Let’s suppose that this is God’s issue of Time magazine. Someone has sent God a lifetime subscription to Time magazine; I guess you would have to say an eternity-time subscription.
And when God’s Time magazine arrives ... by the way, do you know God’s zip code? You don’t think God has a zip code? Of course He does. It’s 37234. Look it up.
When God’s Time magazine arrives, and if God reads it … oh, now, wait a minute. That’s a dubious proposition, you say, since God already knows what has happened, and has no need to read about it.
In fact, a few of you would argue that He knew what was going to happen even before it happened. You know, predestination, the theology that says, "Whatever will be will be, even if it never happens"! But we’ll not argue that point today.
Just for the sake of argument, when God gets His magazine and wants to learn the news, to what section does He turn? In what is God most interested? What attracts heavenly attention first?
Politics? Oh no, we all know that politics is a dirty business. God wouldn’t be there, would He?
How about entertainment? Gracious, no. In the first place, God is serious. He isn’t going to waste even a precious million years on entertainment. And besides, the language and the nudity in the movies these days; God is of purer eyes than to behold all that. No, it wouldn’t be entertainment either.
Well, how about economics? The nuts and bolts of finance? Would God read with interest, compound interest, the financial section? Oh, but remember that His word says that money is the root of all evil. Doesn’t it? NO… the love of money is the root of all evil. Well, what’s the difference? God is spirit; and we don’t envision His being caught up in money matters, do we?
Oh, look, there’s a religion section. That must be the answer. Surely God wants to know what’s happening in His church. Certainly He wants to rejoice at the latest megachurch. Maybe He wants to prepare thunderbolts to pitch at posturing, preening Baptist preachers attending their annual conventions. It must be the religion section that would set celestial thumbs turning pages.
But theologian Harvey Cox, who first came up with the idea behind this little exercise I’m using this morning, suggests that if, indeed, God does read the news magazines, it is the religion section to which He turns last, last, not first. Our God, you see, is lord of all. That means that all of life is of concern to Him. All of life, all that we do, all that we pour ourselves into, all that we are, is of interest to Him. Not just religion, not just churches and stained-glass windows and robed choirs and preachers and pipe organs, but real life. Life as it is lived on the streets. Life as it touches every one of us in every aspect of our beings.
You see, it has been well said that if our God cannot be Lord of all, then He cannot be Lord at all. If God cannot be Lord of all, then He cannot be Lord at all. And so if we limit God’s concern only to things religious; if we somehow think we can lock God up in the box called church; then we have made God irrelevant. We have kept Him from being Lord at all, because we have not seen that He is Lord of all.
Centuries ago, long before news magazines cut our lives up into little segments and labeled one of them "religion", as if God were not involved in all of life ... centuries ago, the prophet whose writings are found in the last third of the Book of Isaiah ... the scholars call him Trito-Isaiah, or the third Isaiah, though we do not know his name …this great prophet saw that it is spiritually dangerous to be religious.
You heard that right. It is spiritually dangerous to be religious. And the reason it is so spiritually dangerous to be religious is that when our spiritual hormones Kick in, we get religious to the exclusion of being real. We get holy and forget how to be human. We get pious and sickeningly sweet, forgetting what God is really interested in: the whole lives of human beings.
Let’s see how this prophet develops this idea and where it leads:
I
First, the prophet sees that a lot of people are ready to be religious, they are even eager to be spiritual. But when they are, there is an underlying dissatisfaction. Despite their spirituality, despite their adherence to all the rules of religion, folks who try to practice their faith out here in the stratosphere end up feeling unsatisfied. No amount of religious observance quite gets them what they are looking for.
God says, "Day after day they seek me and delight to know my ways ... they ask of me righteous judgments, they delight to draw near to God. [But then they say], ’Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?’
Lord, we’re doing all this religion business, but it just doesn’t seem to work. We’re pushing ourselves to get to church, we’re expecting the choir to lift us up out of our seats, we keep on thinking the preacher might say something halfway interesting, but we don’t feel anything. We don’t feel your presence. Frankly, Lord, we get the idea that your mind is somewhere else, and that you are not paying attention.
"Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?"
When I was a teenager, my home church would regularly have revivals of the sort in which a visiting evangelist would come in and would every night for a week preach something like, "Are you sure you’re a Christian? Do you know you’re a Christian? If you died tonight, what would happen to you?" And then these evangelists would always drive it home with rhetoric like, “Do you know Jesus Christ personally? Has He spoken to your heart? Has He walked with you and talked with you and taken you as His own? Oh, if you have, you’ll know it. You’ll know it. You’ll feel it, right in your heart."
Do you know the kind of preaching I’m talking about? Makes you feel kind of guilty all over; you sort of want to slither under the pews until it’s finished. As a teenage boy, I found that no matter how many revival services I attended, I never did feel Jesus walking with me and talking with me and telling me I am His own! No matter how many Wednesday night prayer meetings I sat through, dutifully bowing my head and folding my hands, I didn’t feel this sudden surge of the presence of God.
Apparently these other folks who spoke so buoyantly of a personal relationship with Christ had something I didn’t have. And when in the sixties a bumper sticker appeared with the slogan, "My God is alive; I talked with Him this morning", I concluded that some folks either had a whole different spiritual experience from mine or else they were the biggest ham actors this side of Ronald Reagan.
"Why do we fast, but you do not see? Why humble ourselves, but you do not notice?"
A lot of people are religious, spiritual, churchly, eager. And we just keep on coming back for more, thinking that someday the lightning will strike and we’ll feel ourselves caught up in God’s presence.
The trouble is, according to this prophet, we’re trying to do it through religion. And that’s not what God is principally interested in. We’re trying to find spiritual fulfillment, like Avis, trying harder and harder. And our prayers seem to bounce off the ceiling with a dead thud.
The reason is we’re trying to be too religious and not worldly enough. We’re trying to be spiritual and not real. We’re attempting to be holy and not whole. And we’re just not satisfied.
II
But notice with me that God’s prophet provides the answer. The way to spiritual satisfaction, the way out of the religion box, is to deal seriously with the world and its issues. We do not find God so much by running away to a mountain-top retreat as we find Him by immersing ourselves in the streets of the city and by touching people where they live.
God says, "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn ... then you shall call, and the Lord will answer, you shall cry for help, and he will say, ‘Here I am.’"
Simply put, if you want to find God, then go where God is. If you want to know God, then get interested in what interests God, even though it seems worldly, material, just plain everyday. Get interested in what interests God, and there you will find Him.
Remember, our problem is that we have taken God to the stratosphere. We have supposed that He is out there, up there, somewhere, and we have not noticed that He is right down here, in the smallest detail, and with the most ordinary of things.
Take this soup can label, for example. It is a symbol of food. And not just any food, either, but the particular food of the homeless, the poor, the downtrodden. We speak of "soup kitchens" -- not restaurants, not buffet lines, not picnics, and not even feeding stations. But soup kitchens. Soup conjures up images of something nourishing and warm, something somehow spiritual in and of itself. Soup tempts the nostrils, warms the heart, feeds the body, and relaxes the soul.
You say, so what? How in the world did you get to talking about soup? I thought we were talking about spirituality. Ah, but our God says, "Is not this the fast that I choose?" Is not this the kind of spiritual life that I am interested in? “To share your bread ... or your soup ... with the hungry? ... Then your light shall break forth ... and the Lord will answer." A simple and ordinary, worldly thing, bread, soup; but to give it is to warm the heart of the giver as well as of the receiver.
Or look at this sheet. So ordinary, so worldly. So simple, in fact. Nothing to it. I think even I could take a few yards of cloth and make a sheet, unless you want one of those fancy fitted sheets. Nothing to it.
But do you know the spiritual feel of clean sheets? Do you know how glorious it is to slip into bed when the linens are fresh and clean? It feels good, doesn’t it?
Then imagine what it is like to have no sheets; in fact, no bed; in fact no bedroom, no house. Oh, if you know how slipping into clean sheets makes you feel human again after a long dusty day, then you also have some inkling of the spiritual joy of giving shelter. God says, "Is not this the feast that I choose ... to bring the homeless poor into your house? ’" Then shall your light break forth ... and the Lord will answer." This sheet is a symbol of giving shelter to someone, and when you do, you find that your own heart goes home too.
Finally, these socks. Oh, my, now the preacher has lost his mind. White athletic socks. These are really, really worldly. If you wear them on the basketball court, inside your Reeboks or your Nikes, you are right up there with Jordan or Barkley. But if you wear them peeking out from your dark blue suit, trapped inside your wingtips, you are Mr. Nerd. Socks ... they aren’t spiritual symbols, are they? White athletic socks, at least these are clean!
But listen again. God is interested in the real world. He is interested in the world where men and women slip and fall. He is concerned about the everyday world in which people get old and feeble and frail. And so these socks, which will soon make their way to a nursing home to protect tired and fragile feet, are among the most spiritual of all the symbols we could bring. "Is not this the feast that I choose …when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin? ... then ... then your light shall break forth .. and the Lord will answer [you]." These simple socks, given to someone’s weary grandfather, someone’s worn grandmother, will do more to establish a spiritual connection than any fervent prayer, any driving gospel song, any thundering preacher.
Soups, sheets, and socks are the stuff God cares about. Ordinary, material, worldly. Soups, sheets, and socks. For God so loved the world … the world ... that He gave. He gave a real life, the word made flesh. And when we know Him in the world, where He is at work giving out worldly but human things like soups, sheets, and socks, then, at last, we will know Him in our hearts.
