Sermon of January 9, 2005
Presented by Rev. Chuck Ericson
Scripture lesson: Matthew 3:1-17

“Is God Really Still Speaking?”

You may have heard a campaign exists in the United Church of Christ called “God is Still Speaking” and there are banners on some churches, red and black banners. There’s even a billboard on I-95 somewhere around Bridgeport that conveys this message.  It was in the news a few weeks ago when some television commercials with that theme, “God is Still Speaking,” were being rejected by some networks after they thought they had originally agreed to play them. So this theme, “God is Still Speaking” has been prominent in the news and in our denomination and I wanted to take a few moments to work with that.

And to understand it, I think you have to understand where it began. As best as I can understand, reading in the church newspaper a while back, there was concern with our denominational leaders about lack of financial resources – that money was not coming in and membership losses were increasing or membership was decreasing in the denomination. The leaders felt we should try to do something about it, and one of the things would be to try to promote the unique identity of the United Church of Christ and how we stand out as a denomination that is different from others. 

At the same time, the quote that is at the top of the bulletin today, on the left hand side under “For Reflection,” by Gracie Allen came forth where she said, “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” That seems to be something that would mesh with this identity campaign that was developing, because one of the things about our tradition is that we don’t say anybody has the final word on anything, that church authorities can’t say, as in other denominations, “This is the way it is, this is what God said, this is what the King James Bible said, and you better believe it, period”.

I think why most of you – if not all of you – and I are here is because we want to be in a church that allows for some open-mindedness, some free thinking, some continuing to struggle with questions of faith, that everything isn’t all wrapped up with a big period at the end; there are some commas and some things we still need to work on. It’s interesting that of all the great theologians in the world that Gracie Allen is now the major theologian in the United Church of Christ.  I actually read in another church newsletter one of the pastors writing his version of my “From the Pastor” commenting on Gracie Allen and her husband, “George” Allen… I think George Allen was a football coach, but George Burns was her husband. So regarding the concept of “God is Still Speaking”— there is not a period at the end of God speaking at some point; there is a comma, and God is still speaking to us.

At the recent annual meeting of the UCC in October, there was kind of a debate about this when some resolutions came up, that some were saying “Well, it’s all just in the Bible and that’s it, we’ve got to use that as our guide,” and other people were saying, “Well that’s part of our faith but there’s also a way that God still speaks to us today.” So, let’s take a look at that for a few moments and wonder together if God really is still speaking.

The first thing I think we have to deal with is to ask, “Did God ever speak?” Well, if you do take the Bible, this one (holding a Revised Standard Version of the Bible) or others like it, it does seem to say that God speaks. In fact in Creation it says that God says, “Let there be light, and there is light. God says, let there be a firmament in the sky and water above it and water below it, and there is a firmament.” And God says “do this” and all these things happened. Creation is formed by God speaking in Genesis.

Then there are the Ten Commandments where Moses goes up on the mountain and God speaks to Moses and gives the Ten Commandments and he chisels them out on two tablets of stone and brings them down to the people. God speaks through Moses. And then there is the psalm that Julia led us in from Psalm 29, where actually it all works around the voice of the Lord.  “The voice of the Lord is upon the waters, the God of glory thunders, the voice of the Lord is powerful, the voice of the Lord is full of majesty,” and so forth. It’s all about the voice of the Lord, of God speaking. So our Biblical tradition seems to say that God is speaking, throughout at least those early stages of the Bible.

But the question we have to ask is, is that really supposed to be a human voice like the voice you hear coming from me right now, or is there some symbolism in that? Is there metaphor working there such as Jesus used later on? When Jesus walked the Earth he taught in parables.  His parables were not actual historical events; they were fictional stories he made up to teach a point. So Jesus often used symbolism and metaphor to teach – and maybe earlier in the Bible some of what is presented to us as “God speaking” is not necessarily a booming, loud, human-like voice echoing throughout all creation as much as it’s a stirring in the heart of the people who wrote the stories of the Old Testament…a working in the mind of God’s inspiration, forming thoughts and ideas and stories among people. It doesn’t make it any less divine, any less an important foundation of our faith, but it might not actually be God speaking, as I said, in a voice like this one.

So, was God speaking at one time? Sure. Did God stop speaking?  Well, some will say that God stopped speaking at the end of the Bible. There’s this verse in Revelation, Chapter 22, the very last page in the Bible before you get to the helps, Verse 18, “I warn everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book if anyone adds to them God will add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of this book of the prophecy God will take away his share in the Tree of Life and in the Holy City which are described in this book”. In other words, if anybody says God is still speaking after this verse here, you will be heaped with plagues upon you.  At least that’s how some people interpret it. I don’t think necessarily that’s the case. I think it means, don’t mess with the rest of this book, but I don’t think it means God stopped speaking, although some people do.

The interesting thing is that if you follow the flow of how God is presented as speaking in the Bible, it’s very interesting.  Back in Genesis again, when you go into the Garden of Eden, it’s Adam and Eve and they’ve eaten the fruit and they’re running away and God is coming after them and God is speaking to them as if God is a being in the garden chasing after them. A little later God is up on a mountain talking to Moses or later talks to the prophets, and then Moses and the prophets bring the word of God to the people. So it moves from God speaking directly to people to God speaking later through prophets who then pass the word on to all the people. And then when you move into the New Testament, the Christmas stories we just heard, the way God’s voice comes across is in a dream, or in an angel speaking to Mary or Joseph or the shepherds. It gets further and further removed as we go on, and then we have this morning’s lesson, Matthew Chapter 3 where Jesus is baptized and it says, “A voice from heaven says, ‘You are my beloved son. With you I am well pleased.’” It doesn’t say absolutely God; it really depends on where you think Heaven is. If you think Heaven is up in the clouds, then that’s where the voice is coming from. If you think Heaven is somewhere within you, if it’s a state of being, then maybe that’s where the voice is.  But it seems as you read along that the voice becomes less and less that of a being talking to another being as it is from an angel or in a dream or something heavenly above or within.  So, I don’t think God stopped speaking. I think the way we might think we hear God’s voice changed over time and we stopped thinking that God is speaking in a human voice and we started realizing that God speaks to us but in a voice inside or in our minds or through the voices above us. So God didn’t stop speaking. God is still speaking. But how do we hear God speak?

On either Thursday or Friday night I had the TV on and I was flipping channels and I got on CNN and Larry King had all these religious leaders on: a rabbi, an imam, a Buddhist priest, a southern Baptist president of a seminary and Deepak Chopra. And they were talking about how God is in the midst of the disaster in southern Asia . The southern Baptist seminary president was asked, “Do you think that God was behind the tsunami?” and he said, “Well not directly, but back in the Garden of Eden, when there was Original Sin, Original Sin led to all these horrible things that happen in the world, that earthquakes and fires and hurricanes and tsunamis, all of that is because of Original Sin. And then Deepak Chopra chimed in and he said, “That’s primitive thought.” So then they got arguing about that and I listened to it for a while and I started thinking, “I don’t hear God speaking in any of these people. They are all of these big, smart, supposedly theologians, and I don’t hear God speaking in them.”

I hear them speaking at each other and arguing about who’s got the answer. But in the aftermath of that disaster, where I’ve heard God speaking, is in stories of children who have given up something or taken a portion of their allowance and given it to help someone they don’t know somewhere around the world because they know that somebody is in need.  Or about parishioners who have given last week and this week and even one came in with a check in the middle of the week for $10, that’s all they could afford, but they made a special effort to come and give that to help. I hear God speaking in the compassion of people here and around us for sisters and brothers around the world who are in need. I hear God speaking in that.

I actually did something this week I’ve never done before in my life:  I tore up a parishioner’s check. It’s probably good to know that I’ve never done that before, right? I’m confessing my one and only time.  I was here in the afternoon and somebody called and said, “I sent a check in the mail this week for the tsunami relief, and it’s a little over a hundred dollars, and do you know if it came in?”  I said, “I saw something in an envelope with your name on it that came in when I brought the mail in one day. I think it’s in the pouch.” And they said, “Well please go get it and tear it up, because I found out at work that if I give a donation through work it gets matching funds. So instead of $100 they get a little over $200, and I can designate it to go through Church World Service (which is where our money ultimately goes), but I can’t give it directly through our church.”  So they said, “Could you do that, just tear it up?” So I ran that thing right through the shredder. But I heard in that whole exchange in that pattern of events from that person giving from their heart to them finding out that they could give more to them asking to destroy a check so that they could give more.  Just in that, somehow, I heard God speaking, in a way that you can help more if you do it this way.

This week I got some papers from my students at Hartford Seminary after I gave them an assignment to interview someone in their church and ask them about their faith, and I got permission to share a couple with you. One is from a woman who interviewed another woman in her church who grew up in an age of racism and racial discrimination. This woman, who I imagine has known such discrimination, was being interviewed and asked to describe her relationship with God, and she said, “To me God is my father, friend, guide, peace, joy and love. He’s faithful to me beyond anyone on Earth could ever be. He’s my constant comfort even when he’s challenging me. He’s the one I can always turn to to talk and trust.” 

When you think about being faced with racism and discrimination in life and having those deep words of faith, to me is just a belief that God is speaking through those words. She also, when asked the question, “What gives life meaning for you?”, said, “My life is worth living because it is a gift from God. I find meaning in life through God and try to use my life to glorify Him, through my family, friends, church, my job and my volunteer work. I want to be able to stand before God and not feel as though I have done something to bring disgrace to His name. So I try to live my life in love, in joy and peace to His glory.” These are such wonderful words of such positive spirit after experiencing racism in her life. It’s just a way that I hear God speaking today.

And then one more, a student interviewed a pastor at their church who grew up in Vietnam during the Vietnam War, and asked about how he makes moral and ethical decisions. He says, “I turn to the word of God and I pray before making decisions.”  Then the student writes, “Pastor makes moral and ethical decisions to glorify God. He added that he would never disgrace his family’s reputation; that, too, would be against God.” After turning to God, Pastor would decide issues based on justice and righteousness, but when he was in prison in North Vietnam he spoke up about Communism. Not for himself, but for the suffering of others. In prison, though other Christians denied their beliefs, Pastor could not. “I cannot deny God. If I deny, I deny myself.  It’s very shameful.” To hear somebody who lived through the horror of that war, and was imprisoned and lived beyond it, and has this incredible faith in God, and shares it with others, is another way I hear God still speaking.

Those are some of my examples. I know you have yours, too. You know people. You hear words from friends, from inspiring neighbors from children and grandchildren who help you to know that God is still speaking.  God didn’t stop after Chapter 22, Verse 18, in Revelation.  God is speaking in a voice we can’t hear. God is speaking through the events in the world, through the compassion that is offered from neighbor to neighbor close by and far away and through the voices of people of faith who bring us optimism and hope in the best of times and the worst of times.

The good news today is God is still speaking. The only time we don’t hear God speaking is when we’re not listening.  It’s up to us to listen, to behold God speaking in our lives and in our world.

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