Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Psalm 27:10-18

Philippians 3:17-4:1

LUKE 13:22-35

Sermon – March 4, 2007

We have now plunged ten days into the great season of Lent, the season of repentance, renewal, and preparation for Easter. Sometimes Lent is caricatured as a time of gloom and doom – masochistic melancholy for misanthropes. Sometimes Lent is belittled as a time for making petty sacrifices, or toying with giving up bad habits. That would be like going to your doctor for your annual physical hoping your doctor would find something incurable and slow-growing on the one hand, or going to the doctor simply to indulge one’s hypochondria on the other hand.

But Lent is not our annual physical; Lent is “an annual spiritual exam,” which God will give us, whether we want it or not, or whether we come to it with a desired outcome or not. It’s here. We are being examined, you and I.

We all come to our “annual spirituals” with two inescapable truths before us. First, all people have fallen short of the glory of God, have failed to obey fully the greatest commandments of love of God and love of neighbor, and all people need to repent. Second, no matter what our “annual spiritual” reveals, none of us are incurable. We all can be healed, we all can be saved, for God loves us.

Since loving God with all our hearts, all our souls, all our minds and all our strength is the first and greatest commandment, I wonder if this is harder than it needs to be perhaps because our image of God is too small, and what we need to give up for Lent are any small images of God we may have and turn instead to worship and love God who is more awesome and more wonderful than we imagined.

This is far from being an abstract theological problem for intellectuals. A person’s small image of God does not, of course, injure God, but it truly could cripple the person.

I remember vividly the summer between my second and third years of seminary, when I did an eight week stint of Clinical Pastoral Education at New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston. I and my classmates were student hospital chaplains, under the supervision of wise and experienced professional hospital chaplains. We learned about pastoral care for the sick while seeing, in the course of eight weeks, as many extremely sick patients as a typical parish priest would see in eight years.

Two of the patients who remain vivid in my memory were women who had cancer, both of whom described themselves to me as lapsed Roman Catholics. Both told me that they pictured God as powerful but very remote, male, cold and uncaring. Their impression of Jesus was just the same. Both told me that in their hours of suffering and great need they thought it was useless to pray to God the Father or to Jesus so, each said, “I pray to Mary, because she’s a woman and she understands.”

I did my best at the time not to show it, but inwardly I cringed involuntarily. Every Protestant tendency in me rebelled at the idea of praying to Mary. I prayed with them, trying to emphasize God’s love and compassion. Then, after I left their bedsides, it hit me: what if they had been Protestant and had the same image of God as remote and uncaring – but had no Mary to whom to pray? [Pause.] And then I thanked God for Mary.

Their church experiences had crippled them for when they really needed strength, leaving them with the belief that God didn’t care about them, even in their hours of greatest need. I wonder if they had ever heard or read today’s Gospel, in which Jesus laments passionately over Jerusalem and declares, “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…!”

Jesus describes himself here as a mother hen! Hardly remote or indifferent – or male. Warm, nurturing, protective and strong – yes. I wonder, too, if these ladies had ever heard – or read – the words of God in Isaiah 66:13, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” And I wonder if these ladies had ever read or heard Luke 13:12. To someone who had been crippled for 18 years, Jesus said, “Woman, you are set free from your ailment.” And it was so.

I wish I could go back now to those cancer-riddled women and read those passages, but I can’t. Their churches gave them a “god” who was far smaller than the real God; the real God is passionate, tender, dedicated to healing – and can have what we call feminine qualities as well as masculine. Thank God at least they had Mary, who embodied the tenderness, compassion and empathy they hungered for so much.

But I can’t go back to those women; I can only talk to you. So I tell you, if anyone offered you a god like the ones those ladies had been taught about, that god is too small! Think of Jesus, the mother hen, of God Almighty, the nurturing mother of you, her child, or – as I sometimes think – of God, the tigress, who picks up a straying cub gently but oh-so-strongly and carries the cub to safety.

A year after I served at that hospital I was ordained and began work as assistant rector of All Saints’ Episcopal church, Belmont, Massachusetts – and as a Protestant chaplain at McLean Hospital in Belmont, the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital. One of the duties of the chaplain was to lead a “religious resources didactic” – a $100 name for a bull session about God – at the inpatient alcoholism treatment unit.

In the course of leading these sessions, I learned that an unusually high percentage of those going through the 30-day inpatient treatment for alcoholism had had childhood religious training – and the vast majority of them claimed that they had been taught, “One mistake and you’re going to Hell.” “Since we’re going to Hell anyway,” one explained to me, “we might as well enjoy the ride.”

The “god” they had been given as children was a “god” without grace, forgiveness and new life. That “god” is too small. The real God-in-Christ forgave those who crucified him while he hung on the cross. The real God-in-Christ offered paradise to the thief who repented while on the cross himself – a U-turn at the very last minute. I did the best I could at the time at McLean, but if I could go back I might, after giving permission for the patients to vent for 55 minutes about how awful and unhelpful the church had been, spend the last five minutes of our hour together reading Luke 23:34-43 to them. Yeah, churches mess up. But God, the real God, is a God of grace who offers people second chances. And third chances. And fourth.

If anyone has offered you – or someone you know – a “god” who is devoid of grace and forgiveness - that “god” is too small! The real God does not believe in “one strike and you’re out.” Share the Good News of the real God with someone who needs to hear that news.

Or perhaps we’ve been taught an image of God which is prosaic, dry, ultra-rational, and maybe “plain vanilla.” That “god” is too small! Check out today’s passage from Genesis 15: here you have truly ancient, exotic, and mystical image of God. This declares “the end to the common god.”

Suppose someone’s image of God is that God always wants something first before giving us anything? That “god” is too small! Heck, that idol is barely big enough to be a bookend on a mantle piece.

Check out Genesis 15 again: God, the Lord of Heaven and Earth, unilaterally calls Abram, a semi-nomadic, childless, aged sheepherder from Iraq, into covenant with him and promises him descendents and a homeland. And what, exactly, did Abraham do for God before he received the promises in Genesis 12? Uh, nothing. God just spoke to him, made these rash and seemingly ridiculous promises and said “Follow me, and I’ll show you where to cash the checks.” And Abram went. That’s called faith.

By the way, when God said to Abram, “Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them,” Abram was not looking for stars while in a brightly lit parking lot on a smoggy night in Central New Jersey. From the rural Middle East, you can see thousands of stars, more stars than I can count. And the last time I looked, over three thousand years later, the children of Abram – through both of his sons – still filled the land which God has promised him. Those checks did not bounce.

The real God offers us the awesome role of stewards of “this fragile earth, our island home,” forgiveness by the blood of the Son of God, lifetime “coaching” by the Holy Spirit and a community of fellow believers – as gifts. Just believe, and start acting like we mean it as a way of saying thank you. The real God is a generous God.

Or suppose someone’s image of God is as a pushover, a softie, a real patsy? That “god” is too small! Jesus clearly lays that image to rest in today’s Gospel, in which he says that anyone who merely offers Jesus “lip service” or just hangs out in Jesus’ neighborhood while not being transformed will be thrown out of the Kingdom of God – and have to watch those who have been included in that boundless blessing enjoy it. The real God has standards and both offers and expects transformation; God is under no obligation to guarantee salvation for everyone. Some people may need to hear this message too.

“Annual spirituals” can be times to let go of small, inadequate images of God which may seriously endanger our total well-being and that of others around us – or endanger the well-being of people we know if they mistake those small images for the real God, who is greater than any single image we can imagine. This is why the Bible gives us a banquet of rich and varied understandings of God, each of which by itself is inadequate and may be made more inadequate by the limitations of churches which teach them.

But we do know that the real God is passionate and powerful, transcendent and compassionate, and combines what we limited humans may call “feminine” and “masculine” qualities. The real God says both “Let justice roll down like mighty waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream” and “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you.” The real God is generous beyond measure, forgiving beyond counting and expects us to live lives very different from “those whose god is the belly,” in St. Paul’s memorable phrase.

Let’s give up whatever gods we may have been introduced to who are too small to be the real God – give them up for Lent, and never go back to them again. Whether kneeling, standing or sitting, let us turn to the real God – knowable and beyond knowing, huggable and awesomely transcendent, the God of grace and God of glory. Let us love that God, the real God, with all our hearts, minds, souls and strength, for surely, that is the way the real God loves us.

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church

Monmouth Junction, NJ