Sunday, March 13, 2022
/The Second Sunday of Lent
Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18; Psalm 27; Philippians 3:17-4:1; Luke 13:31-35
The Rev. Clint Brown
God is a meddler. The Bible is really just one long catalogue of God’s meddling, getting involved with us, inserting himself into our business. The Bible is the proof that God has never left us alone.
In the first place, God has chosen to create. Instead of nothing, there is something. It did not have to be so. God’s Nature is Perfection. God doesn’t need or require anything. God suffers no lack, God experiences no diminishment of any kind – and yet, look around. There is something, not nothing. Here we are; here is the universe with all its astoundingness and wonder. The only explanation – why we’re even here at all – is that God wished it to be so. God did the choosing in this, and God chose to create – you, and me, and everything that ever was or ever will be. And that means God is fully invested in you, in us, in the world in the same way as you are invested in your children, in your work, in anything you create. God meddles in all that’s important to God for the same reason you do – because God loves.
Which we see borne out today in a dramatic way in God’s choosing of a people. We speak of the Jewish people as the “chosen” people, and this is because God spoke to a specific person, Abraham, and told him that he and his descendants would be blessed and connected to God in a special way. It’s not that God has no use for any other people, but God chose a particular people in order to reveal Himself in a personal way – through whom He could directly relate to the world. And when this people found themselves in trouble, God delivered them from slavery in Egypt. And when this people turned apostate and rejected Him, God did not give them up, but sent prophets to turn their hearts. And when this people were taken into exile, God made a way for their return. And, in the fullness of time, from among this people there issued forth a Savior, a Son, born of a woman, born into the middle of empire, violence, and sin – born into our world. Proving, yet again, that God can’t leave us alone. And this despite how we much we would often like to be left alone, left to our own devices, left free to live as if God didn’t matter. God can’t seem to keep out of our business.
Every year as we journey from Christmas to Easter, we are reminded that the Christian God is not a hidden God. He is not a concept you need to tease out – an abstraction to cooly and dispassionately judge – but is someone staring right out at you from the place where he lay in a manger – and from a cross. The modern notion that deity is a philosophical concept to be tried on alongside others is quite alien to our tradition. Immanuel – God is with us – is what the Christian has to proclaim. God has come to live and die among us, to confront us directly with his reality, and that demands a decision.
Because God’s meddling is not something we can speak of in the past tense. You need to decide what to do with this meddling God today. No doubt you have experienced God’s meddling at some point in your life. You will have heard a voice within saying that maybe it’s all true? Maybe I should give in and let this Gospel change my life? That is God speaking to you. That is what you get when you have a meddling God who just won’t leave you alone, who won’t let you stay as you are. You can’t escape God, or God’s meddling, because God is the answer to the question. So thanks be to God – this meddling God – who has meddled his way right into history – who has demonstrated how profoundly he loves you – and who will be forever trying to meddle his way into your heart.