sermons
Summer at Reservoir
The Wideness of God’s Mercy
Steve Watson
Aug 11, 2024
What we call people matters.
I have many affectionate little nicknames for my wife Grace and I get no complaint about any of them. They’re signs of my affection and of our intimacy.
But the other day, she noticed I was using a nickname I often use for her, but this time I was calling someone else with it. Don’t worry, it wasn’t another woman. It wasn’t even another person. But I was using this same nickname once reserved solely for her, with our dog.
And she was like:
hey, now, don’t call me the same thing you call our dog.
And I was like:
oh, come on, you’re two of my favorite creatures on earth.
And somehow that didn’t fly. So I was like:
alright, I will not use that name on our dog again.
And I think I’ve held up that commitment pretty well so far, as Grace deserves.
What we call people – and I guess even non-people persons – matters.
The same is true with what we call God.
A couple years ago, my prayer life was flagging.
Some of my views of God had changed over time, and so some of my old ways of talking to God didn’t fit as well any more.
I also had gone through some hard experiences in the months and years prior, and I didn’t exactly know how to talk to God about these things. On the one hand, I deeply believe what the scriptures say about God, that nothing is hidden from God’s sight, that everything is naked and exposed before the one to whom we have to give an answer.
I didn’t think I had to inform God about my experiences, but I didn’t just want to bottle them up either. I wanted to talk about them, and I wasn’t always sure how.
So I was praying less often, less naturally, probably less deeply.
I mostly didn’t feel guilty about praying less than I used to, but at some point, I did want this to change. I found myself wanting to learn to pray more again.
And one thing that helped a lot was a set of written prayers I stumbled upon. A structure for prayer, a set of words for prayer, that I could walk into and make it my own.
And the prayers begin like this:
Prayer Version #1
Eternal God, Creator of heaven and Earth,
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
God of Israel,
God and father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,
True and Living God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Have mercy and hear our prayer.
The prayer opens by asking for God’s attention and for God’s mercy – God’s solidarity and help in all things.
But even before that, just like when we ask for anyone’s attention and help, it begins with an address, with a name.
I appreciate the specificity of this.
When I was young, I used to start my prayers like: Dear God – and it’s like one, that’s a weird way to talk to someone, it sounds like you’re writing a letter out loud. But also the name “God” – it’s kind of vague, like a name that could mean anything, like a big box someone’s carrying and you have no idea what’s inside – it could be a guitar or a gun or groceries, it’s just generic.
When we say God, we could mean all kinds of things. So saying: dear God, or hey, God, or whatever doesn’t ground me in any particular kind of person on the other end of my prayers. It’s vague, like I have no idea who I’m talking to and whether or not they’re listening.
So this prayer names God, which I find helpful.
It calls God “eternal” – someone who has been around forever and is very much still here.
It names God as the creator of everything – me, you, wherever we are or could ever be. Things seen and known to us, things as of yet unseen and unknown too.
Creator God, still yet creative God, could you hear my prayer?
And then it grounds this eternal, creator God in some specific stories.
God, the one grounded in the story and history of scripture – the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, of Israel – this particular God that Jews and Christians and Muslims have been calling on for centuries, this God who we read about in the Bible.
And not only that, but the God and father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, the God Jesus talked about, the God Jesus loves. God who looks and sounds and acts like Jesus, God who is present by God’s Spirit, the God I call my father, who is true and real and very much alive, I’d love to have your attention.
Could you be yet again kind, helpful, merciful, and hear my prayer?
It both grounds me and opens me up when I talk to God this way, remembering just who it is that’s listening. I have a better sense in my heart, in my consciousness, of who I’m talking to, of the miracle that I have this eternal, creator God’s attention.
And all this helps me pray.
But good as this is, I remembered something that would make it even better. When I started using this address, this greeting for God in my prayers, I remembered some encouragement from an author named Wil Gafney. Wil Gafney is a womanist theologian. A womanist is someone who says it’s worth thinking about life through the lens of Black women’s experiences, so a womanist theologian says Black women’s experiences have an important role in teaching us what God is like.
And the line I remembered from Wil Gafney was her encouragement that when we say formulas like the one in this prayer, like this formula from the Bible – the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Wil Gafney says: say the women’s names too. Say the name of the women in the story as well, and see what that does.
So I decided to keep these traditional words for God in how I start my morning prayers, but to say the names of the women in the story as well.
So now, this address starts like this:
Prayer Version #2
Eternal God, Creator of heaven and Earth,
God of Abraham, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah
God of Isaac and Rebekah,
God of Jacob, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah and Zilpah
God of Israel….
And I want to tell you what it’s been like the past couple of years to pray to this God, the God that we name and address like this.
At first it was a memory stretch. Dang, these three men had a lot of women in their lives.
- How do I remember them all?
- Like who in the world was Keturah?
- Who are these people, and why does it matter?
But the more I say their names, the more I choose to inhabit a particular tradition and faith in God, and the more important places that takes me.
I’m talking about the significance of remembering the founding mothers of our faith, but let me start with even the value of the founding fathers.
God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. This is the God of our broken, yet heroic selves.
These founding fathers of the faith are ordinary people, in some ways extraordinarily flawed people, that end up on these epic, heroes journeys.
Our founding senior pastor Dave Schmelzer used to talk a lot about the life of faith as being a kind of a hero’s journey. A hero’s journey is when an ordinary person stumbles into a deeper question or a deeper adventure in life. And the pursuit of this question or adventure calls them into a deeper life. Out of their tried and true comfort zone into the unknown, where challenges and temptations abound. Where new friends and new enemies emerge, where getting what you want in life, or fulfilling the purpose of your life requires great cost but yields great return too. It changes you, and sometimes it changes the world too, or some little piece of it at least.
I’ve resonated with this. The best and most important things in my life have called me beyond myself, even as they’ve called me to engage some of the deepest, most persistent themes of my life story that run all the way back through childhood.
When we think of hero’s journeys, often we think of our work. And I get that. I used to listen to the podcast How I Built This, which tells entrepreneurs’ stories, because I respect what I learn about leadership from my friends and our church board members who start businesses. And the arcs of these entrepreneurs are usually hero’s journeys – people stumble into some bold, big thing they want to try, and on their way to anything like success, there are usually moments where they almost lose it all. And all this requires resilience and talent, but also a lot of help and a lot of luck. And I think that’s been true in the work I’ve been called to do as a teacher and a school leader and a pastor, and it’s true of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob too – God walked with them and inspired and strengthened them in the big work to which they were called.
But for me, I’ve felt this even more in my personal, relational life. I’m trying to be a nurturing father to my kids and a supportive, intimate partner to my spouse, when I come from a long line of aloof men who didn’t always know how to do those things. And I’m trying to be a middle aged man who actually has friends, when again, the men in the culture I come from don’t. And so even this stuff has felt like a hero’s journey, calling me out to new ways of being in the world, and new ways of being in myself.
So when I pray to the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, I remember that we’re not the first people God has called to big adventures, to new work and new ways of living, or to challenging circumstances. We’re not the first flawed people trying to do hard things.
Here’s a little snapshot from Jacob’s life.
Genesis 32:22-26 (Common English Bible)
22 Jacob got up during the night, took his two wives, his two women servants, and his eleven sons, and crossed the Jabbok River’s shallow water.
23 He took them and everything that belonged to him, and he helped them cross the river.
24 But Jacob stayed apart by himself, and a man wrestled with him until dawn broke.
25 When the man saw that he couldn’t defeat Jacob, he grabbed Jacob’s thigh and tore a muscle in Jacob’s thigh as he wrestled with him.
26 The man said, “Let me go because the dawn is breaking.”
But Jacob said, “I won’t let you go until you bless me.”
Jacob is a man with a lot of baggage. He’s a polygamist, he’s got a big and messy family where people mostly don’t get along. He’s a pretty wealthy person at this point, but he’s come by it through incessant struggle and hustle, over decades. And in this scene he’s getting ready to meet up with a brother he hasn’t seen in years, a brother he thinks has reason to hate him, because in all his hustle, Jacob has done some people wrong over the years, his brother included.
But beneath all of this drama, Jacob really just wants a blessing. His father never knew how to love him well, and all his blessing has been gained through hustle and hard work and theft, but Jacob wonders:
is there someone who really knows me and sees good in me? Can I be loved? Can I be believed in?
This is where that name Israel comes from – it’s a new name for Jacob before it’s a new name for an ancient people. It means “struggle with God.” Because that’s the invitation of faith – to struggle with our deepest questions and longings, to struggle over those with God and find blessing, to find that God sees us and loves us and believes in us even as God humbles us and calls us to change.
So when I learn to pray to the God of Jacob, I remember that God has room for my biggest questions and fears. God has room for the knotty, ill-formed parts of me. And God knows the ways in which I’m still the same little kid just looking for his parents’ attention, hoping he’ll be seen and loved and encouraged.
That God had room for Jacob, had time for Jacob, had hope for Jacob. And that God has room and time and hope for you and me.
What a gift.
The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, the God of our broken selves and deepest longings, and heroic journeys.
But what happens when you add the women? Well, when you restore these women into God’s story, you introduce a lot more. Because adding just the stories of these eight women into how we name God, you add in stories of heartbreak, of infertility, of weeping, of discrimination, and sex trafficking and sexual violence.
You add in rivalries and betrayals, people defined by their physical beauty and people defined by their lack of physical appeal. You get people who use people and the people who are used. All of them mattering to God, all of them worthy of God’s love and attention and place in God’s big story.
Take Rachel, she’s the archetype in the Bible of maternal yearning and maternal grief too. In Jewish literary and spiritual tradition, Rachel is always weeping. Because that’s part of what mothers do. Mothers grow babies in their bodies, and feed them with their bodies, and birth them into the world. And sometimes things go great, but usually some things go wrong. And mothers worry and weep, and sometimes they lose their children and they keep on weeping.
The God we pray to isn’t just the God of Jacob but the God of Rachel as well, the God of our weary years, as the song says, and the God of our silent tears.
And what happens when you add Bilhah and Zilpah in too?
Well, first you have to find out who the heck these two women were, and then you find out and you think, my God. A man married off his two daughters to a distant relative of his. And then when there were fertility issues, he took two slaves of his and gave them as concubines, as sex slaves to his son in law.
And now we see God isn’t just the God of our heroic selves and deep aspirations, but God is the God of the victims, the God of our invisible selves and the God of our unthinkable disasters.
The story of Genesis gives bits of this. We learn this about Bilhah:
Genesis 29:29 (Common English Bible)
29 Laban also gave his woman servant Bilhah to his daughter Rachel to be her maidservant.
It’s more polite than the way I put it. But the story is that Rachel’s father Laban gives Rachel a slave to make her life easier. And then this ensues. ***
Genesis 30:1-6 (Common English Bible)
30 Rachel noticed that she was not bearing children for Jacob, so because she envied her sister Leah, she told Jacob, “If you don’t give me sons, I’m going to die!”
2 That made Jacob angry with Rachel, so he asked her, “Can I take God’s place, who has not allowed you to conceive?”
3 Rachel responded, “Here’s my handmaid Bilhah. Go have sex with her. She can bear children on my knees so I can have children through her.”
4 So Rachel gave Jacob her woman servant Bilhah to be his wife, and Jacob had sex with her.
5 Bilhah conceived and bore a son for Jacob.
6 Then Rachel said, “God has vindicated me! He has heard my voice and has given me a son.” Therefore, she named him Dan.
So Bilhah isn’t just a slave, now she’s a sex slave. Surrogate is too polite a term. Bilhah has no choice, no agency here. Her children are accounted as Rachel’s, not her own, and she has no standing she gains, no reward.
Heart-breaking, not part of God’s good longings for the human family that anyone would be used and abused like this, and yet real too. For all our families, if we look long or wide or deep enough, have abuse in them somewhere. They have unbearable injustices and heartbreak somewhere. And some of us, truthfully, don’t need to look long or hard enough in our lives for these stories.
But God is big enough, good enough, wide enough to include stories like this among the founding mothers of our faith. And when we name God by these stories too – God of Jacob and Leah and Bilhah and Zilpah – we remember that God has room and heart and blessing still for the crushed and invisible people of our generation, and for the crushed and invisible parts of ourselves.
God is the God even of our great disasters, which God knows and sees with tears and love, and hope and care.
When we name God like this in our prayers, we signal to God and to ourselves that prayer isn’t a time for thin words and cover up and fake smiles. Prayer is a time for our whole messy selves to engage God in all of God’s deep knowing and in all of the wideness of God’s mercy. And there we can tell the truth about our lives. And we can tell the truth about our world. And we can trust that God has time and love and hope for it all. And see what comes of that.
There was a 19th century songwriter that wrote a song about this. It’s called “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy.” It was written by a man named Frederick William Faber.
He was raised as the kind of Christian who thought that God chose some people for salvation and blessing in this life and in the life to come. And that many other people were not chosen or blessed by God. So as a child and a young adult, Faber would have been taught to think that most of the world was damned. Jews, Muslims, Catholics, the indigenous peoples of the earth that his country – the British Empire – was busy colonizing at the time. He wouldn’t have thought they were part of God’s story until Faber had a change of heart, a change of faith and became a new kind of Christian.
Religious deconstruction and reconstruction isn’t new, my friends. Faber hung on for a deeper truth, and in his last decade of life, ill in bed in his 40s before he died too young, he wrote the hymn “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,”
It says:
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy,
like the wideness of the sea.
There’s a kindness in God’s justice,
which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good.
There is mercy with the Savior,
there is healing in his blood.
But we make God’s love too narrow
by false limits of our own,
and we magnify its strictness
with a zeal God will not own.
For the love of God is broader
than the measures of the mind,
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
What we call people matters. What we call God matters. If we just call the God of our prayers something vague like God, we can easily invest the divine with a bunch of garbage, or have God get vaguer and smaller over time until it seems this God is nothing but a figment of our imagination.
But pray to God as eternal creator of heaven and earth, God of Abraham and Jacob and Rachel and Bilhah and all the rest of the founding fathers and mothers, God and father and mother of our lord and savior Jesus Christ, and we remember there’s a wideness in God’s mercy. We’ll get a bigger God, a God with room for everybody – stranger, friend, and foe – and a God who even has room for all of our selves. God of our broken but heroic selves. God of our weeping selves. Even God of our invisible selves and our great disasters. The God who loves to give us attention and solidarity and love and help all of this.