Sermon — October 4, 2020
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.”
(Exodus 20:19)
I’m sure you all know the name Nobel, as in “Nobel Peace Prize”; you may even know that the prize is named after Alfred Nobel. But most people don’t know very much about Alfred Nobel, so forgive me if you do. Alfred Nobel of Peace-Prize fame was an arms manufacturer, an industrialist and innovator who transformed his steel company into a major producer of cannons and industrial and military explosives.
Nobel’s most influential creation, though, was dynamite. Alfred and his brother Emil were experimenting with nitroglycerin as young men, trying to find a way to stabilize it for industrial use. Nitroglycerin is a powerful explosive, the sort of thing that’s really useful in mining or construction; but it’s unstable. Even a small bump can set it off into a huge blast. And so first, Alfred invented a way to detonate it from afar with a blasting cap, allowing the engineers to create a safe distance between themselves and the explosion. Later that same year, Alfred’s brother Emil died in an accident while continuing to experiment. Alfred continued his work trying to make nitroglycerin safer, and within a few years he’d come up with an idea. If he could mix the volatile liquid nitroglycerin with something inert and absorbent, he might be able to stabilize it enough to make it safe to carry around, but still explosive enough to be useful. He tried cement, coal, even sawdust; some combinations were still too volatile, some rendered the explosive useless.
And finally, Alfred Nobel came upon his solution: diatomaceous earth, the crumbled remains of fossilized algae, the perfect substance that, when blended with nitroglycerin, created a stable, malleable, powerful industrial explosive: dynamite.
“You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us, or we will die.” I love this verse; I sometimes tell it as a joke about parish ministry. “You speak to us, Father, and we’ll listen; but don’t let God speak to us.” But within the whole system of ancient Israelite religion, it’s not a joke. It’s deadly serious, and it makes perfect sense. Holiness is a force, charged with incredible power, and when it comes into contact with moral or ritual impurity, it creates a powerful reaction, like matter and antimatter colliding.
God knows this is dangerous. The people know it, too, and they take appropriate precautions. Just a chapter earlier, God warns Moses that the cloud of the presence of the Lord will descend on Mount Sinai. “Set limits for the people all around it,” God says, and tell them, “‘Take care not to go up into the mountain or touch the edge of it. Whoever touches the mountain will die.” (Ex. 19:11-12) And so the people’s fear of hearing the voice of God isn’t a frozen-chosen punchline or a joke about how we want to outsource religion to the priests. It’s a faithful attempt to respond to what God commands.
In any case, the Lord God descends on the holy mountain in fire, wrapping it in smoke, and as the blast of the trumpets crescendos God delivers to the people ten commandments. (Depending how you count.) And the people are afraid. And they stand far off, lest they accidentally touch the live wire of the word of God and get zapped.
They make sure to keep the commandments, but carved into two tablets of stone. They listen for God’s word, but spoken through the words of Moses. They yearn to encounter God, but they do it through stories written down on a scroll, and prophets preaching in the street. They begin millennia-long project of Judaism and Christianity: mediating the raw power of God through holy books and rituals, sacred garments and liturgies, anything that can contain and circumscribe the volatile power of God.
And I’m not saying this is wrong. We’re Episcopalians, not a Pentecostals; in other words, our spiritual life relies on the patterns and the prayers of a long tradition at least as much as the sudden inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Mixing the raw, explosive holiness of God with the diatomaceous earth of religion renders it just a little bit more predictable, a little bit less dangerous, a little easier for us to mold and use in our spiritual construction work.
Sometimes, of course, the mixture’s too inert. There are millions of Christians around the world who could never be detonated into any kind of action, who will never allow themselves to be challenged or transformed. There’s too much sawdust in the blend. Equally, though, moments of great Christian revival have often faced the problem of charismatic preachers gone bad; of people, believing themselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, who explode at the smallest jolt, wreaking havoc on the people and the communities around them. So there’s nothing wrong with trying to stabilize the dangerous power of the Word of God.
In fact, God does it all the time. This is what the parable’s about. God plants a vineyard, and puts his people in it. God doesn’t come and speak to the people directly. Instead, God sends her prophets to carry the Word of God, and the people don’t listen. They drive them away. The mixture is too inert. God tries again and again, and nothing changes, and so finally God sends his Son, Jesus, thinking that will do the trick—surely now they’ll listen. God sends the Word of God itself, the pure explosive power of God; in all its power, but as a human being, united to humanity itself. And in Jesus, the explosive power of God becomes portable and stable and walks among us, ready to detonate that dangerous spiritual charge inside our hearts from a safe and reasonable distance.
The flaw in all of this, of course, is that most of us don’t buy it. We don’t think the same way that the ancient Israelites did three thousand years ago, or the way that Jesus and other Jews did two thousand years ago. We don’t really believe that the holiness of God is a dangerous thing. God doesn’t zap us if we come too close to the altar. The whole dynamite metaphor is nice, but the Word of God isn’t actually like nitroglycerin. It’s not really explosive—at least not in that cloud-of-fire-around-Mount-Sinai kind of way.
But maybe it’s just a question of what kind of danger this really is. If God speaks to us, we won’t actually die. But when we hear and listen to and follow Jesus, there are parts of us that die. There are parts of us that idolize our own power, our own reputation, our own wealth. There are parts of us that cling to our own self-righteousness, that secretly love our manifold addictions; and if we let God speak to us, these things may die. The Word of God is dangerous not because it hurts us in our true selves, but because it can rip away the falsest parts of ourselves—which are often, ironically, the parts we hold most dear.
Our books and our liturgies and our rituals are not God’s last and best attempt at making spiritual dynamite. Prophets and priests, bishops and Bibles, can bring the Word close to us; but they’re not quite strong enough to blast away the miles of rock around our hearts, to roll away the stones that separate us from God. So Jesus comes to us, not simply proclaiming the good news, but as Good News. He drills down and plants his dynamite deep within us and blows open a mine shaft through our souls, revealing the gold that lies hidden beneath the surface.
In practice, this looks very different for different people. Sometimes, it’s the love of a spouse or a friend breaking open our defenses, giving us the safety and permission to be vulnerable, to show the deepest, darkest parts of our lives, and to start to heal. Sometimes, it’s a Biblical verse or a line of a hymn or (heaven forbid) a sermon that comes back to us, again and again, that changes how we look at the world, that turns us toward a new way of being. Sometimes, it’s a sudden event that throws our lives into chaos, but gives us a chance to build something new and maybe better in the ruins. (Sound familiar?)
It’s almost always easier, in these situations, to call the whole thing off. In the short term, it feels safer. It’s frightening, out there, with “the thunder and lightning,” and “the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking.” (Ex 20:18) It’s safer to say no, to try to piece our old selves back together, to say to the professionals: “You speak to us, and we will listen; but don’t let God speak to us.” Because sometimes, we’re not ready for these parts of us to die.
But we do have the choice. We can rebuild. We can take those shattered pieces of our lives and create something new, not just a mended version of the life God’s blown apart, but a better one, a truer one, with a foundation stronger than we ever could have imagined, a life that’s founded not on our own fragile senses of self but on God’s—for
‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone;
this was the Lord’s doing, and it is amazing in our eyes.’
(Matthew 21:42) Amen.