March 5, 2011
-
Close encounters of the God kind
After I chose my sermon title for today, I wondered how many of you would have any memory of the 1977 movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It is a Steven Spielberg movie starring Richard Dreyfuss as Roy Neary encounters an alien and is drawn to an isolated spot where he finds an alien spaceship. His encounter radically changes his life. He becomes obsessed with his experience and the people around him struggle to make sense of what has happened to him. I read the scripture stories for today and I thought they described a similar experience for the people of God who encountered God up close and personal, Moses on the mountain of Sinai and Jesus on an unidentified high mountain.
Moses has an encounter with God, the burning bush, and his life is radically changed. He is drawn to follow the force of this encounter. He leads a nation into an isolated area and there he goes to the mountain top for a close and extended encounter with God. We are told that this encounter changed Moses’ appearance. The people struggled to understand what had happened to Moses and to make sense of it. Mostly the people are frightened by what has happened to Moses. The people would much prefer that Moses keep the details of his experience with God to himself, much the way people want Roy Neary to the details of his experience with the aliens to himself.
Jesus announces that some of those around him would not die before seeing him coming in his dominion and, a week later, he takes three disciples with him to a mountain top. The disciples are frightened to see Jesus speaking with Moses and Elijah and he glows like a bright light. Peter figures this is a good time and place to build places to house Jesus, Moses, and Elijah. A voice speaks from the clouds confirming that Jesus is God’s child and God is well pleased with him. The disciples fall on their faces in fear.
How do we respond to someone who has had a close encounter with God? Are we frightened when someone’s encounter with God changes them? Wound we prefer it if they kept it to themselves? Or do we busily start working on something to contain them? I think most people are frightened by radical changes and they are even more frightened when those changes are attributed to some supernatural source. Most people like things a little more predictable. How many of us come to worship expecting a radical encounter with God? How many of us would even desire such a thing? This is what Annie Dillard said about what we should expect when we come to worship, “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of the conditions. Does any-one have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake some day and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” Worship, or any encounter with God has the potential to change us radically.
The people who have a glimpse of the potential God encounters have are most likely the ones who are most concerned with controlling the encounter to make sure it doesn’t get out of hand. Someone said that many of us use religion like a vaccination; it exposes us to enough true faith to keep us from getting the real thing. We don’t want God changing us radically, we don’t want to glow, and we don’t want to call attention to ourselves. We just want to have God’s blessing, we want God to know our name without putting any demands on our lives. We don’t want others to think we are fanatical or crazy. The problem is you cannot have a close encounter of the God kind without it changing you dramatically. When we have been in the presence of God, we glow with God’s light. When we have heard God speak to us, we are drawn to follow. Even if God asks us to do things the world will think is crazy. Close encounters of the God kind are not for the faint of heart. Most of those who have had a close encounter with God have been challenged to do more than they ever expected, most have not been understood by the people around them, and many have died without knowing why God asked them to do what they did. My faith convinces me all who have had a close encounter of the God kind have died having lived a fuller, richer life than those who chose to play it safe and keep God contained in a shelter so no damage could be done. Amen.
