Where is God?
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis
June 20, 2004, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill

Isaiah 44:6-22
Colossians 1:15-20

“He is the image of the invisible God….”

When I named this sermon, Paul Johnson was alive. In the midst of my writing, Paul Johnson was beheaded while the world watched on the front page. On the second page, another civilian, David Passaro, employed by the C.I.A., was charged with the beating death of an Afghan prisoner whose human face the world will never see. Both faces—the visible and the hidden--make the answer given by Elie Wiesel to the sermon’s question the only honest place to begin. In Night, Wiesel recounts the now well-known story of the hanging of two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp in Auschwitz. “The man died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. ‘Where is God? Where is he?’ someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, ‘Where is God now?’ And I heard a voice in myself answer, ‘Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows….’”

With the newspaper in one hand and scripture in the other, I believe we must think with considerably more care about where it is and how it is God may be known by us. Last week we did difficult business with the unbelief of religion, with the ways we seek God and the claims we dare to make about the God we believe we have found in the world. This week, we must wrestle in the other direction asking not how we find God, but with how God finds us, is known by us in the darkness.

Presbyterians, you should know, hold some very particular beliefs about revelation, about how we know God, beliefs which generally are not shared by those more taken with popular spirituality or mysticism or fundamentalism. First we hold that, in and of ourselves, we have no built-in aptitude for God, no capacity to be in a relationship with God. For all of our searching, say most Reformed theologians, we were not equipped naturally to find God. “Between God and us,” says one of those theologians, “there stands the hiddenness of God, in which God is far from us and foreign to us except as God has…created [a relationship] between Himself and us—and this does not happen in the actualizing of our capacity, but in the miracle of God’s good pleasure.” That we know God at all is, in the first place, all of God’s doing.

In the second place and again contrary to the mystics, we claim that even as God chooses to be known by us, God never comes to us directly. God is known only as God’s presence is mediated…mediated through the history of God’s chosen people, through the law and the prophets, through the life, death and resurrection of God’s Word made flesh, and through Christ’s church. That is why we tend to be suspicious of those who claim to be in direct communication with their Almighty Father. That is why, in spite of all the brokenness which characterizes any given religious community, we keep getting up on Sunday morning, believing God nevertheless chooses to be known to and through merely human beings and human history and this most human of all institutions, the church. But that is also why we proclaim that where God is known at all, God is known by God’s hiddenness.

In the third place, we believe revelation is a meeting, is the initiation of a relationship, a personal relationship of trust and confidence and commitment. We believe this in contrast to the more fundamental believers of any religion who claim to have been given an infallible truth or an inerrant text. God comes to us that we might live in trusting relation with God. Though like any real relationship, this one is marked by ambiguity and mystery. Dwelling in such trust, we are those who at most have been given a clue, yet only “a clue that enables [us] to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful coherent whole,” says John Leith, “to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities between what life is and what it ought to be.” So in the third place, as God is known to us, we know not what but who.

With these three things noted about how God chooses to be known by us, we may see even more clearly why the relationship between religion [our seeking God] and revelation [God seeking us] is a relationship fraught with irony and paradox. The irony is that when human beings are engaged in what they are sure is a high and holy purpose—when they are seeking after God or serving the God whom religion assures them they have found—ironically they may be dwelling farthest from the God who is God. Paradoxically, when human beings are sure that God is nowhere to be found, convinced that God has abandoned them or is squarely against them or never existed in the first place, there God may be hiding and, incognito, waiting to be known.

That irony and paradox are held in solution no place more honestly than in the 44th chapter of Second Isaiah. There we first hear the voice of God coming to us, the voice of revelation, declaring to God’s chosen people through the prophet, “I am the first and I am the last; besides me there is no god.” Isaiah hears this word in exile, a word spoken to a people “living as a minority in the shadows of the great Marduk temples and amidst the sound and excitement of the Babylonian religious festivals,” notes Paul Hanson. God says “I am” to God’s people who dwelt in those precise shadows, the darkness.

But precisely there, in the religiously-charged darkness, Israel lived in fear. It is fear, says Hanson, which ultimately turns a people away from the source of its life, away from the God who is God: “It is fear in the face of powers claiming to hold awesome powers over them…. [Their] surrender to false gods does not arise out of a pious response to an experience of the holy, but out of a sense of defeat before the demonic.”

Without a clue in these dark days, without the one clue that enables us to put together the disparate experiences of our lives into a meaningful, coherent whole, we believe our place in history to be such a place of fear, tottering day by day, event by event, on the edge of defeat before the demonic powers of death. And while the false gods of our day do not go by the names of Marduk or Gushkinband or Ea, their namelessness is all the more deceptive and dangerous: the gods of military might, of economic superiority, of political power. Afraid of defeat—a defeat whose memory has been freshened with the report of the 9/11 Commission—we turn to these gods to save. We baptize them with theological language and legitimate them with biblical images. We think we have nowhere else to place our trust and our hope, save in these. Where is God? On our side! So religion becomes an unwitting ally to nationalism, embracing these idols as revelatory of God’s will for the salvation of one nation still, we pledge, under God.

Suddenly Isaiah’s description of the manufacture of idolatrous objects [what we think Babylon is in the business of making] becomes a metaphor for our common life. Those things which secure our life are also those things worthy of worship: “Part of it he takes and warms himself; he kindles a fire and bakes bread. Then he makes a god and worships it, makes it a carved image and bows down before it…prays to it and says, ‘Save me, for you are my god!’” Now it occurs to us that Isaiah is not addressing the idol makers of Babylon, but the idol makers of Israel. Knowing the fear that crouched in the corners of their common life, God’s second word to the exiles was, “Do not fear, or be afraid; have I not told you from of old and declared it? You are my witnesses! Is there any god besides me? There is no other rock; I know not one.”

Apparently the Israelites do know one or two or three. In fact, they are so drawn to the gods they have fashioned that they can neither hear the word of God that addresses the fear within them nor perceive God’s presence in the darkness that surrounds them. “They do not know, nor do they comprehend,” says Isaiah,
    for their eyes are shut, so that they cannot see, and their minds as well, so that they cannot understand. No one considers, nor is there knowledge or discernment to say, ‘Half of it I burned in the fire; I also baked bread on its coals, I roasted me at and have eaten. Now I shall make the rest of it an abomination? Shall I fall down before a block of wood? He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot save himself or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud?”

Sometimes the darkness is so great that revelation, finally, can only come to us as a bolt of lightening on a dark and stormy night. Without such light from outside of ourselves, we have only to hold to the fraud in our right hand which cannot save. With even a glimpse of the Light that is Light, we may dare the next step and the next, claiming little for ourselves, trusting all to the God in whose right hand we are held secure. For the Israelites, this bolt of lightening came through the inconceivable, unimaginable, unexpected voice of Cyrus, a gentile who was king of Babylon and by whom their covenant with God was restored, their exile ended, God’s temple reconstructed.

For those of us who walk in darkness now, that lightening, the veritable light of the world, has come through the inconceivable, unimaginable, unexpected face of Jesus Christ. This is the light and so the self-emptying love his church has been given to shine into the midst of the night, as the storm rages without and within. This is the light we now hide because we cannot see or say, “Is not this thing in my right hand a fraud,” this unholy alliance of religion and nationalism? This is the God whose hiddenness we fail to declare because we have placed our trust elsewhere and cannot hear God’s address.

Yet he alone is the image of the invisible God, the clue that enables us to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities between what life is and what it ought to be,” the one in whom all things hold together and in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, to hide, to hold up until we be given eyes to see, ears to hear, hearts to trust.

All of this is to say, his face I see in the face of Paul Johnson, in the face of that nameless Afghan prisoner, in the faces blown to bits by exploding cars, in the face of a little child caught in a tree, in the face of Haitians gaunt with hunger, in the faces dying of AIDS a continent away, in the face of a nameless youth writing on the gallows of Auschwitz. So the God who is God comes to us in the darkness and, in the heart of darkness, we are saved from life without Him.

Remember these things, says God to the exiles about to be delivered, remember these things says the God revealed in the face of Jesus Christ, for you are my servants; I formed you, you are my servants, you will not be forgotten by me. I have swept away your transgressions like a cloud, and your sins like mist; return to me, for I have redeemed you. Thanks be to God. Amen.

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