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The Redemption of Power: God the Father Almighty
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis September 25, 2005, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Hosea 11:1-9 Luke 15:11-32
Last Sunday, Homecoming Sunday, we began the day and the season from the distance of doubt. Doubt, in fact, became the necessary starting place for this next leg of our catechetical pilgrimage, a pilgrimage which began at the beginning of Lent with the Lord’s Prayer, continued over a long, hot summer with the Ten Commandments and now finds us this fall asking after the meaning of the Apostles’ Creed, the creed whose phrases will be before us, off and on, throughout the coming year. Doubt, I remind you, is the distance needed according to the old theologians, “to hear God’s Word.” But exactly how great a distance is needed? How far is too far? “Good people quit God altogether at this point,” says Annie Dillard of the God confessed to be both Father and Almighty. They “throw the baby out with the bath, perhaps because they last looked into God in their childhoods and have not changed their views of divinity since.” For the most part, I think she is right. Our take, not only on God as Father (given feminist objections) but on God’s almighty power, rests on a host of assumptions embraced without question and harbored for those dark days when we need someone to blame for life’s harder knocks. I say this as one who has tried to arm wrestle a good Presbyterian out of the notion that God caused her mother’s cancer and can, as easily, choose to cure it…or tried to reason a dinner partner out of the belief that God controls every detail of human destiny and therefore is responsible for Auschwitz…or tried to comfort a grieving father who believed his daughter’s death was the direct result of an Almighty Father’s powerful wrath against his own pitiable sins. These conversations are not easy because human beings generally will not entertain the notion of faith over against speculative philosophy without a fight. Holding uncritically to a general idea about God’s power, we resist with all of our reason the contrary power revealed in the supposed weakness of a God who has led us with cords of kindness and bands of love or the self-limiting love a powerless Almighty Father who has given us our inheritance and now only may wait and watch for our return from a far country. To think again about what we mean when we confess our faith in God the Father Almighty, we would do well to begin by considering what God’s almightiness is not, begin with those abstract ideas we have of God in our heads. God’s power, we think, has something to do with a Being that can do everything, with “power in itself.” In the abstract, such an idea has prompted questions such as Aquinas’, “Can God make the past not to have existed”; or Origen’s, “Can God make a stone so large God cannot carry it…make a prostitute a virgin…make a selfish person happy?” They are all questions that ask after the nature of God’s power from the premise that absolute power is the ability to do absolutely everything. But more to the human point of it all, if in our daily lives we begin with an abstract belief in God’s absolute power over everything, we end up before a monster that has created and now controls this reality show whose ratings are plummeting. Curiously Hitler called God “the Almighty”, revealing in his own reign of terror the nihilism, the nil, the nothingness of power exercised for its own sake. Logically nothing independent can exist outside a power that is absolute. Therefore everything—from your cancer to my cash flow—has to have been caused by this all-powerfulness. The old theologians, in this regard, can still send chills up our post-modern spines when, in response to the question “What do you believe when you say: ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth’?”, they would have us confess that “whatever evil [God] sends upon me in this troubled life he will turn to my good, for he is able to do it, being almighty God, and is determined to do it, being a faithful Father.” Faithful fatherhood aside for the moment, our minds invariably freeze before the first phrase in this catechism—that the Almighty God sends evil upon us in this troubled life because God is able to do it—thereby hastening our decision to join those good people who have quit God altogether! “It is ‘fatal,’” notes Dillard “the old belief that we suffer at the hands of God omnipotent. It is fatal to reason. It does not work. The omnipotence of God makes no sense if it requires the all-causingness of God…[God being “power in itself”]…God is no more blinding people with glaucoma,” she rails on, “or testing them with diabetes, or purifying them with spinal pain, or choreographing the seeding of tumor cells through lymph nodes, or fiddling with chromosomes, than [God] is jimmying floodwaters or pitching tornados [read hurricanes] at towns. God is no more cogitating which among us he plans to place here as bird-headed dwarfs or elephant men—or to kill by AIDS or kidney failure, heart disease, childhood leukemia, or sudden infant death syndrome—than he is pitching lightening bolts at pedestrians, triggering rock slides or setting fires.” In fact, what the insurers call “acts of God” are “the very least likely things for which God might be responsible.” But on what basis does she say these are the least likely things? How in the world can a reasonable person hold to the Almighty Fatherhood of God and let God so completely off the hook? Clearly the time has come for us to quit these abstract ideas and turn not so much away from reason as to revelation, to the biblical witness, to the God whose power is finally revealed through the Son sent into a far country for our poor sakes. Of course we first open the Bible knowing only enough to seek proof-texts for the God we have long ago quit. With little trouble we come upon accounts of battles won, armies drowned, individuals stricken, cities laid waste by what is said to be God’s almighty hand. Yet if we would read this book as those who listen for the God who has come to us in Jesus Christ, we just might note that power-in-itself is of no interest to the biblical writers. Rather Scripture tells of God’s power always in relation to God’s Covenant, in relation to God’s redeeming purpose in human history: It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, I took them up in my arms; but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them,” says God the Father Almighty to the prodigal people Israel. “Get the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” says the powerless Almighty Father of the prodigal son. So contrary to absolute power and in the first place, God’s power is revealed precisely in the freedom God bestows upon God’s prodigal people. The story simply repeats itself from the beginning in a garden to the end: we are free to turn our backs on this God the Father Almighty and oh how we turn! “Give me my inheritance” says the prodigal again and again, “and let me go.” Ironically, we think ourselves to be asserting our true power and so our freedom as we live out our days over against God’s power. But in fact, say the theologians, the idea was God’s! In granting us this freedom of refusal, God chooses to limit almighty power for the sake of our love, thereby creating us with an independence no “power-in-itself” could abide. But is God thus revealed as powerless over us? Or, in the second place, are we invited—from the beginning—to behold the power that is power: power revealed in the will of the God who desires not a relationship born of force, but only of our free turning in love? God is love, we read, love-in-itself. “We have now to think of…the life of God the Father as Father of His Son, the life of the God who is not lonely in Himself, but…whose inmost nature exists in this community” of self-giving love. God in Christ invites us into this community. Still we refuse the invitation saying defiantly with Davie Napier’s Adam at the edge of the garden, “Well, God Almighty, if you are almighty let us be free of you—or let us die! It is the same, you say, you stubborn God? Then count me out, I say—and come sweet death!” Death does come along with “smallpox and Somalia, polio vaccine and wheat and Windsor roses” and, in the fullness of time, comes God: now not in the garden in the cool of the day or at the remove of a disembodied voice spoken through the prophets, but in the flesh of him who has quit heaven and traveled to a far country for our poor sakes. Face to face, we behold God’s power revealed in “God’s capacity to bend downwards,” says Karl Barth. Downward God bends to assume and be assaulted by every consequence of our quitting God: the arrogance of human power whose Babel towers still topple in terror, the jealously first acted out East of Eden which archeologists now identify as Iraq, the goosestep assent to evil masquerading as order, the idolatry of other gods that will surely bring us to ruin. Here God abides in the places we have blamed God for not being, abides as one whose power is made perfect in the weakness of our own flesh, abides until our choice to quit God “for good” compels us to crucify him. “If we were to describe the [Almightiness] of God,” writes Emil Brunner at the conclusion of his discussion of God’s omnipotence, “we would have to do it in the way in which Rembrandt depicts the Passion. Everything which might otherwise be described as ‘omnipotence’ would have to be left wholly or half dark, and all light would be concentrated on this one point: the love of the Crucified which, as the only power that can do so, subdues our pride, conquers our fears, and thus wins our hearts.” But if we were further to describe the powerless Almighty Father whom the creed confesses, we would do well to lose ourselves, as I once literally was lost from a tour group at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, before Rembrandt’s Prodigal Son. “The longer I look…” wrote Henri Nouwen, “the clearer it becomes to me that Rembrandt has done something quite different….It all began with the hands. The two are quite different. The father’s left hand touching the son’s shoulder is strong and muscular. The fingers are spread out and cover a large part of the prodigal son’s shoulder and back. I can see a certain pressure, especially in the thumb. That hand seems not only to touch, but, with its strength also to hold….How different is the father’s right hand! This hand does not hold or grasp. It is…very tender …the fingers close to each other. [The hand] lies gently upon the son’s shoulder. It wants…to offer consolation and comfort.” Still I saw more, saw the son, our Savior, who had gone to a far country and had taken upon himself our disobedience, our doubt, our distance. Weak, weary, vulnerable, hungry, cold, helpless, homeless, hunted by the powers that be in the world: precisely here kneeling before God the Father Almighty and hidden in flesh of our flesh, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth! Thanks be to God! Amen. |