination, but OHIP will still pay. 

The insurance industry’s rationale seems to be that since disastrous events come without warning or explanation, the only plausible rationalization one can find is that for some reason God did it.  Therefore, since God does such terrible things at a whim, the only thing we can do is protect ourselves from the after effects of these “acts of God”.  Hence, sales gimmick number one of the insurance industry: protect yourself against God – buy insurance. 

Moving to this passage from Luke, we find what also appears to be a very troubling teaching on the topic of why tragedy happens and this one coming from Jesus.  Converse to the insurance industry’s explanation for disaster, that it is a whim of God, Jesus’ answer at first glance appears to be “blame the victim”; that it is human sin that causes these things.  Humanities inward turned and selfishly bent nature has so twisted the way things are that we cannot but expect bad things to happen to us.  In this line of thinking tragedy does not come as a whim of God.  Rather, it rears its ugly head as a result of the chaos that our human sin-diseased state has brought into the cosmos.  Try what we may everybody still dies, some more tragically than others.

Jesus gives what also appears to be a solution for protection against tragedy.  He says, “Unless you repent you will perish just as these did.”  But, we have to be careful how we hear this.  Jesus is not saying, “Get things right with God so that this whimsical, wrathful God won’t smite you for your sin.”  People do interpret this passage this way and it is quite appalling.  Let’s not do that.  Rather, let’s dig a little deeper.

This passage comes at the tail end of Jesus teaching his disciples to watch for the end of times and not worry or be afraid of the end because it is the Father’s good pleasure to give us the kingdom when it hapens.  In response, some people brought up the tragic event of Pontius Pilate martyring a group of Galileans as they offered sacrifices to God wondering whether this tragedy might be a sign of the end.  You see, Jerusalem Jews often looked down on Galilean Jews as being less holy and so were suggesting that God might be starting his end of the age housecleaning by using Pilate to smite a bunch of “hypocritical Galilean sinners.”

Jesus then sets out to correct their prejudiced beliefs by bringing up an incident when the Tower of Siloam in Jerusalem just happened to fall on a group of Jerusalem Jews.  To paraphrase Jesus’ response: “No one is any worse a ‘sinner’ than anyone else.  We’re all ‘sinners’ and unless we all ‘repent’ we will all perish just as tragically and needlessly as those Galileans and those Jerusalemites who appeared to die tragically for no reason”. 

Jesus’ saying that we will all perish just as tragically as victims of tragedy unless we repent leaves me feeling a bit uneasy especially in the wake of several centuries of the Hell-fire and brimstone preaching that the Church has used so effectively to coerce conversions and grow wealthy.  We need to unpack what Jesus is saying and do so by looking at two terms: “Repent” and “perish”.

Let us first take a look at what it is to perish.  If you look back through the Gospel of Luke at the other places the Greek word shows up you will find it translated as to kill, murder, destroy, perish, or lose.  Apparently the word has something to do with death, particularly the futility of life being needlessly wasted.  Ultimately, it’s meaning goes beyond simply dying a tragic, accidental, or undeserved death that serves no meaning to mean wasting life in general as we live it.  Perishing is living with a sense of hopelessness with respect to God and of having not fulfilled any God-given purpose and it all just culminates in death.  To perish is to waste the life God has given to each of us.  Perishing is not God’s punishment.  Perishing for us is like what happens when a plant wilfully removes itself from the soil – if you can imagine the absurdity of that.  So, it is when we turn from God to ourselves to live life according to our own whims.  We perish.

Jesus offers a solution to this universal problem of perishing.  He says, “Repent.”  We have to consider what Jesus means by “repent” within the context of the Gospel he proclaimed.  The Gospel that Jesus proclaimed was not a matter that concerned what happens to us after we die.  His Gospel concerns life right now.  He proclaimed, “The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe this Gospel.”  Our response to that Gospel involves what we do with our lives right now in the present.  “Repent and believe” is a compound phrase of two things that go together to make one inseparable whole like “pizza and beer”, “burgers and fries”, or Dr. Seuss’s “Thing 1 and Thing 2”.  To repent is to pick up and start following.  

The Greek word for repent literally means “be with-minded”; become of like mind.  Unfortunately, our English understanding of the word repent comes to us through the Latin language and the theology of the Medieval Roman Church which defined repent as “remorseful” so that “repent and believe” meant “be remorseful about your sinfulness and obey the Church so you won’t go to Hell”.  Luther and the Reformers turned it into, “Be remorseful for your sins, stop sinning, and believe you are forgiven because of Jesus death on the cross on your behalf so you won’t go to Hell.”  Somewhere along the way the Joyous News that the Kingdom of God is at hand was simply forgotten (actually it was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire.  Topic for another day.).

To repent means to be “with-minded” and to believe is to actively engage one’s loyalty.  In short, to “Repent and believe” is to turn away from perishing in “self-mindedness” to being an active disciple of Jesus.   It is the changing of one’s mind from one’s self-interested mindedness to sharing in the humble and compassionate mind of Christ freely given to us by the Holy Spirit as we strive to know Jesus personally and follow in his way.  This “with-mindedness” with Christ will bring about in us the fruits of the Spirit which are the virtues of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and not to mention the capacity to turn away from the old life of self-interest as he leads us to live according to the cross, by laying down our lives for others.

I use the word fruits above which comes from the book of Galatians because it fits in with the parable that Jesus told on what repentance is.  We as individuals and as a church and humanity as a whole are that fig tree that does not bear the fruit that it is supposed to bear.  That is the problem with sin.  Because of our self-mindedness we have alienated ourselves from God and thus cannot possibly bear the fruits God desires of us.  God would do well to put an end to it all and start over.  But, Christ in his love for us fertilizes us with the Holy Spirit, with the grace of his very own presence, who works in us to bring forth the fruit that God desires.  All we need do is yield to his work and we will grow in him.

In closing I would just like to briefly say how to repent.   Repenting involves more than simply not doing what you know you shouldn’t do.  Repenting is also more than simply feeling remorse for that which you have or have not done.  Repenting begins with a devotional life.  It is making and taking the time to pray and to read the Bible.  Moreover, it requires committing ourselves to a small group of followers who are striving to live as Jesus’ followers.  Jesus’ call to discipleship is a call to fellowship in him.  Repenting is becoming “with-minded” – “with-minded” with Christ while with one another.  Repenting is something we do together.  Christ-filled fellowship is the antidote to perishing.  Amen. 

      

Is God Really Like Jesus?

Luke 13:1-9

What we believe about God has a profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith.  When I say believe, I don’t mean our confession of faith – the doctrinal idea stuff we throw around about God.  Rather, I mean the deep-down-been-programmed-into-me-since-I-was-a-baby kind of feelings that we have about God.  There’s the God we say we believe in and then there’s the God we really believe in.  Who is that God and what’s he like?

Last summer I read a book by Bradley Jersak entitled A More Christlike God: a More Beautiful Gospel in which he points out several different deep down beliefs that we project onto God that aren’t Christlike.  First, he talks about God the doting grandfather. This is the God who spoils us with whatever we want and ignores are misbehaviour. This is the God who gives us the desires of our hearts if we just delight in him.  If you believe, he’ll give you whatever you ask for.  The doting grandfather God works until tragedy hits and you find your prayers aren’t being answered.  Then we must ask how God can allow suffering to happen.

The second projection that Jersak defines is God the deadbeat dad or God the absentee landlord. This is the God who abandoned me, the dad who walked out shirking his responsibilities. This is the God who created the universe and gave it laws to govern how it functions, but then left it to fend for itself.  He's the God-of the-gap whom we blame for everything that's wrong.  This God leaves us feeling like orphans.  He’s simply not there when we need him.  The Atheists can't see past this god. 

A third common image that we project upon God is that of the punitive judge, the God who gets us when we’re bad.  He is a “meticulous micromanager” of our behaviour and a "harsh taskmaster."  This God has given us a law and we must obey it or else.  He seems to like us best when we are feeling guilt or regret about our behaviour.  We try to tell ourselves that he “hates the sin, but loves the sinner” yet there’s no escaping the pervasive feeling that if he hates the sin, he hates us too and will only "pardon" (we have to use legal language because he's a judge) us if we can find someway to make ourselves right with him, someway to appease him and avert his angry wrath.

Jersak’s last un-Christlike image that we project onto God is that of the Santa Claus Blend.  This is the doting grandfather blended with the punitive judge.  Like the doting grandfather it’s, “Ask me for anything and I will give it to you…as long as you’re good.”  And, like the punitive judge he’s keeping a list of everything we do so don’t let your naughty list grow longer than your nice.  Blended Santa falls apart when the good get only socks when they've prayed for ponies while the bad get the ponies.  There’s also nothing called grace here because its all about how good or bad we have been. 

Although these examples may seem a bit trite in my portrayal of them, I think we can all raise our hands and say "those sound a lot like the god I grew up with."  We can confess God as Trinity, as the loving communion of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who has made us participants in their loving communion which biblically and theologically is correct.  But, what we really mean when we say God is God the Father the punitive Santa who under scrutiny initiated by the cold hard fact of suffering in the world is just a deadbeat dad who, although his only begotten Son died to appease his anger towards us, is still ready to pour the wrath out on us because no matter how hard we try we only keep discovering we’re not good enough.  I left out the Holy Spirit because that one’s for crazies and it’s just easier for us to say we’ve been touched by an angel.  This distorted projection of our own devise is the God we functionally serve.  This is why guilt is the number one motivator for church participation.  If you want something done around the church, just find the person who will feel guilty if it doesn’t get done and that’s your bunny, your Easter bunny.  So my point is that our deep down beliefs about who God is ain’t necessarily the God we find in Jesus. 

And so we come to Luke, and this morning’s passage which is admittedly a very difficult passage to swallow.  It seems here that Jesus is making God out to be the punitive judge we met earlier.  It seems he is saying "Get yourselves right with God, repent, or God is going to get you too just like he did those other miserable sinners".  But, that’s not what’s going on here.  I think what Jesus is doing here is confronting a false image of God that was common in his day and then tries to counter it with an image of how God really is...a more Christlike God.
          I build my case on a minor point of Greek; twice Jesus uses the phrase “do you think” which can also mean “do you suppose” or “do you believe".   With this conjectural kind of questioning I think he is pushing into their belief system to expose the false idea they had of God.  A predominant belief back in Jesus day was that God punishes sinners and the worse sinner that you are, God will get you all the more.  Birth defects, accidents, horrible deaths, diseases were all things they believed to be punishment from God for sins committed, secret or otherwise.  Therefore, they would have believed those Galileans had to have been really bad for God to have used Pilate who massacred them and mixed their blood with sacrifices; so also the Jerusalemites upon whom the Tower of Siloam fell.

If I had to paraphrase here and read a bit between the lines, I think Jesus is saying “Do you believe these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans (and we all know that all Galileans are dreadfully sinful).  Is it because they were especially bad sinners that God punished them in such a way?  Is this the God you believe in?”  Jesus answers his own question with an emphatic “No!”  No, they were faithful people on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship God rightly and for some reason of Pilate’s whim they died a horrible death.  Sometimes bad things happen to even the most faithful of people.  So also with the eighteen Jerusalemites who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the Tower of Siloam fell, do you believe they were worse sinners than anybody else in Jerusalem and so God was punishing them?  Is this the God you believe in?  No!  Accidents happen.  Well, if this is the God you believe in, then you better get yourselves right with this God because you’re going to get it in like manner because you're all sinners too.  So tell me, is this really what God is like?”

Jesus then tells them a parable in which he contrasts their false image of God with one that is more Christ-like.  The first image is the vineyard owner.  He is like a blend between God the punitive judge and God the deadbeat dad.  He planted a fig tree in his vineyard and left it to grow on its own coming back only at harvest time when there was something in it for him only to find that the tree bore no fruit.  Since he couldn’t have a tree wasting his good soil, he wanted it cut down.  The vineyard owner, I think was at much at fault here as the tree itself for there being no fruit.  You just don’t plant a fruit tree and go off and leave it.  They need tending.  And, why plant a fig tree in a vineyard?  The grapevines were probably too much competition for it.  You can’t punish something for your own neglect.  This not the way God is, is he?

Maybe God is rather like the Gardener in this parable.  The Gardener won’t cut the tree down.  He knows better.  He knows it needs tending.  He sees that the tree needs some fertilizer and gets his hands dirty with poo to make the tree able to bear fruit.  I think this is the God we see in Jesus.  Jesus, God the Son, got right into the sewage waste of what it is to be human and suffered as we do in every way.  He shared our every weakness.  Though innocent of any crime he was condemned to death for treason.  His closest friends abandoned him and denied knowing him.  He died a horribly painful death (and this is not to diminish the suffering of so many who die horribly painful deaths).  Yet, God the Father did not pour wrath out on humanity for its ultimate crime against God…No!  He raised Jesus from the dead and then poured the Holy Spirit out upon us, that we may participate in his very life.  God is like this Gardener.  The Holy Spirit, God’s very self, is the fertilizer that seeps into us through our roots and restores vitality to us and makes us able to bear the fruits of righteousness.

Well, I bring up all these images of God because as I said at the very beginning that what we believe about God has a very profound effect on how we live our lives and express our faith.  To take Jesus' warning to heart, unless we repent of our misplaced faithfulness to these false images of God that we project onto God and serve instead of the True God, we will perish within the confines of a bankrupt religion.  The Greek word for repentance is “metanoia”.  “Meta” means “with” and “noia” means “mind”.  It is to be “with-minded”, “with-minded” with Jesus.  It means to think, and pursue the things that he thinks and pursues which is adoration and faithfulness to God his Father that expresses itself in the humility of suffering servants.  Paul tells as at 1 Corinthians 2:16 that we have the mind of Christ which means we have the Holy Spirit in us helping us and empowering us to choose and live by means of the way of the cross.  The Holy Spirit makes us able to live together as a community of disciples who love each other as the Trinity loves us and who relate to our surrounding community with compassion and the utmost hospitality.  The Holy Spirit makes us willing and able to get outside these walls and soil our hands with the "poo" of the lives of of real people to whom we can minister in Jesus' name.  This punitive, deadbeat, Santa that we serve only leaves us with boundaries between us and the hurting world out there.  If we persist in clinging to the false images of God that we project onto him we will quench the work of the Holy Spirit in us and we will not be Christ-like but something rather sinister that claims to be.  So, what do you think?  Do you think God is really like Jesus?  Amen.