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There is a moment when you are trying to get acquainted with someone that you want to find out what they are passionate about.

First Questions For God: What Is Your Passion? - Micah 6: 6-8; Hebrews 12: 18-24­August 23,2009 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------         There is a moment when you are trying to get acquainted with someone that you want to find out what they are passionate about. With some people it's obvious right away ­maybe it's the reason you met them - at a fan club or a political rally or an S.U. game. If you're sitting in the dome next to someone who has a bright orange sweater on, and half their head painted' orange and a big orange Number One on their hand, and a depressed look on their face because the Orange just gave up another touchdown, then you already know that person's passion. Chances are, you're there for the same reason, and with the same passion, and are equally depressed. So the two of you will have a lot to talk about. Hopefully, you'll both be happier this season.

But sometimes a person's passion is not so obvious - finding it is like detective-work. You know, you've asked the normal run of questions: What is your name? What do you do? Where do you live? Now you want to know, as I said last week, "Who are you really?" So you want to get the person talking about what they are really passionate about. Because maybe the person has been pretty passive or shy in this conversation. Maybe getting to know them is hard work. You want to find something that really interests them, or excites them, or riles them up. You might mention, for example, Sarah Palin -- that's usually good for twenty minutes of passionate conversation. I happened to be in a convenience store with a TV playing in the comer, when the announcement came out that Governor Palin was resigning. And suddenly a half dozen perfect strangers in that store got to know each other pretty well. Or maybe it's the economy, or the price of gas, those are good topics. Or maybe it's antiquing, or the Yankees versus the Red Sox. The thing is, if you find the right button, then suddenly a person's eyes get a little bigger, and they lean forward a little, and you really get to know them.

As most of you know by now, the last several weeks I've been applying get­ acquainted questions to God, under the assumption that one of the reasons we're here is to get to know God better. And so I wonder: how would God answer that question, What is your passion? I think that's a critical question for God, because I think it's one we mere mortals tend to get wrong. And it seems to me that the Bible spends a lot of time trying to set us straight about God's passion.

A couple years ago a scholar named D. Brent Latham came out with a book with a long clumsy name. It was entitled God is Not ... Religious, Nice, "One of Us' , an American, a Capitalist. That's not very catchy - you can't even remember it very well, but it makes a point. We have taken the God of the Bible and made Him passionate about what we would like God to be. We want Him to be religious - that is, we want Him to pay attention to the religious symbols and traditions that are important to us - as one angry woman said once, "If the good old hymns like 'Rock of Ages' were good enough for Jesus, they're good enough for me!" As wonderful as the hymn 'Rock of Ages' is, there is no known evidence that Jesus ever hummed it. We have our favorite hymns and symbols and practices, and people will defend them with passion - churches divide over which hymns to sing, which colors to fly, which version of the Bible they will use. And both sides will say they're doing it for God. But that is a human battle. There is little evidence that God much cares one way or the other. God isn't religious. God is not tied in to one church or religion or another. God is God.

Another thing that book title claims is that we have made God 'nice.' What I gather is meant is that God is someone who will politely fit in with our nice standard of congeniality - will never ruffle the waters, never challenge our middle-class values, will be a perfect gentleman in the face of all kinds of outrageous behavior. That is not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible rages against injustice. God is not nice and polite when human beings are unraveling creation.

In the same way, to rattle through the rest of Latham's title, God is not 'One of Us', not an American, not a Capitalist. Yet, in every one of those cases, God has been used to justify our actions and attitudes. We have become very good at shaping the God we want, and ignoring the true God of the Bible. I think the people in the Bible often had the same problem, and it centered around the question of what is holy. Because if you really want to get acquainted with God, and find out what His passion is, sooner or later you deal with the concept of holiness. God, in the Bible, is the Holy One - holy is His name, His Spirit, and holy are the things that God is passionate about.

When God is called 'holy', that is the way of saying that He is separate from everything else, and is not going to simply be what we want Him to be. He is not one of us - He is God who reveals Himself as holy. And the people of the Bible had a much higher sense of what that means than we do - for better or worse. God was so holy, they imagined, that to see His face would be certain death. God was so holy that to touch His sacred Ark would also be death. God was so holy that to take His name in vain was unthinkable: The scripture lesson for today from the letter to the Hebrews begins with these words about the things of God: "You have not come today to something that can be touched." Then it talks about God's order in the book of Exodus that if even an animal touches God's holy mountain, it shall be stoned to death. And of Moses trembling for fear before the Lord's holiness. That's the sense of awe about God in the Bible.

We don't have that same sense about God and the things of God anymore. And while I don't necessarily believe we want to go back to some of those superstitions in the Bible, I believe we lose something important when we lose a proper sense of the holy. And that presents us with two dangers. The first is that nothing will be held sacred. And I think that's close to what we are seeing today. For example, we hear everywhere the phrase, 'Oh my God,' as if the name means nothing - it's not anything holy; it's just an expression. There is no Sabbath anymore - Sunday is just another day, just as likely to be set aside for shopping and sports as for worship of God. And the sacred symbols of our faith, if people even know anymore what they are, are not held to be anything special.

The problem is that when nothing is sacred, everything is common; everything is expendable. If God is not holy, and God's world is not sacred, then what does it matter if we destroy the earth? What does it matter if we mistreat animals, or children, or minorities, or ourselves? We don't want to be superstitious like many of the people of the Bible were, but if that means that nothing, then, is held sacred, then we have lost everything worth living and dying for. That is a pretty dreadful prospect.

But that raises the second danger. When none of the traditional things are held sacred, people still long for meaning in life. People still long for things to hold special and dear. And that opens the door for powerful people to manipulate that desire for the sacred to their own ends. We emphasize the wrong things as holy, and miss what is important to God. In other words, we become like the Pharisees in the time of Jesus. The Pharisees were probably not bad people. They just had a high bar when it came to what is holy. And Jesus didn't meet their standards. They said, "You're eating without doing the ceremonial hand-washing - isn't anything holy to you? You're healing on the Sabbath - ­is nothing sacred? You're touching lepers, and talking with women, and eating with sinners." They thought they understood what God was passionate about - and they were wrong. They did not listen to Jesus, who understood the passion of God's heart better than anyone. So where can we really find out what God's true passion is?

One place to look is to the prophet Micah. Micah wrote one of the powerful books of the Bible because he saw what was truly holy to God, and what was not. Micah saw that powerful leaders were convincing people that what God cared about was how the Temple-worship was conducted - if the rams were properly prepared for sacrifice; if the oil was in the fire was right. Meanwhile, the poor and the hurting were neglected. Here's what Micah wrote: "Will the Lord be pleased with thousand of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? He has told you, 0 mortal, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?"

This is what it means to be holy, said Micah, and said Jesus after him. It's not about rules; it's riot about symbols. It's about caring for one another. That's what God is passionate about. Justice for God's people; hope for the poor and hurting; peace for the war-tom and desperate ones; grace to the outcasts and forgotten ones. When Jesus gave his most vivid picture of who was going to be welcomed into heaven, he didn't say, "Come on in, faithful ones. You kept the traditions; you followed every law in the Old Testament; you stood and sat at the right time, and memorized your Bible verses." That's not in there. What Jesus said was, "Come, you blessed of my Father, and inherit the Kingdom that is prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry, and you gave me food; I was naked, and you gave me clothes; I was sick or in prison, and you visited me; I was a stranger, and you welcomed me."

That's one of those moments when God's passion pours out. People put many words in God's mouth. But God says consistently throughout scripture, "If you love me, feed my sheep." That's what is truly holy. And yes, there is physical hunger, and emotional and mental and spiritual and relational hunger. God means all of those things. And sent a Savior to be the Bread of Life that we have to offer others. So how are you doing that? How does your passion reflect God's passion? Do you uphold holiness in your life - not as people define it, by rules and standards but as God does, by grace and hope for all God's people? Jesus wanted us to know that that was God's true passion. And that if we make it ours, God will do incredible things for us and through us.