God Is The Owner, Not The Butler

Thoughts on the First Readings
First Sunday in Advent
1 Isaiah 63:16-17, 19 & 64:2-7

“I wish God would get it together and help me through this organic chemistry,” sighed the young man as we shared lunch at the university center. “I’ve been begging him all semester.”

Though it’s common to think of God primarily as our problem solver, it’s dangerous. Problems often go unsolved and the explanation that God has good reasons for allowing this leads many to respond to assurances of his reliability with, “Maybe; maybe not.” That seriously weakens our faith’s credibility.

There’s another, bigger problem with imagining God as our divine concierge: we turn God into a domestic. We may consider him a vital resource to be cultivated and respected but we still relegate him to the role of go-to guy in difficult situations. We lose God, the loving hope sustaining every reality.

Jesus’ followers saw him as the Messiah because he re-presented the essential reality of their lives, their hope and their national identity.” The Jews of Jesus’ day faced the cruelty of Roman military, economic and cultural domination just as they had faced the cruelty of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon and Greece in previous ages. God for these men and women was the reason for their past, their present and their future. God was the promise that their efforts and dreams meant something. God was their destiny.

Today in educated Western communities questions of who we are, the meaning of our lives and future are up for grabs. We’re coming to realize that we, not just our selves and our nation but our world, are an infinitesimal part of an unimaginable let alone controllable reality. After millennia of assuming that humanity is the necessary apex of creation we find ourselves neither apex nor necessary. We’ve always known the fragility of individual life. In the last generation we’ve come to realize that the whole of life is tenuous and our ability to protect it limited. That realization is beginning to shake us to our roots.

We live in a universe we can’t even describe let alone manage. Yet we cling to a picture of God as a prickly butler keeping our house clean and meals on time. We need an understanding of the God of Abraham and Jesus vastly larger than the one with which we’ve grown comfortable. We need to arrive at it together.