The Goodness of God

We like to turn out noses up at the Pharisees. Who could possibility think that if you won't eat the right things, you doing belong? We say this to ourselves smugly as we move through a world full of brand advertising and images of the respectable good life. To all of us, Jesus issues a reminder that it's the things that we do, how we treat others and ourselves that matter. It's not what we consume but what comes from our hearts.

Picture this. You see someone do something good. You feel good. You feel inspired. You do something good. Turns out, doing good can literally go viral - like a meme. It can be memetic. It's also at the core of the Feeding of Five Thousand. Jesus does miraculously multiply food, but the original food came from somewhere. It came from someone offering it up, and then, Jesus takes it and does something even bigger. It should challenge us to start but offering up what we can and see where God takes it.

Each parable about the Kingdom of God adds a different piece of the picture. The Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed or yeast. It may not look like much but is incredibly powerful. It's something of incomprehensible and irrational value. It's something that not everyone will embrace. When we look at each of those pieces, we should get a portrait of what God is doing. It may not look like much. I may not always be the most popular thing, but it is God always at work in our world.

Back in the dark ages of 2024, we did a sermon series called The Throne of God telling the story of King Saul, King David, and King Solomon like it was Game of Thrones and put out into the universe that someone should make that show. MGM Studios (Amazon) and Wonder Project (the guy who directed I Can Only Imagine, Jesus Revolution, and Young Washington) did essentially that or almost, kind of did that. It's a show that puts on screen the way the throne gets contested, the political machinery, and the faithlessness of Saul, but its Achilles Heal is its PG-13 rating.

Not everyone who is in the Bible or gets ancestor status is a role model. Sometimes, we need to learn that God has been working with kind of lousy people all along and so won't be derailed by the kind of lousy people of today. Jacob is one of those people. He's kind of lousy. The Bible is pretty upfront about that. He steals, lies, and plays tricks. Jacob stands in for broken/chaotic side of human nature, and God finds away around.

It's hard to be vulnerable in public. So much of our world runs on pretending to be cooler, more put together, more dramatic, or more interesting that you really are. Trillions of dollars of our economy runs on presenting a highly curated window into our lives. In introducing himself to the Romans, a church that did not know him, Paul chooses the opposite tactic. He presents an honest and unvarnished image of his sinfulness and his need for grace.

At some point while reading Genesis 22, you have to make a fundamental choice. Do you think that Abraham would have made a good serial killer? To phrase it another way, you either think that Abraham believed God was not going to make him kill his son, or you think that Abraham is a degree of stone cold killer that is dangerous to society. If you choose the former, you see a man who understands the character of God, and how, even when the way isn't clear, believes that God will lead him out of the chaos of life.

There's always this temptation to look at God's grace as the ultimate Get Out Of Jail Free card. You know that God loves you. You know, thanks to God's grace, anything can be forgiven. So, we can just do whatever, knowing that it'll be forgiven, right? Right? To quote Paul directly, "By no means." God's grace is amazing gift and a powerful opportunity to change. To misuse the gift is to deeply mistreat someone who love you a lot and sacrificed greatly for you.