God must be crazy! Or perhaps God is just a fool.

That has occurred to me often enough.

Especially in Lent, as we read God’s promises to God’s people: the Holy One begging them, pleading with them, forgiving them over and over for their infidelity.

God sounds a lot like a hurt yet still love-sick heartthrob, smitten by the object of affection and willing to forgive all if the fickle lover will just return.

“I forgive you, Dear, let’s just start over. This time, I will be yours, and you will be mine.”

We shake our heads at the insanity when we see it in others. “When are they going to learn?”

God appears to be a door mat. A fool. Wasting time, wasting energy, wasting resources on a people who seemingly could care less about God. Who aren’t the least bit interested in God, until of course, everything goes terribly awry. 

God, I keep thinking, could do better. This is God, after all.

We forget that the pickings are slim for a God seeking faithfulness from

humanity. But, then, isn’t that God’s own doing, too?  It was God, after all, who created humankind and gave us free will, of all things, because love can’t really be love unless it is a choice. A conscious choice. Was God so crazy to think we would find it easy to choose God and life and truth and justice and wisdom over the emptiness of unknowing and mindless lock-step existence? What kinds of choices do we make when we are mindless? 

            Consciousness is necessary to be God’s people. God has chosen us, and we must choose God. Waking out of the haze and blur and mindless existence of unconsciousness into a conscious awareness of God.

Awareness. Enlightenment. Knowing God.  Knowing God as opposed to knowing only the mind-numbing, hope-stealing, creativity-robbing world.

Knowing there is a God as opposed to believing only in that which we see.

Living in reality rather than in the illusion that the world is as the culture says it is. Living in light rather than living in darkness.

Taking a different path than the crowd headed down the wide road leading nowhere.

            God is not looking for the whole world to get it, by the way. 

God is only seeking a small handful. A small group to be alert, to be aware, to be different from the crowd. A tiny bunch to go down the narrow road, the road that leads to life.

This foolish God keeps on appealing to a people, seeking them out, forgiving them, blessing them and making promises God will surely keep and they will just as surely forget.

We hear it today in our lesson from Jeremiah:

The people are exiles in Babylon. Exiled because they would not listen to the warnings of Jeremiah and other prophets about their unfaithfulness. So, we are talking about a particularly reticent bunch. A stubborn and willful crowd. 

That never stops God from these insane promises even as the breaking of the first covenant is mentioned: (“It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt – a covenant that they broke, though I was their wedded partner, says the Holy One.”)

“But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days” . . .  “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the Holy One, “ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest,  . .  for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”

            I have to laugh to keep from crying! How pathetic God is! How absolutely silly to think things are going to be any different this time!

            I keep wondering why God doesn’t just quit! Why God keeps on keeping on with this bunch, and the next bunch and the one after that, all the way down to us? Why doesn’t God give up? What does God need with a people after all? I mean, come on – God is GOD!

We resist this kind of closeness with God. C. S. Lewis once said that we don’t want so much a parent in heaven, but a senile grandparent in heaven. Someone who “likes to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all’”

“It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, (God) is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though (God) has often rebuked and condemned us, (God) has never regarded us with contempt. (God) has paid us the intolerable complement of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.” (C.S. Lewis)

            Then I look around at the way things are. I look around at our times, and the fractured nature of our world, and I think I know why God is so foolish.

            We seem to be sleepwalking our way further and further into mire.

Have you ever tried to wake someone from a deep sleep? Ever try to shake a person out of a coma? Ever try to get a drugged individual to get with the program? Ever try to get a self-destructive person to see the future consequences of his or her behaviors?

            If so, then you know a little of the task at hand for God.  Our unconsciousness hurts others. Our sleepwalking has consequences not just for us but also for the whole of humankind. Rampant individualism has clouded our minds to the reality that we are all connected.

God loves all of creation, so God cannot leave us alone in our culture-induced stupor to sleepwalk the planet further into the muck. It is for our sakes, and for the sake of the world that God keeps trying to get the people to pay attention.

            God knows the world still needs someone to shout: “This is wrong! Stop the madness! WAKE UP!!  God needs whistle blowers; God needs creative compassionate committed people. God needs those who can see things the way God intended them to be. as well as how things really are.

And God needs those who are willing to stand up and shout in the crowd: “Hey! If we keep going this way we are going to march right off a cliff! Let’s turn and go a different way!”

            Even if no one listens, even if no one hears, God needs some folks who won’t be co-opted by the culture. 

 God knows the world still needs a people who will walk the narrow road. God knows the world still needs a people who are at least struggling to stay awake.

God knows what the world needs is saints.

            I’m not talking about the canonized saints of the Roman Catholic faith (Though many of them were the kinds of saints we still need.)

            The saints of whom I speak had a unique perspective, consciousness, awareness, compassion and a heart for justice. People like Gandhi, Dorothy Day, or Martin Luther King, Jr. People like those who worked to put an end to slavery, and those who put an end to child labor and those who have worked throughout history to help others find freedom and justice, especially in a culture that did not want to be confronted. I am talking about the kinds of saints that take us all by the shoulders and inspire us to be more fully human and humane.

 These saints are willing to be different. Set apart. Not better mind you. But different. Saints refuse to accept the status quo. They refuse to submit to the surrounding value system. They see a life lived unconsciously as a wasted life, and a life given in service to others as a life well lived. They choose to be set apart for the sake of the whole. They, in other words, give their lives to serving others rather than spend their lives in self-serving ways..

Let me quote from Elizabeth O’Conner about the kind of Christian saints I mean: Elizabeth would never claim to be a saint (no real saint would) but she fits the description I just gave you. Hear her words:

“If we are to accept the challenge of the crisis of our times, we, as Christians, must know that the world’s deepest need is for saints. These are people who can give themselves in ways which seem fanatical to those who live by the usual ethical and moral norms. These are people who live normally by the second mile. It is not sporadic with them. They have thrown the familiar ‘duty’ maps away. They are utter fools for Christ’s sake. They are always finding some cruel little cross to climb up on. They stay there and suffer even when people deride and mock them, and thereby they stay closer to Jesus, who stayed on his cross until he died. . . .

These Christians are those who will throw themselves into the breach between the peace and healing of God and the loneliness, anguish, and terror of the world’s lost. They stand as a bridge between suffering humans and God, willing to become ground grain, broken bread, crushed grapes, poured-out wine, They are willing to be fed upon by the earth’s hungry until those hungry ones can feed directly upon Jesus. The world has always needed such people, and it has survived because, here and there, there have been a few such people” . . ..” the world is (still in need of) such people—and God is calling you become such a person and calling me to become such a person because the world is in desperate need.

“There is no need to review the crescendo of terror in which we live. We will not go into the details of which we are so aware, although I believe it is important that we be willing to face the imminence and gruesomeness of that which is upon us”. All we need do is listen to the evening news or read our papers.  “Christians, who in the true sense of the word are realists, should be willing to look down into the abyss of disaster into which we are being drawn.” (O”Conner)

“The imperative for (God’s people) is that we have been grasped by God.”

For the prophets, for the disciples, for the saints that have touched our lives and brought us consciousness “they had found what it was to be real persons in community. They had discovered that to be alive at all was to be pouring out their lives. to be breaking the alabaster jar of their lives as Christ did on the cross. They had to do this because they belonged to God, not in order to save the world from destruction. As a by-product, they were the world’s salt and life.” (O’Conner)

In other words, we are called to be set apart, different. “It is fundamental to everything we do as Christians, that we personally develop a style of life which is recognizably Christian.” Not in a way that says we are better, as some in the political religious right would have the world to believe, but in a way that reflects the compassionate inclusive justice-loving nature of Jesus.

We will choose to give our lives, fully and completely to God. That is the message of Lent, folks. As it was the message of Advent, and Christmas, and Epiphany and as it is the message of Easter and Pentecost and Ordinary time. It is the message of Jesus himself. It is what he meant when he invited us to take up our cross and follow him. It is this commitment to the teachings of Jesus and the Reign of God that I think is calling us in our day.

I believe we are called as a church to know God, as Jeremiah put it.  Walter Brueggemann says: “to know God is such a rich open phrase. It means a deep, trustful intimacy, acknowledgment of a sovereign authority over all of life, and obedience that is congruent with the will and character of God . . ..   Taken all together, knowing God means ceding over all of one’s life to the claims and insistences of God as the truth of our own life. Second, this “knowing” overcomes all social stratifications. There will be no elitism, no experts, and no dominant, powerful people. This communion-in-obedience is a stunningly egalitarian affair.”

When Jeremiah uses this term about knowing, it is knowing in the biblical sense. God wants a deep intimacy with God’s people. God wants to be known fully by the people. God wants to be one with us. God wants a committed, intimate relationship.

Saints. God wants us to be nothing short of saints. God wants us to be as crazy about humanity as God is. God wants us to have the same heart for justice that God has.

All relationships take time, energy, openness, and a willingness to be vulnerable. Relationships require sharing. And God wants us to share in the journey . . . to travel with God. To learn of God how to love and give our lives away in the same faithful way God has loved us.

This is a process. It is a journey. It is not about arriving, it is about what happens along the way. But the journey requires commitment.

We may never get there. Beware anyone who thinks they have arrived! It’s in the traveling in which we discover how God’s law can be written on our hearts.

This shaping of God’s people doesn’t happen overnight. Nor will it happen in an hour on Sunday morning.

I have to ask myself how much time I spend with God as compared to how much time I spend in front of the television set, or reading, or any other activity. To be God’s people, we will want to spend time with God. We will want to be with God in prayer, we will want to read about God in scripture. We will want to spend time with others who also want to know God -- others who are on the journey with us. 

If we are willing to accept the call of this crazy God to be these crazy people the world so desperately needs, we have to be at least willing to explore what it means to give our lives to God, body and soul. We have to be willing to spend our lives, give our lives, waste our lives in ridiculous ways: in worship, in study of scripture, in prayer, in meditation, in fellowship with others who are also on this journey, struggling with what it means to ‘know God’ in our lives, and be salt, and light, and leaven in the loaf.

            When Jesus broke bread with the disciples, their eyes were opened and they recognized him . . . the table is spread, the invitation offered,. . . come and share in the feast of new life as God’s own.