God Beyond Our Boxes

Jonah 3: 10 – 4: 11 & Matthew 20: 1-16

Roger Lynn

September 30, 2018

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God has a serious attitude problem! It’s been going on for a long time now, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better. For some reason which seems difficult for us to fathom, God simply refuses to cooperate in acting the way we think God should act. Time and time again we have a very clear understanding of what God should do in some particular circumstance or another. And time and time again God chooses to defy us – challenging our best wisdom and acting in ways which fly in the face of accepted cultural norms.

OK, so my tongue may have been located firmly in my cheek! And yet, I suspect many of you found yourselves smiling uncomfortably in recognition of the sentiment. Faith is often an experience of growth because it challenges us to rethink our understanding of God, the world, and even ourselves. What does it mean when we open ourselves to the possibility of God beyond our boxes?

The story of Jonah offers us a glimpse into this experience. While many scholars have come to understand the book of Jonah as a kind of parable and probably not as an historical event, it certainly represents a tale with which many people down through the years have identified. Jonah is so convinced the unwashed, unrighteous, unholy people of Nineva are cut off from God, deserve to be cut off from God, and should be cut off from God that he is unwilling to even participate in the possibility that it might be otherwise. “I’d be better off dead!” he says to God. Jonah is so unnerved by God’s refusal to stay in Jonah’s box that all he can do is stomp off and pout under a tree. The ending of this odd little book reads like a comedy of the absurd. Jonah sounds ridiculous, which is, of course, precisely the point.

And then, several hundred years later, Jesus comes along and tells the story of the workers in the vineyard. And once again we find ourselves face to face with the very uncomfortable notion that God might not behave in ways which fit with our understanding of how the world works. “Of course it’s about working hard. Of course it’s about earning your rewards. Of course it’s about getting what you deserve. Anything else just wouldn’t be fair.” The parable strikes way too close to home because there’s at least part of us that agrees with the workers who complained. We don’t want the world to work like that! We don’t want God to work like that! It’s just not right! But there it is again – God refusing to stay put inside our boxes! The world is bigger than we can imagine. There is more to God’s love than we can imagine.

What I really appreciate about these stories is more than simply the ways in which they help me understand God’s love and inclusion for all people - even the “outsiders.” What I really appreciate, in a “challenging, uncomfortable, don’t much like it at all” sort of way, is the reminder that there are always boxes in which we try to contain God. We never see them as boxes, which is why they are so dangerous. The walls of our boxes are made up of “just the way things are.” Of course the Ninevites are outside of God’s care and concern. They aren’t like us. They aren’t God’s chosen people. Of course we earn God’s love by what we do, and of course we deserve more than those “other” people. God refuses to be contained and God refuses to give up on us, so eventually we do get things figured out. We come to understand that being God’s chosen people only makes sense when it is contained within the larger truth that everyone is God’s chosen people. We come to understand that we don’t have to “earn” God’s love. Love is never something which anyone can “earn.” All we can do is to accept it as the outrageous and abundant gift which it is. 

Eventually we do get some things figured out. But we also keep coming up with new ways to reinvent the box. Part of being people of faith means being constantly on the look out for the new ways in which we try to limit, contain, and restrain God. It’s easy to recognize the ones we’ve already dismantled (or at least are working at dismantling). At least to some extent we have figured out that the color of a person’s skin doesn’t matter (we didn’t use to know that). We have begun to figure out that how much money you have doesn’t matter (we didn’t use to know that). We have begun to figure out that a person’s gender doesn’t matter (we didn’t use to know that). We have slowly begun to figure out that a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity doesn’t matter (and we really didn’t use to know that). 

So what’s next? What boxes will we discover next? What walls will God begin to help us knock down, push past, and render meaningless? It’s never comfortable, this business of letting go of our boxes. There’s safety and security in knowing where the walls are, where the boundaries are, where the limits are. But do we really want a God who can be contained inside our boxes? Do we really want to live a life that can be contained inside our boxes? There is an old saying – a ship is safe inside the harbor, but that’s not what ships are for! May we continue to discover what it means for God to be beyond our boxes.