God With Us and the Obedience of Faith

How many of you have a dog? I used to have two dogs. Now I have two cats who I love my cats very much, but I miss my dogs. Sometimes that feeling is so intense that my heart literally hurts. Our dogs play a big role in our lives and they have such big hearts.

I spend a lot of time – probably more than I’m willing to admit– watching dog-related channels on YouTube. One of those is called “Sitting with Dogs,” and it features a guy named Rocky Kanaka who goes to shelters and sits with the dogs that are the most afraid and might have a harder time getting adopted. It often makes me cry to see the turnaround those pups experience when they start to trust Rocky and open themselves to receive his love.

Another channel I love features Cesar Milan, better known as “The Dog Whisperer.” I used to watch his show on Animal Planet years ago and now I can’t get enough of him on YouTube. It’s amazing the way he helps people who have no idea how to handle their dogs to develop a better relationship with their canine companions. When the human is a good pack leader and shows up with the right energy, the dog willingly follows and does what the human asks. Most of us appreciate a dog that listens, that is obedient.

“Obedience” is a word that can feel oppressive. But Paul uses it in his letter to the Romans in a way that might surprise us.

He tells us that through Jesus we receive the “grace and apostleship to bring about the obedience of faith among all the gentiles…” I want to go deeper today to explore how we might understand “obedience of faith” in terms of our lives today.

We see the fruit of obedience in today’s gospel. First, we know that Mary was radically obedient when she opened herself to God’s Spirit and God’s plan and allowed herself to become pregnant with Jesus. Next, we see Joseph go from planning to divorce Mary quietly to a man willing to endure harsh judgment and condemnation for marrying a young woman who was not only no longer a virgin, but who was also pregnant. But God spoke to Joseph through an angel in a dream, and Joseph trusted God’s voice as much as Mary did before him.

What brought Mary and Joseph to the place where they could trust God’s voice? In a sense, we read it summarized in Paul’s letter. He introduces himself as an apostle, one called to share the gospel of God, which we can also say is the good news of God’s love for and presence with the world. He brilliantly summarizes that good news story as going all the way back to the beginning of biblical history. Now, remember that before God’s interactions with Abraham, the people of biblical cultures did not believe in a God who was present in history, and so this covenant relationship between God and the Hebrew peoples was a new thing.

Paul describes his gospel of God as beginning in this historical relationship and God’s promise of an end to suffering that was given through the prophets. That promise then flows through the lineage of David to Jesus and is proven in his resurrection. It doesn’t stop when Jesus dies but rises again as so much more than a promise to just one people, the Jews. It rises from that tomb as a promise to the entire world (to all the Gentiles)! And we Christians are meant, like Paul, to be apostles or storytellers of God’s love.

When we tell our stories of God’s love and presence in the world, we become the means through which that promise continues to flow to generation after generation.

When we tell God’s love story, it’s through the love we give and show to others that hearts are changed and ways are opened for people to trust God’s voice enough to willingly follow it. We are empowered by the Spirit to have that faith or trust in God and to then turn our wills and our lives over to God’s leadership. This is what it means to have the obedience of faith. This is also how we can encourage that trust in God in others.
For us in the Church, this story of God’s love really comes into focus in Advent.

And as we approach the end of Advent, we anticipate the birth of the one we call the Son of God. In Isaiah, we are told a young woman will give birth to a child and name him “Immanuel,” which means “God with us.” In Matthew, the angel says Joseph should name the baby “Jesus” which means “God saves.” A Lutheran pastor named Melody Eastman points out that the babies are not named “the Son of God is with us” or “The Son of God saves” and she asks if we think there’s a difference. While our Trinitarian brains want to say no, she says, our hearts can feel the difference between “believing that God ‘sent someone’ to save us” and “hearing that God’s own Self came…” When we say that God’s own Self came, this is a remarkable statement of radical communion.

We are saying that the God of the cosmos, the God who created billions of galaxies, not only created us but loves us so much that God poured God’s Self into human flesh.

The incarnation of God is, according to Eastman, “a mind-boggling revelation of radical love.” God doesn’t just love us from afar but takes on flesh and is willingly “joined to us who are not God. Somehow God is with us in this vulnerable, helpless, infant. God-with-us will live, laugh, walk, hunger, grow weary, suffer, and die.” This God will “come into our space and experience what it is like to be born, to grow up, lose loved ones, feel rage, face temptations, know betrayal, endure torture.”

In Dog Whisperer language, this is how God becomes the “pack leader” that we can trust and willingly follow. God doesn’t yell at us from above or beat us into submission. God doesn’t rub our noses in our mistakes. No, God even while remaining the awesome God of the cosmos, gets down on the floor with us, comes down into our mess, and experiences the worst and the best that we live every day. God knows us because God was with us and lived as us.

But it’s even better than that. God is with us still, right here, right now.

The Church typically teaches that God came to us in the past as the history of Israel and the incarnation in Jesus, comes to us in the present as word and sacrament, and will come again in the future at the end of all things.

But I don’t believe that.

I don’t believe God is only present today in the word and in the sacrament of the eucharist because I believe the whole cosmos was the very first sacrament.

My own experience has shown me that God is in every living thing on this earth, in my heart, in your hearts, and in every moment of the world’s experience. I see God in every moment when suffering transforms into grace. Because when healing is present, the Spirit of God is present, because healing is a fruit of the Spirit.

This is my story of God’s love, my own version of “I once was lost but now am found, was blind but now I see.” When we share these love stories that have their roots in the Big Bang, in the burning bush, in the manger, and in the empty tomb, then we help to midwife the birth of Christ in every heart. That is our true calling, our true vocation. And that is the obedience of faith flowing to us, through us and from us to others. Amen.