Sunday December 7, 2008

Thanks to everyone who attended class today. We had tremendous attendance and great discussion on what I thought was a difficult topic. Bonhoeffer's second sermon challenges us from the opening scripture -- Moses is told by God to go to the top of the mountain, to look over the valley into the promised land, to see all that he had hoped for during the wanderings in the desert and the bold proclamations he made to Pharoah, and then to lay down and die without entering. What a challenging scripture, and what a challenging picture of our good and gracious God.

Bonhoeffer puts in front of us a different perspective on God and on Advent. Bonhoeffer asks us to do what so many of us today have trouble doing -- to love God absolutely even when we don't understand our lives and God's action or his inaction in them. A dear friend of mine and I have discussed this many times in the context of marriage and relationship. We all talk about loving one another in truth, but few of us really think about what that means. In the context of relationship, it means seeing the good and the bad in someone, acknowledging that good and bad make them who they are, and still choosing to love them. To love someone, anyone, in truth means we don't ignore the tough parts of their personality. It means we encourage when we'd like to pick on them. It means we hold them up when they cannot do it themselves. All of this is very difficult to do with someone we can see. How do we do it in the context of our relationship with an inscrutable and unseen God?

Bonhoeffer would tell us to stop thinking of God as unseen, but rather to see him in the faces of the least of these. Bonhoeffer would tell us that we have to go to the top of the mountain with Moses, see the vision of our unfulfilled hopes, and trust in the wisdom of a loving God. Will you go to the top of the mountain this Advent season, trusting that our good and gracious God will be with us as we live in the midst of unfulfilled hopes and dreams? Will we sit in front of the Christmas tree and think about the present we really want the most, and still love our God when we know that the present we desire with all of our hearts won't be there this year? Sometimes we just have to sit with our God and wait.

Ultimately, we Methodists affirm the power of choice, but I think we sometimes want to make choices that God is not interested in us making. We have the power to choose to love in the midst of difficult and uncertain times. We have the power to choose to trust when our hopes are unfulfilled. In short, we have the power to choose the most important things in this earth.

Blessings to each of you this week. We will see you next week.

Bryan