Drawing Near an All-Loving God
Before we begin, I want to offer a content warning. Our bible story today is one that includes struggles with infertility. And for some folks, that is a tender reality. I am also going to talk about violence against minority groups. If you are someone who might be affected by that conversation, I encourage you to do whatever you need to do to take care of your heart, body, and spirit. That may mean stepping away – do what you need to do.
(Would you pray with me?)
As the Fall has started and we’ve returned to the beginning of a new narrative lectionary cycle, I find myself sitting with some of the most foundational stories of our faith – and they feel a little bit like a pebble in my shoe. Foreign. Unsettling. Uncomfortable.
Because I think that oftentimes, we learned these core stories of faith from a perspective that is NOT ours, from a perspective that may not connect with our life and our experience of God. And maybe, just maybe, what we were told about God twenty or thirty or forty or even more years ago doesn’t actually match up with how WE have seen God move in the world. Along the way, we may have been told that what we were taught was TRUE and therefore to question TRUTH was dangerous. Even heretical.
So that nagging feeling – discomfort with the things we have been told about some of these most foundational stories – has been with me for a few weeks now.
And because I am deeply Wesleyan, I include my experience of God, right alongside scripture, tradition and reason – that beloved Wesleyan quadrilateral. Because of that, I’ve been letting that experience of discomfort take me in different directions in our texts.
Last week, when we talked about what happened in a garden between ha-adam, ishshah, a serpent and God (or the absence of choosing to consult God), I noted that maybe this wasn’t really a story about “The Fall” – as in the one really big disastrous sinful moment, but rather it was about separation from God – which is sin, and is pretty omnipresent in our drive to know and control as human beings. And just as it is not necessarily “The Fall,” it is also NOT a story that defines gender roles or marriage.
Discomfort is hard. Using my lived experience of God – and our lived experience of God - alongside the Bible, well-reasoned biblical scholarship, and the tradition of the church is slow work…sometimes things are just cooking away in the background, just beyond conscious thought…at work and slightly uncomfortable.
A pebble in my shoe.
This week, as I sat for the umpteenth time with the story of Abram and Sarai, who eventually are renamed Abraham and Sarah, I wrestled with how Abraham has been trumpeted as a man of great faith. The father of a great nation.
Abram and Sarai DO show great faith when they choose to GO where God asks them to go and do what God asks them to do. Hear me say, they DO show great faith.
They also make some really bad choices along the way. They are impatient and untrusting when God’s promise of an heir doesn’t happen as they expect it to. They try to manipulate events as they struggle with migration and infertility. Abram passes his wife off as his sister in Egypt. Sarah insists that Abraham consort with her servant to produce an heir. When they finally do have their own biological son, Sarah’s jealousy causes Abraham to abandon the servant Hagar and his own son Ishmael in the wilderness.
So…Abraham is faithful but flawed. Abraham and Sarah are faithful but flawed. Much like we are.
This week I’ve been struck by the importance of really focusing on what it is that GOD is doing in these stories. What is GOD redeeming? How is GOD regathering the LOST? How is GOD cleaning up the messes that we humans inevitably make? What is GOD doing in spite of us?
Let’s look at that in this story.
In the text from this week, solidly the middle of the story of Abraham and Sarah, Abram, fresh from winning some political battles, laments that he and Sarai are still childless despite God’s promises.
Hearing Abram’s lament, God draws near.
In Godly Play – a story-telling form that we use here with our kids sometimes - the act of drawing near is an important part of stories from Hebrew scripture. It is so important that there is a gesture that is used across multiple stories, a physical way of showing what it means for God to draw near – so that children learn to feel God’s nearness in their bodies.
In those stories, in the story of Abram and Sarai specifically, God comes near to Abram and Abram came near to God.
And in those moments of nearness something transpires. God reassures Abram. And Abram sees the possibility that God is indeed going to do something amazing. At a minimum, Abram connects to God. The closeness between God and Abram in moments like this, in the moment when God shows Abram the stars in the sky and promises that his ancestors will be like these, is a moment of relationship and deep love. God draws near to Abram and Abram draws near to God.
Maybe you know moments like that with God.
Maybe you have had the experience of wondering how and if it was all going to work out only to have God draw near. And if you were awake enough to notice, and if you yourself responded by drawing near to God, perhaps - perhaps there was a moment of reassurance – not that fixed everything that was wrong, but that reminded you of who God is and how God is with you.
Yesterday, in a teaching session with some theologians and mystics that I dearly love and whose work I swim in, I was introduced to a new word.
That word was amipotent. That is AMI-potent. As in “all loving.” The idea comes out of some work and writing by process theologian Thomas Oord. If that name rings a bell, perhaps it is because he was recently defrocked by the Church of the Nazarene for fully affirming LGBTQ+ folx.
Oord describes amipotence as God’s power. If God is love, then God’s power is love. God is all loving. God is amipotent.
For hundreds of years, church fathers (and to be clear, they were mostly men who codified doctrine over the centuries) church fathers have described God as omnipotent – all powerful.
And yet we live in a world where mass shootings happen with numbing regularity, where powerful natural disasters destroy innocent lives, and where we as humans daily choose our comfort and our material wealth over the thriving of the world’s population.
In light of that, I struggle with God’s omnipotence. I don’t experience God as omnipotent. If God is omnipotent, it would seem he’s choosing against creation an awful lot.
Time and time again, I do experience God as all – loving.
As amipotent.
We are called by Jesus to love God and to love one another – to mirror God’s amipotence.
Maybe we find ourselves looking out at a field of stars,
and every one of them represents a beloved child of God,
and every one of those beloved children of God is connected to God,
even in their brokenness, because we’re all broken somehow,
because God loves us still
and as such all of us are connected to one another,
like a galaxy held together by God’s powerful love
vibrating between all of us.
God took Abram out into the darkest night to gaze up in wonder and amazement and to remember the promise God made.
The promise was eventually fulfilled. Abraham and Sarah begat Isaac. And Isaac begat Esau and Jacob. And Jacob begat SO MANY SONS… and on and on.
And somehow, the idea of amipotence, the idea of God’s power of love through all of that and even now, helps me feel like the pebble has been removed from my shoe. Because I see God’s powerful love in this story, perhaps especially in the hard parts.
Last weekend, Montgomery County police concluded their investigation of vandalism on our property with the successful identification of the individual responsible. The word “hate” has been used, by me and by others, to describe the crimes this vandal committed. Whether or not the vandalism rises to the level of a “hate crime” remains to be seen. And that is not our work. It is the work of the justice system.
But throughout this week, this has also been a pebble in my shoe. What is hate, really? And what makes a crime hateful?
But perhaps more importantly, what is OUR response to hate? How do we recognize, honor and mirror God’s amipotence in the midst of it all?
I am really wrestling with this. It is bigger than a pebble in my shoe. It’s more like a rock in my spirit.
And I invite you into that wrestling as well. Let’s do it together.
Here is an explanation of how hate can operate from the office of the attorney for the District of Columbia (a very helpful definition):
Hate generally starts with bias that is left unchecked. Bias is a preference either for or against an individual or group that affects someone’s ability to judge fairly. When that bias is left unchecked, it becomes normalized or accepted, and may even escalate into violence. When hate manifests against a person or group of people, it usually derives from ignorance, anger, fear, a sense of injury, or a perceived threat to the status quo.[1]
We live in a world where unchecked biases are being normalized regularly and rapidly.
Last Tuesday, false accusations were made publicly about immigrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, OH. And on Friday, bomb threats were called into Springfield area schools and government offices. And on Saturday, bomb threats were called into Springfield area medical facilities.
Hate begins with a bias that is left unchecked.
According to a statement by Everytown for Gun Safety, the number of trans people who were murdered nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021. Their spokesperson went on to say, "Bias-motivated crimes are a real, frightening problem in the United States, and LGBTQ+ people continue to be targeted because of who they are."
It's important for the church to be a place where bias does not go unchecked. It is one reason we became a reconciling congregation. To be a beacon of love in the midst of a world that is allowing bias against so many groups – Jews, Arabs, Black and brown people, immigrants and the LGBTQ+community.
Can we show up reflecting God’s all-powerful love in every corner of this community as an antidote to bias before it becomes hate?
And can we bring God’s love and NOT our biases to bear on the hearts and minds of those among us who seem to be driven by their unchecked biases?
I think we must.
I think it is going to be hard.
But God is all-loving.
And Jesus called us to be all-loving too.
May it be so.
Amen.
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