The Wednesday Homily: "Unreasonable God"

I recently spent a day at home, brought low by what was either an extremely short-lived stomach virus or food poisoning. I woke at my normal 6:00 AM, feeling a bit “off,” and by the time 9:00 rolled around, I was investigating breakfast and the morning coffee for the second time, in the toilet bowl. I spent the rest of the day shivering in bed and sleeping on the couch in the basement. As you can imagine, eating was pretty low on the list of priorities, and even the next day, I only ate enough to quench the light hunger pangs I was feeling, as I was anxious not to tax my stomach too seriously before it had time to recover.

The one benefit, I thought, would be losing a few of the pounds I’d been trying to drop. I’m running a marathon in late June, and my goal is to break the four hour barrier, which will be much easier if I have a few less pounds to carry around for those four hours. But it’s been a struggle. I lose a few pounds, I gain them back, and nothing seems to work. As I headed off to the gym this morning, I thought to myself, “at least two days of eating next to nothing guarantees I’ve lost some weight!”

Nothing doing. I’d actually gained three pounds since my last weigh-in on Friday.

A radio show that I catch via podcast sometimes advertises itself as presenting the “reasonable” message of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and every time I hear their announcer say it, I want to slap those good folks around, just a little bit. It’s not that I don’t like being reasonable – far from it, in fact. In a world where a father gets arrested for choosing to use his seatbelt for his beer instead of his son, where the local chapter of Jedi is attacked by a drunk pretending to be Darth Vader, reasonable is an aspiration I’m happy to hold, most of the time. The problem is that “reasonable” has its limits, and sometimes we need the power of an unreasonable God to break through everything else that is unreasonable in our lives.

In a reasonable world, a man who throws up breakfast and doesn’t eat for most of two days will lose weight. In a reasonable world, the government of a nation devastated by a cyclone would welcome the assistance of other nations, not deny it to satisfy their own paranoid delusions about power and control. In a reasonable world, executives who exploit illegal workers would be as guilty as the workers themselves, if not more so. But it becomes increasingly clear to anyone who tries to see the world with open eyes that because of our bondage to sin, we do not live in a reasonable world, though we may try with all our might to make it so. In fact, sometimes the world is so unreasonable that we don’t even have the words to describe it.

It is in the midst of all this unreasonableness that God also acts unreasonably. Scripture is filled with testimonies to the unreasonable love in which God holds the children of creation. “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” says the prophet Isaiah; “Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you.” Hosea says, “My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger; I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath.” The Creator of all things, upon witnessing the destruction we stewards have wrought upon God’s creation and ourselves, refuses to indulge righteous anger and come in destruction and rejection. How many of us could say the same in our own relationships?

And, of course, Jesus Himself, in union with the Creator’s unreasonable love, said “Blessed are the poor in spirit… those who mourn… the meek… those who hunger and thirst for righteousness… the merciful… the pure in heart… the peacemakers… those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake… [and] blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on My account.” These are unreasonable words, to be sure, but would we expect anything else from the unreasonable Savior who proves God’s commitment by choosing death instead of rejection and forgiveness instead of domination?

Sunday will be Holy Trinity Sunday. In our churches we will celebrate the mystery of God as Three and One. We have words from God the creator and Jesus the Savior and Son of God in Scripture, but no directly attributed words of the Holy Spirit, whom we confess to be active within and among us in this time of creation. Yet Paul’s letter to the Romans ascribes one means by which the Spirit speaks: when we ourselves don’t have words to express the deep longings of our hearts. I don’t mean the longings for material wealth or rewards: I mean the spiritual longings for all that is holy, all that is righteous, all that should be reasonable in God’s creation. Sometimes being unreasonable is the only means by which what is needed is given, and, God be praised, the Spirit remains with us, the unreasonable voice of God speaking among and for God’s unreasonably sinful, broken, lost people. In an unreasonable world, the Spirit takes our groans and sighs and lifts them heavenward to the unreasonably loving Creator, who knows and hears them all. The Spirit intercedes for us, thanks be to God: It is unreasonable power for an unreasonable God, granting unreasonable access to an unreasonably blessed community. Amen.