Sermon "God is Other, People"
Rev. Dr. Steven A. Peay
Sunday, March 15, 1998
Luke 13:1-9
go to
Bible Study
"God is Other, People"
"Do not come near; put off the shoes from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground..."
The March issue of the journal First Things carried an article by Avery Dulles, a theologian I admire a great deal. The article, entitled "The Ways We Worship," began with Dulles recalling a banner he'd seen in a church years ago. The banner read: "God is other people." His recollection was that he wished he'd had a magic marker so that he could have added a comma. In his mind, the banner should have read: "God is other, people."
Dulles thinks that the versions of the banner articulate the major streams of thought on Christian worship. He describes them as 'otherworldly' and 'this-worldly' orientations. It's a thoughtful piece and his conclusion is correct: "we may conclude that neither reading of the inscription on the banner in the parish church does justice to the mystery. God is neither other people nor does he dwell in remote seclusion."
So, how do we talk about, approach God? It's a problem Christian folk have been working on for some time now. Annie Dillard, writer-naturalist-contemplative and one-time Congregationalist, has offered some powerful thoughts in her book Holy the Firm. In the book she examines the power and mystery of God evident in nature and contrasts it with the ordinary response of Sunday morning worship. Dillard describes the often surface meetings with God we have as "set-pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without getting killed." Dillard's description almost makes me think of one of the 'Monty Python' routines where the clueless cleric is babbling away: "O Gawd....you are so verrrry huge. Gosh, we're all impressed down here." In another work, Teaching a Stone to Talk, she offers this comment on worship as commonly practiced:
...on the whole I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible, aware, of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blindly invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children, playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning."
Moses was "sufficiently sensible;" he knew that he was in the presence of something, someone different from anything he had experienced before. There in front of him was a bush...burning...yet unconsumed by the flames. He knew, instinctively, that this was Other than what he was. From the midst of the flames a voice called him by name and told him he was in the presence of the holy. The voice identified itself as that of the God of his 'fathers,' the patriarchs. In that moment, Moses became the next link in the great chain of tradition - the "handing-on" of a gift from giver to recipient. The giver and the gift were one-and-the-same; the living God opened himself to his creation.
In the moment of encounter God discloses his name to Moses: "I AM WHO AM." The name reveals the truth we know about God: He is and because he is, all else is. I may use the verb "to be" in reference to myself, but it is always changing. What I am now is not what I was and not what I will be.....but the "I AM" does not change. He is the constant from which all life and change derives. He is, as the theologian Paul Tillich put it, "the ground of being." Or, as Thomas Oden writes in his wonderful book, The Living God:
The faithful know themselves to be alive, but God is known to be more alive than any imaginable living being. God has no trace of decay or death at work in himself. It is to the living God that faith prays, present amid the people in radical, unceasing spontaneity and limitless energy. The language of Exodus at Mount Horeb at the moment that God's name is revealed as Yahweh suggests the sense of dynamism and intensity surrounding this reality: "I am that which I am," or "I am that I am."...Not only is God living, but also the source of our life - active and tireless. God is unfailingly alert and aware as distinguished from "the gods," who, without life, are without consciousness or power.
When we come to worship on a Sunday morning, bow in prayer, respond to the beauty of our world, think a thought, speak a word, know love or any other emotion, it is that God we encounter. God challenges us to come to know him, to see "earth crammed with heaven and every common bush aflame" with his presence. Even the science and technology so many use as an excuse to avoid the encounter - counting it useless, frivolous or ridiculous - has its source in the living God who lurks in the occurrence that "just can't be." More wonderfully, he is present in the glories of the ordinary and, as the mystic Julian of Norwich reminds us, holds the world in his palm and loves it because he made it.
It seems to me that a stroll through any bookstore, a cruise through the internet, a look at most any magazine says that people are hungering for an encounter with God. The word 'spirituality' is everywhere, but so few know how to name it. The recent sociological study A Generation of Seekers identified that people are looking for something bigger than themselves; an over-arching principal which will allow them to "put it all together." Yet, the tendency on one side of contemporary Christian theology has been to reduce God to our size, to make him "user-friendly," and this is not what fills the void. The other tendency has been to practice 'traditionalism;' which has been brilliantly described by Jaroslav Pelikan as the "dead faith of the living." Both positions, I believe, stand in opposition to the reality of the Christian tradition: "the living faith of the dead."
The God who is Other desires to be known by us. He speaks his name to Moses and enters into covenant relationship with the people of Israel. So powerful is God's entrance into human history, Paul even sees the Incarnation of the Christ foreshadowed in the Exodus event. When people confront Jesus with Pilate's massacre of a group of Galileans, seeking to find an explanation for evil in the world, he redirects their thinking. He shows how they misunderstand and, categorically, refuses to blame God - his justice, or his carelessness, or his powerlessness - for any so-called "act of God" catastrophe. Nor can the sinfulness or lack of faith of the victims be blamed. If sin is mentioned, it should only to be to remind ourselves that we're all falling short of where God wants us to be and to renew our dedication to conversion. Sin, alienation from God, is the greatest tragedy of all because it makes us insensitive to the presence of God in our midst.
Jesus reveals in the parable of the fig tree what Moses encountered on Horeb: God is patient. I like what one commentator has written on this passage:
...[God] cannot bring himself to cut down the barren tree, cannot stop hoping that it might show signs of bearing fruit after receiving special care. It is God's patience that grants a delay to give the sinner a last chance to be converted and bear fruit. It is God's patience that, far from justifying negligence, must make the sinner conscious of the urgency of conversion. God does not tire, does not lose patience. . .ever. For "it may bear fruit in the future." But he is powerless before those who refuse to yield to the unceasing calls of his kind solicitude and grace.
The God whose presence burned in the bush has continued among us throughout history. Again and again, God has manifested himself inviting humanity into the encounter with graced existence. When we have strayed from the way of life he has desired for us, his Word has beckoned us back and took flesh among us so that we might know the way of peace, of hope, of patience. Even the powerful lure of temptation could be overcome, Paul told the Corinthians, if we trust in the power of the living God. No wonder Julian of Norwich heard these words, "And all will be well. And all manner of things shall be well."
Are we "sufficiently sensible"? Are we aware that we have entered into the presence of the living God - not just in this hour of worship, but in every aspect of our lives? How are we to respond? The voice from the burning bush said, "take off your shoes;" acknowledge that you are on holy ground. I'm not so sure God intends for us to go around barefoot. Rather, I think we are to heed the voice of the Incarnate Word; who told us that we were to be like our Father in Heaven. In other words, we are to love, to serve, to be the way it has been modeled for us.
Practically, our response begins with our attitude toward God. If we realize that we are in his presence, we will act accordingly. The goal of Christian life must be the 'practice of the presence of God' as we walk the path of union with him. His will for the world he made will come to fruition as we encounter the mystery of the God who is other people; God who is other, people...the living God who is beyond our imaginings, our comprehension and who loves us very much.
