The God That Does Not Give Up
“The God Who Does Not Give Up”
Rev Wendy McCormick. First Presbyterian Church – Granville March 17, 2024
Last Sunday’s odd little story about the snakes has generated lots of interesting conversations. It is certainly a story that leads people to conclude that God is irrationally angry, wrathful and generally not a nice guy. Sending poisonous snakes to bite the people. I reject that old saw that says the Old Testament God is a wrathful while the New Testament God is loving. But if that’s your point of view, you can certainly find evidence in the poisonous snake story.
However, if you take the Bible as a whole --- which I think the people who put it together mean for us to – there is an overarching narrative – a trajectory – and it does not require the postulation of two different gods or two radically different characteristics of the one god that turn on a dime when you turn the page from Malachi to Matthew.
One way to look at that overarching narrative is through the lens of covenant, which has been part of our worship journey this Lent. Today’s reading from Jeremiah, appointed for this fifth Sunday in Lent, completes the Lenten series of covenant readings. And as we look back over them, we see that they have been accumulating, like layers. One add to the next, not as replacements but as amplification. The covenant with Abraham doesn’t nullify the covenant with Noah but instead offers a new layer, the next effort by God to love the world. The work of the prophet Jeremiah is intense, passionate and often painful to read. About six centuries before the time of Jesus and about four centuries after the time of Moses and the exodus, Jeremiah was called by God to speak about God’s judgment coming for a people who had strayed a long way from God’s covenant expectations. Loss of the promised land and destruction of the Holy City Jerusalem at the hands of the great Babylonian empire were on the horizon. This time people did not react with repentance but with hostility toward Jeremiah. Much of the book is grim and painful.
Today’s reading comes from a welcome section of comfort. In the midst of many chapters of pain and judgment, Jeremiah shares these beautiful words from God: an almost utopian vision of hope and comfort: however far people stray, however recalcitrant they are in turning from God’s plans and ignoring God’s hopes and dreams for a creation blessed by a chosen people, however many times we turn to our own devices and away from the call to be a light to the nations, a vessel of God’s love for all the world, God does not give up but tries again and again. As these successive covenants come, we can almost imagine God saying, OK let’s try this. Plan B. Plan C. Plan G. . .
We so rarely encounter a human relationship where one person shows that kind of resilience and patience and determined love. But this is our God. Never giving up.
And so comes this vision --- a new covenant, not like the ones we’ve tried before, not like the covenant the people broke, God says --- “even though I was their husband” – such poignant words from this deeply relational God. Even though I am again like a heart-broken spouse, this is what we’re gonna try --- I’m going to write my words on their hearts – they will know me innately --- they will love and follow without having to learn how to do it, without having to be coaxed and called. My people and I -- we will be simpatico, says God.
And then that line which is repeated so often in scripture and in our worship liturgies: “for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more.” We serve a God who never gives up. Who through centuries of Old Testament witness just kept trying new angles, new layers of covenant to draw us into God’s orbit that we might live lives that care for creation and bless all peoples of the earth. This final covenant reading of the season gives the hope and comfort of a God who never gives up. I will put my ways within you, written on your hearts.
I wonder how we might orient our lives differently if we believed that this is the God who calls us, the God who claims us, the God who invites us to represent God’s ways in how we live. Might we be less judgmental of others? Might we be more persistent in our efforts to bring people out of bondage – whether it is the bondage of their own making or the bondage of the world’s powerful and oppressive systems? Might we follow Jesus with a renewed commitment to do whatever it takes just as God’s efforts to make covenant increasingly showed a willingness to do whatever it takes.
We talked in our Lenten study this week about how we tend to be paralyzed by fear when it comes to stepping forward especially in the face of injustice. We tell ourselves we don’t want to get involved. We fear being –quote-unquote – political. We hold back waiting for someone who is more qualified or maybe just more willing. Someone with less to lose. Surely God has the right person in mind, and surely that person isn’t I, we say. One person observed that only those who have few other options – or no other options – are likely to risk stepping forward, risk getting involved. And we people of privilege are rarely out of options in that way.
Might we take a lesson from the God who never gives up and try again, and again, taking one small step at a time in the right direction?
Jesus came to show us how to do that. How to persist in the right direction, sharing God’s love with the world just as God has been trying to show and lead and call people to do since way back at the beginning. This fifth Sunday of Lent, just a week from Holy Week we heard another passion prediction. The reading from John invites us to think about what the coming celebrations of Holy Week and Easter mean for us. Too often we have stepped back passively to look at something Jesus did for us that asks nothing more of us than faith. But when Jesus talks to his disciples about what is coming, he is always trying to get us to think about what it means to follow, what it looks like to never give up, to try again, and to step forward in the right direction.
Today’s little section begins with the frustration of the religious leaders – “look the whole world is going after him, they say.” And then some Greeks come to the disciples asking to see Jesus. If we are paying close attention, we might remember the God of the rainbow who wants to wants love and blessing to extend to the whole world. This has never been an exclusive club. Greek was widely spoken in the known world by people of all faiths and backgrounds. The religious leaders frustrated at the size and diversity of Jesus’ following and then Greek speakers approaching him telegraphs again John’s message that God so loved the world – all the world – not just the chosen people – not just one religion over another. God so loved the world.
But then in one of John’s favorite literary devices, those Greeks who asked the question fade away as Jesus makes a speech not just in response to them but directed to everyone, to all of us. He echoes the idea we heard a few weeks ago when Mark’s Jesus talked about those who want to follow taking up their cross. Those who love their life lose it and those who hate their life in this world – that is the ways of the world, the powers of the world, the evils of the world – will know eternal life, abundant life. Whoever serves me must follow me, Jesus says. And what that looks like comes in the little agricultural parable.
I’m no gardener. Ask anyone who knows me. But if you’ve ever germinated a seed above the ground, you have seen what he’s talking about. I think about when you take an avocado pit and balance it on picks partway into a glass of water. Eventually it roots and you can plant it, but in the process the pit splits open. It is a kind of death from which abundant new life grows, bearing fruit that if you are a gardener and know what you’re doing, can turn into an avocado tree and countless generations of avocados.
But that pit – that seed – has to break open. This breaking open is more than just death followed by life. This isn’t a reference to Jesus will die and be resurrected. This is a single grain, a single death, bearing much fruit. This is sacrifice for a greater good. It is understanding that the pain or consequence of doing the right thing has ripple effects that far transcend the brokenness or suffering or death of the immediate moment.
It’s coming. We will read the stories again and stand with those who watch Jesus be tried and executed. A troublemaker lifted up as an example to other would-be troublemakers. An outspoken critic of the powers that be and the death-dealing ways of the world silenced by those same powers. Nearly everyone will fall away. They don’t want to get involved, lest the same fate fall on them.
But God will turn an instrument of torture and humiliation --- being lifted up on a cross – into an incredible triumph for those with eyes to see, for those who know that the one lifted up on the cross will also be the one lifted up on Easter morning and the one lifted up to God in the ascension – all of which will be taken to mean that God does not give up, does not give up on humanity, does not give up on the ways of love and liberation and standing against the powers of evil and oppression and death. And neither should we.
When I hear Jesus’ little parable about the grain of wheat dying --- breaking open --- in order to bear much fruit, I think of Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was a great leader in El Salvador in the 1970s and 1980s. He regularly preached and taught and witnessed against a violent and repressive government. A government that regularly sent death squads to take out those it didn’t like, those who spoke up. Romero knew his life was in danger. But he also knew that God’s ways of love and justice were more important and more powerful. Just days before he was assassinated while saying mass, he famously told a reporter, “If they kill me, I will rise again in the people of El Salvador.” Indeed, his martyrdom still bears fruit in the lessons it teaches about what it is to be faithful to God.
Of course, we don’t set out with grand plans for martyrdom in order to bear much fruit. It doesn’t work that way. As the authors of our Lenten study book say, God doesn’t give five and ten year plans. No, we choose each day, in decisions big and small, but usually small, we choose to follow. Choose to follow this God who doesn’t give up. Choose to follow the way of Jesus, speaking truth to power, standing with those the world has forgotten, taking little steps like packing lunches for hungry people or opening our hearts to the stories of Haiti, and then taking the next step and the step after that. Eventually, step by faithful step, our hearts break at the pain of it all, and step by faithful step our lives break open as well. It is a kind of dying. Dying to our cherished belief that our own comfort and security are the most important things, dying to our cherished belief that everybody is on their own because the world is a level playing field, dying to our cherished belief that this amazing God who doesn’t give up is ok with us giving up. And in the miraculous ways of the natural world in that dying and breaking open, we bear much fruit and we experience eternal and abundant life, now and forever. May it be so. Amen.
