Romans 8:26-39, John 10:11-18
Not so long ago I was speaking with a young person who grew up in the church but no longer attended. I asked whether they still believed in God. They answered, “I think I believe that there is more out there than we can explain, but I don’t think I believe in the kind of God that you believe in.” I replied, “I don’t think I believe in the kind of God you think I believe in.”
We make many assumptions about who God is and what kind of God we will believe in, or refuse to believe in.
Yet each of us, in our own way, suffers from the problem depicted in this cartoon by David Heyward.
The words we use to describe and speak about God are our theology. Each person who seeks to define God is doing theology. Yet all of us are tempted to limit God’s existence to our finite understanding. Our concepts of God are far too small.
The influential theologian Augustine Bishop of Hippo in the late fourth and early fifth centuries, taught.
We are speaking of God. Is it any wonder if you do not comprehend? For if you comprehend, it is not God you comprehend. Let it be a pious confession of ignorance rather than a rash profession of knowledge. To attain some slight knowledge of God is a great blessing; to comprehend him, however, is totally impossible. [1. Augustine, Lectures on the Gospel of John, as quoted in Reformed Dogmatics, vol 2, 48] https://aaronarmstrong.co/knowledge-great-blessing/
One thing I have come to understand in my journey of faith is that any experience of God is not God; it is my experience of God. I can only describe that experience within the limits of my human reason, vocabulary, thoughts, and feelings. My description of my experience of God cannot domesticate the divine.
When the religious leaders saw these letters, they simply said the word ‘Lord’. These letters were poorly translated as the word Jehovah and then more recently as the word Yahweh. Neither really fits the original intention which was to suggest the mystery that lay behind and beyond these symbols. As an aside the tetragrammaton is a play on the Hebrew phrase, “I am who I am”.
When we are confronted by the mystery of the origin of all things, our temptation is to simplify God into something that reflects who we are. We make God in our image. However, God is utterly other and mysterious. this mystery because God became human.
God is both utterly transcendent and completely immanent.
In his book exploring the concept of “God”, the philosopher and theologian, David Bentley Hart reminds us of Augustine’s teaching that “God is not only superior summo meo – beyond my utmost heights – but also interior intimo meo – more inward to me than my inmost depths.” (P.10)
We are going to explore these two aspects of who God is as beyond and within us after we sing the old hymn Immortal, invisible, God only wise.
Immortal, invisible, God only wise
When we begin to contemplate the mystery and otherness of God, I am often reminded of something that the 16th century reformer, Ulrich Zwingli said, in his Commentary on True and False Religion. "Of ourselves, we know no more of God than a beetle knows of man".
Yet even this statement is inadequate as an expression of the gap between the divine, uncreated mystery that is God and our existence as created, finite beings.
There is a well-known mystical writing from the 14th century called The Cloud of Unknowing which helps us consider the problem that we face. Written as a guide from a teacher to a student the teacher expresses the problem like this.
By your eyes you can know only what has size and shape—what is large or small, round or square, near or far, light or dark, coloured or shaded. By your ears you perceive only sound. By your nose, only scent. By your tongue, only taste—sweet or bitter, sour or fresh, pleasing or foul. By your sense of touch, only heat or cold, hardness or softness, roughness or smoothness. But neither God nor any spiritual reality possesses any of these qualities.
As such we might say that God does not exist in the way that anything else exists. God has no form, no matter, no time, requires no space in which to exist. God is no thing that we can describe. God is nothing.
Possibly, the most that we can say about the nature of God’s existence is what the author of 1 John postulated “God is love” (4:16).
Love here is not merely an amorphous emotion or an abstract idea; love is what God does. God creates and sustains all things, and God’s love is made manifest in the Word that becomes flesh. In Jesus, the God who is totally other enters time, space, and matter as a person.
This is the paradox of mystery of the divine that the philosopher David Betley Hart describe when he says,
“To speak of “God” properly, then…. is to speak of the one infinite source of all that is: eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, uncreated, uncaused, perfectly transcendent of all things and for that very reason immanent to all things.” P30 God Bentley Hart God.
Through Christ and in the Holy Spirt the unknowable God seeks to be known to us and is, as the saying goes, closer to us than breathing because as Paul puts it, "In him we live and move and have our being". (Acts 17:28)
Then let us sing of God’s love coming to us in such a personal way as we sing The Great Love of God.
The Great love of God
The incarnation emphasises how close God wishes to be to creation, because through the eternal Word becoming flesh God shares in what it means to physically exist. When Paul reflects on God’s love and closeness to people in and through Jesus, in his letter to the Christians in Rome, he asserts, as we heard today:
Neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The intimacy of God’s relationship with people and with the whole creation is reflected in the intimacy expressed between Jesus and the one whom he names as Father and in the invitation for we as people to come to God through Jesus as his followers.
Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and my own know me, just as the Father knows me, and I know the Father.”
The intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and God, expressed in the language of fatherhood, should not lead us into a single conceptualisation of God as male or as Father. Yes, the language is important because Jesus used it, but we should not reduce God to a bearded old man in the sky. Jesus’ language is a metaphor that emphasizes intimacy and sits alongside a vast range of other images and ideas that express who God is.
The literary theorist and philosopher Paul Ricoeur asserts that the Bible is polyphonic in the naming of God. That means the Bible presents many ways of describing God. The Uniting Church theologian Sally Douglas, in her book Rewilding Prayer, which we have in the library, outlines some of the myriad metaphors for God that are used.
For example, God is a rock (Ps 18:2) and the Most High (Ps 56:2); God is a bird (Ps 57:1); God is a refuge and stronghold (Ps 144:2); God is a mother who holds us on her lap (Ps 131:1–2). She also emphasizes that the biblical warrant “for using male and female language for God is clear. So too is the invitation to utilize non-gendered imagery for the Divine”. It was this range of imagery that inspired the book, What is God Like? that I read at the beginning of the service.
A few weeks ago, at the open evening, I answered a question that I have been asked numerous times, “Do you think that God is non-binary?” The answer that I gave I think reflects how I think about God’s immanence or closeness to us as well as God’s transcendence.
My answer is that non-binary is a term drawn from human understandings of gender. Like all gendered language, it seems illogical to apply it directly to God. For the God who is beyond time, space, and matter, gender is an irrelevant category. However, because we use many words and images to help us come closer to God, including gendered language that describes God as both male and female, I think that if imagining God as non-binary helps a person come closer to God, then I would consider that O.K.
The immanence and closeness of the God, who is love, transcend all our human differences. God is close to us no matter if we are 8 months old or 88 years of age, whatever our economic or social status, regardless of our gender or sexuality, whether we are healthy or confronting a terminal illness, wherever we come from and whatever our ethnicity. Christ is all and Christ is in all and the Holy Spirit lives within us and intercedes for us. This is love.
The
gift of connection with this God, who is totally other, is a glimpse into
eternity. The good news we share is that we can encounter and experience God,
and through that encounter we are transformed and can come to live on earth as
it is in heaven because we find ourselves in God’s company.
