Do you want God? I am sure you do. How much do you want God? That’s hard to quantify. Do you want God more than everything else? There’s the rub. If God isn’t at the top of your want list, you aren’t alone. It’s hard. It’s like riding a roller coaster. We go great guns for a while and then we get distracted by something new and glitzy or enthralling.
This is one way of looking at what the first commandment requires: “You must have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:30). All our likings and desires, our hopes and dreams, our fears and our trust should always be directed to God alone. Lutheran pastor R. J. Grunewald notes that “sin, at it's heart, is wanting something else more than God. Anybody who suggests that they truly have no other gods is a liar. The Scriptures call us to love God above all else, to be fully satisfied in Christ alone.”(1)
Paul told us in last week’s reading from 2 Corinthians (5:17), “if anyone is in Christ, that person is part of the new creation. The old things have gone away, and look, new things have arrived.” That same thought that is behind what Paul tells the Philippians in today’s reading.
Paul hadn’t really desired God more than anything else. He had put all his hope and energy into external activities and milestones: circumcision, lineage, theological association, doctrinal purity, and the Law. But not God.
In our own ways each of us asks, What is the least I can do and still be a Christian? It’s the same thing we do in this year of political puffery. What is the least I can agree with candidate A, B, or C, and still vote for him or her. It’s a difficult task, because most of us are not one issue voters, but which responses to which issues are deal breakers for a particular candidate. With God we go through the same kind of mental gymnastics. I’ll give you my full attention between 10:45 and noon on Sunday (I won’t even fall asleep in church), but don’t press me on things during th rest of the week. Allow me my bigotries, my prejudices, my unwillingness to listen to other views.
Grunewald notes,
[H]ere’s the tension of the Christian life. Being a Christian isn’t about sinning less and wanting God more. Being a Christian is about realizing that sin is an even bigger problem than you thought and that the cross is even more gracious than you dreamed.The new beginning is always difficult. That’s the first message which the Georgie Harris House guests heard yesterday from several speakers who testified about their trials with addiction. But their message was two-fold. The second part was that making the new beginning was well worth the effort.
When I don’t sin, it is the supernatural work of Christ in me, but when I do sin it’s not evidence that I'm not a Christian – it's evidence that my sinful flesh still battles against the new creation.(2)
Anyone who has tried to diet, quit smoking, learn to play an instrument, take up a sport, make any significant behavioral change comes to realize that they can’t do it by themselves. The self-help books notwithstanding, we need tutors, we need coaches, we need fellow travelers, we need guides who have gone this way before and who know the pitfalls and rapids. It takes a community.
We all need to lean on each other. That sounds a lot like a row of dominoes set on their ends in such a way that you push the first one and they all go down. In reality the community of Christ – the church – is like the interlocking girders of trestle bridge or the rafters that support the roof above us right now. Each member bears and distributes the weight so that no one member has to do it all.
As Paul struggles to want God more than everything else, he knows his reality.
It’s not that I have already reached this goal or have already been perfected, but I pursue it, so that I may grab hold of it because Christ grabbed hold of me for just this purpose. Brothers and sisters, I myself don’t think I’ve reached it, but I do this one thing: I forget about the things behind me and reach out for the things ahead of me. The goal I pursue is the prize of God’s upward call in Christ Jesus.Like Paul, we are constantly failing to choose God over ourselves in the business of living. But even in our failures, God still wants us. God still reaches out to grasp us, to grab us close to God’s self and embrace us in holy and eternal love.
It is a continual battle. Every day we are issued a helping of manna equivalent to 86,400 seconds. We get a bye for somewhere between 25,000-30,000 of those seconds when we are asleep. But each and every one of the rest of them are up for grabs. Will we want God or will we want a second of life filled with God-denying, God-restricting, God-ignoring less-than-full life?
Paul recognizes the struggle. He wishes it weren’t so. But he also knows that if wanting God completely without any competing wants weren’t difficult then he, and each of us, would never grow into the depth of appreciation for all that God provides through the saving work of Christ Jesus empowered into us through the Spirit.
The other two readings for the day reaffirm this. Isaiah delivers the message of God to the beleaguered, exiled, refugee Israelites caught in the no hope of the future and the fond memories of a time which seems a lot better in retrospect than it did in the immediacy of the moment.
Don’t remember the prior things; don’t ponder ancient history.Look! I’m doing a new thing; now it sprouts up; don’t you recognize it?I’m making a way in the desert, paths in the wilderness. (Isaiah 43:18-19)When we make an idol of the past, remembering the better parts and forgetting the rough parts, we diminish our ability to want God above everything else. We diminish the possibility of faith in a God who has never given up creating and who renews and upgrades life all the time. We close our eyes to the new things that God is constantly doing – the creation of relationships, the healing of broken ones, the growth of new dimensions of relating and the inclusion of new participants in existing relationships.
God does not cease to want us. I “give water to my people, my chosen ones, this people whom I formed for myself, who will recount my praise.” (Isaiah 43:20-21)
In the reading from John we see two differing desires. Judas, behind th facade of thinking of the poor, is desiring his own way of life, whether it is for the possibility of dipping into the common treasury as John suggests, or maybe grabbing the glory of being the one to distribute the alms to the needy. (Jesus once noted that even those who are evil know how to make friends for themselves.)
Judas is contrasted with Mary who anoints Jesus with the expensive perfume. Her giving of herself and the perfume – which Jesus declared was preparation for his burial – was a moment of total desire for God whom Mary recognized in Jesus, sitting in her living room, eating at her table. The burial preparation, signaled a coming new beginning. And even though Lazarus had been raised from the dead, no one yet understood the import of that act and of the greater one which Mary was helping to inaugurate with her perfume.
All the new beginnings that God creates are not just for God’s amusement. God earnestly desires each one of us. God wants our God-focused desire to stretch as far as it can so that one day, when the new heaven and new earth become the final reality of creation, our desire for God will climax in its fullness completely removing all other desires.
However much you want God today, keep wanting God more tomorrow, and every day after, until the new beginning promised by God is the reality of your life.
Yes, indeed.
(1) http://www.rjgrune.com/blog/want-god, March 10, 2016.
(2) Ibid.
Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com.
Copyright © 2016 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.
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