Foothills Congregational Church The Rev. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ Veteran’s Day Sunday

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos 94022 November 11, 2007

What Does The Lord Require?

Psalm 145; Deuteronomy 10:12-13

At the heart of our Jewish ancestors’ faith, and at the heart of our faith, is the conviction that God has created us in love, that God remembers us, and that we need God and are expected to respond to God.

To say that we are created in love is an important value statement. We could easily say we are created at random, accidents of the evolutionary process. Those of us who are scientists and engineers, and all of us who grew up trained in the scientific process have adopted a value-neutral stance to our observations of life. What does it mean to say that we are created by God in love?

There are those of us who take an objective approach to this question. God is a person in cosmic space who creates, manages, and intervenes in life, giving special attention to the human creature as the object of His attention. From this point of view God loves the chosen ones and hates the wicked. We hear this reflected in v. 20 of our psalm: The Lord watches over all who love him, but all the wicked he will destroy. Our God is a mighty fortress. You are either in or you are out.

It is these sorts of hidden speed bumps in the psalms that disturb me as much as they do when I am driving down the street. I didn’t see it coming and suddenly I am jostled, because my experience of God is much more subjective. That which we call God is mystery for me, a great unknowing that I, nonetheless, experience in moments of revelation.

I call it “synaptic faith.” The brain is made up of bundled ganglialong nerve cells (neurons), that stretch out to other nerve cells like those famous fingers in the Sistine Chapel, reaching out but not quite touching. There is an essential gap between the fibers called a synapse. Electrical impulses race along the nerve cells taking “a leap of faith” over the synapse charging our lives with thoughts, dreams, speech and autonomic responses. It is a complex mystery, but it is how we experience the world.

God is the mystery we experience in a million different ways every moment, and the sum total of this experience is that life matters, the Creator cares for each person, as well as, each leaf and rock and bug and tree, paramecium and bacterium. In this way we intuit that God is love whose whole purpose is to express the gift of life.

If we allow ourselves to wax rhapsodic about God’s love for all of God’s creation, does it make sense to rejoice over the destruction of some people, whom we call “wicked.” J. Clinton McCann, Jr., has a persuasive response: “The happiness or prosperity of the righteous is not so much a reward as it is their experience of being connected to the true source of life – God. Similarly, the destruction of the wicked is not so much a punishment as it is a result of their own choice to cut themselves off from the source of life. The compassionate God does not will to destroy the wicked, but their own autonomy gives God no choice.”

Now there is a caution for us – we who value independence, individualism, and autonomy – not to take this to extremes or it will destroy us. Rather we are made to be in community. We are, as St. Augustine wrote, “created by God for God’s own self, and our restlessness until we rest in God.” We are called into the mystery of life to participate in the beauty of the creative process that continues even as we speak and breathe and think and dream. We are, at the same time, our culmination of our history and the growing edge of our imagination seeking the future. We are wonder-born beings.

Because we live between the past and the future we struggle with the objective reality of living in the moment. Is this a time of scarcity or is this an opportunity for abundance? Let me share with you an image that serves as a metaphor for me in this struggle.

I grew up in New England: Connecticut, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. I loved roaming through the woods – and there was always woods close by. Often, I would come across a stone wall in the forest. Why would someone build a stone wall in the forest? When I was in college I saw some aerial photographs of New Hampshire from the turn of the century. 90% of the land was cleared land. I was told that during the Civil War the hay crop in New England rivaled the cotton crop in the South, and since the south couldn’t sell it’s cotton, the North had the advantage of, at least, feeding its horses and cattle.

At the turn of the century farms were no longer viable, better land was available in the Mid-west, factories built during the Industrial Revolution had polluted the major rivers and streams, and an economic down turn forced people west. And within seventy years hard wood forests took over the abandoned farms until now 90% of the land in New England – one of the most heavily populated regions of the United States - is forested.

As a subjectively religious person I would say God is at work in the creative process of renewing and restoring the earth to balance. This is what the Psalmist is lauding in our verses this morning: God’s goodness and the vision of how things are supposed to be, how God intends them to be.

Walter Brueggemann, Old Testatment professor extraordinaire, has written extensively on the theme of God’s abundance and how things are supposed to be: “Israel reflects on the free gift of food: the earth germinates, the seasons work, water, sunshine, breeding, production, nurture, availability. It is a guaranteed system culminating in the food chain for those in God’s image, the whole designed for us. There is elemental generosity at the root of human life in God’s world. There is enough. Israel sings its lyrics of abundance” (The Covenanted Self).

The Psalmist looks around at what is, and gives God the credit for the beauty and wonder of creation. The singer looks at creation and people’s lives in it and gives God the glory. God is the source of life, worthy of our prayerful attention, and a participant in our community and our shared values. God has provided for our every need in the gift of creation. This is a pretty good definition of love.

If elemental generosity is at the root of our human life is God’s world then why do we seem more ruled by a scarcity mentality? This is an old, old problem, and it was at the root of Israel’s struggles. You remember the prophet Samuel? He was the boy that heard God calling him in the night. He will be the prophet that anoints David as the future king, but he was a reluctant prophet, reluctant to start the monarchy.

The story goes that the people begged him to give them a king – because everyone else had a king, Egypt and Persia, and even the Philistines. Samuel said, “I don’t think you want a king.” But the people said, “If we had a king we would be strong, we would be players in the world, we would be able to defend ourselves.” Samuel said, “If you have a king you will regret it. Kings need to centralize their power, which means they will take you sons to build an army. Then they will take your daughters to keep your sons happy. Then the king will take your food to feed the army. Then the king will levy taxes to pay for armaments. The community’s wealth will be kept in the king’s palace, and he will pass law’s to justify his actions, and they will call it wisdom. That is what you will get with a king: power, wealth, wisdom in the hands of one man and those who surround him. Still, the people demanded a king, and they got Saul, who was succeeded by David, and then by Solomon. The kingdom lasted for 75 years before it fell into disarray, and 150 years later it was all but destroyed. Is this what God intended or was it the result of unintended consequences? We didn’t create all this but we do have the power to destroy it all this.

The authors of Deuteronomy, writing during the Babylonian captivity, did some rethinking of their history, and asked: So now, O Israel, what does the Lord require of you? Only to fear (awe) the Lord your God, to walk in all God’s ways, to love God, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and keep the commandments (ten words-core values) of the Lord your God… for your well being (Deut. 10:12,13).

Long ago, in a land and culture with far less in terms of material possession but perhaps far more in terms of spiritual wisdom, Israel’s song of “exuberant trust” praises the way God set things up, the way God established “a coherent, viable, life-giving, life-permitted order… a place for life” (WB, Theology of the Old Testament).

This is the point of being “church” – to be a “place for life.” Here we worship God, sing our praises, celebrate our dead, remember our history, teach our children, bless one another, eat together a sacred meal, pray for the sick, give sustenance to the poor, defend the abused, visit the prisoner, preach peace. We’re God’s agents in the world, and there are folks who need us to fight against poverty, hatred, hunger and war.

If elemental generosity is at the root of our human life in God’s world then we must become stewards of God’s grace. Life is given to us, not to hoard, but to give, to share what we have received, because it is an overflowing of God’s blessing that has been entrusted into our hands. This is what the psalmist is singing about, and as the singing proceeds through our own voice, our own experience, we begin to notice the grace of generosity emerging in our own life. Stewardship, generosity, giving, this is the song we sing in the church.

Let me end this reflection on Psalm 145 with one last quote from Walter Brueggemann who has written many beautiful prayers rooted in Scripture. This one is based on Psalm 145:

“When we sound the ancient cadences,

we know ourselves to be at the threshold

with all your creatures in heaven and on earth,

everyone from rabbits and parrots to angels and seraphim… Alleluia…

angels teaching us how to adore you…

That is how it is when we praise you.

We join the angels in praise, and we keep our feet in time and place…

awed to heaven, rooted in earth.

We are daily stretched between

communion with you and our bodied lives,

spent but alive,

summoned and cherished but stretched between…”

(Awed to Heaven, Rooted to Earth).