The Park Road Pulpit
Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church
Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors
Praying with Jesus: Setting Up Camp and Pitching a Tent
Ezekiel 36.22-23 and John 14.8-12
Amy Jacks Dean, July 20, 2003
One of my favorite things to do is to go camping. I know for some of you a Holiday Inn Express is as “roughin’” as you get, but I absolutely love tent camping. It is one of my fondest childhood memories with my whole family. We’d go tent camping at the beach in the summer (Myrtle Beach and Lake Arrowhead Campground where now they have covered over some of the best camping spots with concrete!) and in the mountains in the fall, following the Presbyterian College fighting Blue Hose to watch them play football. It’s one of my favorite adventures now with a family of my own. I love the whole process - picking out the perfect site (level ground and sweep away any debris), getting camp set up complete with a Coleman camping stove and lantern (is there anything better than the smell of fuel on your food?), pitching the tent (and arguments you can get into when you don’t do it exactly right), exploring the area and gathering wood. How something that is so much work is so relaxing, I’m not sure, but to me it is. I think is has to do with those precious moments at the end of the day around a campfire with marshmallows and a cup of coffee, because it’s always cold enough camping to drink coffee. It has to do with the smell of bacon, early in the morning way before anyone is ready to get up, in a campground. I think it has to do with going to bed early and the complete darkness and the sound of the crickets and the tree frogs. Those of you who camp know what I am talking about. Those of you who don’t should give it a try. Tent camping is one of the greatest things on earth.
Today’s phrase “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is one that I find myself using quite often. I frequently work it into the Assurance of Pardon or the Offertory Sentences and Offertory Prayer or into public prayers. “On earth as it is in heaven.” This is perhaps my favorite phrase in the Lord’s Prayer because it is a vivid reminder to me that it is the here and now that is of utmost concern to God - not something out there in the future. It is life in the moment that is the most important time.
This phrase “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is my favorite and it is the most frustrating. God’s will is troublesome for me - troublesome only because of the way people use it, or in my opinion, misuse it. Two of the most harmful words in all of religious language in my opinion can be “God’s will.” We use that little phrase to make God out to be either the best magical gift giver or the worst sadistic tyrant of all. Perhaps the most offensive way the phrase “God’s will” is used is on the occasions when there are no explanations and nothing to say, and we cannot leave that silence alone. When silence is needed most, some religious people are compelled to say “It was God’s will” as if God’s will includes harm and pain and suffering and grief. Leslie Weatherhead wrote on this subject in 1944 a work that is still being read today. In his book The Will of God, Weatherhead recalls a time when he was with a good friend in India. The friend’s young son had just died in a cholera epidemic. The friend consoled himself with these words in an attempt to make some sense out of something so unacceptable. “Well it is the will of God. That’s all there is to it. It is the will of God.” Weatherhead could not let this rest. This man was too good a friend to not challenge this faulty theology. Weatherhead said, “Call your little boy’s death the result of mass ignorance, call it mass folly, call it mass sin, if you like, call it bad drains or communal carelessness, but don’t call it the will of God.” (pages 11-12) I wish someone had told me that as a child and as a teenager – that time in life when you are trying to make sense out of everything – why do bad things happen to good people? A bad answer – the one that I got – was that it was God’s will.
God’s will is, I believe, very simple. Not easy, but simple. The will of God is for an abundance of life for all people- right here and right now. John’s gospel puts it best when Jesus says, “I have come that you might have life and have it abundantly, to the full.” (John 10:10) Right here, right now, I think he said. God’s will is for life - abundant and full. If you could accept that simple definition of the will of God for at least a moment, I wonder how many of us could say that we are living the will of God. In my time as a college minister, I wonder how many dilemmas I have listened to - what classes to take, which roommate to live with, what summer job to accept, which school to transfer to, which career to choose - “what was God’s will?” they asked, as if there is only one choice to choose to be in the holy center of God’s perfect will. I don’t know where that is, but some people spend their entire life trying to find that one path to that one center known as “God’s will.” I often challenged (and offended) these students when I suggested that perhaps God didn’t care which class they took or what they majored in - as long as in that class and in that vocation they were living abundant and full lives, all the while creating an atmosphere for everyone around them that was abundant and full as well. (Please do not confuse abundant and full for merely happy. Fullness of life includes all of life - joy and sorrow. Abundant life is whole, complete - living life - the good with the bad, the bitter with the sweet.) If you could accept that the will of God for you was fullness of life, could you say that you are living the will of God?
“Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I quote lots of theologians, lots of scholars as I study for sermons. This week, I went back to the second phrase of the Lord’s Prayer on which Russ preached: Who art in heaven. Here is what Russ said about heaven.
Reading from John’s Revelation: [After he had seen the great, final judgment, that ultimate winnowing of the saved from the unsaved, the writer says] Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God… And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them as their God; they will be God’s peoples and God will be with them… for the first things have passed away” (Revelation 21.1-4).
“Heaven, far from the caricatured pictures that fill most of our minds from childhood and popular piety, the eternal home with God is pictured as an earthly home! And that new Jerusalem is pictured as an urban center, inscribed with gates. In John’s world, gates were the outposts of commerce and exchange. And, why would there be any need for gates on that city -- after the great “judgment”? These are the signs of God’s eternal welcome, a never-ending invitation. Heaven is no gazillion-year venture of harp-strumming, wing-flapping praise, but in John’s vision, an experience of growth, development, industry, cooperation, dialogue, exchange -- it’s life in the big city. Forever! . . . To characterize “eternal life” as some dramatic after-life change in venue, from worldly to otherworldly, is to remove this life from that which is ultimately real and divinely important. It is to dismiss this life of its lasting consequence by making of it some kind of dress rehearsal for “the real thing.” But the eternal life of which Jesus taught is the real thing. It is abundant life which begins now. It is your life – with eternal significance, heavenly implication, even today.” (Russ’ sermon from June 29, 2003)
So if we were to accept that the Will of God was, simply put, for us to live an abundant and full life, right here/right now, and if we were to accept that Heaven begins in us today - then the question is begging to be asked: How will God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven? Based on the two texts we read this morning - one from the prophet Ezekiel and one from the gospel of John, who is it that is responsible for bringing God’s will on earth as it is in heaven? How will the seemingly impossible become possible? Through us. By us. In us.
We live in a society where our desires are strong and prayer can be risky business in that type of environment. It is difficult to pray for God’s will and not confuse that with our desires. Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas note that is it absolutely essential, therefore that “we begin by asking God that God’s will might appear to us, might be made manifest to our eyes in all of its terrible and wonderful distance from what we want. To pray `Your will be done’ is to beg not for what we want, but rather to beg to have our lives caught up in some project that is greater than our lives . . . to have our lives caught up in something bigger and better than our lives, namely the adventure of what God is doing in the world.” (Lord Teach Us, page 66-67)
[I rarely, if ever, leave my manuscript to preach “off the cuff.” If the Holy Spirit does any work – it usually happens at the computer in preparing to preach. But on this Sunday, I left my manuscript – quite unexpectantly to me – and began a small tirade about the work of the Vision Team as we are drawing closer to a time of presentation of our almost one year’s worth of work. Here is what I said that was not in the original manuscript. I had to leave out some of the end of what I had written (which is included here, though not spoken that day because of time).]
{Two weeks ago I mentioned the work of the Vision Team. Last week I wanted to mention it, but thought I’d be overdoing it. I cannot study this Lord’s Prayer and not think about the discussion that is going on in the Vision Team. How are we going to say to this congregation – “we are going to have to change as a congregation”? Everything flows out of this moment. The gathered people of God, in this moment, must come together but this is not enough. It’s when we leave this place that matters. It’s why we gather here so that we leave this place different than when we came in. The Vision Team is hashing out that we heard you say, very clearly, that we want to be a place that is a mission agency in this community. We want to be a place that thinks beyond ourselves. We want to be a place that makes a difference in our community. “Let us do it!” you said to us. And then we go to the community and the community says to us, “We have needs located right in your community.” And do you know what our fear is, as the Vision Team? That we won’t do it. That we won’t do what we say we want to do. That we won’t be able to do it long term and that the fear of the financial resources it will take to do that – and the fear of the people resources it’s going to take to be what we say we want to be and what the world says that they need won’t happen. The Vision Team will not present to you out of fear. We will work through our fears and present to you a plan that will call us to say “God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven” and it will happen through Park Road Baptist Church because we are a part of the Body of Christ . . . . after a long pause trying to get back into the manuscript and not being able to, I continued. Can you tell that that is really on my mind, and I really am compelled to keep talking about it? And you are going hear more about it, and I don’t want to hear anyone say that they are tired of hearing about the Vision Team because it is so exciting but it is going to be something that will call us to change – not because we need to change – we’re fine. But the world in the year 2003 is a different world than the year 1950. And many things have come a long way since 1950 both here and in the community, but we must keep looking at that.}
If Ezekiel is right and the nations shall know who God is when God’s holiness is displayed - through us (the very people who have profaned God’s name, according to the text), and if Jesus is right and those who believe in and follow Jesus will do the works he did and, in fact, will do greater works than these - what does that mean for us? It means that even today we carry a heavy load – a big responsibility. Some of us will have to reprioritize our time. Some of us will have to reprioritize our giving. God is counting on us. We sell ourselves too short too many times. God has high hopes, big expectations, and ultimate confidence that we are both capable and worthy to partner with God to bring abundant life to all people.
God always does all that God can do. Frank Tupper, our theology professor, once uttered those words and it took years for them to make sense to me. But now they do – God always does all that God can do – much of it I cannot see and I am unaware of. Whether you can incorporate that thought into your own theology or not, let me give a twist to that sentence: Are we doing all that we can do to bring God’s will on earth as it is in heaven? I am confident that God is doing all that God can do. But if this one phrase today from the Lord’s Prayer teaches us anything it teaches us that faith is a calling – a call to partner with God in this world, on this earth, at this time that we might be a part of bringing heaven to earth. “See, the home of God is among [us]. God will dwell with [us].” – both now and forevermore.
(The bullet point section was omitted from the spoken sermon because of time) What would heaven on earth look like, I wonder.
· The lame walking and the blind seeing
· The meekest among us inheriting the earth
· The least being the greatest and the last being the first
· A safe place for those who are afraid – afraid of hunger and cold – afraid of being alone
· Enemies that prayed for one another – lions and lambs that lie together
· Peace, Peace, and then more Peace – (I’m afraid we don’t know much about that)
· Loving our neighbor as we love ourselves (which means that we have to love ourselves first)
· Basic needs of food, shelter and clothing for all people
Remember – through us God’s holiness will be displayed AND greater works will we do than those of Jesus himself. I am not making this up. “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is more of a prayer for vision, for courage, for action – on our part – for could we not all agree that God is already doing God’s part? Will Campbell, noted writer, preacher, farmer, good ‘ole Baptist boy once said, “God’s not in Heaven and all’s right on earth. God is on earth, and all Hell’s broke loose.”
An image came to me one day as I listened to one of the college student leaders at Samford agonizing over trying to discern God’s will for the campus. He had prayed for God’s will to be revealed to him as a leader in Student Ministries. He had poured over his Bible – he had even fasted – believing that something was missing at Samford University among the student body – they were not spiritual enough, they were not longing for God enough. He believed that God had not yet come among them and he just about distraught. And so I said to him, with all the patience and gentleness I could muster, “Lucas, God has already set up camp and is just waiting on us to pitch a tent.” And as I said to you earlier, tent camping is one of the greatest things on earth. May it be so.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven, we pray O God. Help us to mean it.
Give us a vision – the vision that is yours – that our ways might be your ways, that our thoughts might be your thoughts, that our words might be your words and that our silence might allow you to speak.
May we display your holiness. May we be a part of even greater things. May we see in ourselves something of what you see in us. We hold great potential. We embody your divine spark. May we live up to our calling and bring your abundance of life to all of your people – that your people might just become our people, today. Amen.