The god of our misunderstanding

John 6: 1-21, NT pages 97-98 Betty White was the star of the hit TV show “Golden Girls,” and just a year or two ago she was invited to host one of my favorite TV shows, “Saturday Night Live,” because of an outcry of support from Facebook. Mrs. White is 93 years old, she doesn’t have a Facebook account, and rather than thank her millions of fans who requested that she host “Saturday Night Live,” she said something like, “I don’t even really know what Facebook is, but it sounds like a gigantic waste of time.” Now that’s true, and if I had a good idea of how much time I would waste on the social media outlet I might never have signed up, but had this logical side of my brain prevented me from signing up for Facebook I also would not have heard that Buddy Fisher has been named Alumni Volunteer of the year by Vanderbilt University, I would not have seen so many beautiful pictures of your children, and I would not have been overjoyed to receive so many happy birthday wishes last Tuesday. My friend Andrew Hickman said to me once that you can complain about Facebook as much as you want, but it is hard to beat how nice it is on your birthday to hear from old friends. Jane Carney is one old friend that I heard from on my birthday this past week. She was a member of the church I served outside Atlanta, and I was always amazed by her dedication to the people of Haiti. She served on the mission committee, and as often as four times a year she would fly down to Haiti to be a part of medial mission trips. She talked me into going with her once, and I remember calling Sara from Haiti while on that trip and saying, “if I had known it was going to be like this I’m not sure I ever would have agreed to go.” Haiti is a country that shines so clear a light on the reality of economic disparity in our world. It’s a country without – without food, without healthcare, without roads, without electricity, without water – and that was my impression before the catastrophic earthquake of 2010. For our flight down there we met our team at the Atlanta airport, and it was there that Jane showed me my wheel chair. She told me I’d need to ride in it and maybe if it hadn’t been so early in the morning the logical part of my brain would have been working better and I would have asked some questions like, “why do you need me to ride in that wheelchair,” or do you think I’ll get in trouble ridding in that wheelchair since I don’t actually need it,” but like I said it was early, so it didn’t really occur to me that pretending to need a wheelchair when I didn’t need a wheelchair might have landed me in Guantanamo Bay. They waved me around the metal detectors, let me board the plane before everyone else, and all I had to do was remember which leg I was pretending was hurt. Having arrived in Haiti safely we rode in a van down miles of potholed dirt roads to an isolated field near a village. A crowd was already assembled and was waiting for us to provide them with medical care. The first in line was a man in a wheelbarrow. His son had pushed him for 8 miles in the hope of a proper wheelchair. Now we’ve been taught to think before we act. To count to 10 before we speak. That just because everyone else has jumped doesn’t mean that we should, because we should be smarter, guided by logic and not emotions, led by our rational mind and not taken advantage of by our lack of information. That describes our religious tradition in some ways. John Calvin who established the theological base of our tradition was distrustful of human emotions believing that a tearful conversion on Sunday morning was only as good as the change in lifestyle come Monday. That tradition continued, so while James K. Polk’s mother was a good Presbyterian, a longtime member of this church, it is the Methodist Church across the street that has his likeness at the center of their rose window due to a conversion experience he had at a Methodist Tent Revival. There would have been no Presbyterian Tent Revival in those days – you want to become a Presbyterian you will have to accept the beliefs of this tradition in your mind, you need to hear all the standards of the Westminster Confession, not just the parts espoused by the revivalist’s sermon. Think before you act. Count to 10 before you speak. And just because everyone else has gone down to the alter doesn’t mean that you should, because you should be smarter, guided by logic and not emotions, led by your rational mind and not taken advantage of by some traveling preacher who may not tell you the whole story. But what if knowing the whole story stands in the way? We can watch the weather channel now. Receive reports of what the weather might do 24 hours a day to avoid planning a picnic on a rainy day. We can watch the stock market as much as we want. Watch it go up and down and back up again. There are projections for all kinds of things. We can go to the library to read, surf the internet for breaking news, and hear all kinds of theories from all kinds of sources and this can all be so very good – there is power in knowledge – but with knowledge can also come “paralysis rather than empowerment” . You might have read in the Daily Herald last Tuesday that James Bennett, the editor, quoted an academic at the University of Southern California who predicted in 2012 that newspapers would be gone by 2017. Academics make a lot of predictions like this one. Every publication in the religious world is analyzing declining membership numbers in the churches of the United States and Western Europe – many concluding that the church is failing. And then there are commercials that ask questions to keep you up at night: “Are you getting a good night’s sleep?” “Will my car insurance cover this?” “Will you have enough for your retirement?” These are good questions, and those who don’t think about them are foolish, but those who think about them too much might be even worse. Thomas Jefferson is famous for having edited his own Bible. He was man of the Enlightenment, so wanting to distance himself from superstition he cut out the parts of the New Testament that he could not make sense of using his considerable intellect. In the Jefferson Bible there are no miracles like the two we’ve just read, and it had to be this way, because Jefferson, like so many of us, believed in a God that he could understand. The term – “God of your own understanding” is a helpful term used by Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and the other groups in this significant family of recovery support. They use the term to be inclusive of a variety of religious beliefs, which is helpful, but the sin of our culture and the sin of the disciples, is that our God will not be limited by our understanding. We have a God who lives and works beyond our best efforts to understand and comprehend. Idolatry is one of those religious words that people use and know is bad, but what it means is this – that we are prone to create our own gods and to mistake the gods that we create for the living God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ. We don’t want to be superstitious, and beyond that, we want to make intellectual sense out of what we read, so we go to the Gospel of John, read that Jesus fed this crowd with the bread and fish that the little boy brought with him and we explain the miracle rationally. “Maybe what happened is that the boy’s willingness to share what he had inspired others to share, and the miracle is not that God provided but that people shared what they had?” we say. Indeed this is a miracle that people shared, but we must be careful with our boldness. We are fools to limit God according to our definition of what is possible, for here in the Gospel of John our Lord is calling us to step beyond our understanding. To get over our logic and our convictions about what is possible, to get beyond our intellect which is natural, and to live into our faith, which is based on the super-natural. The prophet Elisha was called to a hungry people. A righteous man brought food but asked, “How can I set this before a hundred people?” And the Disciple Philip said to Jesus, “Six months’ wages would not buy enough bread for each of them to get a little.” We worship the God of our misunderstanding. We hedge our bets and wring our hands and rush to accept the literal facts that are before us. That was the case with my friend Fred. We were in seminary together and Fred was in the midst of an internship as a hospital chaplain. He was called to the room of a woman whose husband had just died. Fred knew that as the chaplain it was his duty to comfort the family in this time of death, so he gave a nice prayer. A very nice prayer, but when he was finished the man’s wife was disappointed. “You forgot to try to raise him from the dead,” she said. When Fred told me this story I laughed, but the more I think about it the more I have to come to terms with my laughter in the face of this faith that I claim which affirms Christ’s resurrection. We’ve been taught to think before we act. To count to 10 before we speak. That just because everyone else has jumped doesn’t mean that we should, because we should be smarter, guided by logic and not emotions, led by our rational mind and not taken advantage of by our lack of information, but if we do, is there any room in our minds for the Lord who walked on water? According to our faith in the God of our misunderstanding there must have been a sandbar or something to stand on. Our obedience to the God of our misunderstanding means we dull down the words of our Savior when he tells us to turn the other cheek – but in Scripture is the Lord who was whipped, beaten, nailed to the cross, and do you know what he said? “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.” I don’t understand it, but I don’t have to understand it. I have to believe it. I have to believe that after he fed the 5,000 he told his disciples to gather up the leftovers, that while his disciples looked around with all the logic of clearheaded men the call was not to be clearheaded, but to be faithful. We’ve been seeing what we are supposed to see. We’ve been looking at our bank accounts like those who trust in riches. We’ve been thinking like good and proper boys and girls but the God of our misunderstanding won’t protect us from anxiety and fear – won’t offer us anything we didn’t have already, which means that maybe it is about time for us to hear from Jesus who said, “It is I; do not be afraid.” Do not be afraid, even if they tell you that you should be. Do not be afraid, even if you run out of options. Do not be afraid, even if you go to the cupboard and the cupboard is bare, for the one who walked on the water, who fed the 5,000 is the living God, and the living God still provides, still sustains, and still faces the storm with so much power that you need not be afraid. Amen.