I’m Right Here

http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/031016.cfm

John 5:31-47

Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father:
the one who will accuse you is Moses,
in whom you have placed your hope.

In whom do we place our hope? Beneath the sting of Jesus’ words sits a practical reality. We choose this person. We select in whom we believe. The signature of belief is whom we build an expectancy of love — love for us, and our love for him or her.

If we form that love relationship with someone other than God, he will, then, allow that person to be our prosecutor. Yes, the one we’ve established as the provider for our belief system gets the ominous task of prosecutor when we pass over to the next life. That person will somehow be handed over the evidence of our belief. If we are faithful to what that person says to do, then, …. Well, I’m not so sure about that part. If we are unfaithful to what we said we believed, I suppose some penalty will apply. I think penalty comes with prosecution.

In truth, Jesus’ message was really about identifying Moses as the epic witness of Jesus as God. If the Jewish people took Moses’ words to heart they would have recognized who Jesus was. Believing what Moses wrote, meant a subsequent fealty to God the Father.

For if you had believed Moses,
you would have believed me,
because he wrote about me.

A vast host of dead people who have been revered over thousands, hundreds, and dozens of years are sitting in heaven wondering why in the dickens they’re in the prosecution business. I’ll bet they didn’t expect this kind of activity from a fawning list of followers. Just look at the subjects of adoration over the last several centuries — Mohammad, Buddha, Siddhartha, Mother Theresa, Abe Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Saint Peter, Martin Luther, Joan of Arc, L Ron Hubbard (It’s a stretch that he’ll be in heaven, but you never know), Plato, Shakespeare, Queen Victoria, Mother Jones, and an endless string of Dalai Lamas, kings, queens, lords, saints, patriarchs, celebrities, and popes.

Granted, Moses is a fairly logical person for the Jews to turn to. He was real. He spoke to God, and God spoke back. He did great things. His writings have been the “Law” for thousands of years. Even in Jesus’ time, Moses had already logged 1.5 thousand years as the go-to guy for the Jews. Plus, he wrote about the Messiah, which is who Jesus was.

I’m going to go out on a limb, though. I don’t believe Moses would be a patient prosecutor. All those heavenly hopeful Jewish defendants with their caseloads in hand surely experience a raucous attorney. Moses may have moved on from scrolls some time ago, but even a digital tablet made in heaven would go through a terrible beating every time Moses is introduced to the unbelievably stupid stuff that people do.

I’m also going to assume that most of us, without much prodding, could list more than one Moses-like champion in our lives. The parade of folks in whom we have placed our trust is probably very long. My list includes my folks, my grandfathers, several popes from my youth, John Kennedy, at least two kind teachers, several professors, Billy Graham, Floyd Patterson, Johnny Unitas, Thomas Jefferson, and, well … it gets more embarrassing the more I recall my fawning history.

In each of these cases, though, my trust and hope followed from a distance. I didn’t personally know any of these folks, beyond my relatives. The premise for my worship dealt primarily with them meeting my expectations, usually based upon a high bar of performance, with a keen desire that they recognize my affection for them with a compensatory affection for me.

In my dreams, I imagined playing basketball with Wilt Chamberlain. He was very kind to me. I can remember having fantasy conversations with Ernest Hemingway, exchanging storyline ideas. We smoked cigars and drank scotch. In a philosophy class in college, I floated away, pretending that Einstein was teaching the course and then turned beet red when the actual professor called on me and I had no idea what I was being asked. I once caught a baseball on the run from left field, probably the only outfield catch I ever made, and shouted out to Willy Mays that I now knew what made him tick. Hubris on grass. In a daydream as a teenager while riding a bus, I sat prepared to offer Rosa Parks my seat, ready to fight off racists, assuring myself that’s how I’d be her friend forever.

Total fantasies. Unbelievable hutzpah. Deep felt desires to rub elbows with champions and share deep thoughts with icons.

In a conversation the other day with Steve Hall we sat talking about God’s playfulness. I had the same conversation with my dear friend John Sorensen just yesterday. That’s when it hit me, that Jesus wasn’t making fun of the folks who had put their hope in Moses. All of our heartfelt desires to be recognized and honored in the presence of giants is not just a yearning. It’s based upon a promise written on our hearts. A promise of being lifted up, elevated to walk among the saints, the stars, the amazing and the awesome. But it’s not a promise that we have to wait for, or a relationship to imagine from a distance.

You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.

Jesus is decidedly supernatural, and much too busy to spend time with us. So we believe. We find more sense in approaching our heroes than our God.

Dreamy fantasies about D.H. Lawrence urging me to finish my novel on friendship with God; or Ghandi agreeing to speak at my book club and explain patience with God; or Richard Feynman coming off the pages of a book to map out on a white board how God keeps time from imploding. These improbably scenes, though, seem more real, more likely than getting the ear of God.

Not so. All those unlikely fantasies can be exchanged for an intimate, loving relationship with the actual factual creator of the universe. Written novels, and philosophical and quantum insights from God, are a breath away.

God isn’t barricaded away, on an inaccessible floor at the top of a highly secured building, in a city I can’t reach. He also isn’t an overworked architect collecting unwanted requests for changes to drawings that he’s given us, which we should just follow without question. Neither is he an invisible celebrity, weirdly deciphered through coded press releases, rumored citings, and 3rd hand social media tweets. God is so personal and engaged with us that all of our imaginings about being loved, being recognized, and being included in the greatest experiences of human history can be fulfilled immediately.

With God there’s no waiting, and no imaginary encounters. God doesn’t make us hang around for answers, though it seems that way. The honest truth is that he often sets aside our requests for the m moment to call our attention to more important things. Things that build our relationship with God. Things like found quarters in a pocket, a woman humming a song to her baby that we remember from our youth, a gas station that coincidentally appears just as we’re running out of gas, a scripture verse that seems unintelligible or inappropriate until we sit back and let God explain it to us.

Do we believe that God explains himself to us in the physical space we inhabit, and in the time frame of our breathing?

We can take on grandiose projects that God urges us to do, repairing a building that is precariously close to demolition. We can catch a fly ball in the stands for a wide-eyed, shocked young boy simply by asking Jesus to allow us the privilege of doing so. We can even walk into a crowd of unruly men and protect innocent people simply by standing there, praying, maybe taking a few blows, and absorbing the rage until it runs its course. We can create, perform miracles, and calm the seas.

Our imaginations, our dreams, can all come true, because the one in whom we place our hope can be a living, loving Jesus who always has his eyes on us, knows our deepest desires, even better than we do, and will never let us go. Ever.

Jesus calls out to us to, “Catch!”, “Watch this!”, “Over here,” “Pick that one,” “You’ve got lots of time,” “Don’t be afraid,” and most importantly, “I’m right here.”