God Is Not at a Safe Distance

Well, good morning again, everyone. You know, we’ve, over the past few months, we’ve come through the great feast of the church year, the long arc of Advent through Trinity Sunday. And now we’re in that long green stretch of ordinary time. The Sundays after Trinity don’t announce themselves the way Easter or Pentecost do. No fire from heaven, no angels at the tomb, just the prayer book, the Bible, and six months of green vestments. Which is, I think, exactly right because this is where most of the Christian life actually happens, ordinary time. Ordinary weeks, walking with God when the ground feels uncertain and the feasts feel far off sometimes.

You know, the appointed lessons today know exactly where we are. The psalmist almost didn’t make it. Not in the sense of some dramatic crisis of faith, but quietly, the way most people lose their footing. He looked at the world around him and things just didn’t add up. He says, the ungodly in such prosperity. They are in no peril of death, but are lusty and strong. They come in no misfortune like other folk. Neither are they plagued like other men. And then comes his honest admission. My feet were almost gone. My treadings had well nigh slipped. He almost concluded that there wasn’t much point in holding fast to God.

You know, that same temptation presents itself to us. It doesn’t actually come as a form of crisis. It comes quietly, over time, in the way of specific things. You watch a man who never gives God a thought come through a hard year in better shape than the man who hasn’t stopped praying. You watch a family that fears God go without. And a family that doesn’t give God a second thought go without nothing. You sit with someone who’s been faithful a long time and is now frail and frightened. And somewhere in the quiet afterward, the question forms, is God actually attending to any of this? Or is he far off somewhere, occupied with larger matters, letting us or even this country unfold however it will?

The prophets in Jeremiah’s day had their theology arranged around exactly that assumption. And honestly, a God at a safe distance is a remarkable, useful development if you’re in the business of saying what you like. They’d moved him far enough off that no one was really watching, far enough that a man could dream his own dreams and call them the word of the Lord, speak in God’s name without consulting God, tell the people what he wanted to say, and put the Lord’s signature on it. It didn’t require a great wickedness, it just required the slow, settled assumption that the one who fills heaven and earth wasn’t in any practical sense close enough to matter.

That’s what they thought. But God answered in one of the greatest rebukes in all of scripture. He says, am I a God at hand, saith the Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret places that I shall not see him, saith the Lord? Do not I fill heaven and earth? No, that’s not a threat from some distant God. It’s the correction of a God who refuses to be lied about. He is near. He hears every word spoken under his name. And his word, when it comes, doesn’t mince him. He says, is not my word like as a fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces? The fire and the hammer, they’re not cruelty. They’re what a near God does to a hard heart. He breaks it open to receive him.

And this is why the true prophet, when he stands to speak, doesn’t reach into his own heart first. He stood in the presence of the near God, and that nearness isn’t comfortable, and it isn’t optional. Jeremiah was beaten, imprisoned, mocked, and lowered into a cistern. He wasn’t always glad of what he’d been given to carry. But the word he carried was a fire, and the fire did its work, even when his voice was shaken.

Now, the rich man, whose name we don’t know, had what you’d have to call an excellent situation. Purple and fine linen, sumptuous fare every single day. He’d clearly figured something out about how life works. The only complication in the arrangement was Lazarus at the gate, full of sores, with the dogs coming to lick them, simply desiring to be fed with what fell from the table. But the rich man managed, with some skill, not to let that spoil things. The parable doesn’t say he was cruel to Lazarus. It just says Lazarus was there. And the rich man, as far as Lazarus was concerned, wasn’t.

But heaven keeps different records than the world does. Speaking to the rich man, Abraham names a great chasm. He says, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed. But that chasm wasn’t dug at the moment of death. It was dug day by day across a lifetime of living, as if God were very far off and had no particular claim on what happened at that gate.

The psalmist nearly made the same choice. What turned him was the sanctuary. Until I went into the sanctuary of God, then understood I the end of these men. He went where God had promised to be near. And in that nearness, the question that had nearly finished him went away, it dissolved. It wasn’t that the outside world changed. The wicked were probably still prospering when he walked out the door. But he’d found his answer. And his answer wasn’t the resolution of a philosophical puzzle. His answer was God himself. He says, whom have I in heaven but thee? And there is none upon earth that I desire in comparison of thee. My flesh and my heart faileth. But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. God himself, not what God gives him, God. You know, sometimes that’s a hard lesson for even me to learn.

St. John tells us where the nearness of God finally settles. He says, herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. The love moved toward us first, always first. We love him, as St. John says, because he first loved us. And the love he puts in us is the love by which we eventually see who’s lying at our own gate. None of us generate that love. It’s freely given to us by God.

You know, it’s a love that calls us on Tuesday when the week’s been hard, or that remembers a name and asks about a grandchild the next time, or that gives to the Sealy Pregnancy Resource Center, or to One Eight Go Global, or to the brother across the aisle who’s been quietly out of work. That love comes from somewhere. It comes from the One who loved first and came near first.

St. Augustine spent years moving God to a convenient distance, just like in the time of Jeremiah. A God too abstract to make real claims, too impersonal to care how a man spent his afternoons. When that arrangement finally fell apart, when he found that God hadn’t moved at all, he says, thou wert with me. And then he says, and I was not with thee. Those are hard words. That’s the whole thing right there. The distance was, or I should say, is never God’s.

And so the Collect knows exactly what it’s asking, and it’s not shy about it either. It says, O God, the strength of all those who put their trust in thee, grant us the help of thy grace, that in keeping thy commandments we may please thee both in will and deed. Will and deed. Why? Because we can’t supply either one on our own. The psalmist recognized his footing wasn’t on his own achievement. Thou hast holden me by my right hand, he says. The love that eventually opened his eyes wasn’t his own doing. The grace we need is the grace of the near God who hasn’t stopped being near.

We know in a moment the Father will feed his adopted children with the body and blood of his Son. We didn’t earn this table. We were brought to it by the same grace the Collect names. And this is where the psalmist’s question gets its fullest answer. Not in circumstances rearranged and not in any rearrangement of the visible world, but here at this altar. The word that breaks open the hard heart is in the bread and in the cup. The love that won’t let us walk past the Lazarus at our gate is given here. And it goes home with us into the week.

Encouragers, if the psalmist had measured his portion by the visible ease of those who gave God no thought, he’d have walked out of the sanctuary the same as he walked in. But he didn’t. He entered carrying a heavy question, and he came out with God as his portion, and from there everything else found its place. So we come to this table with our own heavy questions. Some of them long carried, most of them never spoken aloud. And what we receive here isn’t an argument for why things will get easier. It’s the grace to will and do what pleases him, from the one who is already here, already near, and was with us long before we were with him. The same God who says, Come unto me, all ye who travail and are heavy laden, and I will refresh you.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.