So
far this Lent I’ve given up the God of Power, the God of Prosperity, and the God
Who Shares My Enemy List. Today I’m
giving up the God Who Is With Us—although I do so reluctantly and temporarily.
Because I will always long for Emmanuel: God With Us. I will continue to sense the sacred in the
chatty high school student who bags my groceries and in the simple bread I
offer you at Holy Communion and especially in that moment when you take the
bread and your eyes meet mine in a true communion. I will still expect to hear the God Who Is
With Us in bird song and poetry and the outrageous satire of the Stephen
Colbert Report. God breaks through to me
in ordinary ways.
But
in my daring—or dire—moments, I see that God is actually way out ahead of
me. I don’t feel this elusive God has
abandoned me exactly, though I suppose I’ve felt that, too. I’m talking now about the possibility of
being too glib about God. I just can’t
pretend that God is my BFF, or deny that holiness is tinged with terror, or
speak in Christian clichés used like passwords to a private club. God is wild, as was said of the lion Aslan,
the Christ figure in The Lion, the Witch,
and the Wardrobe. But we’ve domesticated God and pulled God around on a
leash. As a preacher, I catch myself at
times speaking about God with more familiarity and certitude than any human has
a right to. So I try to live in that
paradoxical experience of the God Who IS WITH US and even WITHIN US and also
the God Who is Way Out Ahead of Us. Theologians like to say it this way: God is
both immanent and transcendent, both intimately knowable and completely
unknowable.
Here’s
why I believe in the God who is out ahead of us.
1. First,
I see this God in scripture—in today’s Hebrew Bible reading, for instance.
You’ll recall from the larger Moses story that God, in the form
of fire and cloud, led the Israelites to the Promised Land. This God told Moses to likewise “go ahead of
the people” even as God was going ahead of Moses to the rock at Horeb where
Moses would find water (Exodus 13:6). The God imaged in
the Moses story as a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day is not easily
embraceable or knowable. Moses’ God is shrouded and clouded in
mystery and cryptically, evasively named “I Am.” This “I AM” God, unlike the
Canaanite fertility gods, for instance, could not be imaged. I mean, how do you create a visual
representation of “I Am”? How do you, if
I may borrow words from The Sound of
Music, “hold a cloud and pin it down”?
In fact, the "I Am” God later forbad graven images, making it less likely the
Israelites would put their god in a box.
Hearing
Jesus’s words to the Samaritan woman about water that gives eternal life
reminds us that even glimpsing the divine in ordinary human encounters—as
this woman did in a Jew whom she’d been taught to distrust—the mystical remains. The woman at the well tried to literalize the water of which Jesus spoke. But she began to imagine a God as an unfathomable
font of living water, something essential that slips through our fingers and which we
can’t control. Appreciating the mystery of God is a healthy corrective when we
are prone to believe we know the mind of God.
Westboro
Baptist’s pastor Fred Phelps had, for decades, damned gays to hell. Fred Phelps
died this week. Many, including a few former followers, believe he is now encountering
a God whom he may not at first recognize, so certain was he of God’s hatred. But we believe and hope, even for the sake of
Fred Phelps, that if the Reverend Phelps did not know God in this life, he
knows God the Merciful now.
We
preachers, by the way, have a difficult job speaking both with conviction and
humble circumspection, of sharing what we believe is a God word while
recognizing our limitations and the limitations of human language to express
the ineffably Sacred. I’ve considered printing this disclaimer in our worship
bulletins: “This preacher tries her best to listen to the holy and preach words
of goodness and truth, but you are responsible for your own spiritual
discernment. Listen to this sermon at your own risk.” I love what Rhoda has
said and which we quote on Open Table’s website: “I
love my church because my pastor doesn’t tell me WHAT to think but encourages
me TO think!” I love that y’all get that and I think you are also aware
that I hit different theological notes in different sermons. Over time I try to
play a range of notes as corrective emphases because good theology is nuanced
and paradoxical.
For
today this preacher is asking you to consider two problematic postures before
God: at one extreme we cower before an imperious God like fawning subjects –
and at the other we cozy up to our personal friendly God who’s there to do our
bidding. Scripture pictures God as both the Pillar of Fire—and the Loving
Father. Today’s scripture leads me to emphasize God as not entirely
approachable.
2. The
God Who Is Out Ahead of us is also confirmed in a basic Christian disposition
that is forward looking. The Christian
gaze is on the horizon of the new dawn, which is our Easter posture. Traditionally and ideally churches were
built, like this one, oriented toward the East, into the dawn of the new
day. Each Sunday you are facing the
direction of the next day with the past behind you. We are oriented toward
hope, and the word “oriented”—think about its root in the word “orient”—literally
means “to face into the sunrise.” For Christians, our truth North is actually
East. Our very orientation should be a hopeful stance, an “East-er” stance,
with Easter newness as our defining event and disposition. Although Christians are rooted in traditions
and stories from the past, our “orientation” is toward resurrection and
potentiality and change—toward evolution, I might say. Which brings me to my final and maybe most
challenging point.
3. While
scriptures affirm a God who is way ahead of us and Christian disposition points
us forward, this future orientation toward the God Up Ahead is also hard-wired
into our species and in the cosmos itself.
A God who is light years beyond us is supported by evolutionary science.
Evolutionary Christianity attests to a God whose ongoing creativity must permit accidents, randomness, unpredictability, novelty, a God who has not, therefore,
scripted your life and mine. Science
proves that the ongoingness of life requires diversity and chance. Evolution follows some predictable laws of science
as well as randomness, mutations, some false starts on the evolutionary tree
and some accidents, some of which lead to heartier creatures that can survive
by evolving as conditions change. Individual creatures continue to grow, adapt,
and change or they die. This cosmos
continues to expand and change. So how can a God consistent with evolutionary
science who does not contravene the order of the universe, be at work in your life and in this world?
Through
love, which on the atomic level might look like simple attraction between atoms
to create a new molecule, and which on the human level might create families
and cooperative societies for their flourishing. But love cannot be exerted through compulsion
and manipulation. On a very simple,
personal level, you know that real love does not force or coerce or
control. Therefore, if we believe God is
Love, we may have to give up the God Who Is a Puppeteer Pulling the World’s
Strings. You may have to give up the God
Who Has a Detailed Plan For Your Life.
Moses’ God did not hand him a map.
In fact, the journey that should have taken only weeks took the
Israelites 40 years of wandering, of detours and accidents. Growth of the species and the human heart is
not programmed for uniformity or efficiency; it’s programmed for connection and
diversity, which help us survive and adapt and evolve. The God of Moses and Jesus offers us a
vision rather than a plan. God is a
dreamer, not an architect. God is the
point out on the horizon, not a GPS.
And
from that point out on the horizon, God exercises the power of love through
allurement, not coercion. For more than a century, evolutionary science has
prompted theologians to revisit the claims that God loves a world that seems
brutish and cruel. However, since love
does not annihilate or force itself upon the beloved, then God’s loving grace
must also mean “letting the world be itself”
Because God’s essence is love and God’s work is the continuation of
creation, any manipulation of the creation is counterproductive. God’s alluring
love can operate in our lives only to the extent that we desire and appropriate
it (39-40).[i]
So
the God Who Is Ahead of Us is not a God who scouts out the smoothest path or
clears away any obstacles. God
is out ahead of us to open up potentialities. God is in the ever enlarging possibilities for creation. God is out of ahead of us in terms of the
height and depth of the love that is ever expanding.
But God is also with us. The whole world is shot
through with sacred moments and God-lit people and holy places. God is right here, right now. In the smoothness of the polished wooden pew
you can run your hand along. In the play
of light and shadow in this room. God is
in the next breath you take, which may be the most sacred and ordinary thing
you can know. God, another name for the
powerful flow of love and life, is the active ingredient in our relationships.
But
consider that God may be at work in your life and in our galaxy by enticing,
beckoning, attracting us—like an electron attracting a proton, like the pull of
gravity, like the waft of a lovely fragrance. God’s influence is here but God—whatever
that might mean—is always just up ahead.
God
lures us into the future, entices us with hope, urges us to do a new thing,
think a new thought, encounter a new situation, understand a new friend, hear a
new word.
God
works by tuning our hearts to an elusive melody playing up ahead.
I
close with this prayer of Thomas Merton, which captures a beautiful tension
between the unknowable God who leads us from up ahead—and the God who companions
us and never leave us:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I
do not know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think that I am
following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you. And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am
doing. I hope that I may never do
anything apart from that desire. And I
know if I do this, you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing
about it. Therefore will I trust you always. Though I may seem to be lost and
in the shadow of death, I will not fear for you are ever with me and you will
never leave me to face my perils alone. Amen
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