God's Eyes

5 Lent B 2009
(Jeremiah 31: 31-34; Ps 51: 1-13; Hebrews 5: 5-10; John 12: 20-33)


Do we see with the eyes of God?

It is told that, early in the church’s history, a fierce persecution broke out and some officials saw an opportunity to get rich. Rumor had it that the Christians had accumulated a lot of money as donations. Back then deacons, in addition to everything else they now do, took care of the church’s finances. So soldiers went out and captured a well-known deacon named Lawrence. Dragging him before the officials, he was asked, “Do you know where we can find the treasures of the Church?” “Of course!” replied Lawrence. Lawrence led them down many side streets and finally down into a catacomb. The officials blinked as they and Lawrence emerged into an underground room lit by candles. The room was filled with the poor, with the sick, with the abandoned elderly. “What is all this?” the officials roared. Lawrence smiled. Sweeping his arm across the room, he said, “Here are the treasures of the Church.”

Lawrence had a mad sense of humor. He also had a touch of divine vision. He saw with the eyes of God.

We do not see ourselves as God sees us. Our best gift from God this Lent is our humanity, in all our strange and vulnerable glory.

I have had many conversations lately about how vulnerable people feel, how our sense of self-sufficiency has been taken from us. But people have spoken to me about the gift that lies hidden there. People within and without the church are speaking of community, of how we are meant to be bonded, that the gift of this time may be to start over with ancient wisdom and new ways to forge bonds, to rely upon one another and care for one another. As hard and anxious as these times are, we are invited not to flee into ourselves, but look to the gift that we may find in our shared connection.

For us, strength to do this lies in how God connected with us.

The New Testament today speaks of the strange wisdom of God and how God forged this everlasting connection. Jesus cried and mourned in his humanity during his life, says Hebrews. The strange wisdom of God did not remove us from the fragility of our humanity. Instead God entered it fully and shared our journey, becoming as vulnerable and as limited as any of us. I believe that many Christians are either afraid or offended by the core truth of the Gospel, which is the humanity of God. But that astounding, offensive news is our hope. And this is not an old ho-hum dogma. God made flesh is always a new and electrifying hope, because no matter how we change, no matter where we are, in our ever-changing human reality God takes flesh in Jesus. And it is there—in the human vulnerability we share, like the vulnerability we share now—that our deliverance, our liberation is found.

Jesus in John’s Gospel speaks of glory. But that glory will be the cross, fame will be lifted up on rough wood, losing will be gaining. One life, vulnerable and left alone, is the one gift given to us all for all time, stronger than fear or death.

Jeremiah says that God can make a new covenant, and makes a new covenant with each of us today. We can leave today’s worship knowing that God will write a new deal on our hearts, we can take Communion feeling the new life of Jesus human and Jesus divine within us, we can welcome that new deal and that new life within us no matter who we are, where we are, alone or together. Dare to take, dare to accept, dare to believe that God’s eyes see clearly and God’s heart is wise and God is making new life among us and within us, in our glorious, broken, beloved humanity, today and wherever our journey will take us.