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The Character of God
Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 4, 2007, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill Exodus 3:13-15; 34:1-10 Acts 4:5-22
“How did he affect you? Did he frighten you? Did you love him? What was he after? Did he change much during the time you knew him? What most impressed you about him?” Listen to Scripture, suggests Jack Miles in God: A Biography, “as a juror in a courtroom, not attempting to reconstruct events but simply receiving character testimony from a character witness.” Listen to Scripture, others have counseled, as a child waking in the midst of the story to wonder what she can expect of the main character, a character that tends her on one page and terrifies her on the next. Listen to Scripture, I will finally implore you this morning, because your life is naught without the character whose sovereignty and solidarity will continue to confound you and console you until that meeting-for-which-you-are-destined when you see face to face. “What” asks Miles in an interlude between his listening to the testimony of Genesis and Exodus, “makes God as we know [God] at this point godlike?” In the most basic sense of the word, God is “the protagonist, the pro agonist or ‘first actor’” of Scripture. “[God] does not enter the human scene. [God] creates the human scene that [God] then enters. [God] creates the human antagonist whose interaction with [God] shapes all the subsequent action.” In other words, what we know of God’s character we know only in relation to us! “The Old Testament in particular,” says Walter Brueggemann, “is relentlessly committed to the recognition that all of reality, including the reality of [God], is relational….” Unlike other religions where the gods have a life offstage, cavorting with one another while mere mortals suffer and die, the witness on the stand [namely, Israel] can only say what she has come to know of this singular character as she knows this character’s action upon her life. And even unlike later Christian witnesses, Israel is mum when it comes to those character traits [those marks that make God, God!] most admired by the classical theologians: omnipotence and omniscience and omnipresence, to name a few. Rather Israel majors in what God does for us, what God is for us and so speaks not so much in adjectives as in verbs that connect God’s mighty acts to our mortal lives. That said, we turn the page and lean in to listen for the nature of the character who has dealings with us, asking of the witnesses: How did he affect you? Did he frighten you? Did you love him? What was he after? Did he change much during the time you knew him? What most impressed you about him? Lately we imagine ourselves like Moses who met God in the midst of tending his flock in Midian on an ordinary day: we go about our ordinary lives, opening the Bible in the morning before we brush our teeth or on the 7:12 into the city or at eventide before we drift off to sleep; and we find, after a few weeks or years or maybe only just before our closing eyes, that we have come to the mountain of the Lord, to the place on earth where this character steps into our story and Israel’s testimony becomes revelation! We come to the place where we must ask—as we ask of every character we really meet: “What is your name?” I AM WHO I AM, this character says, but here we need some help from the folks who have combed these words over the centuries for their meaning. Others have insisted that a nuance has been missed…that they have heard instead: I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE. Still others testify that the name is I WILL CAUSE TO BE WHAT I WILL CAUSE TO BE. But given his sense of God’s biography thus far, as well as a surmise in the absence of a vowel—Hebrew being a stream of consonants, Jack Miles ventures another name: “‘I am what I do.’ [‘I will be what I will do.’] As we have already repeatedly seen,” says Miles, “God is indeed defined by what he does, defined this way even for himself….‘Tell the Israelites, “I Will Act” sent me.’” But act how and in what way? we ask. If, as another interpreter notes, the force of God’s name is “not simply that God is or that God is present but that God will be faithfully God,” what does God faithfully do? Should not the character who acts faithfully be the character who acts consistently, our little minds think? Yet depending on the preconceived notion we have of God’s character [God always has kept my family safe; God rewards the good and punishes the bad every time; God can be counted on to give me exactly what I want], when God turns out [either on paper or in person] to be a hobgoblin, we somersault in the face of contradictions to make our god be God: to make God consistent with the character we had in mind before we opened this book. Moreover, because it is usually in extremis when the god of our devising does not avail, we are left to make excuses for God as we do for a friend who suddenly does something completely out of character. We say of God “God must have misheard my request” or “God has not been able to answer my prayer quite yet” or “God must be testing me.” Or we might even revise our understanding of God’s character accordingly, “God always seemed so merciful, but after this God must be….” It is, I think, our version of idolatry: if God was the character in our lives who always blessed us but now seems hidden by dark clouds, then perhaps, to be consistent, we should consult the God of rain and see what that God can do for us today. The God of Israel is One, counter the witnesses. These are monotheists who have quit every easy explanation available to worshippers of multiple gods in every age. Given the mystery that is human existence in relation to God’s character, their testimony cannot help but be complex and contradictory. For the sort of faithfulness that characterizes the God of Israel is not the faithfulness that issues in domestication, but the faithfulness that acts in freedom! “This means,” says Brueggemann, “that witnesses, who had other options available, who for whatever reasons chose to utter the matter in just this way, established through their [testimony] what is ‘true’ about the character of God.” The question that then remains for the jury that is still out in our hearts and minds is whether their utterance is “the clue that enables [us] to put together the disparate experiences of life into a meaningful, coherent whole, to see a pattern and purpose in human history, to overcome the incongruities between what life is and what life ought to be….” [John Leith] In light of that question, listen to Scripture in the second place like a child waking in the midst of a story to wonder what you can expect of the main character, a character that tends you on one page and terrifies you on the next. Turn these pages stripped of every preconceived notion you ever have had about this character whose faithful action is marked by solidarity with us (by a relationship) and by sovereignty over us (by God’s freedom). Meet for yourself--between Mt. Horeb and Mt. Sinai—the God who hardens the heart of power and sends plagues upon the oppressors…who strikes down the firstborn in Egypt but passes over the firstborn of Israel…who parts the sea for God’s chosen ones and drowns their pursuers…who sustains, leads, chastens, commands, carries, accompanies and comforts God’s people. But know that is only half of the story! For the children who first woke up in the midst of Israel’s story were the children who had come of age in Babylon, beseeching the God who had done nothing of late to help. Sp Israel’s life consists in coming to terms…with the immense problematic that [God] turns out to be,” says Brueggemann, “often uttering promise and command, but sometimes silent; often present and visible, but sometimes ashamedly absent; often evident in righteousness and faithful ways, but sometimes unreliable and notoriously cunning, all to doubtful effect….Nevertheless,” he says, “Israel could never shake off its resolve to continue its [testimony] about [God], for in this very utterance Israel knew its own life to be differently characterized in holiness, sometimes savage and sometimes beneficent…” but always met by the mystery of the character in whose story they were chosen to appear. What then of our lives lived in relation to this character who, by God’s own testimony on Mt. Sinai, is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation? Tended and terrified, we are reading the story as fast as we can in order to see how this ends for us…ends in the sense of finis, finale, fulfillment. The end, witnesses have testified in these latter days, is Jesus Christ. In Jesus, they utter, the testimony of Israel is fulfilled and the character of God is finally revealed in flesh and blood to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. What is more, the God who was sometimes silent…and ashamedly absent; was sometimes unreliable and notoriously cunning; who once visited the iniquity of the parents on the third and fourth generations because life ended with death and God’s justice demanded no less: this God has visited the sins of us all upon him and, in freedom, has chosen never again be silent or absent or unreliable! Finally in the character of him who loved us even unto death on the cross, the disparate experiences of our broken lives are given a purpose and we are given a promise: that the incongruities between what life is and what life ought to be will come to an end. Therefore you and I can neither receive the testimony of Israel nor listen to the story of our salvation except in the light of his life, death and resurrection. Ask, then, of these witnesses page after page: is this the God, the same character, I know in Jesus Christ? For our relationship with the God who is finally what God does in Jesus Christ is through him, for there is no other name under heaven among mortals by which the character that is God is with us and for us. How then will he affect you? Will he frighten you? Will you love him? What is he after? Did he change much during the time you knew him? What most impressed you about him? Now you must be his witnesses, sent into the world to utter his name and to testify to the end that the disparate pieces of another’s life might, in him, cohere and be healed. So listen to Scripture, I finally implore you this morning, through the character of God revealed in Jesus Christ; because, until that meeting-for-which-you-are-destined when you see face to face, life simply is naught without Him. Thanks be to God! |