I like to plan things. I like to know what to expect if I can, and how to manage. If I’m not in charge of planning, I like knowing someone else is planning. If you know anything about me, this should come as no surprise at all. Now, I freely admit that planning only goes so far. All we need to do is look at this past year of the pandemic. I really appreciate a meme I saw this past year that said the most useless thing I ever bought was a 2020 planning calendar.
I’m probably not alone, even those people who like to fly by the seat of their pants through life, even those people like some structure. And all of us have had a hard year planning. I think at least part of this comes from the territory that we are in a post-modern period. There is a strong part of our culture and our time that is fueled by self-reliance. Again, after this year, we could kind of mentally put some self-reliance aside, it did us little help this past year, and we could realize that it’s a little over-rated, but you get my drift.
Our self-reliance seems to make us think that everything is about choices that we have made. The readings this Sunday, particularly from Numbers and Ephesians, but also the Gospel of John, have themes of good and evil, as factors that characteristically either draw us to God and drive away from God respectively. These things redeem or lift up human life or denigrate human life; some part of this comes back to the choices we make through our lives, but these things that redeem or denigrate human life are also larger than us too.
Now, you may say, “Sarah, I think I followed you, but could I point out that we had a snake on a stick in Numbers (actually specifically a poisonous snake on a stick) and we had principalities in the air in Ephesians.” And you would be right. And, of course, we have problems of metaphor translation in the Bible, but clearly this is not the only challenge we have reading biblical texts or specifically the challenge with this week’s readings. In this case, we have several thousand years to bridge with major differences in understanding. The text from Numbers sounds almost like magical arts, (‘look at a snake on a stick and live’). In the Epistle, we need to explain that the air between earth and heaven was where demons were thought to dwell. So, following these explanations, there is a take-away that words matter, but the passages still lean into the sentiment that evil is larger and wider than the sum total of all our choices. Likewise, the good, when we manage to do good, is also larger than the sum total of our choices for good.
Bear in mind that evil is not defeated by our choices and/ or our will to good alone. Instead, we rely on a higher power, a Divine power, which is God, of course, an attraction to the good, whose help we need, in order to live into the life that the source of that good offers us. Even if we name our “evils” differently now, we are players on a larger screen. The powers of the air in the Epistle, we now name as social, political and global macro forces that threaten to pull us apart. We need to be aware of this to know what we resist, and still there is more than what we can name. I do believe there is actual evil and actual good. And if we don’t consider that there is more to it, then instead we think we ourselves alone are enough, we have self-reliance, we are individualistic, very modern and American.
We are agents, but we rely on a power larger and deeper than us. And thus, we turn to prayer and intercession and trust that God will redeem what is beyond what we can fix. It is still on us to try to do what we can. A wise quote reportedly from the Talmud reads, “Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
As I wrote part of this sermon, I was listening to a lecture on Comparative Theology, Theology of Religion and Interreligious Theology. Now I am no expert in this, but the background verbiage compelled me to address the passages of the Gospel John. Earlier I mentioned that the Gospel also has themes of good and evil, as factors that characteristically either draw us to God and drive away from God respectively. This particular Gospel can be read in such a way that seems divisive and exclusive of others. This seems very antithetical to our understanding that God is love— that God redeems all.
Now it is true that scripture always critiques itself. It is more interesting that in this case the Gospel of John critiques the Gospel of John. And so perhaps if we are in the business of reaching for the higher power, the good beyond us, to help us with the evil beyond us, then we have to read the whole of the Gospel and reach beyond. “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil. For all who do evil hate the light and do not come to the light, so that their deeds may not be exposed. But those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that their deeds have been done in God.”
God is love, God redeems all. Perhaps on occasion even the Gospel writer of John needs confronting with his own language. God is indeed love. So, imagine a world where God loves and works among the oppressed, the outsiders. May I suggest that it is real, there is light. If Christ is the light of the world, then love is indeed poured out in the entire world, redeeming all. We are not “obligated to complete the work, but neither are [we] free to abandon it.” May I suggest we do the work we can, we trust in God to lead us to faith, we trust in God to redeem all, for God is indeed love. The evils and challenges are bigger than us; but so is God bigger than us, and God’s love will, in fact, redeem.