Gimme a “G”!

The Rev. Dr. Whitworth Ferguson III

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

June 26, 2011

Gimme a “G”!

1 John 4:1

Beloved, do not believe every spirit,

but test the spirits to see whether they are from God;

for many false prophets have gone out into the world.

We’ve seen them in movies or on television;

some of us have even been to one: a Pep Rally.

A large group gathers, usually at a high school

the night before a big game against the school’s archrival.

The cheerleading squad run out onto the field

to lead all the people in shouting and singing

as the band punctuates brassily and boomingly.

Everyone is excited;

Everyone is filled with spirit.

Worship services can sometimes feel a bit like a pep rally,

especially at churches set up with stages ringed with lights,

audio equipment booming out pulsating sound;

seriously cool preachers in their Hawaiian shirts,

and headset microphones

working the stage, working the crowd,

building energy, building excitement:

“Gimme a G!,

Gimme an O!,

Gimme a D!...”

Everyone filled with spirit,

filled, we certainly hope with the Holy Spirit.

But our text reminds us that

just because something sounds good,

seems cool,

seems exciting, even fun;

just because a lot of other people are involved;

just because everyone is energized,

just because everyone seems to be filled with the spirit,

that doesn’t mean that what is happening is good,

truthful,

authentic.

Flash and excitement do not necessarily equal integrity.

We know from human history

that it doesn’t take much to get a group of people

whipped up into excitement,

even frenzy,

and then have their energy, their spirit

directed to truly awful, evil purposes.

Men and women filled with spirit,

can just as easily be filled with the wrong spirit.

                                            

We don’t have to dig deep in human history

to see how easily we humans get pulled in

to something that seems exciting at the time

but leads to violence and destruction:

marauding brownshirts destroying Jewish neighborhoods

in pre-War Germany;

lynch mobs in the deep south.

Look at how sports fans often celebrate championship victories

or even defeats.

The otherwise mellow residents of Vancouver,

a city regarded by many to be among

the best, most livable cities in the world,

didn’t take their Stanley Cup loss very well.

                                                     

Our text reminds us that we have hard work to do:

the hard work of discernment.

We cannot just listen and conclude that

because something sounds good,

it must be good.

Our text teaches us we have to test the spirit

to help us determine if something is truly godly.

There are lots of preachers out there

who work to preach and share the word of God

as faithfully as they can.

They do their work with love, with grace,

with humility.

And then there are the heirs of Elmer Gantry,

that smooth-talking, lubricious preacher

who came from Sinclair Lewis’s pen,

but who was based on more real-life examples

than we might care to count.

If you’ve ever seen the movie “Leap of Faith”,

in which Steve Martin plays a character named Jonas Nightingale,

a flim-flam revivalist,

you’ll remember he wasn’t even apologetic

when he was confronted by the local sheriff:

“I give the people good entertainment.

They go home feeling good,

maybe even feeling a little hopeful;

Isn’t that worth the $10 or $20

they put in the baskets I pass around?”

Jonas Nightingale was an expert at

filling his crowds with spirit;

but just what spirit is the question the text calls us to ask.

This past month our two Bible Study groups have been learning

how we have failed to test the spirit over the centuries

as preachers have talked about the place we call hell.

It is a place that doesn’t exist in the Old Testament.

It is place Jesus refers to metaphorically

as part of his teaching,

using the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem

to provide a vivid illustration of his points.

                                                     

But within a few centuries of Jesus’ death,

it had become a very real place,

a place of torment, of agony, of torture

for the sinner, the nonbeliever;

It quickly became a place that preachers used

to instill fear in the hearts and minds

of their listeners:

“If you don’t do what I am telling you,

you’d better prepare yourself for

an eternity of torment.”

Augustine locked us into this

misguided interpretation 1600 years ago

and no one tested Augustine’s ideas.

They accepted them, even built on them.

But what we learned these past few weeks

is that almost everything we think we know about hell

has come from places other than the Bible:

our knowledge has come from books,

from paintings,

from preachers like Jonathan Edwards

who ranted from his pulpit some 250 years ago:

“Consider the fearful dangers you are in:

Tis a great Furnace of Wrath,

a wide and bottomless Pit,

full of the Fire of Wrath,

that you are held over in the hand of that God,

whose wrath is provoked and incensed…”

The title of his sermon said it all:

“Sinners in the hand of an angry God.”

But if we test Edwards’ words

we have to ask: does what he preached

ring true of the God Jesus teaches us:

the beloved “Abba” we talked about last week;

our Father in Heaven,

whom Jesus wants us to know just as intimately,

just as lovingly as he knows him,

the Father in Heaven he illustrates to us

in the moving parable of the Prodigal Son,

the Father waiting expectantly,

always ready to forgive,

always ready to embrace in love.

According to Edwards, this God is an “angry” God

a wrathful God,

a God who is “provoked and incensed”

and by our sins.

Let’s test this claim of Edwards not only against Jesus’ teaching,

but even against Old Testament passages,        

against, as one example the prophet Micah who marveled,

“Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity…

He does not retain his anger forever,

because he delights in showing clemency.”

(Micah 7:18)

Let’s test it against the Psalmist who sang out,

“The Lord is merciful and gracious,

slow to anger

and abounding in steadfast love.”

(Psalm 103:8)

Does the father in the parable of the Prodigal Son,

stand facing his wayward son,

arms folded,

stern look as he glared at his son

over the top of his glasses,

saying to him,

“you’ve got a lot of explaining to do…”

Where we’ve ended up,

because no one tested the spirits of so many over the centuries,

is that we believe that God wants to consign to torture

for all eternity,

anyone and everyone who doesn’t conform

to his precise standards.

Test that notion:

does it fit with the God Jesus reveals?

A God of grace?

A God of love?

A God of mercy?

A man shows no interest in God, in Christ,

in faith, in church

until one day at age 50 he walks into a church.

He goes back the next week,

and the week after that, and the week after that.

A few months later he calls the pastor of the church

to tell her that he feels ready

to make his profession of faith in Jesus.

The minister responds with joy

and after checking the calendar

tells the man that the third Sunday of next month would work.

Five days later the man dies tragically

in an automobile accident.

Do we really want to believe that God will consign

the man to flames and wrath

because he had not stood up in a church

to profess publicly his faith in Christ?

Even Augustine struggled with that notion

and finally came up with the creative

but ultimately absurd notion

that God must have some sort of divine thermostat

to regulate the heat and flames:

more for the truly terrible,

not so hot for the not-so-bad.

Augustine’s are notions we must test,

because they lack spiritual integrity:

they don’t reflect the spirit of God revealed in Jesus.

In their wonderful book, “If Grace is True”

pastors Philip Gulley and James Mulholland

remind us that “The Bible doesn’t say

God can be loving

or God is often loving

or even God is usually loving.

It says ‘God is love’

(1 John 4:16).”

If God IS love,

then as we test statements that suggest something

other than a loving God –

statements that paint a picture of a wrathful God,

a vengeful God,

even a preferential God,

we’d have to conclude that the ideas cannot stand,

that they do not reflect spiritual integrity

grounded in the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

So, for the idea of punishment for all eternity,

Gulley and Mulholland write that it

“contradicts even the harshest concepts of justice.

It defies God’s commitment to restoring all things….

Coercion, punishment and wrath are incapable

of creating the kingdom of God.

They represent the weakest form of power.”

(If Grace is True, 82)

The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann,

the most prominent Protestant theologian today,

has added his voice to the growing number

who are testing and reexamining some of the notions

we’ve long thought were biblical and authentic

regarding judgment and eternal punishment.

He too has found the older ideas we’ve long held

lacking in spiritual integrity.

He paints a different picture for us

than what we get from a Jonathan Edwards,

or many contemporary clergy:

He paints a picture of a God who may judge,

but judges with grace, with mercy, with Love:

“The divine justice which Christ will bring about

for all human beings and for all things

will… not be retributive justice

which rewards the good and punishes the wicked.

It will be God’s creative justice

which brings justice for the victims

and puts the perpetrators right….

The perpetrators of sins and violence

will receive a justice which transforms and rectifies.”

(Sun of Righteousness, 137, italics mine)

This sounds like the God revealed to us in Jesus Christ!

We are called to discern,

to listen, to test as we worship,

as we read,

as we listen to the voices all around us

claiming to know God, to follow Christ.

We are called to test to see if the spirit of the words,

the actions, are “attuned to the depth of God’s love

as expressed in Jesus Christ.”

(Wogaman 208)

Are the words, the actions

grounded in grace,

grounded in mercy,

grounded in forgiveness?

Are the words, are the actions

suffused with acceptance,

empathy,

selflessness,

compassion.

If we test and find we can answer our test questions

each with a strong “yes”,

then we can be confident that

lively or contemplative,

loud or barely a whisper,

people excited, or everyone still,

we’re hearing the word of the Lord. 

AMEN