Eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost (20B), September 23, 2018; The Rev. Susan Ackley

You might know that Emmanuel Church has started a Recovery Eucharist.

I initiated it when I came here because I’ve celebrated — and “celebrated” is a good word — a weekly Recovery Eucharist for seven years at a drug and alcohol rehab in NH.

I emphasized “celebrated” because I’m an alcoholic and I live in perpetual wonder that God lets me do this priest thing!

Last week in my local AA meeting, I listened to a reading by someone who had been in AA from the very beginning, even before the Big Book was written. He was a proud atheist and he’d stand up at just about every meeting and say this God business was ridiculous. In fact, he was so obnoxious about it that his home group sometimes met without him to pray that he’d decide to leave!

Over time he softened, but when Bill Wilson and others were drafting the book Alcoholics Anonymous, he insisted that the words “as we understood him” be added to all the  reference to God in the Steps:… . “to the care of God as we understood God,” “conscious contact with God as we understood him.”

I may be a minority of one, but I think those are some of the most important words in the Big Book. I wonder, too, if they are particularly important to us here at Emmanuel, where “Believing is not a condition of belonging or beloving.”

When I’m preaching to people in recovery I often point out that what the Gospel is giving us are hints as to “God” as Jesus understood God.

Sometimes even now Jesus’ angle of vision on God startle and shock us and we suddenly see the Divine, the Holy, the Mystery, God—whatever word we choose, in a new way.

It happens at the end of this week’s Gospel.

Jesus and closest followers are heading south through the northern area of Palestine on their way to Jerusalem.

Jesus has temporarily succeeded in ditching the crowds who usually surround them. Time  is getting short and he is determined to teach his disciples what they need to know to continue his work.

So far it’s not going well.

The problem is that they don’t want to believe what he’s trying to teach them.

They’ve already been given two hard things to swallow —

First, that Jesus sees himself as one whose coming work involves suffering and death, when they’d hoped he’d be a conqueror to free Israel from Roman rule.

And second. that their vocation, their “follow me,” isn’t at all to worldly power. Even though they’d been arguing on the way over which of them was the greatest, they are not called to be “successful” in any worldly sense. None of them is  destined, in John Wesley’s terms, to become Prime Minister in a new government!

But at the very end of today’s Gospel now is perhaps the worst challenge to their belief or would have been if they were really listening. It’s what one commentator calls, “the most scandalous of scandals in Mark’s Gospel”–What Jesus is suggesting about the nature of God. Maybe God isn’t quite what the disciples thought “he” was.

It’s easy to miss. Right at the end of the Gospel, Jesus sits—the formal position of a teacher, a rabbi — and invites a little child into their midst. He embraces the child and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.”

Hear that? “Welcomes not me, but the one who sent me.” That is, God.

Children were cherished by their parents in Jesus’ time, but they had very low social status. They were essentially powerless. They had no legal standing at all, and from the point of view of society in general, they would only become contributing members when they began to be able to help in the economy of the household.

So when they welcome a little child they welcome Jesus and when they welcome Jesus they’re not really welcoming him. Jesus becomes transparent or effaces himself completely and they welcome—God. A vulnerable God, or at least a God that needs help.

Jesus is introducing his reluctant followers to a God who is more like a child than a king. A God who can be hurt, who is vulnerable, who needs help.

If the disciples had been Hindu, this concept of God as child would not have been so shocking. In Bhakti Yoga, the Yoga of devotion, one practice is exactly that — loving God with the special kind of love you give a child—caring, providing for, protecting, cherishing.

Closer to our tradition, I think of  Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who died in the Holocaust, and who has become a powerful influence on both Jewish and Christian thinking about God (she herself didn’t identify exclusively with either religion).

In her diary she recounts her experiences as the Nazis invaded Holland and entrenched their power. As things got worse–the yellow stars, the bans on free travel, the threat and then the actuality of concentration camps — she prayed for help from God.  No help came.

But even as pain and fear escalated around her, she did not reject God. In July of 1942, she wrote  “There are moments when I can see right through life and the human heart, when I become calmer and calmer, and am filled with a faith in God that has grown so quickly inside me that it frightened me at first, but has now become inseparable from me.”

Then — in July of 1942, a revelation:

“… if God does not help, then I shall have to help God… I don’t fool myself about the real state of affairs, and I’ve even dropped the pretense that I’m out to help others. I shall merely try to help God as best I can, and if I succeed in doing that I shall be of use to others as well.”

Etty was ordered to a transport camp where she cared for sick, starving, terrified men, women, and children. Finally, with her parents, she was crammed into a train to Auschwitz. She died in there on November 30, 1943.

I wonder — how does Hillesum’s experience of a vulnerable God, a God who needs our help, strike you?

I’ll be honest — as a person in recovery I have experienced a power—a Higher Power working in me and I believe with all my heart I wouldn’t be here without that active, loving power. I’ve seen it in others, miraculous turnarounds in profoundly addicted women and men. I name that power “God.”

But I also live in this world. I’ve lived to watch genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, the slaughter in Syria, starvation in Yemen. I’m disheartened each day by news of what’s happening and not happening in our own country right now.

Because of that I feel the lure of the idea of a God who is not at all all-powerful, but who yearns ceaselessly for goodness, justice, and the healing of the earth. A God who has some power and helps us by way of grace, but is also in need of help, who cares, but also in some mysterious way needs our care.

I invite you now into silence. Think about this idea of a God who needs our help.

[Pause]

I’ll end now with a poem by Dorothee Soelle, German theologian:

not without you

He needs you
That’s all there is to it
Without you he’s left hanging
Goes up in Dachau’s smoke
Is sugar and spice in the baker’s hands
gets revalued in the next stock market crash
he’s consumed and blown away
used up
without you

Help him
that’s what faith is
he can’t bring it about
his kingdom
couldn’t then couldn’t later can’t now
not at any rate without you
and that is his irresistible appeal

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