There have been moments through the years when I’ve found myself ready to sit down in our study at home to type the sermon for a Sunday morning, when I would be interrupted by my son, who would want to sit on my lap and tell me a story. Pressed for time, I was tempted to focus on my writing. But I’m glad I resisted that temptation. I got to sit for moments with either son, instead, and I got to enjoy their cuddles, utterances, curiosity and frankness. Those moments are gifts.

Whenever I’m sitting alone with my cup of tea and looking out my window over the yard, I carry my children with me. The memories I hope to hold on to aren’t of me sitting alone, contemplating God’s love for Mount Airy and for the world. The memory I want God to preserve in my mind is the feeling of my sons’ small cuddles and the sound of their small sneezes.

Because things are better when we’re together. That’s what I think it looks like when God is in control. God brings us together. God brings us together for worship, God brings us together to support one another after a death or an illness, God brings us together to help rebuild after a natural disaster. Because things are better when we’re together, when God is in control.

Look at what things are like when people act like there is no God. They behave with violence, attacking each other out of revenge and disregard. This world is full of violence. Others treat strangers with fear and suspicion, terrified that their deepest prejudices would be confirmed. This world is full of fear. Others, still, pursue destruction and death as they hunger for power by intimidation and coercion. This world is full of destruction.

In the face of all that, God wants to be in control. God wants to bring us together. God’s actions aren’t coercive, or fearful, or violent. God’s work of reconciliation brings together all the disparate facets of the world and all the broken pieces of creation, out of a love for us all, a love that lives in each of us.

People will argue with you about what it’s like for God to be in control. They’ll say that churches should all believe one thing or another, about how you treat your neighbor, how you treat the vulnerable. It’s hard to agree though. It’s hard to get everyone to have the same point of view. People will fight anything other than what they’re used to.

But there’s one thing that can keep me humble if I remember it in the moment. It’s that it’s difficult to describe what things look like when God is in control. God will not be named for Moses. God will not be seen face-to-face. God will not be hemmed in. God is beyond our categories of power and might, holiness and goodness. God is more than all that. And so is God’s reign, what things look like when God is in control.

That’s what is so mystifying (and even troubling) about the kingdom of God; it’s allowed to mean one thing to one person and another thing to another. That is why living in unity as the Church is so vital as we try to welcome God’s power into our lives. We help sharpen each other’s understanding and anticipation of God, where otherwise we might altogether miss it (Proverbs 27:17).

At the moment, people seem to be missing the Kingdom of God a lot. For some reason we think that posturing, causing division, and casting blame are what it means to be faithful Christians. Just inside The United Methodist Church, we have spent the past several years arguing, as we have splintered into different groups, each seeking some vision of holiness we feel only we truly understand. The others just don’t get it, we say. And we end up isolating ourselves from one another, living in our own small worlds.

This Sunday, I’d like to share with you an alternative, one which you clearly already honor since you make time in your week to spend in worship with a community of faith. Instead of striking out on our own, when we have problems listening for God’s voice, we might be able to hear it better if we listened to the stories of those we would prefer to ignore or write off.

Maybe you’ve wanted to ignore someone who was really sick. You felt powerless in front of them. That feeling of weakness made you uncomfortable. Maybe you felt guilty you couldn’t make it better. Maybe you couldn’t enjoy yourself as much, because you felt weighed down by the struggle of a friend. It is natural to want to avoid pain, even the pain of others. It is natural to want to focus on things that are happy and pleasant.

And maybe you discovered an alternative to this way of thinking when you got sick. Maybe you learned that the Holy Spirit works with us when we feel more broken than whole. Maybe you realized that:

“when God lists all the people we’re supposed to visit, [it’s not] so that we could be extra nice to them. And it turns out – like the widow, the poor, the orphan, or whatever – it just turns out, of course, that’s where God is. God is there, so that’s where we should go.” And a lot of people never realize that, until they are completely undone.

The joy of being a pastor is that I have to regularly go back to that place, that mostly in our lives we drift away from (that place of pain) and in my job, my actual job, I have to go there on purpose all the time to people’s lives, the parts of their lives that aren’t flattering, exciting, all put together, and splendid seeming. I get to visit people in the hospital, in recovery, in memory care units, in their indignity, living in houses that are falling apart around them, whose families are falling apart all around them. I get to visit people whose hearts are broken, who are living in a world that feels broken, in a world where it seems like God is not in control.

It’s not just pastors. The joy of being a Christian is that we get to go to the people we would rather ignore and wake up to the fact that God is there, that God is in that place with them. And when we discover that truth, we can be brought to a better understanding of ourselves, a better sense of the world, of God’s love, and how life and peace and truth and grace still persevere when we don’t think they have a chance of making it through the night. God’s reality can force itself into ours, into our thinking, into our despair, and resurrect hope and possibility again.

“Where two or three are gathered, there I am.” Maybe Jesus didn’t mean when two people pray or three people study scripture together. Maybe Jesus meant when two people are hurting, when one person is visiting the other, when one person is more vulnerable than the other is, when the two or three are together, not apart, living in each other’s company, that’s where Jesus is.

Jesus is with twelve disciples in the Gospels, disciples who are in conflict, disciples who are zealots, fighting against the Romans, and disciples who are tax collectors, working for the Romans. Jesus is with Peter as well as James and John, fishermen from the same area who do not work together. They are not business partners but competitors.

And here they are living with each other, walking from village to village, hearing Jesus’ words, and interpreting for themselves something different from what the others are hearing. The tax collector and the zealot do not hear the same message from Jesus’ teachings. Wouldn’t they prefer it if everyone thought the same way? Wouldn’t they rather avoid having uncomfortable conversations? Wouldn’t they fare better if everyone was on the same page?

But then they wouldn’t understand each other. They wouldn’t understand what so many people are going through. They wouldn’t understand that God is more than just their own trivial notion made in their image.

So to live with each other through the conflicts of life, they learn more and more about themselves and about the God who made them in God’s image. And they find their way together, as disciples. 

That’s what we’re doing when we come together. Of course we support those who have experienced calamity and destruction – be it a hurricane in the Gulf or in the Caribbean, an earthquake in Mexico, or a monsoon’s flooding in India. By giving of ourselves, we point to the source of hope and redemption in our lives that can help others rebuild and restart their own.

And in giving of ourselves to strangers, we may end up crowding out what traces of violence, fear, and destruction still linger in our hearts. We may find in ourselves only enough room to support, inspire, and encourage the people around us.

But just as importantly, when we come together, we realize that we are not in control and never were. Our world is bigger than our point of view. It’s too much for us to make sense of. Only God can show us how to live within it. With God in control, we can look like a family. With God in our lives, we can help each other make it through the tribulations and trials of each day and year. With God, we can all do our part to help those in need.

Thanks be to God. Amen.