You Become What You Worship

Sermon preached by the Rev. Lowell E. Grisham, Rector
March 12, 2006; 2th Sunday in Lent, Year B
Episcopal Revised Common Lectionary

(Mark 8:31-38)-- Then Jesus began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, "Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things."

He called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, "If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels."

How you see God will determine how you experience life. Another way to say that, in non-religious language -- how you see reality will determine how you experience life. It's the same sentence, for God is reality itself. God is ultimate reality.

I know someone who thinks life is fundamentally a struggle. It's a struggle between good and evil. It's a struggle between right and wrong. It's a struggle between winning and losing, between life and death. I don't know too much about his childhood, except that he lived with a very powerful father who was a preacher who built a church out of nothing. I do know a good bit about my friend's God. His God is a righteous judge. And I know a good bit about his beliefs. He declares his certainty in the Word of God as revealed in the Bible. He is certain of the rightness of the Bible and he clings to it for his identity. He follows the Bible as his guide. Not everybody who follows the Bible as a guide sees life as a struggle, but my friend does. It's pretty easy for him to find that in his Bible.

We got into a discussion that didn't quite degenerate into an argument because we have a lot of respect for each other. It was a conversation during the months just after the attacks of September 11. He was telling me that Muslims are not people of God. He had gone through much of the Koran and studied it. He pulled out the most egregious of passages from the Koran. They were passages of condemnation toward non-Muslims. Passages of violence and aggression. There is a struggle, he told me. It is us verses them. They know it. We'd better know it. Their Koran tells them to destroy us. We need to join God's side in the battle. Not to do so would be to betray God. He was incredulous that any sensible person wouldn't realize the truth of what he was saying, and risk not only being attacked by the Muslims, but also risk rebelling against God by not joining the fight on God's side.

My world view is so different from his that it took energy for me to even listen to him. I spoke to him of my friend who is a Muslim. How I see in him virtues of compassion and love. He is not trying to destroy anything. In fact, his experience of a compassionate and merciful God is much like my own. He decries the violence done in the name of Allah as a betrayal of the Koran which he prays several times every day, I said.

I could see by the look in my friend's eye, that he couldn't believe in what I was saying. Maybe it could be true about this one Muslim, that he was kind and loving, but he just didn't understand his own religion, my friend insisted. Our conversation degenerated into two people talking past one another, until awkwardly we had to agree to quit that conversation.

My friend is a person of great faith. He has faith in the victory of God through Jesus Christ. It is the only way, he says. My friend has a generous and compassionate heart. He will give the shirt off his back to someone in need. But he's sure that it is a fallen world -- a world not to be trusted, not to be loved. We are in a struggle, until we come to a better place that is prepared. But not for all. A better place prepared only for those who are on God's side, who have joined the battle in the name of Christ. Sometimes he worries whether or not I am on the right side.

How you see God will determine how you see life. He sees God as a righteous judge. My friend's life is a courtroom of struggle between the sides of good and evil. He works hard to distinguish good from evil. He divides most people up into either good or evil. He thinks of most behavior as either right or wrong. Judgment is his paradigm, his world view. He is energized by the vocation to be and to do right, until he takes his last breath, triumphant in the victory of Christ. He'll be remembered as a righteous person who fought the good fight for Christ.

Abraham also had a vision of God. He knew his God to be a God of blessing. He believed in a creative, fruitful God who intended to bless. That knowledge made him confident and optimistic. Even in the face of impossible odds, he trusted that God would bless him and make him fruitful. It is easy to see how Abraham's view of God influenced his whole life. When he was young, he felt called to leave the security of his ancestral home and launch out without destination. He took off in confident optimism to settle in a new land. When things got too crowded, he let his young nephew have the first choice of select land, and the nephew chose the green, lush valley of Sodom. Abraham confidently took the leftovers, knowing somehow he would be blessed. When three strangers approached his tent, he welcomed them with warmth and generosity, blessing them, and thus entertaining angels unawares. Though he and his wife were too old to bear children, he remained steadfast in his faith that God was a God of blessing and creativity. Somehow Abraham trusted that God would find a way to create new life and to bless him, because that was the kind of God Abraham knew and believed in.

Abraham believed in a creative God of blessing. And Abraham became a creative person who spread blessing. You become what you worship.

We see the same God of creative blessing reflected in the life of Jesus, who speaks of his God as being the God of Abraham. The God that Jesus reveals is a God of ultimate blessing, a God of love. The God Jesus reveals is love stronger than death, love that embraces and transcends suffering and its final expression, death. Knowing God as ultimate love made Jesus courageous. He was willing to risk it all for love, to lose his life, to pour it out for love. He became love incarnate. You become what you worship.

Thomas Merton said, "Life is this simple: We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the Divine is shining through it all the time. This is not just a nice story or a fable. It is true." And Thomas Merton's life become one that was transparent to the divine shining through him. Gandhi said, "I believe in the essential unity of all that lives. Therefore I believe that if one person gains spiritually the whole world gains, and if one person falls, the whole world falls to that extent." And Gandhi became a person who could create justice without using violence, maintaining unity even in the face of conflict and oppression.

What is most real to you? That will determine how you experience your life. For one of my friends, life is a struggle between conflicting forces, and he's fighting the good fight. I worry that he makes enemies and fears where there are none. He worries that I just don't understand. Abraham believed that life is a blessing, and that God blesses. Abraham became blessed and a blessing, the father of many nations, including Islam. Thomas Merton believed that life is transparent to the divine, and he became transparent to the divine. Gandhi believed we are one, and he found a way to be one even with his enemies. Jesus loved a God of love with all his heart, soul, mind and strength, and he became a person who poured out love even unto death. Two millennia later children sing, "Jesus loves me, this I know."

Who is your God? What is most real to you? What is most important to you? You will become what you worship? What do you worship?

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