“Abundant God”

Sermon by Rev. Peter Shidemantle

October 21, 2018
Exodus 16:13-17; Mark 6:30-34

As I look back and think back over my sermons with you over the years (by this point
somewhere around 1,000 of them!), the focus, or emphasis, for the most part has been on
living​ the Christian life, rather than on what we should or shouldn’t believe about it. What we
believe is important, because if we don’t know what we believe in – if we are confused about
that – sooner or later we will probably live confused lives. But what is far more decisive is not
so much how a person expresses or conceives his or her faith, but how he or she lives it. Not
the “talk” but the “walk.” What really claims our loyalty and devotion? How do we spend our
time? What do we give ourselves to? Having said that, who and what we believe in should
somehow match up, or be “in sync” with how we express and live our faith – and how together
as the church of Jesus Christ we witness to the reality of God, to the people we are called to be,
and to the world that God so loves.

Over the last couple of years during October Ron Cavanagh and I have shared in sermon
dialogues about how we are living in a time that calls for re-imagining, or re-conceiving, the
basic tenets of Christian faith as have been inherited over the centuries, as expressed in the
classical doctrines and creeds of the church – and in keeping with the thrust of the Protestant
Reformation (last year the 500​th​ anniversary) that the church is to be reformed and always
reforming, according to and in keeping with the word of God.

This year, as I am nearing the completion of my ministry with you, and our ministry together,
we’re hoping to carry the dialogue further – only this time I’ll preach the sermons and Ron will
lead the forums! We hope to engage each another and all of us in a way of believing that has
real and vital connection to how we are called to live as Christians in the world – with a view
toward the faithful and fruitful future that God wants for all of us, the God who is love, the
future that God is always calling and luring us toward.

The organizing theme of our sermons, reflections and conversations is “abundance:” Abundant
God, Abundant Christ, Abundant Life. “Abundance” is also the theme of this year’s
Commitment Sunday program, as the Session has determined, and this determination was what
opened this up for us. As Pebble Hill is coming up on a time of transition, there is, naturally
enough, some anxiety about the future. Believe me, I share that anxiety for myself as well!
None of us knows what the future holds. But we know who holds the future. We also know
from our experience simply in living, that we have significant influence in forming that future.
We are not passive observers; we have as much impact on the future by our inaction as by our
action, but the future will be different accordingly. There are lots of other factors that enter in,
but be assured that God is actively involved in forming that future. God is not sitting there
waiting for us to figure out what he has in store for us, but invites us to partner with him in
creating and faithfully moving toward it.

I’ve remarked before about how the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann raises the
issue of an “anxious scarcity” that seems to infuse our society. “We have a love affair with
‘more,’” he says, “and we will never have enough.” Consumerism isn’t simply a marketing
strategy: “It has become a demonic spiritual force among us, and the theological question
facing us is whether the gospel has the power to help us withstand it.”

Brueggemann opposes this attitude of scarcity, and the anxiety that accompanies it, to the
biblical attitude of abundance. The Bible starts out, he says, with a “liturgy of abundance.”
Genesis 1 is a song of praise for God’s generosity, telling how well the world is ordered. It keeps
saying, “it is good, it is good, it is very good.” It declares that God blesses – that is, endows with
vitality – the plants, the animals, the fish and the birds and humankind. And it pictures the
creator as saying, “Be fruitful and multiply.” In an orgy of fruitfulness, everything in its kind is to
multiply the overflowing goodness that pours from God’s creator spirit. And, the creation ends
in Sabbath. God is so overrun with fruitfulness that God says, “I’ve got to take a break from all
this. I’ve got to get out of the office.”

Israel celebrates God’s abundance. The psalmists praise the God of abundant goodness (Psalm
31), abundant mercy (Psalm 51), abundant in power (Psalm 147). The prophet Isaiah urges the
people to “seek the Lord while he may be found . . .”- the God who will “abundantly pardon”
(Isaiah 55:6-7). In the New Testament Paul prays for the Ephesians to the God “who by the
power at work within us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or
imagine.” (Ephesians 3:20) And Jesus, in the gospel of John, declares that “I came that they may
have life, and have it abundantly.” (John 10:10)

The God of abundance, when grasped by the human heart, can cause even the poorest among
us to say, “I am needful of nothing.”

The God of the Bible, the God of abundance, is active in the world, working to overcome evil
and to create new things. He is a God who lovingly yearns for his people to love him in return,
and to love one another as God has loved them. God responds to his people’s cries and exults in
their joy. He mourns their unfaithfulness and is enraged at their injustices. In Jesus Christ God’s
loving heart is laid bare to the forces of evil, hatred and ignorance, and God’s love is victorious
even over death. This is a God with whom we are in relation, and who is in relation to us. He is
not a God who is unmoved or unfazed by what’s happening in the world. He is not a God who is
unaffected by the decisions and actions of his people whom he created free to choose him or
not.

But is this the way you think of God, or understand your relationship with him? Is this the God
you pray to? I’d be willing to bet that most of us are kind of conflicted about this, because
we’ve inherited a view of God that comes from ancient Greek thought and was used in
developing the early doctrines and creeds of the church – which were ways of putting into
systematic thought and language the ​experiences​ of believers in the God made known to them
in Christ. The ​experience​ of God lay at the root of all of this development, and the classical view
of God – the God of classical theism – speaks less and less to the experiences and the yearning
for relationship with God in our day and time.

What I am speaking of is a conception of a God that people, including believers, increasingly do

not believe in – and the tragedy of it is that many have decided that if this is who God is then
they won’t believe at all, and the church, to the degree that it insists on this view, will fall
further out of connection with people who yearn for a God they do not see or experience there.

You know the view of God I’m speaking of. He is God the “cosmic moralist,” the divine lawgiver
and judge, who has given a set of moral rules, who keeps records of offenses, and punishes
offenders. He is the God who is unchanging and absolute. This concept comes from the ancient
Greeks, who maintained that “perfection” meant lack of change (immutable). In this view, the
world needs God, but God does not need the world. God wills good for the world, but is
unaffected by the world. This is the God of “controlling power,” who controls every detail of the
world, the God who when natural or human-made tragedies occur spares some while allowing
others to perish. This is the God who supports the status quo – because God the cosmic
moralist is primarily interested in order, and God the unchangeable one suggests the
establishment of an unchangeable order for the world, and God the controlling power suggests
that the present order of things exists because God willed its existence – so to be obedient to
God is to preserve the status quo.

Though I have over-simplified, and we’lI explore this more in our morning forums, I hope you
get the point. Moving forward, I pray that we will feel less the need to defend a God who is
increasingly not believed in than to follow the ways of a God who needs us to accomplish his
will in the world.

Last Spring a number of us read together John Cobb’s book, “Jesus’ Abba.” “Abba” is the word
Jesus used for God, in his language, which was Aramaic. In Aramaic, Abba was the only term for
father. It means, just like it sounds, Papa, or Daddy. Cobb describes how in the Bible we find
two major images of God – one is monarchical, and the other is familial. In the Hebrew
scriptures (Old Testament) God is most often imaged as “King” (other images also), whereas in
the New Testament “Father” is dominant. But over time such ideas as divine sovereignty (as a
king is sovereign over his people) began to play a larger role in Christian thought than the more
intimate idea of paternal feelings. This shift began very early in Christian thought.

In the New Testament itself, however, Jesus is never depicted as addressing God as King. He
always spoke to and about God as his, and our, Abba, and he taught the disciples to address
God in this way. Language makes a difference. Feelings that cluster around “Abba” are very
different from feelings evoked by royal language. “Abba” is baby talk, and Jesus thought of God
in a language whose earliest and primary connotations came from infancy. As Cobb puts it,
“The normal relation of the father to the infant is one of tenderness and unconditional love. It
was unconditional love rather than controlling power that dominated Jesus’ understanding of
God.” In our day and time we would conceptualize the image of God also as mother – not just a
paternal God, but a parental God.

Once God is seen as “king,” then to praise God is to praise God’s power – and it would seem
that if we put any limit on that power, we’d be praising God less. In fact, Cobb says that when
he has argued for a different view of God, based on parental images, he’s been told that his
“God is a wimp.” For many, divinity is characterized by the kind of power exercised by an
absolute monarch, “but this is not the way we evaluate fathers.”

I mentioned earlier that we might feel a bit conflicted about some of the practices of our faith,
given the concept of God that we’ve inherited. Prayer is one such practice, a central one when
we consider our relation to God, and God’s relation to us. What sense can we make of prayer if
God is unchangeable, who does not need us though we need him, and who, in the classical
view, knows all things and determines every detail in the world from the beginning of time and
eternity? If that is the case, and this is the God to whom we pray, prayer makes little sense.
With such a God, prayer would seem to be a futile attempt at a kind of divine arm-twisting, to
try to get God to do something that he may not otherwise be inclined to do.

But we pray because we have to pray. Prayer is the language of faith, even prayers that use no
words. And it “makes sense” to us when we know we have prayed and felt God’s presence and
movement in our lives. When we pray as Christian people we are claiming as our own and
speaking back to God the word that God has addressed to us through the witness of the church
and through the life and needs and possibilities of ourselves and our neighbors. When I pray for
a sick friend, when I intercede for someone who needs to be healed, what am I saying? I am
saying that I shall take responsibility for my sick sister, that I shall not forget that she is precious
to God, and that I am responsible for her. I often like to forget that. So prayer is the means of
grace by which I take as my own this claim of God on my life. It makes a difference to God, as
everything makes a difference to God. As the sages of the church have said, we do not pray to
instruct God, but to instruct ourselves.

I love what Thomas Merton says about prayer: “Prayer . . . means yearning for the simple
presence of God, for a personal understanding of his word, for knowledge of his will, and for
the capacity to hear and obey him.” The operative word is “yearning” – yearning for a God who
yearns for us – as a lover yearns for the beloved, as a child yearns for the security of a loving
parent, as our restless hearts long to find rest in God.

The abundance of God, the abundance from God, is not the abundance of his power but the
overwhelming generosity of his love. “(So) do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat
or drink or wear,” Jesus said . . . “Look at the birds of the air; they neither sow nor reap nor
gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them . . . Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not
clothed like one of these.”

Nearly 20 years ago Brueggeman wrote words that speak clearly to the situation we are in
today – in both church and society: “Whether we are liberal or conservative Christians, we must
confess that the central problem of our lives is that we are torn apart by the conflict between
our attraction to the good news of God’s abundance and the power of our belief in scarcity – a
belief that makes us greedy, mean and unneighborly.”

The church has always carried the treasure of God’s abundance in earthen vessels. As Henri
Nouwen writes: “Over the centuries the Church has done enough to make any critical person
want to leave it. Its history of violent crusades, pogroms, power struggles, oppression,
excommunications, executions, manipulation of people and ideas, and constantly recurring
divisions is there for everyone to see and be appalled by.”

“Can we believe,” he asks, “that this is the same Church that carries in its center the Word of
God and the sacraments of God's healing love? Can we trust that in the midst of all its human
brokenness the Church presents the broken body of Christ to the world as food for eternal life?
Can we acknowledge that where sin is abundant grace is superabundant, and that where
promises are broken over and again God's promise stands unshaken? To believe is to answer
yes to these questions.”

May we say yes to our abundant God, and may we walk in the way of life that meets the
scarcity of love and justice in our world with faith in the God “who by the power at work within
us is able to accomplish abundantly far more than we can ask or imagine.”
To this God, be all glory and praise, now and forever. Amen.