I missed a Sunday; so my rainbow ended up with a white hole in it. Somehow, that white hole seemed more noticeable than the dozen colored stickers that filled the rest of the rainbow.
After many years living with me, my partner can testify that I still have a problem with holes in my rainbows. I can more easily tell you about the two things I have done wrong when I cook a meal than I can about the ten I have done right.
Maybe that's why Psalm 130 speaks to me. The second verse reads, "O God, if you should mark iniquities, who could stand?"
As a young man, I experienced God as a sadistic dictator, who definitely marked iniquities. God made up rules that no one could keep - and took pleasure in seeing us fail. I imagined God, sitting in heaven, just waiting for the moment that I would sin, ready to spring the Second Coming on me, quick before I could repent.
It was rather arrogant - assuming that God would time the Last Judgment just to get me.
Many people ask the fundamental question, "Is there a God?" For me, the problem arose because - emotionally if not always intellectually - I didn't ask that question. I was convinced of God's existence. That was the problem. I doubted that God could accept me. God might be an almighty father, but I needed a God who loved me.
Part of the new men's movement involves searching for a lost relationship with the father and often involves the longing as a son to hear one's father say, "I love you." I did not have that problem with my earthly father - just my heavenly one.
The church gave me a God who was distant, demanding, somewhat brutal - and never said I love you. Yet, like so many men in the men's movement in relation to their fathers, I knew in the depths of my being that I was related to this God who created me. And even when I hated God for all the impossible demands, I cried out with the Psalmist from the depths, "O God, Hear my voice! Be attentive to my cry."
The cry from the depths is the moment we offer ourselves to God as we are, no longer trying to live up to God's expectations - or what we perceive them to be. "This is who I am. Can you love me knowing that?" In the words of John McNeill, we "take a chance on God."
And when we get an answer, we may be amazed at the God who answers back.
I mean, all during my growing up in Sunday school, I had been fed the image of Jesus coming as a thief in the night. If Jesus came back right now, would you go to heaven? How would you feel about drinking that beer if Jesus came back right now?
But when I offered myself, warts and all, the God I met in Christ wasn't anything like the one Sunday school had taught me to fear. In Christ, I met a God whose first and only words were, "I love you."
The Psalmist says to God, "with you there is forgiveness, and for this we revere you. I trust in you, O God, my soul trusts in your word." In Jesus, I met a God I could trust. Fundamentally, Jesus' humanity succeeded in reestablishing my relationship with God.
In the words of the Apostles Creed, Jesus was "conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary, he suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried." It is a litany of shared human experience.
We see a strong movement toward support groups in our society: Alcoholics Anonymous, mental-health consumer groups, women's spirituality groups, men's groups. We find great power in shared human experience.
Confessing Jesus Christ as my Savior is my way of saying God connects with me out of shared human experience - all the way to suffering and dying. The Black liberation theologians who proclaimed that Jesus is and was Black were recapturing the central point of the creed that Jesus was politically oppressed and executed - and thus, treated as a slave, shared African-American human experience. The feminist artist who sculpted Christa, a female Christ hanging on a cross, far from denying the historical reality of Jesus, captured the fundamental confession in the creed. To proclaim Christ as Latin American peasant, as handicapped, as Palestinian, as single, as abused, as HIV positive, as woman or man, as gay or straight - to claim that Christ possesses whatever our condition is, captures the essence of salvation. In Christ's absolute humanity, God completely shares our experience and out of that shared experience saves us.
In the imagery of Psalm 130, God hears my cry from out of the depths because God dwells in the depths of human experience. Or as the apostle Paul says, in a passage that was the favorite of Menno Simons from whom the Mennonite Church takes it's name, it does not matter who builds or whether we build with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw. At the foundation - in the depths - dwells Christ - the word and love of God.
We do not recite the Apostles Creed as often as we once did. But when you do, you may want to look it over and think how God meets you in the depth of your being. And if you would like to either say or think, as you confess it, a word or two differently to express the particular depths which God shares with you, I would not consider that apostasy.
I once told someone that every time I preached, I preached the same sermon. "God loves you. God loves me. Jesus Christ is the love of God embodied. That is what salvation is all about. God is love." It really is the only sermon I know how to preach, because in the depths, at the rock bottom, foundation, the love of God in Christ is what I stake my life on. And it does not matter that God does not love us all the same because we are all different and God loves us each differently as we need to be loved - out of the depths of our particular humanity.
After the holes in my rainbow in Sunday school, we got a new attendance sheet. On that one, Jesus stood in a pasture by a stream, a shepherd's crook in his hand. Each Sunday we attended, we got to paste a sheep in Jesus' pasture. I liked that poster a whole lot better. Whether Jesus had one sheep or twenty in his flock did not matter. The important thing was that Jesus was there, loving his sheep from the depth of his being. For once, there were no holes, and everyone's picture was whole.