Lest Blood Be Shed

As I was preparing for this weeks worship, I couldn’t help but have a nagging voice in my head bring up last week’s sermon.  Last week I talked about the struggle we all face in determining God’s will for us and how no matter what we have done in life, God is able to embrace us where we stand and comfort us.  In fact, God’s love for us is so deep that God is able to use even what tradition may call the most wretched part our past and transform its purpose into a great blessing.  A solid Christian doctrine, but the nagging voice kept telling me that I had described the process as being too passive and submissive.  As if all we must do is realize we don’t know God’s will and passively accept the Holy Spirit’s correction.

This submissive acceptance of passivity in our relationship with God comes from many ancient and modern theologians trying to sanitize the God we encounter in the Hebrew Bible.  God gets God’s hands dirty in the Hebrew Bible but we have accepted a cleaned-up version of God as described in the Christian Scriptures as being a transcendent parental figure whose only interaction with us is through an emissary.  As much as we would like to pride our generation with coming up with a great Christian heresy, this sanitizing is not something new.  As early as the first century of our common era, sects within Christianity were trying to distance themselves from the God described in the Hebrew Bible.  In some cases, they went so far as to say that the God we encounter in the Hebrew Bible is actually not the same God as described in the Christian Scriptures.  You may have heard other preachers talk about or more likely experienced yourself in your own study the tension between old and new.  In response to this tension some preachers may just leave out the Hebrew Scriptures reading from the lectionary selection on Sunday because the God described is too harsh or the material talked about is too raw.  We ourselves may simply not read that part of the Bible.  It’s understandable that we would want to distance ourselves from a God that seems to be complicit if not intimately involved in genocide, infanticide, misogyny, slavery or a host of other things that offend us but what we are left with then is only one side of the story.  This one-sided approach leads us down a path of passivity in our relationship with God and in how we react to injustice in the world.