When I was a kid, my Dad gave me a comic book version of the Bible.  I think he figured that since I was really into comic books, he could sneak some Bible knowledge into my childish mind by this route.  And he was right!  I read that comic book Bible several times from cover to cover, and some of its images have stayed with me, for better or for worse, life-long.

            All things considered, it was a pretty good comic book, something I benefited from as a kid.  But there were a couple of downsides.  The comic book artists had a hard time drawing God.  You’ve heard about the kid in the Sunday school class who was drawing a picture.  His teacher asked him what he was drawing.  He said, “God.”  “But no one knows what God looks like,” said his teacher.  “They will when I get through,” said the kid. 

            The Bible comic artists didn’t know what God looked like, but they tried to draw God anyway.  Most of the time they drew God as a cloud.  Usually the cloud representing God had words written on it to show what God was saying to us.  Sometimes the cloud had arms protruding from it, great big arms that looked as if God could bench press a couple of million pounds with no problem.  When Jacob wrestled with the angel, the artists had him wrestling with a cloud with arms coming out of it.

            And I remember vividly the exchange between God and Abraham that we read about in our scripture lesson.  When Abraham first asked God to spare Sodom if there were fifty righteous people in it, the writing on the cloud said, “If I find fifty righteous people in the city of Sodom, I will spare the whole place for their sake.”

            But then Abraham asks for the number to be reduced to forty-five.  And then forty.  And then thirty, and so on.  And with each request from Abraham for a reduction in the numbers, the writing on the cloud got bigger and darker, indicating, so I thought, that God was getting very irritated and impatient with Abraham for trying to talk him down.  And finally when Abraham got to ten, the writing on the cloud said, in huge dark letters that blotted out the whole horizon,

“EVEN FOR TEN I WILL SPARE THE CITY!!”

            The message I got from the Abraham story in that Bible comic book was that you’d better be very careful about talking up to God!  If you weren’t, God would be very upset and maybe yell at you.  Or worse.  It took me years to get over that comic book.  In fact, it wasn’t until I did my preparation for this sermon that I noticed something I’d never seen before in this passage: there’s no indication that God ever raises his voice and expresses irritation to Abraham for asking him to be merciful.  There are, you probably noticed, no huge dark letters in the text of your pew Bible indicating God’s irritation.  I checked the Hebrew Bible, and same thing: no huge dark letters.  No indication at all of God’s being irritated or upset.  None!  In the place where God is depicted by the Bible writers as expressing amazing patience with Abraham, the comic book writers drew him as being very impatient.

            One of the morals of this story: don’t depend on the comic book version -- get the straight stuff from the Bible itself!

            Paul in I Corinthians 13 reminds us that “love is patient....”  In the past few weeks I’ve been preaching and teaching about love.  We’ve looked at God’s word in an attempt to find a good definition of love, and we’ve found love best defined in the person of Jesus.  We’ve also seen that love is not just a good feeling toward people.  To be loving we must also act in a way that is just.

            Today we want to start looking at the qualities of love.  “Love is patient,” Paul tells us in I Corinthians 13.  What does that mean?  God is love, so whatever patience means must be informed by the character of God.  So, when we say that God is patient, do we mean that he is passive: will God just grin and bear it, putting up with anything and everything out of love for us?  Or, does God’s patience mean that God is permissive: does he just want us all to have a good time and enjoy ourselves?  Or does the patience of God mean something else altogether?

 

IS GOD PASSIVE?

 

            When we hear about God’s patient love, are we talking about a passive love?  Is patience passivity?  A brick wall would be very loving by that definition, but when I’m looking for love I generally don’t go to a brick wall!  Brick walls don’t have much pizzazz!

            A couple of hundred years back, one of the very popular ideas about God pictured him as the missing Creator.  God was the one who wound up the universe in the beginning, like a clock maker who winds up a gigantic clock, and then when the mechanism was running, God left.  According to this notion, God may have had every good intention when he wound up the universe and left us to our own devices, but as we all know, things have run amok ever since.

            You can’t get much more passive than that!  Just as the ultimate of passivity in a marriage is a partner who simply leaves with no forwarding address, so the ultimate of passivity in theology would be God winding up the universe and then just taking off.

            Thomas Hardy wrote a poem about such a God.  He pictures himself as a delegate from the human race to find God and remind him of how bad things have gotten for us humans since he left.  Eventually the poet finds God puttering around on the outskirts of the universe, and he tells him that the earth he created is in big trouble.  God scratches his celestial head and then confesses that he can’t remember creating the earth.

            “O Lord,” says the poet, “forgive me when I say you spoke the word that started it all.”

            “Hmm,” says God.  “Let me think.  Oh, yes, now I remember, I did make the earth.  It was one of millions of similar planets.  I didn’t do a very good job on it.  Surely it must be gone by now!”

            “Lord,” says the poet, “it’s still there!”¹

            Is that what God is like?  Is our heavenly Father the ultimate deadbeat dad?  No way!  The picture of God we get in the story of Abraham is consistent with what we see of God in the rest of the Bible, a God who is so vitally interested in his people that he appears personally among us from time to time to comfort us and assure us of his love.

 

IS GOD PERMISSIVE?

 

            Well, then, if God’s patience is not passive, could we say that God’s patience is permissive?  When we’re small children, we’re inclined to think that love should be permissive.  We know that our parents love us, and we wish that they would let us have our way more than they do.  The terrible two’s when, as the books tell us, little children are just skin stretched over a huge ego, are manifestations of our desire to get our own way.  When we’re in our two’s, we want what we want when we want it, and if we don’t get it, we sometimes yell and scream.

            I talk to an awful lot of people who are going through crises in their lives, and I’ve noticed a thing or two about the theology of some of them.  Most of us get over the terrible two’s when we turn three, but for some of us our theology doesn’t keep pace with the rest of our development.

            Some of us picture God as a divine benevolence who will let us do anything we want without consequence.  Maybe you heard about the priest who was hearing confessions at Our Lady of Perpetual Indulgence one Friday afternoon.  The first penitent in the confessional booth said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  I committed adultery last week.”  “How many times?” said the priest.  “Two times,” said the penitent.  “Say the rosary two times,” said the priest.

            The second penitent entered the confessional and said,” Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  I committed adultery last week.”  “How many times?” said the priest.  “Two times,” said the penitent.  “Say the rosary two times,” said the priest.

            The third penitent entered the confessional and said, “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.  I committed adultery last week.”  “How many times?” said the priest.  “One time,” said the penitent.  “Say the rosary two times,” said the priest, “and go out and commit adultery one more time.  We’re running a special on adultery this week, two for the price of one.”

            Lest you think this is a slam on the Catholic Church, friends, let’s not forget that our Protestant distortion is that when we sin, we don’t even have to repent.  We don’t even have to do the rosary!  We say, “This is a great world: God loves to forgive sin, and I love to sin.  What could be better!”

            But whether we adopt the typical Protestant or typical Catholic distortion of repentance by presuming that God’s patience is permissiveness, we haven’t gotten beyond the comic book understanding of God’s word.  Paul reminds us that where sin increases, grace increases all the more, and most of us here this morning have gotten that part of the message.  But then Paul nails us: “Shall we persist in our sinning so that grace may increase?  What a terrible thought!  God forbid!”²

            You certainly can’t read this story of Abraham and conclude that God’s patience means permissiveness, as the people of Sodom found out!

 

IS GOD PERSISTENT?

 

            On the contrary, the Bible presents us with a picture of God whose patience is neither passive nor permissive but persistent.  God’s love is stubborn.  Nothing can move God from his commitment to love us.  It is God’s nature to love, and he will never give up loving us.  Even in his anger with us, he continues that stubborn love to the human race.  Our Presbyterian Confession of 1967 reminds us that even God’s anger is actually an expression of his love: “God’s love never changes,” says the confession, “Against all who oppose him, God expresses his love in wrath.”³  “In a surge of anger I hid my face from you for a moment,” says the Lord through Isaiah, “but with everlasting kindness I will have compassion on you.”⁴

            It’s that kind of stubborn, persistent love that God calls us to exercise with each other.  I’m astonished from time to time at how quickly we give up on each other in the church.  There are people here this morning who aren’t talking to each other because they’ve given up on each other.  Worse, there are people who aren’t here this morning, who used to be in this congregation but are now going to another church, or to no church, because they’ve given up on each other and are avoiding running into each other. 

            Friends, speaking the truth to you in a spirit of love, let me say that you can’t afford such an attitude in this church!  This attitude will kill Grants First Presbyterian Church.  Literally, you will kill Grants First Pres is you hold onto an attitude of impatience with each other.

            People tell me, “I’ve tried everything, but so-and-so just won’t change.”  Wait a minute, you’ve tried everything?  You’ve tried everything?  Back in 1949, information theorist Claude Shannon estimated that there are about 10 to the 120^th power possible moves in a 40-move chess game.  Do you have an inkling as to how many possible moves that is?  To give you an idea of how enormous that number is: it dwarfs even the most generous estimates of the number of atoms in the universe. And you’re telling me that you’ve tried everything?  Even God in his patient, persistent, long-suffering, stubborn love hasn’t tried everything, so don’t waste my time by telling me that you’ve run out of options in your attempts to love your neighbor!  You haven’t even gotten started.

            Edwin Stanton was Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of War.  No one had more contempt for Lincoln than Edwin Stanton.  He called him “a low cunning clown,” he nicknamed him “the original Gorilla” and said that the African explorer, Du Chaillu, was a fool to waste his time going to Africa to try to capture a gorilla when he could find one easily just by coming to Springfield, Illinois.  Lincoln did not insult Stanton in return.  He appointed him Secretary of War because he was the best man for the job.  He treated him with extreme courtesy. 

            Then the night came when Lincoln was assassinated.  As Stanton stood in the little room where the President’s body was taken looking down on that familiar homely face of the man he had once despised, as tears streamed down his face he choked out, “There lies the greatest ruler of men the world has ever seen.”⁵  The patient, persistent stubborn love of Abraham Lincoln had won over the cynical Stanton.

            Who is the Abraham Lincoln in your life that you deride, that you gossip about, that you put down, but whom you haven’t yet begun to love?  Or who is your Edwin Stanton in this church or town who just drives you crazy with all his or her snide or insulting comments about you?

            Love is patient.  Just how patient we will never fully appreciate, but God’s stubborn love persists even beyond 10 to the 120^th power.  There are an infinite number of ways that we, with God’s grace, can exercise this patient, stubborn love towards each other and our neighbors.

            What do you think: isn’t it about time we got started?