Exodus 3: 14,15; Mark 8: 27-30

Changing biographies

Last week we talked how we use our words to paint the canvas of our lives and how the painting we paint of our lives has a place within the greater canvas of life that God is painting.  Today we bring another dimension to that thinking by speaking of biography, or how the history of our lives is intertwined with the history of God.  The Bible writes a kind of biography of God.  We read the book of Genesis and get a picture of God as Creator which then expands into a description of God as a judging (and at times jealous Being).  As we go through the Bible the historical picture of God evolves and gets chiseled and sanded down.  The sculpture of Who God is becomes more nuanced and refined.  When Moses comes face to face in the second book of the Bible, God sends him to the Pharaoh to free the people of Israel. Moses is clueless. He has no idea of this God of Israel Who is neither a god of the royal Egyptians who raised him or the Midanite desert family he has married into.  He doesn’t even know how to refer to God, so he asks God: “What do I even tell them Your name is.”  And God answers: “tell them I AM WHO I AM sent you.”  I AM WHO I AM is not exactly very specific.  The idea of God is still a rough sculpture.  As we read each book of the Bible more about God is becoming clear. The specifics will become clearer later.  God is not interested in giving a resume here.  This God will be known by actions and above all by love.   Throughout the Bible a picture emerges of a loyal, faithful God Who gets disappointed time and time again, but forgives time and time again.  And then comes the New Testament where God truly shows God’s ultimate love on the cross. It is beautiful.  The God become human winds up asking:”Who do You people say that I am?”  But the biography goes on. Christian theologians keep on writing about the God of the Bible and making corrections and additions in understanding. Of course the books about famous people are never definitive biographies, just new insights. The Bible is definitive about God, but can be subject to new interpretations in new contexts. Kim Davis, the clerk in Kentucky who is defying the laws by refusing to sign the marriage certificates of gay people, has her own biography of God.  Unfortunately in her interpretation God is not one to celebrate the love of all people expressing their fidelity to one another.  Not having lived a perfect life and claiming to have experienced God’s grace, her mind is still quite closed as it pertains to the grace others experience.  Both her own biography and that of God seem to be very tightly controlled.  her biography.

Friends, do you ever find yourselves thinking about persons you cared about whom you lost long ago?  You are thinking about their life and the decisions they made, the things they wanted to do but never did, the things they didn’t want to do but had to and suddenly out of nowhere a new insight comes to you, even as you didn’t expect them. You understand them more and appreciate them more.

In a masterpiece mystery ( PBS) program called Worricker, Johnnie Worricker (Bill Nighy) is a British spy addicted to his work and the intrigue that comes with it.  He and his girlfriend (Helena Bonham Carter) have to go into hiding because they know things that the British prime minister wants to keep hidden.  His girlfriend stays with a Anglican priest, a friend of Worricker’s and the priest tells her that Johnny Worricker used to love the church and wanted to be a priest, but that he, the priest, had to point out that Worricker actually didn’t believe any of it.  Worricker wanted his biography and the biography of the Church of England to be part of one another, he wanted to place, as it were, his biography within the biography of the Church, but the problem was Worricker had no biography of God. God was not real to him.

Friends, our biography without God’s biography does not end well.  The two biographies have to come together for us to realize that our biography, with all its connections and separations, triumphs and flaws, is not complete without the biography of God.  You know, there are all kinds of ways of interpreting the Bible.  Some like Davis, interpret it in such a way that people who may not have hurt a soul in their lives get hurt as a result.  Other interpretations push people to great acts of sacrifice and love and selflessness in the slums of the poor cities of the world, in warzones and in disease ridden hospitals. I am sure that more than once the elements of the biography of God as I see it has been wrong or off course.  What is important is that the story of our lives is not complete without the story of God.  Our story without the story of God does not have a happy ending. With it, it is a hopeful tale where all the good we do has a place within God’s greater story. Thanks be to God.