Wesley Menke
Grace Lutheran Church
30 May 2021
Do you ever feel different? Do you feel as though you don’t fit in, or that the world is changing around you and you stick out in a crowd as someone who is different than those who are all around you?
Once I had a roommate who wasn’t different at all. This was in college. He majored in something that a lot of other people majored in. He had a couple of different girlfriends and was very smooth. He had the cool clothes and the cool music, and a cool car. One time we were just hanging out and talking on a Friday night. He had his current girlfriend with him. He said to me, “You know what Wes? You are so normal! You are the most normal guy I have ever met!”
I said to him, “Excuse me? You think that I am normal? No sir. You have it entirely backwards. I am different. You are normal!” We then began an argument as to who was more normal. I went to church. He said that made me normal. I said that it was just the opposite. Most people in college don’t go to church, therefore I am not normal. The conversation proceeded along those lines for a while. Finally it was decided that “normal” and “different” are very subjective concepts. We decided to accept each other just the way we were, as two normal and yet different guys.
What is normal anyway? We all think we know what normal is, but it is totally relative to what we think is normal! If there is anything I know, it is that God is 100% without a doubt, NOT NORMAL! God is different!
God is different!
The Father is different from the Son. The Son is different from the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit is different from the Father. Yet God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Therefore we must say that God is essentially different. God is not internally consistent. God is not uniform. God is different.
Sometimes people like to ask me about the Trinity. They say, “What’s the deal with the Trinity? I don’t get it!” A family member once asked me when I was in seminary, “When did they invent the Trinity?” That one made me laugh. It’s funny to think about inventing the Trinity because on the one hand it is a very honest question. You can study the history of the church and in fact lift up dates when the doctrine of the Trinity began to take shape in the Christian mind and discourse. On the other hand, the doctrine of the Trinity itself would argue that the Son and the Holy Spirit are co-eternal with the Father. That is, that the Trinity has been the Trinity since all of eternity.
Christians are monotheistic, but other monotheistic religions understandably struggle to understand how we believe that the Father is God, that Jesus is God, and that the Holy Spirit is also God, but that there is only one God. If it sounds confusing, that is good, because it should sound confusing. The whole point is to disrupt your mind from thinking that you can understand God. You can’t! God is far beyond your understanding.
That is the point of the call narrative of the prophet Isaiah. There were some people who used to think that God literally sat on the Mercy Seat on the top of the Ark of the Covenant and basically lived there inside the temple in Jerusalem. The offerings of grain and meat and what have you that came into the temple were like food for God. Isaiah’s vision invited him and us to consider that God is ridiculously greater than could fit inside the temple. Isaiah said that the hem of the robe filled the Temple. That would mean that God had to be huge!
But that was not the only point of the vision. The main point of the vision is that this gargantuan God called the mortal Isaiah with a job to do. He would be sent to proclaim the word of God to the people. To be a prophet. God is so vast and we are so small. And yet God calls each and everyone of us with specific jobs to do! No matter who you are, or what you have done, right here at this moment there is a path that God has created for you. Because God is internally inconsisten, that is, because God is essentially different, God can not only handle your difference, but God creates a path for you to walk that only you can walk. God makes a different path and a different calling for each person and all of their differences!
Leo Tolstoy wrote at the beginning of Anna Karenina that healthy family and people are borking because they all share the same characteristics of being healthy and functioning people. However, broken and dysfunctional people get it wrong in spectacularly different ways. I like Leo Tolstoy as an author, a lot. Anna Karenina is fabulous novel. But on this point I have to strongly disagree with Mr. Tolstoy. It is sin, death, and the devil that are always the same. They use the same old playbook over and over again. Dead things are just dead and inert. But life. Life! Is fabulously different and creative! Look at how the species have evolved over millennia. Life is what is bizarre and different. God calls each particle and living entity to unique paths of difference. Because God is different!
Consider Psalm 29. The voice of the Lord makes Lebanon skip like calf. The voice of the Lord strips the forests bare, and makes the temple shake. All of the life forms that have ever existed have been called into their being by the divine voice of God. In Genesis God’s voice calls of creation into existence and the swarms of baffling variety are manifold! Because God is different!
And then there is Romans 8. What is going on there? Why does Paul have such a problem with living according to the flesh? What’s wrong with flesh afterall? I’ll tell you what is wrong with living according to the flesh. The flesh is obsessed with normality. Living according to the flesh is racism. Flesh is just a fancy word for skin. Paul was a missionary who wanted the whole world to know about the saving love of God revealed in Jesus Christ. Paul had a vision of all people in their differences having faith that God was pure grace who loved them just the way they were.
Paul was profoundly counter-cultural. He was opposed by leaders within the church who thought differently than him. Difference of opinions in church? Who knew! Other leaders, like Peter at first, wanted everyone to conform to a prescribed way of being and living. At first they only wanted people who looked the same. Who spoke the same. Who thought the same. Who ate the same. And Paul said, “No!” Difference is what we need! If Paul spoke French he would have said, “Vive la difference!” Paul saw past the racist prejudice of sin lurking in the hearts of the week minded all around him, and God gave him a vision of something different. Why? Because God is different!
Paul’s vision was for great and glorious thing we call: Fellowship! Fellowship! Fellowship is an intimacy among people who are different! Fellowship is a loving spiritual family that does not insist for normality or sameness, but can tolerate difference with love. Fellowship isn’t an option! Fellowship is essential to God. Fellowship is what the Fater, the Son, and the Holy Spirit share. The Trinity lives in fellowship and emanates fellowship economically. Difference is necessary for Fellowship! If everyone was the same that wouldn’t be fellowship that would be hegemony and homogeneity. It would be the borg. Resistance is futile? No resistance is essential! Each and everyone of us must resists the normalizing tendency of evil and sin. We must strive to live in peace with those who are different. Why? Because God is different!
So how is this possible? How can a motley crew of differences ever live in harmony? How can we have fellowship?
We can’t. But God can! Nicodemus came to Jesus at night because he and the other Pharisees could see that Jesus was up to something. They knew that he was not an evil man. But he was different! Why? Because God is different! Yet Nicodemus didn’t know what to do with the difference. So he asked Jesus what to do. Jesus said that he must be born again. What!? This was preposterous! A grown man cannot be born again. It would be tantamount to saying that a camel must walk through the eye of a needle. It just can’t be done. However, what is impossible for humans, is possible for God. God will make you be born anew.
How do you think it feels to be born? I think it must be a little painful. It must be very painful for both mom and baby. Maybe you’ve been feeling some of this pain. Maybe it hurts to feel different. Maybe it hurts to see the world change around you. Maybe it’s hard to come out of quarantine and the world isn’t going to go back to normal like it once was. It is going to be different. But in this process God is going to help you be born again. God will lead you into a new light, and a new understanding. God will make you grow, and give you the words to know what to say to all the different people all around you. The wind blows where it chooses. You can’t stop it. You can’t stop God. God’s very breath is going to stir your heart into new life. You will be born anew. And you will be different! Why? Because God is different!
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