The God We Didn't Order

There are two people in the readings for Proper 17A who both, in their own way, tell God: this isn't what I signed up for.

One of them is Peter. Last week he nailed the answer — you are the Messiah — and Jesus told him he was a rock. This week, Jesus starts talking about Jerusalem, and suffering, and dying, and Peter pulls him aside like you'd pull a friend back from embarrassing himself in public. God forbid it, Lord. This must never happen to you.

The other is Jeremiah, a few hundred years earlier. He didn't ask to be a prophet — nobody does. It cost him his friendships, his peace, his place at the table with everyone else who still got to laugh. And by chapter fifteen, he's done being polite about it. He accuses God, flat out, of being unreliable. A deceitful brook. Waters that fail.

I don't think either of them is wrong to say what they say.

Here's what I keep noticing, though: both of them had a God already in mind before the actual God showed up. Peter wanted a Messiah who wins. Jeremiah wanted a God who'd protect the guy doing the hard, lonely work on God's behalf. Reasonable things to want. And both times, the God who actually showed up didn't match the order.

Most of us have a version like that too — sketched out somewhere in the back of our minds, mostly unexamined, updated on the fly. The God who keeps good people from getting sick. The God who rewards the church for staying faithful with growth, or at least with not shrinking. The God who, if we're honest enough, we've been kind of managing, the way you'd manage an employee who's technically in charge but really isn't, as long as things go the way you need them to.

And then something happens — a diagnosis, a budget line, a year that doesn't cooperate — and we find out how much of our faith was actually faith in the version we built.

What gets me about this pair of texts is that God doesn't argue either of them out of it. No defense of the resume. No "let me explain." Something quieter than that, and honestly, something harder to sit with.

I'm not going to tell you what that something is here — that's Sunday's job, not the blog's. But if you've ever caught yourself negotiating with God over what you will and won't accept from him, this is worth showing up for.