Scripture: Ephesians 4:1-16; Luke 9:57-60.
I want to talk about the faces of God. We were invited last week to respond to the question: How has someone very different from you shown you the face of God? We were invited in small groups to tell each other about someone who had shown us the face of God.
It has been the intention all along of those planning worship for these weeks to bring some portion of what was said last week into our worship today. The idea was that this was a worship activity and not a business meeting, so we were not assigning reporters and recorders and having a formal report out of small groups as though we had to produce something. But we did want to gather some of the memories of what was said and give them some expression in our worship today. Thus the litany that began our service today.
As I was trying to prepare that litany, I was having all sorts of feelings of inadequacy. I was aware that I had personally been in just one group and that we didn’t have a systematic reporting system, so there were going to be lots of things left out, much of what was said being left out. Then I was also aware that there were not only a lot of words inadequately represented, but even more a lot of the feelings that accompanied those words, feelings on the part of speakers and listeners of those words, those feelings in no way were going to be adequately represented in this litany.
And then there’s the difficulty of trying to put into words at all the experience of seeing the face of God in another human being, which to me is a mysterious and profound event. So I’ve been feeling inadequate even just in listening to people tell me about some of the things that were said in their groups and trying to take it in and make it a part of me, much less trying to turn it into the formal words of a litany.
Nevertheless, I have some observations to make about what was said in small groups last week…even though I heard very little of it directly, even though what I have heard about I know leaves out much of what was said, even though I was aware that there was a lot of emotion in the room but was not aware of what caused it…in spite of all that I have some observations to make. You will tell me if they are off base.
What struck me is that so far as I can tell, and maybe without exception, the images of God we offered to each other were not images of power. Collectively we have seen the face of God in a very wide array of human faces. The faces who were not in that gallery last week were faces of power. In a way this is not surprising, I suppose. I was not expecting anyone to say that they had seen the face of God in George Bush, Al Gore, Joseph Lieberman, Dick Cheney, Chuck Robb or George Allen. Had I thought about it, I probably would have expected us to say pretty much what we did, that we have seen the face of God in people whose loving spirits, whose forgiving spirits, whose genuineness and whose vulnerability perhaps has touched us in some very deep places in our spirits. It is not surprising to me that our responses were of that nature, but there is a disconnect between those responses and much of official theology.
God is after all generally thought to be powerful, in fact all-powerful. That is the way we often refer to God, and it’s implied in the words we often use about God. Sometimes more than implied. God the omnipotent. God the creator. Almighty God. Such words roll off our lips, or at least have rolled off many lips, and have framed many of our images of God and defined how we think about God. And how we ask questions about God: If God is all powerful, why does God allow such suffering to exist? People talk about the will of God as though everything that happens on the earth is because it is God’s will, on the assumption that if it were not God’s will it would not happen. This image of God as all powerful is deeply ingrained in us, in the pictures we have of God, and in the ways we have of talking about God.
And yet, when we are asked where we see the face of God, it is not people of power who come to mind. The answers we gave suggest—maybe—that we need some new ways of imagining God, describing God, thinking about God, talking about God. The answers we gave suggest that the essence of God, for many or most of us, is not God’s power. This is not a matter of engaging in a theological argument about whether God is or is not all powerful. I am not wanting to argue theology. I am wanting to recognize where God is most real for us. I am wanting to keep in focus those faces we have seen that have made God real for us. And I believe they tell us eloquently that the essence of God is not power.
The essence of god is not even that God powerfully loves us. Again, we were not asked to name some people who had taught us something about God’s powerful love, but rather to speak of some people who had shown us the very face of God. And the thought that occurred to me was that thinking of the responses we made last week the essence of god is not even that God loves us, as some powerful being from beyond, but that God is that being, that reality, that calls forth love from us. The essence of god is not even to be all-loving, but to call forth love from us, to break through the hardness of the world. And so we see the face of God in people who have had that love called forth in them, and/or people who call forth that love in us. I think we need work, for many reasons, on our images of God, our ways of talking about God, our ways of imagining God, and I hope we are agreed that that is one of the things we are about here as a community of faith.
Which brings me back to the idea of covenant, and to what the title of the sermon says I am supposed to be talking about this morning. I am supposed to be talking about being grounded, about what it is in our lives that will keep us steady, and firm, and focused, and on course, not as the scripture says, tossed to and fro and carried about by every wind of doctrine.
I’ll be honest with you. I have struggled some with the sermon this week. Part of my problem has been that I knew I wanted to return to the theme of our covenant with one another this week, which I have been seeing as a kind of overarching theme for our worship this fall. At the same time I have been listening to myself say the word covenant so often in various contexts recently that I was starting to feel like preaching on almost anything else, anything other than covenant. Just some random topic—the meaning of miracles, angels, predestination, the death penalty, whatever—just so it wasn’t about our covenant.
On the other hand, I say to myself, this feeling I have is a symptom of the problem. We live in a society where attention deficit disorder is a widespread phenomenon. And I don’t mean because so many people in recent years have been officially diagnosed with ADD. I mean because from where I sit we live practically in a whole society that suffers from attention deficit—where news comes to us in bytes and where we move almost instantaneously from heartrending images to cheerful banter between the news anchor and the weatherperson, and where we ourselves can sit and flick the remote, deciding as we go whether to spend a few seconds or a few minutes at each station—a society where people often testify that they feel pulled in many directions all at once, running from one activity or commitment to another, with too little time or energy left over to reflect or center— a society where too many people, images, needs, tasks, and causes tug at us for attention and the good and right thing to do often seems to respond to as many different things as we can. It may not be the winds of doctrine that toss us to and fro, but life often does these days. In the midst of it all how do we stay grounded?
And then here I am worrying about whether a concern for our covenant can be sustained as a theme for worship for more than a few weeks, as though we should be clicking the remote and going on to something else. So I remind myself: there’s something important here, something that actually is worth spending some time with, paying attention to.
What is at stake in any talk about covenant is our sense of being a community. Are we doing something together here? What is it that ties us together in all our diversity? Are such questions important enough to us that we can spend more than a few weeks thinking and praying about them? Isn’t this why we even have a leading concern, to have a sense that we are working together on something, not just going our separate ways and doing all the good things concerned people do on their own? Isn’t this why we need a worship service from time to time when we can talk to each other, and if we don’t choose to talk just listen, as we did last week?
There are a lot of ways to work at becoming community. And there are a lot of answers as to what grounds us as a community, a lot of ways to answer that question. My answer for today is where I began. I actually answered the question today before I asked it.
What grounds us, among many other things, or perhaps among many other ways to say the same thing, is that we have come together to continue looking for the face of God. To share, yes, where we may have already encountered the face of God, but also to keep on seeking the face of God.
We are grounded not so much in the belief in God as in the quest for God, grounded in the faith that if we engage in that quest with enough diligence, with enough passion, with enough energy, with enough soul that it will be worth the effort, worth the journey—not that there are any guarantees of what will happen if we devote our energy to that questing but just that somehow it will be worth the effort.
We come from many places spiritually. Some of us may feel that God already is a powerful presence in our lives. Others of us may be more familiar with God as a silence, or an absence, or one who we have heard others speak of but have not yet met. In either case we are seekers after the face of God, in the one case because we can never allow God to become too familiar, in the other because we are called to explore the silence.
Sometimes we think in terms of church being a place where we come to have our hunger for God satisfied, and I hope we may be a place where some of our spiritual hungers do get fed. But there is another way of looking at it that may be equally true. A community of faith may be a place where we come to have our hunger for God reawakened, to have it intensified, not satisfied. In that way perhaps we can be grounded and at the same time set out on our journey again. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 8, 2000