A Generous God

A Generous God
Matthew 13:1-9

We could use some new God talk. The Christian God of conservatives sounds like Greek and Roman pagan gods. They preach God as capricious, angry and full of wrath, bad-tempered, a God needing to be calmed down by sensible human beings.

And they have centuries of ammunition for such a view of God. These vengeful Christians created a hell to send people. I call it the ultimate evangelical revenge. They created Satan as a real entity rather than a mythological one. They believe God destroys civilizations, kills people by the millions. Such words about God need to be tempered by people like me. I believe a good God created a good universe – a universe prepared for our coming.

Literalism is the scourge of Christian theology. Literalism is the equivalent to death because it closes down the discussion, pours biblical content in concrete and forms them into tablets never to be questioned, explored, or found capable of new meaning. Literalism is boring. I am a preacher of tropes, a true poet of God. I go troping every day when I read the Bible.

Swimming in a sea of similes can be like a rhetorical state fair. Saying that something is “like” something else” allows us to make comparisons and determine better visual meanings. I think similes, metaphors, and analogies are necessary for any God talk.

Rhetorical scholar James Arnt Aune explains that similes and metaphors are strategies of invention used to construct meanings different from those already in circulation. “Meaning, any meaning,” says Aune, “occurs as part of struggle with previous meaning.” At the time of Jesus there were already multiple meanings circulating around the idea of God.

Jesus offers us similes as a defense against literal meaning and the powerful presence of a precursor’s meaning. Using similes and metaphors can be called “troping.” It sort of rhymes with “tripping.” But to trope is to fight a war against God’s bad reputation.  God talk depends then on what we now called memes: new visuals, new words, new meanings, new actions for old words, phrases, and metaphors. I’m not only talking about God, I’m troping.

John Killinger said Jesus was God’s answer to a bad reputation. Conservative Christians are convinced God is angry and filled with wrath. They take Old Testament texts of God killing people literally. Ken Ham, Creation Museum CEO, claims 20 billion people died in the Great Flood.

Jesus offers us what historian Doug Frank calls, A Gentler God. I’m on board. Sign me up because I think the God of conservative evangelicals is cruel. The evangelical treatment of gays, women, minorities and the LGBTQ+ community is cruel. They call it love but they are lying to themselves. They serve a cruel God and they like God to be cruel. I dissent from this view.

At least 8 times Jesus says, “The kingdom of God is like.” God is like, in other words. Jesus does theology with similes. God is being explicitly compared to something in the material, fleshly world. But not in literal terms. God is too difficult to grasp so similes are necessary to help us move toward the meanings of God. To speak metaphorically of God is to see God in terms of something else. The metaphors bring out the thisness of a that, the thisness of God. Parables, as extended metaphors, tell us what God is like.

Now, everyone offers opinions about God. The guy sitting on a stool at Katie O’Byrne’s Irish Pub in Schenectady has opinions about God. Your doctor has opinions about God. Atheists have opinions about God. Atheists write books describing the God in whom they don’t believe. Conservative Christians fill the television and the media outlets with their version of what God is like.

I bet you have heard people say, “You can say anything you want about me, but don’t you talk about my mother!” Listen, God is our father and our mother, and when someone besmirches God’s reputation, we have to say a word or two or three. I should let you know, I’m in the “Don’t talk about my mama” mood.

I spent a lot of anguished years working out the God who loved me before I loved God and the dark pictures painted of God in some portions of the Bible. This struggle is necessary if you intend to leave the bleak land of fundamentalism and literalism. But there are plenty of road signs.

God’s song has music that will raise the hair on your neck, music that will make your heart sing, music that will make you leap for joy, music like you have never heard before. And every note of the God song tells us what God is like. I am not a preacher jettisoning the judgment of God from my theology. I believe that the judgment in the Bible represents the consequences of our bad choices. God doesn’t actively attack us with terror. God loves us, but God does not force us into obedience.

I don’t believe God kills people. She doesn’t go around the universe dishing out cancer, blowing up cities, passing out heart attacks or committing mass murders. God doesn’t sanction genocide. Such thinking is bad religion.

Rowan Williams, in Tokens of Trust, argues, “Bad religion is about not trusting God, trying to avoid God or even outwitting him; about approaching God as ‘the management’, or the head teacher, perhaps, a presence that is at best critical or hostile, always to be outmaneuvered where possible.”

WHAT IS GOD LIKE? God is generous

Jesus disseminates his message of life to everyone. God is like a farmer planting seed and throwing them wildly everywhere. Imagine a farmer throwing corn seeds down the middle of I-90, in the ditches along Highway 50, here, there, everywhere. The parable of the sower is a parable about parables – how they work, what they do.  The Greek word for parable means “to cast beyond,” and suggests casting seeds onto soils or words onto minds. God, the sower of good, is a promiscuous sower, throwing seed everywhere.

God is generous beyond our measuring. God has created a generous universe filled with goodness. It is a primary belief of progressive Christians. I like the way physicist Howard van Till describes the universe: “The creation was gifted from the outset with functional integrity — a wholeness of being, an affirmation that the creation was fully equipped by God with all of the resources, potentialities, and formational capabilities that would be needed for the creaturely system to actualize every type of physical structure and every form of living organism that has appeared in the course of time.”

God is extravagant!

The extravagance shows up early and stays forever. “God so loved the world!” The world includes every creature – animate and inanimate and every human being – straight, gay, lesbian, transgender, bi-sexual, queer. God’s love extends to all persons regardless of color, especially the poor and the immigrant.

God is promiscuous with the good news. God celebrates waste and extravagance in grace and mercy. And the most wasteful act of all is the son of God dying for every living creature, most of whom will not accept, appreciate, or even know of the gift. The Bible fills with acts of extravagance, many of those acts of God, but also acts of people. A widow cast her whole living in the offering plate. Extravagant. Barnabas sold a farm and gave all the proceeds to the church. Hosea went to a pagan temple and paid big bucks to buy his wife back from service as a temple prostitute and loved her. A woman anointed Jesus with an expensive perfume that was worth a year’s wages. Christianity has always been populated by those who give everything they have. Extravagant people following an extravagant God. On God’s part, the love, the mercy, the forgiveness is a mighty river flowing without interruption into the world and gushing into a dry land out of the sheer love and joy of the Trinity. On the other hand, God’s judgment is always with a broken heart and reluctance. My grandmother often said, “I don’t mind a preacher preaching on hell, but when he enjoys it, I’m not happy.” God suffers in watching people experience the consequences of bad decisions.

John Durham Peters has an excellent take on the parable of the sower in Speaking into the Air. Peters compares Jesus and Socrates, Plato’s Phaedrus and the Synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. According to Peters, Plato promotes dialogue, intimate, one-on-one dialogue while Jesus promotes dissemination without any sense of control.

This is important: JESUS DOESN’T TRY TO HAVE CONTROL. And this means that the people who follow him should not be control freaks. But look at the religious minority in America today attempting to control every facet of our lives. They are interested in control; Jesus is interested in invitations to participate in the goodness of life.

Don’t ever be confused about where I stand. I play the music of the good, gentle, and generous God. If you want to know more about this view of God, read Doug Frank’s, A Gentler God, for a powerful response to the portrayal of God as mean and ugly. God doesn’t go around the universe stirring up killer hurricanes. God doesn’t send people to hell or kill people.

God, having created the universe, has no agenda for the destruction of creation. God is generous beyond our imagining.

God’s Generosity Shows Up in Gifts

God disseminates gifts in embarrassing abundance. The Scripture says, “He gives gifts to his people.” God has given the gifts of creation, life, intelligence, emotion, vocation, and the opportunity for wholeness to everyone. In addition, God gives other gifts to those who become part of the church: “The gifts he gave were that some would be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until all of us come to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ. We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body’s growth in building itself up in love.”

Look, God has reconciled the universe through Jesus. When I am 100 years old and mumbling my sermons (because I will still be preaching) in my rocking chair at the nursing home, I hope I am repeating over and over, “God has reconciled the world in Jesus!”

I will be preaching, “God is good. God is merciful, kind, loving, gracious and giving for as long as I can to as many people as I can.