Sunday November 9th, 2025 Worship

As humans, we are constantly trying to shape God into our image or narrow down the understanding of who God is and what God’s love means for the world based on our viewpoint. We see this all the time, probably so much so that our brains tune out much of the noise. From our preoccupation with where ourselves, or often other people, are going to end up after death (I’m sure you’ve all likely seen a billboard or two along those lines or heard the street preachers outside of the stadiums), to our desire to put strings and conditions on who is loved by God and what we need to change about ourselves in order to be deserving of it, our history is littered with examples of our attempt to constrain God.
Take Job’s story, for example. In today’s reading, Job is making his profession about his trust in God in the face of his friends and neighbors claiming that he can’t possibly still be faithful after the death of his children, the loss of his wealth, and the challenges to his health. Surely, he must have done something to royally anger God, or at least that’s what they seem to believe. As challenging as his situation is, Job doesn’t need to prove his faith or justify himself in the eyes of the people around him. His relationship to God is between him and God. When we can’t make sense of the pain and suffering in the world or in someone’s life, society is really quick to point fingers and blame them for their reality. After all, they too must have done something wrong or maybe they just weren’t faithful enough. We ignore the human systems that make life more challenging for many people by narrowing the understanding of what it means for someone to be loved by God; and we want to bestow this honor on someone if we think they are deserving; if they look, think, and act like us. Yet, as people of faith, we are called into a more radical way of living in the world. One that helps to break down those human barriers, as we understand and witness to what it means to be loved by God and to share that love with the world in turn. When we become a conduit for love, instead of the judge and the jury. One of the ways that we do this is when we profess the words of the Creeds.
I’ve been teaching a course on the Apostles’ and Nicene(-Constantinopolitan) Creeds on Wednesdays as we prepare to bring them back into our weekly worship. I wanted to spend some time studying them first, though, because many of us have had to memorize the Creeds, but we have not always been given the opportunity to spend time thinking about what it meant when it was written and what it means for us now. When we look at it line by line, we can see the depth of the words and what they are conveying about what we believe. The Creed, then, isn’t just something that we had to memorize as a part of our religious education, but becomes a statement of faith about who we believe God to be and what that means for our world. It’s not something that we just recite from memory, but something that helps shape our understanding about what God is up to in the world and how we are called to live as a response.
I can’t help but think of this work in studying the Creeds when I see the final line of our Gospel today: “Now God is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to God all of them are alive” (Luke 20: 38). Here we have this proclamation from Jesus that God is the God of the living, not because the dead are excluded or too set apart from God as to be unwanted, but because they are alive in God too. He is giving this profound statement about the resurrection life and this intimate relationship that God has with creation. When we hear the words of the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended to the dead” or “he descended into hell,” we are confessing that there is no place that is excluded from God’s love and grace. It is a radical statement about who we understand God to be and who is welcomed and loved by God. It matters that Jesus didn’t just die, but that in his Resurrection, death and suffering are not given the final say. This is at the very heart of what we believe.
But, this notion that God is God of the living isn’t just a comfort to us in the midst of death. This promise of the resurrection is also supposed to influence how people are living their lives now. It frees us from worrying about where we are going to end up after death and instead calls us to live in the here and now, according to teachings of the Gospel. To live in community with and for one another; to open ourselves up to the pain and beauty of the world; to practice this radical act of love that doesn’t add strings or conditions. The promise of the resurrection is rooted in God’s love and grace for the world, all of it, even the parts that we want to deem unworthy. We are called to live as if we believe that to be true. The sole purpose of our lives isn’t to focus on where we go after we die, but to be present to our life as we are living it, and to be guided by the commandments to love God and love our neighbors.
When we look at Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians today, we are seeing his critique that people are being distracted away from the Gospel with their focus being consumed by this sense that Jesus is going to return to them soon. Instead of living faithfully every day, there was this extra emphasis placed upon what was going to happen to them when the return of Christ occurred. The people forgot what they had been taught, and instead focused on how they and others were going to be judged; they discarded the present to only think about the future. We seem to be missing the point of the Gospel, when we want to shy away from doing the difficult work of actually caring for one another today, or when we turn this into a righteousness contest, trying to show off how we are more faithful than that person over there. We seek self-justification based on what others are doing or not doing. Instead of dignity and respect, we are bringing in so much fear and shame, done in the name of God, all while trying to predict what the end times will be like and when they will happen.
Yet, when we hear that God is God of the living, we also are called to trust that God is still in the midst of all of this. Even when we get it wrong. Even when we are surrounded by so much pain and suffering that we can’t possibly understand how God can even be present at all. We are trusted to embody the Good News, to share God’s radical and unending love for humanity, even in all of our brokenness and messiness. We are beckoned to enter into the fray, to be present in the midst of daily realities instead of just trying to focus on the world that is yet to come. We are invited into the work of ushering in God’s kindom in the here and now.
This isn’t always easy work, as you know. Yet, it also doesn’t always have to be as complicated as we make it. We are not called to be the judge or the savior of the world, and thank goodness for that! We are, however, called to love this world without trying to determine if someone else is deserving of God’s love. We are called to love the world in big ways and in small. It can be as simple as asking someone how their day is and genuinely being interested in listening to a part of their story. It can be contacting your representatives, or donating to the food bank, or volunteering at the local school. This work is inherently grounded in our communities and in our relationships. Our little actions cascade into larger change, as the effects ripple out.
If the arc of the Bible teaches us anything, it’s that God does not turn away from us humans, no matter how many times we screw up, and that God is so much bigger and God’s love broader than we can ever try to contain. After all, it’s not up to us to hoard it away, but to share it with one another, and leave the rest up to God. We are able to do so because of the Crucified and Risen Christ, and the freedom that we are given through this gift of grace, to break down the barriers we put up around God. When our words and actions profess who we understand God to be, and we live as if we believe these promises to be true, who knows what ways God will continue to keep turning the world around. Our story is still being written, and it’s important that we don’t just try to jump to the end. After all, we are given this one beautiful, messy, chaotic, wonderful life; and God has given us this gift of life so that we do just that, we live.