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God Is Good All The Time!
By Riviera UCC | April 12, 2009
God is Good All the Time
a sermon based on Matthew 28: 1-10 & Mark 10:17
given at Palm Bay, FL on April 12, 2009
by Rev. Scott Elliott
One Easter tradition in churches like ours is that the pastor says “Christ is risen!” and the congregation says “He is risen indeed!”
Okay let’s try that again, “Christ is risen!” (He is risen indeed!”).
Fantastic.
For those of you who have come to this church at all in the past year you probably have participated in another tradition that we do almost every Sunday in this church. I stand up here and proclaim at the beginning of our service, like I did today that “God is good!” and then you all reply, “All the time.” “All the time” “God is good.”
That was fantastic too!
I got to thinking about that weekly proclamation of ours. Like many things in Christian theology our proclamation that “God is good all the time” can have more than one meaning. It can be heard to mean that God is always good.
Listen for that meaning as we proclaim it: “God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.” I imagine most of us hear that meaning when we say it on Sundays. God is always good.
But we can also hear it to mean that all good is God– all good is God.
Listen for that meaning this time as we proclaim it again: “God is good. All the time. All the time. God is good.” It’s little different. Good is God.
Understanding God as a good God most of us have down.
That all good is God is perhaps a less common take on the phrase. This is a little surprising since it is recorded that Jesus long ago told us that all good is God. It’s not an Easter story per se, but, in Mark 10:17 we are told that a man ran up and knelt before Jesus and asked him “Good Teacher what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus’ initial response was “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”
God is good.
Good is God.
I mention this on Easter Sunday, not just because Easter is a day of great goodness –which it surely is– but also because in order to get to this day of goodness a lot of ugly stuff happened and goodness not only prevailed in the end but, all the time God was good and God was good all the time.
Even today in the stories of Jesus’ ministry, and especially in the Passion and Easter stories, God as goodness calls out to us from the pages of the Bible and the stories that form in our minds as we hear the Word read.
Jesus was by all biblical accounts a man of lowly birth and means. We forget that he was a nobody to the big wigs of his day. He was after all a criminal who was executed in a manner reserved for those Rome considered low-lifes.
Somehow this nobody to the powers-that-be in the Roman Empire is somebody that we still listen to today. Why? Because his message is all about love and God is love.
And it’s a good message, it’s good news, and God is good.
Jesus takes the Jewish concept of loving your neighbor and makes it so complete a love that he goes around and preaches the good news that even the neighbor who is your enemy is to be loved. This is good stuff, it’s God stuff.
Jesus does not just preach good stuff/God stuff he practices it. How? By bringing into his community every sort of neighbor you can imagine. Jesus embraces everyone with love, wholly. No one is left out. Jew and Gentile, Roman and Samaritan, male and female, poor and rich, religious and non-religious, criminal and pious, old and young, sick and healthy, disabled and non-disabled, friend and enemy. All get in. All are loved and treated with respect by Jesus. This is good stuff. This is God stuff.
Rome’s political and religious elite in Palestine got really, really worried about this good stuff, this God stuff. Equality and love for all clashed with the system of oppression they had established to make a very few wealthy on the backs of the very many.
Jesus’ Way challenged the status quo with ideals and conduct that threatened the structure which claimed wealthy patrons were the godfathers of their underlings. God as father, and all as equal, is a good Jesus preaches. But the powerful? Well, they did not hear it as good for them.
Even still we can hear in this clash between Jesus and the powerful that God is in the good that Jesus preaches and practices. We can feel God tugging us to that Way, calling us to the good.
We can also feel God pushing us away from the bad, things like Rome’s oppression and the powerful’s opposition to Jesus’ good God and good teachings.
The good stuff, the God stuff, is like a magnet for the soul. We know innately that in that story the pull is good and it is God. We want to move toward the positive pole of God.
While at the same time, we are repulsed from the negative pole of the awful things Rome did – which Jesus challenged– as well as the terrible things Rome and its stooges did to Jesus.
The Passion stories, of course, get really ugly. We wince and even cry at the pain and the darkness Jesus travels through. It’s nearly unbearable to consider.
Good calls out to us to keep us from teetering off into the abyss of the mess of Jesus’ mistreatment and death. We can barely stand to think on it. It’s awful. Jesus is brutalized. Crucifixion is horrible. It is difficult to imagine a worse way to die.
We feel repulsion from the horror of the story of Holy Week. That repulsion is due to goodness, to God who is good, calling us from the bad.
There are preachers and theologians who will tell you that Easter is the result of God personally requiring the human sacrifice of Jesus in order to redeem us from a sinful state, and that God intentionally sent his only Son, Jesus, to be sacrificed and brutally killed so he could rise again to save us.
In other words, some churches assert that God required and planned the horrors of Holy Week.
But, we are allowed to understand the story differently here at Riviera United Church of Christ. Our theology, like Jesus’, centers around the conviction that “God is Love,” that God is good, that God never desires harm or oppression, never plans, requires or compels violence or horrors of any kind.
We proclaim every week that God is good, that God is love.
Love and goodness are in direct conflict with the idea that God personally required human sacrifice to redeem us from a sinful state; that God intentionally sent his only Son Jesus to be sacrificed and brutally killed; and most especially that God sends to hell anyone who does not believe the Easter story a certain way.
As puny mortals with a thimble full of love compared to God’s oceans of love, we know that sacrificing humans is not a mark of Love, we could never send anyone to hell.
If we are images of God what sort of images does a human sacrificing God make us? What sort of God of Love could do that? Or send good people (or anyone) to hell. Where is the good-ness of God in any of that?
Jesus certainly sacrificed his life and God made the best of it, even resurrected him for us to find our Way to Love, but it’s okay to refuse to accept that God planned and demanded Jesus’ death from the start to fulfill a divine need, a hallowed blood thirst for human sacrifice.
We do not have to believe God intentionally sent Jesus to earth to be tortured and put to death as a sacrifice required by God. Such requirements fly in the face of our overriding convictions that God is love and that God is good– all the time.
One of the miracles of great good that we often overlook at Easter is that neither Jesus nor God responded with violence to the savagery inflicted on Jesus by Rome and its stooges. Rather the Divine responses were victories through non-violence.
If God and Jesus had the power to call in legions of angels to inflict harm and defeat Rome and its stooges with violence, they did not do so. What they did do was inflict love on them and everyone else– whether they wanted to be loved or not.
The power of Easter is pure love.
It’s not some kind of so-called tough love, that punishes or sacrifices humans to get results. It’s unadulterated, pure love. Jesus on the cross, with great pain, humility and complete rejection and criminalization by Rome was utterly loved by God, as were his disciples and his persecutors. And on that cross, Jesus– Jesus the man being brutalized– utterly loved us and God and his disciples . . . and his persecutors.
In death Jesus loved his neighbors, even his enemies, and we have none of us ever been the same since.
Easter is about the miraculous amazing end of the story resulting from Jesus’ execution, sacrifice, and death– and his love though it all. These things the world tends to think of as weaknesses are turned on their head and made everlasting strengths by God. Indeed, they led to Jesus’ resurrection; which in turn has led others (even now) to his Way of new life, of love for all.
Easter is about unqualified love. Regardless of race, religion, gender, sexuality, nationality or enemy status God loves us. God loves us!
Easter proves this is true even in our darkest hours, even when are on a cross, even when we feel forsaken, even in death. And remarkably even when we are wrongdoers, God is good all the time and so loves us. That’s the good news, that’s the God news.
Christians do not have the only way to Empire of God, but we do have a Way. It is Christ who saves us from our lesser selves. At Easter we celebrate that Way of love and the transformation to our better self that we find upon that path. On Easter day we especially give thanks for that; and love God and Jesus back.
In all of this, of course is the fact that Jesus died, yet he lives. Christ is risen (He is risen indeed!)
Christ’s resurrection is clothed in mystery; and has been since that first Easter.
The resurrection, though mysterious, is nonetheless true on so many different levels.
Resurrection means “a rising again from the dead.”
It cannot be denied that Jesus was killed to stamp out his life and his cause. Yet both live on to this day. It is a miracle that a lowly man, a poor nobody to Rome was killed in the boonies of that empire yet still rose up in such a way that he lives on today.
Some argue that Jesus’ resurrection was a resuscitation, that is he was brought back to life resuming his previous existence. The idea of resurrection can, but, does not need to include the resuscitation. (Borg, Marcus from The Meaning of Jesus at p. 131).
Indeed resurrection in the context of the Gospel writers meant an entry into “a new kind of existence.” (Ibid.) From Easter onward Jesus has a new existence. He can no longer experience death. He is no longer confined by time or space. He lives on vibrating through time affecting lives and history even for non-Christians. That is a new kind of existence beyond ordinary humanness, it is a resurrection by any definition of the word.
The actual state of Jesus’ body is not what matters, it is the state of his being that is resurrected. This is nothing new, Paul reported experiencing the risen Christ, not as a physical body, but as a being.
What matters is that Jesus lives on after his death in a new kind of existence. In the Bible he is reported to have been experienced in unfamiliar and familiar forms. Mary sees him in a gardener. Two followers encounter him an unknown traveler on the road to Emmaus. He feeds his followers fish as a stranger on the beach.
But he also shows up in his familiar form coming through walls like a spirit, and is experienced as both touchable and untouchable to prove his rising. After his death Jesus stays and walks with and speaks with his followers. He did this that first Easter morn and he does this today. On Easter we remember and celebrate this.
We experience Christ today not only in the texts, and in varied and deeply personal encounters, but also here in the church. Churches have been known since the start to be the very Body of Christ in the post-Easter world.
And here is the thing. Good-ness, God-soaked experiences are the common thread in all of the Jesus stories, those in the Bible and, those we know from personal experiences, those that continue on in communities gathered in his name, just as we are this glorious Easter morning..
Jesus embodies love and goodness –Godness– in both the pre-Easter and the post-Easter stories of his life.
Any way you look at the meaning of his stories, of his resurrection, of Easter itself, is that Jesus provides an everlasting Way to connect us with God, who is love, who is good; all the time.
Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!
AMEN.
COPYRIGHT Scott Elliott © 2009 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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