Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
April 30, 2006
Scripture:
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
Recently Cindy, Dianna, and Jesse gave the church a gift. I hope you’ve seen it. It’s the tapestry now hanging in the Fellowship Hall. It’s a picture of a lion and a lamb lying peacefully together. Written below the animals is Psalm 4:8, which reads in the version on the tapestry: "I will both lie down in peace and sleep, for You alone, O Lord, make we dwell in safety." In the NRSV translation that we heard this morning it reads: "I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety." Either way, it’s a beautiful verse. It’s a beautiful image. In God we are safe. In God we can rest easy, because God makes us safe. When we close our eyes at night, we need not worry. When we close our eyes for the last time in death, we need not worry, for we are safe with the Lord. In life and in death we are, as my late wife Francie’s grave marker says, "safe in God’s hands."
These ancient words of the Psalmist speak powerfully to people today; and that’s a bit surprising. Most of us probably think that Christianity is more about forgiveness of sin than about lying down in safety. Certainly our reading this morning from the First Letter of John seems to bear that out. It says: "You know that he [Jesus Christ] was revealed to take away sins...." The New Testament is full of such statements. There can be no doubt that the earliest Christians experienced the significance of Jesus Christ as having to do with the forgiveness of sins. The most vocal and visible parts of the Christian church today reinforce this conception of Christianity. Their whole pitch is: What you need is to have your sins forgiven, and you can have that if you will believe in Jesus. And indeed I, and I’m sure most of you, believe that we do need to have our sin forgiven and that in Jesus Christ our sins are indeed forgiven.
Yet I’m not so sure that for most people today sin is our biggest existential problem. My experience and my reading in contemporary Christian theology tell me that most people today do not think of themselves or of most people primarily as sinners. Certainly a lot of people in liberal Christian denominations like the UCC do not think of themselves or most people primarily as sinners. That’s why so many UCC people dislike the confession part of the service so much. Sinner, it seems, isn’t how we see ourselves. Therefore forgiveness of sin isn’t primarily what we seek from our religion.
So what is? This morning I’d like you to consider this proposition: What we seek from our religion more than forgiveness is a feeling of safety in a world that feels anything but safe. We all are acutely aware, I think, of how dangerous the world is and how fragile life is. Modern science has made us aware in new and frightening ways of the fragility of life. It has taught us the incomprehensible enormity of the universe, in which we sit on a speck of dust that is less significant to the universe than is a single grain of sand to the world. It has taught us that this unfathomably immense universe operates according to immutable natural laws that care nothing for our survival, and modern theories like the Heisenberg uncertainty principle really don’t change that fact. Science has taught us that disease is not the result of sin and therefore is not within our control but that it is the result of physical, chemical, and biological agents that operate according to their own natural imperatives. Like the universe, they care nothing for our survival.
Our world in the early 21st century does little to make us feel more secure. We have learned that we are all at risk from international terrorists. The supposed experts tell us all the time that there is no way that we can make ourselves completely safe from them even if we were to do all the things they say we should be doing that we are not doing. Add to that unsettling reality the fact that we seem hell-bent on destroying our environment, which may be close to passing the point of no return because of global warming, the reality of which our federal government will not even acknowledge, much less act boldly to counteract. Most of the time we don’t think about these things. That much disparaged tactic of denial is, after all, sometimes a necessary survival strategy. Still, we’re all aware of them. They’re always in the back of our consciousness causing at least a low grade existential anxiety. That existential anxiety is, I believe, more significant for most of us than is our sense that we’re horrible sinners in need of divine forgiveness.
And we came here this morning and heard the Psalmist say: "I will both lie down and sleep in peace; for you alone, O God, make me lie down in safety." We like the sound of it, but how can we possibly believe it? How are we to understand it? What does it mean? There is among many Christians a naïve, simplistic understanding of what it means. Simplistic Christian preachers tell their people that if your faith is strong enough, and if you pray hard enough, bad things won’t happen to you or your loved ones. But I just don’t get how anyone can believe that. It seems obvious to me that neither life nor our faith works that way. I mean, there’s one undeniable fact that puts the lie to this simplistic understanding of the faith. We’re all mortal. No amount of faith, no amount of prayer, has ever rendered any mere mortal immortal, and it never will. The unavoidable fact that all die should be enough in itself to lay to rest once and for all this simplistic, mechanistic understanding of what it means to say that God makes us lie down in safety.
So what are we to say? That the Psalmist is wrong? That this verse that we find so beautiful, so comforting has no truth to tell us? Is it simply false to say that God makes us dwell in safety? No. It’s not false. It’s profoundly true, but in order for us to live in that truth we need to get over the simplistic, mechanistic understanding of how it works and get to a deeper, more radical understanding; and I think we can do that if we look again at our reading from 1 John. Not the part we looked at earlier in this sermon about sin but at the opening line of the lectionary selection, 1 John 3:1. That line reads: "See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are." This verse makes two points. First, God loves us. That’s the main thing. It really is what makes us lie down in safety, but it’s vague. It’s a generalization. So John gives us a more concrete, a more familiar image to give the statement some content that we can grasp. It is the image of the parent-child relationship. In our passage, God is called "the Father," as God is throughout the Johanine literature. And our passage says that we are children of God. The image is of course metaphorical. We all have our own literal biological fathers, so God isn’t literally our father; but John’s language invites us to look at the human parent-child relationship as an image of the love that God has for us.
What is the essence of that relationship? It is, I believe, unconditional love. Ideally, we human parents love our children unconditionally. Sometimes, especially when our children are teenagers, that love gets put to a pretty severe test. I know mine did. Still, even someone as limited and fully human as I likes to believe that I always loved my children, even when I didn’t like them much because of how they were acting. I always like to believe that they always had a place they could come back to and be accepted, and that they still do. I like to think that about myself, but I know it is true of God. We human parents may struggle to love our children, but God doesn’t. God loves us, always, no matter what; and for God it isn’t hard. It’s who God is. As this same letter says elsewhere, God is love. 1 John 4:8, 16
And that’s why we can lie down in safety. The safety of God is the love of God. We have a divine home that we can always come to. And more than that: A human child can leave home and separate him- or herself from a parent’s love, but God is with us at all times and in every place. We can close ourselves off from our knowledge of God’s loving presence, but we cannot truly remove ourselves from that presence. God’s loving presence is with us no matter what, and that is our safety in God.
It’s not an earthly safety. It’s something much bigger than that. It is a cosmic, existential safety. It is a deeper safety than mere physical safety. It is the safety of the soul. It is the safety of trusting that in all things God is present loving us. It is the safety of trusting that despite everything, this is God’s world. It is the safety of trusting that at the deepest, existential level God is, as our tradition has always said, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer of us and of all creation. That safety is always there for us. All we have to do is turn to it and embrace it. The safety of God’s love will embrace us even in the most difficult times of our lives, and even in our deaths. Count on it. I do.
But here’s another thing. If we want that safety of God’s love to be available to us in bad times, we need to practice living in it in good times. The trust in God that gives us that safety is a decision we make, a leap of faith; but it isn’t once for all. It is a continuous decision that we make every day, every minute. Like any skill, it takes practice. We can’t go blithely through the easy times of our lives ignoring it, not practicing it, then expect it to come to our spiritual rescue when trouble comes. That would be like never practicing the violin, then expecting to be able to play a recital at Carnegie Hall on a moment’s notice. It doesn’t work like that. So if you don’t already do it, I urge you adopt some spiritual practice that keeps you in touch with the safety of God’s love. It might be spoken prayer or silent meditation. It might be devotional reading or Bible study. Whatever works for you. It doesn’t matter what the spiritual practice is as long as it keeps you in touch with God’s love for you and all creation.
So, we really can lie down in safety. We can do it because God loves us so much that we are indeed children of God. The love of God is our safety. It doesn’t mean bad things won’t happen. It certainly doesn’t mean we won’t die. It does mean that in all of that we are safe. Not by the world’s standards but by the much deeper, more powerful standards of God. So let us say with the Psalmist: "I will both lie down and sleep in peace, for you alone, O Lord, make me lie down in safety." And let us add our own heartfelt Amen.