|
"Keeping Faith and Moving Forward"
Many of you sitting here hope that the future is cut and dried. You have worked hard and planned carefully. After all this is the age of goals and objectives, evaluations and critiques, accompanied by the power to carry them out. Life is now devoted to avoiding the wrong step. You have chosen your path. Your hope is that the future will be more of same, at least as much as you can make it.
But your hope is always accompanied by doubt about your ability to control the future. Too many ingredients go into the shaping of the future for our human efforts to control it. There is the givenness of physical and historical environments that has defied the best laid plans of human beings and their organizations. The biochemical and genetic make-up of human beings, as well as the mystery of human freedom cause us to despair. The complexity of the situation, the elements of unpredictability, and human freedom, all painfully remind us that the future can’t be programmed, guaranteed, or scheduled by human wisdom or work. The best-laid plans for the future are flawed by human sin and ignorance. Our techniques and skills can only sustain appearances for a brief time. All of these variables make us nervous about the future. The truth of the matter is that life remains incomplete, always open, always capable of change. You are incomplete. For it does not yet appear what you shall be. The last word has not been said. The future far from being a repetition of the present or of the development of present trends remains open, mysterious, and surprising -- all by the wonderful grace of God. The future is God’s; God sets the agenda. We have our freedom to make plans and act them out, to live our own lives. But there is another sort of freedom that scripture speaks of, namely God’s right to be God, to have God’s way with us in all our sitting down and our rising up, our comings and our goings. God allows us, God’s creatures, to be free - free to do evil as well as good, to make our own mistakes, to test our powers upon the real world. As God doesn’t relieve us of accountability for our actions, so God does not abandon us completely to our own devices. Any discussion of the future must begin with God. The future belongs to God. God’s purposes will prevail. It is with this future, God’s future that we have to reckon. God, in divine freedom, keeps the future open. God is constantly providing fresh, new surprises that challenge us to face the present knowing that the future is open. This freedom of God twists and turns and is full of surprises filled with grace, spontaneous, uncalled for, undeserved, uncontrollable, grace new every morning, fresh every evening. The writer of Ephesians knew that. Lifted up by the thought of what can happen to us in God’s freedom and love, he breaks out in doxology:
Did you notice that phrase "more than all that we ask or think?" A paraphrase might be: "Is able to do infinitely more than all that we ask or imagine." God in divine freedom goes far beyond our wildest expectations. In a word: supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. We have not even begun to realize a fraction of the adventurous possibilities of life in Christ. The living God has never said the last word on any subject, but is always ready with more things to tell us than we now can hear. Gracefully, this means that there is no end to anything until God finishes it, brings it to completion. Gracefully, something new is born of every ending. Yes, other hands are at work in history, sometimes all too painfully evident. But that is the price God has been willing to pay for calling human beings to cooperate with God in love. Yes, we remain sinners and work evil as well as good. But, God will keep sending other human beings across our paths and other tasks over both of which we stumble and fall. And so from our knees we gain a better perspective.[1] If God is the living God, then we must accept the risk of living with God and under God, not only here and now, but also in the future.[2] But a word of warning. The transcendent God is not the prisoner much less the devoted servant, of the Christian community. God is not just in the church or in Christians, but in the world, whether human beings know or acknowledge God or not. God is the creator and ruler of all people. God is at work in the history of all nations, in all times to judge and help. The difference between insiders and outsiders is not that God in divine freedom lives and works among us and does not love and work among them. The difference is that we know about God’s love and what God is doing for the good of all people in the world. Because we have heard who God is, what God wills, and what kind of God, God is, we recognize signs of God’s work. We may expect the gracious God to be at work in the world even in lives who do not yet confess him. Human events are never only human events. In the company of this God your challenge is two-fold: keeping faith and moving forward. Keeping faith does not mean getting belief right and then defending it against all comers. Faith is much richer than that according to our text: faith is being strengthened in the inner person by the Spirit, our hearts becoming Christ’s dwelling place. Faith is being rooted and grounded in love, in its height, length, breadth and depth, surpassing knowledge. How is that possible – it is not possible for us, but it is for God. Faith is not an add-on to a life you shape. Faith is trust in God that unifies and guides life. Faith is a gift. It is not something that we have found and now possess so much as it has found us and is drawing us into the purposes of God’s triune love, purposes at work in the world. An old hymn says it well: "I sought the Lord and afterward, I knew, he moved my heart to seek him seeking me." We receive such faith not privately or in the garden by ourselves, but in the company of those God has chosen to be our companions, the prophets and apostles, sinners and saints of God’s church. We belong to one who has chosen and called us, and has made us part of a community of people filled with human beings we did not select. In that community we plunge ever deeper into the faith, living the story of God’s love in Christ, loving the world in which we find ourselves, loving our neighbors and the strangers in our midst. The gracious God will do the rest. Keeping faith is to plunge ever deeper into the gospel, studying, learning, imagining, doing, serving, trusting. Moving forward is to think in the future tense. To act in the future tense is an act of love for it looks to the as yet unrealized possibilities of other human beings and becomes a part of the process of the realization of those possibilities. To spend our time reminiscing and longing for past glories dishonors those on whose shoulders we stand. If we fail to keep faith with all those who have gone before us, we break the chain, we lose our momentum, and worst of all we lose sight of God who is always leading into the future. My lover’s quarrel with the institutional church is that we often live in the wrong tense. Your call is to move on. You are called to spend a lifetime learning that all things hold together in God, including the future. You will find out there an awesome, passionate God who pushes us from behind into shaping the new, lures us into the new with a promise of hope, and is always present with us opening up new possibilities. Let God surprise you. Our lives have had lots of divine surprises. I hope I have been one for you. It is not necessarily a bright, successful future, if we mean by that that everything will be ok. It won't. You will be called to bear pain and face failure. You will make mistakes. You will know both effectiveness and ineffectiveness. Your life will be a lover's quarrel with the church. But in spite of its weaknesses the church remains the people of God. It is a good future because it is God's, and we will learn that God is stronger than failure and pain, mistakes and success, and even despair and death. It will be a God-filled time when grace will work its way, sometimes it will work thanks to us and sometimes in spite of us, but it will still work. This dependence upon and confidence in God characterizes the servants of God in both Testaments. It will characterize you no less. As Howard Thurman has described it so well,
We have a God who in freedom will let nothing separate us from God and who is able to do far more abundantly than we ask or think. _________________ |
F.
Harry Daniel