“There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,”

misprinted in a bulletin as

“There’s a Wildness in God’s Mercy”

and I decided that would make a great sermon title, especially during Pentecost. The wildness of God’s mercy is more than just a bulletin typographical error.  It is a reality found through scripture.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is no tame, harmless deity.  The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers behind a screen. The Holy Spirit is not a gentle summer breeze that barely ripples the water of our lives.

The author of the Letter to the Hebrews (10:31) is absolutely correct:

“It is a fearful thing to fall into
the hands of the living God.”

Fearful indeed.  God is the awesome power who, in the words of Isaiah (45:7),

“forms light and creates darkness,
who makes weal and woe.”

God is the one who shatters the false peace of Pharaoh and Pilate and politicians in general. God is the great disturber of every order of injustice, every manifestation of sin and death. The Lord declares in the words of the prophet Jeremiah (23:29):

“Is not my word like fire,
and like a hammer
that breaks the rock in pieces?”

Frequently scripture portrays God not as our friend, and certainly not as our good buddy, but as our adversary.

Wait a minute.  Doesn’t the idea of God as adversary sound almost blasphemous?  Surely God is our friend.  God loves each of us as if there were only one to love, we believe.  If there is anything we are sure of, it is that

“God is love.”

We think of God as the kindly old grandfather who never says no…..a sweet, harmless little god who showers blessings on all God’s children.  J. B. Phillips has written a book, entitled, “Your God is Too Small.” We have a need to keep God small and manageable because then we can control God.  But the God of the Bible is made of stronger, sterner stuff. We do God little honor by whittling down the divine sovereignty to fit into the matchbox of our expectations.  After so many years of domesticating God, sending God to obedience school so that God comes back properly housebroken and ready to walk on our leash, it is time we come to grips with the wildness in God’s mercy.

So, first, let us consider the wildness of creation itself.  If God is the creator of all that is, and if God creates all things out of nothing as an expression of God’s overflowing love, then, my God, what a wildness we worship. Think of it……a universe coming into being by an explosion of inconceivable power and expanding at unbelievable speed.  A universe of exploding stars and black holes in which entire galaxies are formed and destroyed in the twinkling of an eye; a universe of violent forces and incredible vistas of time and space beyond all imagining.  The wildness of God the creator.

In her reflective book, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” Annie Dillard says that not only did the Creator create everything, “He is apt to create anything. He’ll stop at nothing….The creator goes off on one wild…tangent after another or millions simultaneously, with an exuberance that would seem to be unwarranted, and with an energy sprung from an unfathomable font….It all flows so freely wild….The creator loves pizzazz.” The wildness of God’s mercy in creation.

But it does not stop there.  Secondly, consider the wildness of God’s mercy in redemption.  If anything is clear in scripture, it is that God calls onboard the ark of the church the most unlikely crew of saints imaginable.  There is not one with a halo, and hardly a one the media would not crucify in an instant if he or she dared to run for public office.  In the wildness of his mercy God seems to have a special fondness for the black sheep of his flock.

Look at the crew that comes marching down the gangplank.  Father Abraham, with whom God makes his covenant to bless all the families of the earth, tries to pass off his wife, Sarah, as his sister when he notices the gleam in old Pharaoh’s eye.  “If she’s my sister he won’t kill me.”  And Sarah laughs in the face of God when she is told that she will spend her 90^th birthday in the maternity ward.  And poor little Isaac is about as mousey as they come.  He is unable to pick out his own wife. Apparently being tied to the sacrificial altar by your father is not too good for one’s self-esteem.  And slick Jacob is a deceiver and manipulator from day one.  There is nothing he will not do and no one he will not cheat to get what he wants.  And no sooner has Noah stumbled out of the Ark than he gets roaring drunk.  After all that time with all those animals, who wouldn’t?  And Job, dear, patient Job, shakes his fist in the face of heaven and demands that God be accountable.  And the young shepherd boy David may have been uncommonly handsome, but that was hardly a blessing as things turned out, not with his fondness for women.

Things are not much different in the New Testament either.  Peter is always putting his foot in his mouth, and he is about as hardheaded as “the Rock” Jesus calls him.  And we think that name was a compliment? James and John try to do an end run around the rest of the disciples to get for themselves the best seats in the kingdom.  And Paul was a bitter Pharisee before that U-turn on the Damascus Round.  Well, you begin to get the picture.  A motley crew if there ever was one, these strangely unsaintly saints of God.  God is apparently not too particular about the company he keeps and has a marvelous way of using the most unlikely characters to accomplish what God wants done.  Which, I suppose, means that there is a bit of hope for me, and for you, too.  Where would we be without the wildness of God’s redemption?

But there is still more to the wildness of God’s mercy.  Look at the trouble He gets us into. Almost any biblical character you can name was a lot more comfortable before God came on the scene.  Abram was doing just fine in Ur of the Chaldees.  He had everything a man could want until God said, “Go.  Go from your country and your family and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.  And I will make of you a great nation.”  And Moses had it made as the adopted son of Pharaoh, growing up in the midst of all the splendor of Egypt, until out of a burning bush, God said, “I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry….I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians….Come, I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring forth my people out of Egypt.”

Jeremiah could have joined the popular preachers of his day in proclaiming a gospel of health and wealth, happiness and success.  He would have been well paid for his eloquence and probably would have been a top-rated TV evangelist.  But the Lord God set a burning fire in his bones and called him to speak a word of judgment so harsh that he was thrown into prison and threatened with death for the crime of treason.  He dared to criticize the government. Jeremiah struggled in the depths of his soul with the wildness of God’s mercy, with some of the most violent language in all of scripture.  In Chapter 20 we read how he felt about the burden of his message.  Jeremiah shakes his fist at heaven and cries out,

“Cursed by the day on which I was born.
Why did I come forth from the womb to see trouble and grief and spend my days in shame? O Lord, you have deceived me and I was deceived; you are stronger than I, and you have prevailed.  I have become a laughingstock all the day; everyone mocks me.  Yet if I say, ‘I will not speak any more in the name of God,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

Jeremiah proclaimed the judgment of a holy God, but also a breathtaking hope for a new covenant, written not on tablets of stone, but on each human heart.

The same story unfolds in the New Testament as well.  The disciples lived comfortable enough lives as simple fishermen, until a voice said, “Come, follow me.”  And they followed, not knowing what they were in for.  It’s a good thing they didn’t know.  One of my favorite hymns is William Alexander Percy’s “They Cast Their Nets in Galilee.” It expresses the wildness of the marvelous peace of God.”

They cast their nets in Galilee,
just off the hills of brown;
Such happy, simple fisherfolk
before the Lord came down.

Contented, peaceful fishermen
before they ever knew
The peace of God that filled their hearts brimful, and broke them too.

Young John who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless in Patmos died.
Peter who hauled the teeming net,
head down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace,
but strife closed in the sod.
Yet, brothers/sisters,
pray for but one thing -
the marvelous peace of God.

The drama of the wildness of God’s mercy goes on and on across the centuries, all the way down to your life and mine today.  What’s the point in talking about all this?  To scare you away from the life of faith?  Not at all.  The point is to make clear the adventure to which we are called in obedience to an untamed and untamable God.  God does not call us to lives of quiet desperation.  The gospel is not a lullaby to rock us to sleep in the arms of “sweet baby Jesus.”  It is a trumpet call to dare and to do more than we ever dreamed in obedience to a crucified and risen Lord.  The church today needs to hear the real gospel.  Not a gospel relevant to our most self-centered wants, but the gospel of costly discipleship.  The gospel of empowerment by the wildness of God’s mercy, free and uncontrollable as the wind.  As searing as fire.

Who knows what might happen if we were to take to heart the gospel of the wildness of God’s mercy. People might think we were drunk……or serious.  This much is clear: the wildness of God’s mercy will not make everything in our lives simple and easy.  It will not save us from suffering and struggle.  The truth is, it will get us into more trouble than we could have gotten into on our own.  But that’s the glory of it to those who want more out of life than just to be safe.  Those who are willing to be challenged and changed, those who hoist their sails to catch the mighty wind of the Spirit will find that God may deny you peace to give you glory.  In the tempest of life we, too, may come to know the wildness of God’s mercy, which, when all is said and done, is our deepest joy and our truest hope forever.

AMEN