"What's in it for God?" - Sermon for 7 Pentecost 7-27-25

What’s in it for God?

The Church has always held that God doesn’t need us; God doesn’t need anything. God is God.

We are made in God’s image to love, honor, and serve God in this life, and to be with God in the next. Not to keep God company or to feed God’s ego; but rather that we, as God’s beloved creation, can cooperate with God and, when we’re at our best, experience a sliver of what it is to be God-like.

God made us not out of need, but out of love. And God’s love is life-giving; it can’t help but create. It creates the cosmos, and you, and me. That’s what love does – even our love. It creates.

So why do we pray? Why do we ask and beg and bargain with God, as Abraham and everyone after him did, and we still do today? And if God loves and creates and wants to give, why doesn’t God always give us what we want? Is it too much to ask to have God give us a peaceful world and a stable climate and enough of the globe’s goods to go around so that nobody is homeless or hungry or preventably sick? We want fish and eggs, for God’s sake; not snakes and scorpions.

There is, of course, great mystery in God’s designs and purposes. Disaster-ridden Job found that out, and settled for God’s answer that some things are just beyond our knowing, at least in this life.

That’s the answer we often must accept, too, even if it’s teasingly unsatisfying. Stormwaters flood and tectonic plates shift and cells mutate and synapses snap. Bad things – or what we’ve come to call bad things – happen in nature because that’s how nature works. Some attribute this to “The Fall” of our first parents, disobedient in a garden. Others claim that nature simply does what it does, and sometimes we human bad actors punch above our weight to make things worse, or we get in the way, and the innocent and the guilty suffer the consequences.

But I do think that Jesus was onto something with his talk of fish and snakes and eggs and scorpions.

What’s in it for God is that God desires for us to be in dialogue with God. God doesn’t need, but God desires. Remember, there’s a difference. God desires us to ask, search, and knock; to persist in each of the kinds of prayer our catechism lists – you can look them up in your prayer book later. My point is that the more we pray – both by our words and by our silences – the more we get used to hearing, if that’s the right sense, the better we hear God what desires to say to us. What we may think are fish and eggs, to God might be snakes and scorpions, and vice-versa.

We don’t always know what to pray for or even how to pray, which is why Jesus said that it is the gift of the Holy Spirit – wisdom and discernment and right-judgment and all that – it is the Holy Spirit that God gives to those who ask; if not always the good things we want, like world peace or the cure for the common cold.

Put another way: perhaps the ability to affect what can change, to accept what cannot be changed, and to have the wisdom to know the difference – that’s the Serenity Prayer – is what Jesus means today.

Even Jesus did this, obedient in a garden as Adam and Eve weren’t, by asking in prayer for the cup of suffering and death to pass him by, if possible; and for the ability to accept the mystery of the divine plan if not; the mystery that was to be revealed only on the third day, the day of resurrection.

What’s in it for God is that God loves and trusts you and me, just as the Father loves and trusts his only Son. God doesn’t delight in the suffering that may follow when our prayers fall short of what we want, but God does delight when we live into the fullness of our humanity by daring to persist in the holy conversation that God starts with each of us.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

7^th after Pentecost C: Proper 12 – July 27, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“What’s in it for God?”