By J.D. Walt
Prayer of Consecration
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body as a holy and living sacrifice to you.
Jesus, We belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Scripture
What if God, although choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction? What if he did this to make the riches of his glory known to the objects of his mercy, whom he prepared in advance for glory—even us, whom he also called, not only from the Jews but also from the Gentiles? As he says in Hosea:
“I will call them ‘my people’ who are not my people;
and I will call her ‘my loved one’ who is not my loved one,”
and,
“In the very place where it was said to them,
‘You are not my people,’
there they will be called ‘children of the living God.’”
Isaiah cries out concerning Israel:
“Though the number of the Israelites be like the sand by the sea,
only the remnant will be saved.
For the Lord will carry out
his sentence on earth with speed and finality.”
It is just as Isaiah said previously:
“Unless the Lord Almighty
had left us descendants,
we would have become like Sodom,
we would have been like Gomorrah.”
Romans 9:22–29 (NIV)
Consider This
Something deep within every single one of us wants to be God; even if we don’t want to admit it. At least we want to sit in the seat from time to time. This is the Achilles heel of being the image bearers of God. We have enough of the stuff of God in us we think we can do the job better than God—and clearly we can do it better than the guy driving the car next to us. We think we know best.
As a result, we are all amateur theologians, desperately trying to understand what is happening in us and to us and all around us and make sense of it and yes, to explain it to each other. I repeat—we are all amateurs—from the highly educated to the most unlearned. For better or for worse, we are all doing theology, all day every day; believers or not; willfully or unconsciously. Theology, or grasping after the logic of God, is our native language. Again, when you are made in the image of God, it’s what you do. Oh yeah, and you create other gods (aka idols) in the process (to try and fill in the gaps and make it all work for you), but we will save that for another day.
So Paul is doing theology with the Roman church about this matter of the Jews and their future and his agonizing hope concerning such. And because we have weeks yet to discuss all this business, I would like us to take a minute to get some altitude, look down, and admire his method. For starters notice the three-word opener, which he repeats again in the same paragraph:
What if God, . . . ?
It is a beautiful way to open a conversation, isn’t it? What if God, . . . ? Ponderous, open, invitational, and yes, humble. When it comes to conversations about God, beware the NIDs and the SIDs: That’s shorthand for the “Never-in-Doubts” and the “Seldom-in-Doubts.” They mean well, but they are plagued with insecurity and as a result, they can’t risk faith, so they opt instead for an over-confident certainty. Faith pursues another outcome: clarity.
What if God, . . . ?
Notice also how Paul pursues clarity. He’s not building on the philosophical constructs of Aristotle, Socrates, or Plato (who were important players but quite late to the game). Nope. For Paul, it’s Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He works from Scripture as not only his foundation but his four walls and infinitely vaulted ceiling. The story of Scripture serves like his stained glass: The windows through which all light enters and is filtered—and the lenses through which he sees and interprets all of life and the world; history and eternity. Monday he called on Sarah and Rebekah. Yesterday it was Pharaoh and Jeremiah. Today it’s Hosea and Isaiah. Paul knows this story upside down and inside out. He knows it not like an academic remembers facts and data but like an old man remembers his life story with all its twists, turns, and surprising transformations. The story of Scripture is the substance of his memory and the source of his imagination.
What if God, . . . ?
That’s the starting place, isn’t it? It can lead to questions like, “How might God be working in this challenging situation or that intractable dilemma?” And, “What might God be saying to us in this moment of opportunity and possibility?”
What if God, . . . ?
It’s also the ending place, isn’t it? On this point, no one says it better than Isaiah. We will give him the last word today.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8–9)
Prayer
Abba Father! Indeed, we know this—your thoughts and ways are not our ways and thoughts. Your ways are higher, deeper, longer, and infinitely wiser than we can imagine or even comprehend. And yet you have written them down in a book, through a thousand stories that are one story, and all of it perfectly finished and beautifully fulfilled in Jesus. Come Holy Spirit and teach us to ask this question, “What if God?” and to let the question permeate our stories, big and small. I want to be that kind of theologian. I want to live a “What if God” life. Praying in Jesus’s name, amen.