GOD IS STILL SPEAKING
December 5, 2004
Texts – Isaiah 11: 1-10
Romans 15: 4-13
Rev. Robert Lee
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma . . . God is still speaking.” That’s the catchphrase which the national expression of our United Church of Christ has adopted as a shorthand description of our church’s identity. Last Wednesday, a national media campaign featuring that motto was launched. As you may know, it immediately ran into trouble when both CBS and NBC declined to accept the first 30-second commercial.
The ad – which we’ll be showing in the Chapel during coffee hour this morning – features two bouncers standing outside an unnamed church, denying entry to various people. Written text on the screen says, “Jesus didn’t turn people away. Neither do we.” A narrator says, “No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.”
You are welcome here . . . That is the touchstone of our ministry, isn’t it? “Come to this table not because you must, but because you may” we say in our invitation to the Lord’s Supper each month. “Come not to express an opinion but to seek a presence and to pray for a Spirit. Come, sisters and brothers, simply as you are.”
Hard to imagine that as controversial. Alas, in an increasingly fractured and polarized society, that is exactly the way some interpret it.
“God is still speaking.” It’s a phrase with deep roots not just in our faith community’s heritage but in our country’s history. It harkens back to those first European immigrants who arrived on the shores of New England as religious refugees in 1620. “Never forget,” their pastor told them when they set sail for the so-called “New World” . . . “Never forget that God hath yet more light and truth to show forth from His Holy Word.” God’s self-revelation is not finished, he argued in other words; there is more – much more – for us to learn and to do.
So the phrase – “God is still speaking” – is deeply grounded in our faith tradition. Its more contemporary expression – “Never place a period where God has placed a comma” – is not. It comes from a letter that Gracie Allen, the gifted actress and comedian, wrote to her husband, George Burns, just prior to her death in 1964. She was hardly what one would call a theologian, but she did have a remarkable way with words.
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” We do that a lot, don’t we? I do. Something negative happens – you lose your job, or your spouse of many years walks out on you, or the results of that routine physical turn out to be disastrously dark and foreboding – and right away too many of us are ready to throw our hands up in the air and say, “That’s it! Game over!”
I heard a story this week about a man named Bob Buford. His adult son, a successful investment banker, disappeared from his home near the Rio Grande River. After days of frantic searching, the young man’s body was finally recovered from the river. He had drowned. Buford was crestfallen. “I went for a walk along a limestone bluff 200 feet above the river,” he later said.
“I was as frightened as I’ve ever felt. ‘Here’s something you can’t dream your way out of,’ I told myself. ‘Here’s something you can’t think your way out of. Here’s something you can’t buy your way out of. Here’s something you can’t work your way out of.’ This,”
Buford thought to himself while walking that river bluff, 0000
“This is something you can only trust your way out of.”
And he did. He made it through that dark, dark place, Buford says . . . that place where everything and everybody seemed to say God has placed a period here – a period to your dreams . . . a period to your hopes . . . a period to your life – he made it through by trusting.
Dark dangers come for all of us. The sooner we learn to trust our way through them, the better. Which is to say – “Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” Why? Because God is still speaking. God is still acting. God is still reaching out in love to each and every one of us.
Oh, but it’s tempting (isn’t it?) to jump to our own conclusions. Tempting to place a period to the conversation and move on. Tempting because then we can still be in control. It sounds perverse (doesn’t it?), and it is, but it is also very much in line with our human nature. After all, is there anything more difficult than simply waiting and not knowing? The most difficult day is always the day before the surgery, not the day after. Oh there’s plenty of pain and discomfort in those first days after the procedure is complete, but the night before is filled with the demons of not-knowing and what-if. They are ferocious adversaries.
There are some things you can’t dream your way out of, aren’t there? Things you can’t think your way out of, or buy your way out of, or work your way out of. The only thing you can do is trust your way through them. And that is what we are about here – trust. It’s just another word for faith.
“No matter who you are, or where you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” Why? Because “God hath yet more light and truth to show forth from His Holy Word.” God’s self-revelation is not finished. God is still speaking. Thanks be to God. Amen.