Don Friesen
Last Sunday I spoke about our need for friends on earth below. Friendship, its fault-lines notwithstanding, is a gift, one we nurture and enjoy; it is a tonic to our spirits. Though the dance of friendship is a delicate one, its choreography demanding on occasion, its rewards are many. Friendship is also at the core of our life as a church, for we are a faith community.
We come together as friends, but we are more than friends. If friendship was all that drew us together, we could just as well meet to play tennis! We could rearrange the chairs in here, put up some nets, and sit back and enjoy the game. There are many social groupings other than the Church that offer friendship. If you don't like tennis, we could form a society an ethnic society, a literary society, or a society of golfers! We could form a society dedicated to buying homes larger than we really need! We could form a society dedicated to purchasing every consumer product known in the capitalist world! We could form any manner of societies, and no doubt many of us belong to other social circles in which we have found friendship.
However, many people whom our society deems successful socially, materially, and in every other way yearn for more. Even those with a well-rounded, well-read, well-travelled, well-financed group of friends yearn for something more. After one has accumulated all of the education one wants and could ever use; after one has accumulated all the material things one can possibly store; after one has tasted every exotic taste available in travel, food and entertainment there remains a yearning for something deeper. I believe it is a yearning for God, a longing for some connection, however tenuous, with the One who transcends our existence.
A Yearning for One Who Transcends our Existence
Though we may be surrounded by friends, we are also people who, having heard rumours of God, cannot lay those rumours to rest. We share a yearning for communion with God that no earthly relationship can satisfy. That is certainly the testimony of many biblical saints. The psalmist wrote, "As a deer longs for a stream of cool water, so I long for you, O God." (Psalm 42:1, TEV) Or, as the choir sang it, so poetically:
The yearning itself is a gift of God, for unless we smother it with all manner of diversions and distractions, it prompts us to keep searching and reaching for something more. We all have a longing to be more than we are, to go beyond where we are. We long for a quality of experience richer and deeper than our present experience. Saint Augustine said it well:
Psalm 113: A Matter of Height
As I meditated on today's reading from the psalms I was struck by its fascination with height, most explicit in verse 4, where the psalmist writes, "The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory above the heavens. Who is like the Lord our God, who is seated on high...." (Psalm 113:4-5) The transcendent majesty of God is emphasized even more in verse 6, where God, seated on high, "looks far down on the heavens and the earth...." (113:6) Even the heavens are far below God.
The height differential between God and humanity is emphasized even more in verse 7, where the psalmist writes, "(God) raises the poor from the dust, and lifts the needy from the ash heap...." (113:7) The King James Version translates it more vividly, saying that God "lifteth the needy out of the dunghill," indicating the worst of debasement and wretchedness. God, says the psalmist, will lift them up! God will "make them sit with princes" (113:8), elevating them to honour and dignity.
Psalm 113 is a hymn of praise to the God who is supreme over all the universe! This is a hymn of praise to a God who is exalted. This is the transcendent God of glory! This is also a God who makes some of us nervous, for we have been schooled of late in the immanence of God the teaching that God is on our level. Some have said that our era is largely devoid of transcendence. We live in a world pre-occupied with the observable. Our consciousness is cluttered with miles of data and we have conned ourselves into the conviction that we ourselves are the only source of meaning. We live in a culture that values a style of thinking that ascribes all validity to the measurable, and is quite impatient with the immeasurable. We have become a transcendentally-challenged culture, our minds closed to that which lies beyond our mega-reams of data.
Sidestepping Transcendence
Our time tis not the time to talk about the transcendence of God, for to do so is to open ourselves to ridicule, as expressed in a cynical little poem:
What has happened to the transcendent and awesome God of our forebears, many of whom died at the stake? John Updike (1932-), addressing this reticence about transcendence, wrote, in a poem:
Our own religious tradition, while cheering Barth in his refusal to genuflect to minor gods or demagogues, inadvertently sidestepped transcendence itself. Centuries ago our own tradition sought to draw back the clouds of mystery, laced, as they were, with not a little superstition. We argued for simplicity of religious devotion and for integrity of religious assembly, wanting a tangible, flesh-and-blood faith community uncluttered with hocus-pocus and comprised of more than good intentions. Our worship retains that simplicity, but I think that the persecution, privations, and suffering our people endured could not have been endured without belief in a God who transcends a wicked world a God who is sovereign over all and who can help us rise above the vicissitudes of history brought about by barbaric, lesser sovereigns!
The Scriptures Take us into the Orbit of Transcendence
The Scriptures, especially the Old Testament Scriptures, lay great emphasis upon the sovereignty and otherness of God. Though God is a Friend, He is a Friend above all friends. The Scriptures speak much of the mystery of God. The psalmist declares, "Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised; his greatness is unsearchable." (Psalms 145:3) The Old Testament prophet, Isaiah, declares that the "...Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth... His understanding is unsearchable." (Isaiah 40:28)
Even Job, whose great suffering was more than sufficient cause to harbour reproachful feelings against God, said, "(God) does great things and unsearchable, marvellous things without number." (Job 5:9) One of the intertestamental writers, challenging anyone who is transcendentally-deprived, asks, "You cannot plumb the depths of the human heart or understand the workings of the human mind; how do you expect to search out God, who made all these things, and find out (God's) mind or comprehend(God's) thought?" (Judith 8:14)
In the New Testament Paul writes, "O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are (God's) judgments and how inscrutable His ways!" (Romans 11:33) And then quoting Isaiah, Paul asks, "For who has known the mind of the Lord?" (Romans 11:34, citing Isaiah 40:13 in the Septuagint) To the Ephesians Paul writes, "I pray that you may have the power to comprehend...what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge...." (Ephesians 3:18-19)
"How unsearchable are (God's) judgments and how inscrutable his ways!" (Romans 11:33) Inscrutable refers to that which is incomprehensible, unfathomable, impenetrable. What Augustine said about the Trinity holds for God, in general, that if you deny God, you will lose your faith; try to comprehend God, and you may well lose your mind!
There is more to God always more than we can fathom. God's infiniteness cannot be fathomed by finite human faculties! William James (1842-1910), musing over the prospect of immortality and considering all of the possible theories, finally laid his rationality aside and confessed that the notion of immortality is beyond our powers to comprehend. He suggested that, like Job, we put our hand over our mouth and be thankful that in our personal littleness we are here at all!
We Need a God Who Is in a Position to Lift us Up
I confess that I find comfort in a God who stands somewhat distant from human affairs. Years ago I read a biography of the celebrated defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who faced William Jennings Bryan in the 1925 Scopes trial. When William Jennings Bryan stated his belief in God and what he believed about God, Darrow replied, "Mr. Bryan, the trouble with your God is that He is too high up and too faraway."
Many Christians resist a high view of God, thinking that it somehow reduces us to worms and that all that is left for us to do is slither! I'm not so sure. The truth is, I need a God who is high up and faraway. For me, God's distance from the human enterprise does not for one minute spell God's disinterest. Only One who is removed from us is capable of lifting us out of our human situation and helping us to transcend the more vicious aspects of the human experience. Only a God whom we cannot fathom is equal to our unfathomable human wickedness!
I think of Jesus' parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), one of the companion pieces to the parables we heard last week. Here was a fanciful fellow who lost himself in "dissolute living" (15:13) and it would have been of small comfort and little help to him to be befriended by another of his ilk. The most they could have done was commiserate together. The prodigal son was shrewd enough to realize it, and so he headed home to someone who was in a position to lift him out of his dunghill pig dung, in his case and that was his father. He knew he could expect little from his father, given the power and authority differential, but he would have been pleased with the lowliest job on the farm.
We Have a God Above Who Welcomes and Embraces us
The father, however, put aside all power and authority, and ran out to meet the prodigal. He welcomed and embraced his son! Jesus was telling us that we can expect a similar warm welcome and embrace from God. Jesus, whom God sent to us to proclaim and demonstrate the Divine welcome, did that, with a special heart for those who seldom experienced the warmth of a welcoming heart. He touched and healed a lonely leper (Matthew 8:3). He had lunch with a dubious and reviled tax-collector (Luke 19). He willingly accepted the welcome of an outcast (Luke 7) and crossed cultural and racial barriers to welcome a Samaritan woman. (John 4)
Jesus demonstrated that the welcoming arms of God are much wider than we could have guessed. To children, who know instinctively what it means to belong and how much it hurts to feel excluded, Jesus said: "Let (them) come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of heaven." (Matthew 19:14) To weary adults, he said: "Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." (Matthew 11:28)
Jesus was so convinced of God's welcome and hospitable spirit that he used the image of a great banquet table (Luke 14) to convey the delight we experience in God's presence and God experiences in our presence. And Jesus insisted that the guest list include not just the usual suspects, but also many of those who never expected to get an invitation! (14:21)
The New Testament writers, convinced that God's heart is a welcoming and hospitable heart, repeatedly invite us to "draw near to God" (James 4:8); to "draw near with...full assurance of faith" (Hebrews 10:22, RSV), telling us that we can "draw near to the throne of grace" (Hebrews 4:16, RSV) with "boldness". (NRSV)
It seems strange that a God is so high above us would bother with us. One might expect a Creator God so high up and faraway to play Snakes and Ladders with his little creatures, greasing the rungs of the ladders now and then to amuse Himself. One might expect that a God so far removed from us would not bother with us, but that is the scandal of the gospel, that the transcendent God of glory is also our Friend a Friend who hears the cries of the poor and defends the orphans, widows and immigrants. This is the God who came among us as a vulnerable child born among the homeless, living as an immigrant, associating with outcasts, then executed as a criminal and buried in a borrowed tomb!
The message is profound: The Transcendent One has moved into our vulnerability. We might prefer a God who shields us from our own vulnerability an invincible, self-sufficient, controlling, and all-powerful God but instead God enters into our vulnerability, helping us to find strength in weakness, gain in loss, power in suffering, life in death.
We Gather as Friends Below to Praise our Friend Above
We come together as friends, but we are much more than friends. We come together as friends, on earth below, because we share a Friend above. We gather as friends below to praise our Friend above, because he lifts us up! We gather as friends because where two or three of us have gathered God has promised to be a Spirit-Friend ("God Sends us the Spirit, Hymnal: A Worship Book, #293) in our midst a Spirit-Friend who stands by us, come what may.
"As the hart with eager yearning
"My soul thirsts for God," continues the psalmist. (42:2) We long for a intimation of the sacred that would put to rest all of our doubts about this world and about ourselves. We long for moments of awe, when we catch a glimpse of another dimension. We long for those moments of awe when we glimpse life's widest horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era! We long for the wisdom and insight to perceive in the smallest of things that which is of infinite significance, and to perceive in the ordinary the extraordinary!
seeks the cooling watercourse,
so my soul with ardour burning
longs for God, its heavenly source."
(Hymnal: A Worship Book, #500)
"Our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee, O God."
We long for a trace of the transcendent a trace of the One who is beyond all that we know.
"Morning service! parson preaches;
A decade ago Marsha Witten wrote a book entitled All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton University Press, 1993), in which she analysed preaching on an important New Testament text, the Parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15). She discovered that the transcendent and awesome God of our forebears has been greatly softened in demeanour. It appears that God's primary function now lies in providing psychological benefits for believers; the Parable of the Prodigal Son has reduced God to a lovable, teddy-bear-like Daddy subject to the manipulations of his spoiled and prodigal children!
People all confess their sins;
God's domesticated creatures
Twine and rub against his shins...."
(Alec D. Hope, "The House of God," Modern Religious Verse)
"Let us not mock God with metaphor,
Updike, of course, was a reader of Karl Barth (1886-1968). Barth was schooled in the liberal theology of his time, but he began to question the moral content of his human-centred education after he saw his theological lecturers marching in support of Kaiser Wilhelm's war policy. It drove him, in his commentary on the book of Romans, to explore the radical "otherness" of God. Liberal theology had made God an object to be pondered whereas Barth saw God as a person to be encountered. You needed a God that transcends minor human elevations if, like Barth, you became involved with Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the anti-Nazi Confessing Church movement in Germany and were dismissed from your teaching post for refusing to salute Hitler!
analogy, sidestepping transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the
faded credulity of earlier ages;
let us walk through the door."
("Seven Stanzas at Easter")
All quotations of Scripture, unless otherwise noted, are from the New Revised Standard Version.