7/16/23 Sermon
In January of 1956, the phone rang late one night in Alabama. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. remembers the voice saying: “Listen, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” Dr. King says, “I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.”
He got out of bed and started to pace the floor. He had been threatened like that many times, but for some reason this one had gotten to him. He made a pot of coffee, poured a cup, and sat at his kitchen table thinking of all that he had to lose. Dr. King writes, “I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born. I started thinking about a dedicated and loyal wife, who was over there asleep. And she could be taken from me, or I could be taken from her. And I got to the point that I couldn’t take it any longer. I was weak.” So, he prayed about it. He just kind of poured his guts out to God and then sat there quietly.
And then Dr. King says, “I tell you I’ve seen the lightning flash, I’ve heard the thunder roar. I’ve felt sin breakers dashing trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me alone. At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.” Three days later his house was bombed.
Dr. King said that night praying at his kitchen table was the first time in in his life he believed that God was personal. He said, “True, I have always believed in the personality of God. But in past years the idea of a personal God was little more than a metaphysical category which I found theologically and philosophically satisfying. Now it is a living reality that has been validated in the experiences of everyday life.”
I’ve tried to carry that around with me. I try to remember what Dr. King says here about God being a metaphysical category that can be theologically and philosophically satisfying rather than God being personal, interactive, and, well, real. Because it’s easy I think for many of us to sit around and think about, and try to figure out and study about God, rather than developing a relationship WITH God, and learning who God is, and seeing God working in our own lives. I guess in a moment self-examination sometimes I think I spend too much time reading books and watching documentaries in order to know ABOUT God rather than living my life and ACTUALLY KNOWING God.
The question I’ve been struggling with all week as I prepared for worship this morning, is what in the world am I supposed to say about this story we just read in 1st Kings? What is it about? What’s the main point? Because it just seems so weird. And the best I can come up with, what I think the story is trying to convey to us, is that our God is still with us. It’s a story of God showing up where Baal doesn’t. I love here where Elijah asks the priests of Baal if maybe their god is on a bathroom break and maybe that’s why Baal isn’t showing up at the moment. It’s such a good dig.
Elijah sets up this contest between the two gods, between Yahweh and Baal and Elijah sets it up in a way to give Baal all the advantages possible. He’s trying to show that what’s about to happen is fair. He’s got nothing up his sleeve as it were. But despite all the advantages, Baal is a no-show. And all the efforts that the priests perform only make their humiliation that much more complete. But Yahweh, the Lord, our God. Well… our God shows up.
These days, I think we face a different type of faith crisis than people did in Elijah’s time. I don’t think we’ve taken up worshipping idols or false gods like Baal. I think we just don’t worry about God or God’s existence anymore. Today’s problem is that for many people, God simply just doesn’t exist. They just don’t see any evidence of God around them. I have to admit, there would be something pretty satisfying to show people like Elijah does here.
But I think what happens is that people get caught up in the minutiae of everyday life, of worrying about the day-to-day things and we’re taught - especially in this country- that our self-sufficiency is what makes us successful - that we alone are responsible for the outcome of everything that happens in our lives - and we basically make a god of ourselves. Our idols aren’t necessarily wood and stone. But our idols are ourselves. And what happens is we lose sight of God, and we forget how to look at this world to see God working in it at every moment. We look to ourselves so much that we lose the ability to see God working every day and we forget that God isn’t just a theologically satisfying idea. But God is a reality that is personal and involved in our ordinary, everyday life.
You see, I think God still lives and walks among ordinary people in ordinary life. I think God still walks with us and moves among us and is personally invested in each of us. And sometimes we lose sight of that and sometimes we forget about this Big and ultimate God who gets involved with ordinary everyday human beings. I think that sometimes we spend so much time thinking about God that we forget to spend time with God. I know that sometimes I move God into abstraction and forget that God is here and now, moving and working, living, and breathing among us. But then when I remember that and I look around, I can see God moving and acting and living in this world every moment of every day.
The problem is, is that it’s easy to forget that God is acting and moving in this world or that Jesus is still with us. It’s easy to miss God in this world for some reason.
Sometimes it’s just too easy to miss God in our presence. Sometimes, we see these miracles of God happening all around us, but we don’t realize that’s what’s actually going on. Sometimes we’re so busy living our lives and doing what it is that we think we should be doing that we forget to look up and see God with us. Sometimes we get so jaded we forget that miracles still happen all around us.
I feel like I’m lucky though. I have these amazingly creative kids. All four of them. And if I can cut through the sometimes-frustrating parts of their creativity, they teach me so much about what it is to look at the world with fresh eyes. They help remind me that sometimes thinking isn’t what’s called for. That I need to be more open and to look at things with new eyes and with an openness to what may really be there. That I shouldn’t discount the possibility that things aren’t always what they seem. And when I do that, when I take their advice and I stop thinking about and I stop trying to analyze things, I really CAN see God and God’s miracles in this world. Sometimes it starts by seeing God in their faces and realizing what miracles they are and realizing what a miracle life is. And when I do that, I can start to see the miracles that happen all throughout life that we sometimes forget are miracles.
You see, not only is it a personal God, a god that knows us and a god who walks among us, and a God wants to be in a relationship with us, but our God is a God who performs miracles every day, sometimes in very small and very simple ways. I mean take the wedding in Cana story in the Gospel of John. Turning water into wine isn’t really a big miracle. It isn’t like healing lepers or raising people from the dead. But it’s a miracle all the same. And it happens at a wedding. Something that happens every day. Some people didn’t even see it as a miracle. Like I said, one of the guests thanks the host for saving the best wine for last. He had NO idea of what had happened or that this miracle had taken place or even that God made human was literally standing right in front of him. But there Jesus was and it’s a miracle all the same.
And I think that just like God is a personal God, God is a God who still does miracles. And these miracles happen every day. It’s all a question of whether or not we choose to see them that way. I mean, life is a miracle. Love is a miracle. Children are miracles. Elderly people are miracles. The fact that we have relationships with each other is a miracle. The human body is a miracle. All of creation is a miracle. And these miracles don’t stop happening. They happen all the time. Sometimes, we just don’t see them as such. Sometimes we just don’t recognize them. But if we take time to look at things anew, if we take time to stop analyzing and quiet our minds and then really LOOK at what’s in front of us, I’m truly convinced that we begin to see the reality of a personal God who is intimately involved in our lives and the miracles that this God creates all around us at every moment.
So may you see the miracles of God all around you.
May you have eyes wide open to the reality of God and Jesus with you.
May you understand that even when it doesn’t seem like it Your God and Your Christ are intimately and personally involved in your life.