In the wildly hilarious and often offensive musical Book of Mormon, a group of missionaries are sent to Uganda to preach their faith and win converts.
One of the missionaries, Elder Cunningham, is at a disadvantage because he has never read the Bible or the Book of Mormon. But he has read Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring and he has considerable expertise in Star Wars and Star Trek.
While other missionaries are preaching about Jesus and Joseph Smith, Elder Cunningham regales his listeners with stories about Mordor and Middle Earth and Darth Vader and the attack of the Sith. The people love the stories and begin to call Elder Cunningham a prophet. But when he has Boba Fett turn people into frogs, the other missionaries have had enough. They accuse him of lying.
Not so, a Ugandan woman replies scathingly. “It’s a met-a-phor.”
It turns out the Ugandans are not so naive as to believe Elder Cunningham’s stories. They understand them as allegorical promises that their life of misery will not last forever and there is hope on the horizon. And that is a prophetic message indeed.
Metaphors can be very powerful and very confusing. Christians who believe Bible stories are literally true may be perplexed by claims that Adam and Eve were not real people, or that Eve is not merely a morphing of Adam’s rib. For many, the Song of Songs seems like poetic eroticism between a man and a woman and is not immediately understandable as a metaphor of God’s love for creation.
Jesus’ use of parables to teach higher truths may also be confusing. Even the disciples had occasion to ask him what he meant. And sometimes the fictitious characters Jesus made up – the Prodigal Son, the foolish virgins, the rich fool, the woman searching for a lost coin – seem very real. I was once in a bible study class when a student exclaimed, “Wait. The Good Samaritan wasn’t real?”
Not real? Of course he becomes real every time people reach out to one another in love, every time we come to each other’s aid, every time we have each other’s backs. But a real person?
Sorry. It’s a metaphor.
E. Trey Clark, assistant professor of Preaching and Spiritual Formation at Fuller Theological Seminary, calls attention to today’s Gospel reading as a means of introducing us “to images or metaphors for God in Scripture that we tend to overlook or underemphasize. Of course, metaphorical language for God in Scripture and elsewhere must not be absolutized, since it tends to both highlight and hide aspects of the mystery of the triune God. Still, in today’s lectionary passage from the Gospel of Luke, we find at least three different ways God or Jesus is described that call the people of God to …be attentive and alert to the priority of God’s reign.”
The first metaphor Clark points out is “God as a generous parent.”
In one of my favorite lines in Luke, Jesus presents God as a parent – a father – who loves us and wants the best for us.
“Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.” (Lk 12:32)
This is such a reassuring promise.
I don’t know how I got the idea, when I was a kid, that if I was bad, God would judge me vengefully. If I wasn’t good, I wouldn’t get into heaven. God was always looking down on me in judgment, a cosmic elf on a shelf, keeping a list and checking it twice.
I certainly didn’t get these heretical ideas from my parents, a functional Methodist/Presbyterian concordat who surely told me God is love. But it was so easy to get swept up in the flawed belief that God was keeping a stern eye on whether I was naughty or nice.
I was a young adult before I was able to think of God embracing me with unconditional parental love, a reassuring presence at my side, not “up there” somewhere.
In my Baptist days, however, I still thought of God as withholding the gift of salvation until I decided to accept Jesus as a personal savior. My old sociology professor, the late Tony Campolo, used to talk about the evangelical rallies he attended as a boy.
“Accept Jesus into your heart now,” Tony would quote the preachers. “You could walk out of this meeting tonight and get hit by a bus and your soul would be lost.”
“But,” Tony said, “it didn’t make me afraid of losing my soul. It made me afraid of buses.”
Most Christian denominations preach that your salvation is entirely up to you. Jesus died for your sins and all you have to do is reach out and accept it. If you wait too long, you may find yourself blocked from getting into heaven by a savior who tells you, “I never knew you.” (Mt 7:23)
Martin Luther preached that it is not up to us to get ourselves saved because God has already taken care of it.
It is the Holy Spirit that gives us the power to have faith, not we ourselves. When evangelicals ask Lutherans if we have found Jesus, our response should be, Jesus has found me. By grace we are saved and Jesus welcomes us into God’s kingdom. We no longer have to be afraid of buses.
For me, this confirms the concept of God as a generous parent, a father who brings God’s little flock together and expresses his good pleasure in bringing us into God’s kingdom.
Metaphor two: God as Servant Master
“Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes; truly I tell you, he will fasten his belt and have them sit down and eat, and he will come and serve them.” (Lk 12:37)
Okay, there’s a slight ick factor in this verse as we look at “master” and “slave” from our historical perspective. We think of masters and enslaved persons from our bleak understanding of America’s “peculiar institution” of cruelty and oppression. There are no masters on record who were kind to the human beings they owned and certainly no masters would deign to serve their human property. Enslaved persons who hear of masters who “will come to serve them” might regard it as a spiteful metaphor.
It helps to remember that masters and slaves had a different relationship in Roman households. Many slaves were artisans, chefs, domestic staff, entertainers, librarians, accountants, and physicians. Many Roman slaves worked to buy their freedom.
Be that as it may, slaves served their masters and not the other way around. Luke’s gospel turns the master-slave relationship inside-out and upside.
This is a scandalous affront to societal norms. Luke reminds us that Jesus comes to us seditiously as a servant master who waits on his disciples.
This is a powerful metaphor about the relationship God has chosen to have with the universe, and about the Messiah who comes to us not as a mighty warrior but as a suffering servant. The metaphor reminds us that we Christians, at the very least, should be effecting a sweeping upheaval of society in which the first shall be last, the last first, the weak strong, the strong week, the poor rich, the rich poor.
Metaphor Three: God the Thief in the Night
“But know this: if the owner of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have let his house be broken into. You also must be ready, for the son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” (Lk 12:39-40)
My mother, a Presbyterian elder, was determined to be prepared for that unexpected hour when the Lord returns. She kept the beds made, the dishes washed, and floors swept so the Lord would not suddenly appear and catch her with a messy house.
Of course my mother also sought to be spiritually prepared and she made sure her five children said their prayers at night and were scrubbed clean for Sunday worship at the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y.
But my mother’s strenuous preparedness made me wonder if she was fretful about the Lord’s return. Would he enter houses with white gloves to check for dust and untidiness? Would he suddenly appear when my brothers and I were pummeling each other on the living room floor and shout, “GOTCHA!”? What, indeed, were we to expect about the Lord’s return?
Clearly adults are not the only ones struggling with this question I first heard the joke in 1960 as my fellow adolescents were sitting around a campfire at Pathfinder Lodge, a Baptist camp near Cooperstown, N.Y.
“The good news is that Jesus is back.”
“What’s the bad news?”
“He’s pissed.”
This sounded dangerously impious to seventh graders and the counselor’s silent disapproval was accentuated by the snapping firewood and the gyres of sparks in the humid darkness. The censorious face of a counselor looks satanic in the red glow so we’d cautiously tongue our smores until the evening ended with choruses of kum-bah-yah and we could escape to our tents. There, we’d repeat the hazardous joke and squeal with laughter.
Actually, this is more a hermeneutic than a joke. It’s a brief, two-part sermon with yawning theological depth.
It forces us to ask ourselves: what is there in our world to gladden the heart of a returning savior?
Certainly if Jesus came back this morning and beheld the divisions and strife in our country – the proliferation of guns, the political lies, the wholesale rounding up and deportation of our neighbors, the racial and ethnic hatred - he would be enraged by our rigid inability to put his greatest commandment into practice: love God and love your neighbor. If we are to be prepared for Jesus’ sudden and unexpected arrival, we have work to do.
As it turned out, my mother passed into the kingdom without experiencing the sudden arrival of the celestial thief in the night.
Luke, in his metaphors, reminds those of us who are still here of these divine truths:
God is a generous parent who delights in giving us the kingdom.
God’s kingdom is an upside down realm in which masters serve their servants.
And we should be prepared for the final fulfillment of God’s loving kingdom that will burst before our eyes when we least expect it.
Fear not, Little Flock. This is most certainly true.
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