THE NON-TRADITIONAL GOD
April 1, 2001

TEXT: Isaiah 43:16-21 John 12:1-8

One time a man and his family were sailing on the Chesapeake Bay. He had little experience and he had never been in waters where you had to navigate. Unfortunately he ran aground. The Coast Guard came to his aid and towed him back into safe waters. When they asked to see his chart, he handed them a Rand McNally Road Map. He had been navigating with a road map and not a nautical chart. For those of you who know nothing about sailing, a nautical chart shows the depth of the water, shoals, obstacles and channels. The road map, of course, just shows where there is water.

Too many people today are navigating through life with the wrong map. They are using maps that may be accurate, but are not helpful for the situations and crises that we face in the twenty-first century. Too many people also live in the past, doing things the same way they have always done them before, taking no risks and having no adventure.

When the journey gets difficult people get stuck, like the fellow who went aground. All seems hopeless. They are not prepared to face rough waters or weather the storms that arise. They can't cope with a crisis and they are unable to adapt to changing conditions.

The Israelites were stuck. They longed for newness and refreshment. But rather than forge ahead into the wilderness they remained where they were, thirsty, empty and unfulfilled. The Israelites were traveling with an old map. In the past God had led them through the Red Sea, provided manna from heaven and delivered them from their oppressors.

They looked back to a religion that had worked in the past, an interpretation of God that made sense to their ancestors. But the "old time religion" would not work in the future. Clinging to the past would not help them with their present problem.

God hadn't changed; God's word hadn't changed. What had changed was how that word would be interpreted for their present situation. How we interpret and understand God is different for each generation. God has prepared a "new thing" for them and this newness awaited them in the wilderness.

A few weeks ago the USS Iowa navigated its way through the Panama Canal. The ship is more than 100 feet wide. She slowly steamed through the narrow passage with less than one foot of clearance on either side. The Panama canal has been used for decades but many of today's larger ships are unable to use it.

Times change, and if we don't adapt, we become like those sixteenth-century French subjects, the original “April fools,” who wouldn't recognize the new calendar of Pope Gregory who moved New Year’s Day from April 1 to January 1. Or like those who forget to change their clocks to Daylight Savings Time, and run on a different schedule from the rest of us.

God says, "Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?" We need to get the old ways out of our consciousness-the ways that have failed, that have led us astray, that have prevented us from achieving the goals we have set in life. You cannot become a new person until you cast off the old self.

Do you remember the symbol for the medical profession, two snakes entwined around a staff? It is called the caduceus. I always wondered why doctors adopted the caduceus which in Greek mythology was carried by the god Hermes, the god of thieves and charlatans. But snakes were also sacred to the god Aesculapius, the god of healing, who carried a knotted wooden staff around which a mystical snake was coiled. The staff of Aesculapius with a coiled serpent became the traditional symbol of medicine. In the Old Testament, Moses held up a serpent on a staff to heal those who had been bitten by serpents in the wilderness.

What do snakes have to do with healing? When a snake sheds its skin, it became a symbol of new life, of putting off the old self, the dead shell, the worn out form. The snake became the symbol of regeneration, of newness, of healing, of putting off the old self and becoming a new being, of resurrection.

God is constantly breaking the molds of old-fashioned structures and creating new ways of doing things, of looking at life, of re-inventing ourselves to adapt to an ever-changing world. Some of you computer-users may be old enough to remember 53 floppies; they are not putting those drives on computers any longer because the technology is changing so rapidly that they have become obsolete. And if you don't know what a floppy is, then you have an even better idea of what I'm talking about. The rapidity of technological change is mind-numbing. We yearn for a part of our lives that can be static, that can be a zone of tradition where we can do things the way we have always done them.

For many people, religion is that safe corner of life to which we can retreat. The church can be a shrine to our past where nothing ever changes, where there is an aura of familiarity, where the scriptures are timeless, where we do not sing new songs, and where our worship has a comfortable feel about it. We want the church to become our haven against raging seas of change in the world.

And now we have to deal with scriptures that talk about God doing new things. We try to rationalize this passage by saying, "Well, it was new three thousand years ago, but God hasn't done anything new since."

But in our Gospel lesson we have Jesus, the incarnation of this radical, non-traditional God, who talks about new wine in new wineskins and is always making cutting remarks about the Pharisees and the religious conservatives of his day. This Jesus who often prefaces his remarks by saying, "You have heard that it was said in the law and the prophets, but I say to you and then introduces a new teaching. What are we to make of this Jesus, this radical liberal, who breaks the laws of Moses and justifies it by saying that he is interpreting the laws in a new way? How do we make sense of this Jesus who defies the conventions of his day and introduces a new behavior based on love rather than legalism?

What irony! The name of Jesus is so embraced by the far right and invoked in support of all the traditional causes. But if the Jesus of the Bible would show up in today's churches with the same kind of message he preached in ancient Jerusalem, he would be crucified all over again. Many in the Christian church have re-invented Jesus and made him into an image that fits what they want to worship. Can the worship of Jesus be idolatry? Yes, it can, if the Jesus you worship is one of your own construction, and not the Jesus who reflects the image of God.

Let's be specific. In the today's gospel lesson Jesus is at the home of the two sisters in Bethany. Martha (think Martha Stewart) is out in the kitchen getting dinner ready. She has been fussing around getting the table set, arranging the flowers, putting the name cards in the right places, and, according to Luke's account of the incident, getting very annoyed with her sister.

Mary, on the other hand, embodies a new behavior for her time. She takes a jar of very costly ointment and pours it on Jesus' feet and wipes his feet with her hair. Talk about a conversation stopper! I'm sure if this happened in your dining room with one of your friends after supper, it would be a long time before you invited her back to your house again! The story makes us squirm. It is so intimate and carnal. Remember that in those days women were not allowed to touch men in public. As she anoints Jesus, she is breaking out of a code of conduct and liberating herself and others for new life and a new way of seeing things. And Jesus endorses her conduct and praises her for this very sensual act of love and kindness. Martha Stewart would be apoplectic.

Breaking with convention; going against tradition; defying established practiceCall in the name of love. As Mary wipes the feet of Jesus, so Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus, Gandhi walked hundreds of miles by foot to the sea to ensure independence for the Indian people, and Nelson Mandela endured 27 years of prison without violent protest so he could emerge to lead a free South Africa. The way of love is non-traditional, and it turns the world upside down.

In the gospel story, Judas represents the traditional, conservative approach. Don't waste the ointment, sell it, and put the money in the treasury. Judas said he wanted it to give to the poor, but the rest of the disciples had him pegged for the thief he was. Judas knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing. The contrast was so obvious with the extravagant, wasteful attitude of Mary who didn=t count the cost, but poured out her love for Jesus.

There were gunshots in a schoolyard again, and I remembered several years ago as two young boys shot and killed four of their classmates and a teacher and wounded 11 others. Seeing one of the shooters drawing a bead on a 12-year-old girl, her teacher, Shannon Wright, acted instinctively and jumped in front of the girl and took the bullets. She suffered mortal wounds to the chest and abdomen but succeeded in shielding her student. The young girl whom she saved said, "I think Mrs. Wright saw that bullet coming. She grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me out of the way. She never thought of herself, just the children."

I think of Gloria Hufford who also didn't have time to count the cost, but reacted instinctively to save her two-year-old granddaughter by tossing her to safety before she herself was killed by a car in Reiffton.

When you can act instinctively out of love without analyzing the situation, or counting the cost, or weighing the benefits of your action, then you have taken on the mind of Christ. The non-traditional God is beyond the limits of reason or necessity, beyond our comprehension . . . it's not the exact price of things we ought to be concerned about in this life, but rather, comprehending and accepting the true cost and value of being alive, being loved and loving. A God who is forever calling us to change ourselves, who is ever seeking to do a new thing, who calls us to love in extraordinary ways, is non-traditional God. It is this God of love whose image we need to hold before us and become.

Amen.