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Down on the Ground Sermon by Cynthia A. Jarvis February 7, 2010, Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill II Corinthians 4:1-6 Acts 4:1-12
We are gathered by God’s grace every week, you and I, to talk about the God we have never seen, to pray to the God we have never heard first-hand, to beseech God on behalf of our lives so in need of God’s nearness that we are speechless. Yet we also come together every week to bear witness to the same God who came down to earth from heaven, whose spoken words we do have recorded on a page if not written upon our hearts, whose nearness we proclaim now in the sure and certain hope that our eyes at last shall see him. We must therefore do business, if the Christian claim is to be heard in our shaken, snow-covered world, with a paradox whose tension we collapse at the peril of exchanging the truth for a lie. This is the paradox of the God known only in hiding and yet the God who longs to be known here and now. This is the paradox of the God who dwells in heaven's heights and yet the God who has pitched a tent in the flesh of our broken humanity. This is the paradox of the God who is without image and yet the God whose glory we see in the face of Jesus Christ. This is the paradox of the God who is up in the air and down on the ground. In words which push human speech to the very edge of what words can say, the biblical witness reveals one God: ultimately unknowable and intimately known, transcendent (above all) and, in the same breath, immanent (in all). So it is to the paradox of God’s transcendence and immanence that we turn. We begin in the first place, behind a veil and with some vague sense of the God who is transcendent (above all), but that is all. As for transcendence, you could say we know its meaning first-hand. In everyday conversation, we say to one another, "I was able to transcend the situation," meaning whatever happened, we were able to rise above some unpleasantness, and go on with life unaffected, untouched, from a loftier point of view. I think, in the light of day, this is also what we think about God. The God our minds can manage to conceive of, on the one hand, exists as a God above it all, removed from our difficulties, at a distance from our cries. Because we cannot see God, because we have only second-hand hearsay of God's speech included in this story we inhabit-but-barely-believe, we live willing to entertain the notion of God's existence and not much more. “I believe in a supreme being,” we say, “a greater power, the source of life, creator of the universe.” But when it comes to a connection between the details of any given day and a relationship with this transcendent Being-Above-the-Fray, God-up-in-the-air, there is nothing much to say, because there is no real relationship to speak of. “Has God a hand in this?” we ask with Annie Dillard. “Then it is a good hand. But has [God] a hand at all? Or is [God] a holy fire burning self-contained for power's sake alone?…Then the accidental universe spins mute, obedient only to its own gross terms, meaningless, out of mind, and alone.” This we can accept confidently in the daylight as our lot. But what of our darkest nights? Then the ‘notion of a supreme being” is not enough. “Of faith I have nothing,” Dillard continues, “only of truth: that this one God is a brute and traitor, abandoning us to time, to necessity and the engines of matter unhinged. This is no leap; this is evidence of things seen:…one sorrow, one sensation bewildering the heart, and enraging the mind, and causing me to look at the world stuff appalled." In our darkest nights, the idea of God is not sufficient and leaves us in the hand--or more accurately beyond the hand--of One who is alone transcendent, above it all, unaffected. This is not enough. We must think again. And we think in the second place, still behind the veil and estranged from the truth of evidence seen, we think, “Faith would be that God bound himself to time and its hazards and haps as a man would lash himself to a tree for love….That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen. Faith would be, in short,” says Dillard, “that God has any willful connection with time whatsoever and with us.” Here, on the other hand, is our take on God's immanence. Here we begin with the more fantastic claim that God has entered human existence, has become flesh down on the ground, and dwells among us as one like us, but the claim is hard to sustain. For there also creeps in the popular notion that God is infused in the world and so totally within, like the God of Alice Walker's Shug: “‘Here’s the thing,’ says Shug. ‘The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it.’” Here, for the sake of God's felt immanence, we let go of God’s transcendence--God over and against us, God outside ourselves--to have at hand a domestic deity in our service, in ourselves. Helpless, says Dillard, our baby to bear, but in no way able to save us from the distance we believe, in the daylight, to be between ourselves and the absent God of our minds. Contrary to popular belief, the biblical witness has nothing to do with either of these notions: of God's transcendence far removed or our intimations of God's immanence deep within. As for God’s transcendence, we read on each line of Scripture that the very God who is “above all things” also can be found “down on the ground.” And as for God’s immanence, we are told that the God who comes to us and is with us, always comes to us as a Word from outside ourselves rather than from within and so is resistant to our grasp. In other words, the God who is God is made known only as Scripture speaks of God's transcendence and immanence in one and the same breath, one and the same person. Over the centuries, theologians have amassed volumes of abstractions asking after the truth of this seeming contradiction. Yet in the dark, like children afraid of all we cannot see, we cry out not for a theological system but ask instead for the story of our salvation to be read to us again, in hopes that its words will mediate the mystery of the God beyond our power to comprehend. The story we tell first speaks the truth about God's distance above us--for we will not be lied to--and yet speaks the fact of God’s coming to us, because we cannot find our way home without Him. “When we reach our limits,” writes John Shea, “when our ordered worlds collapse, we often enter into the awareness of Mystery. We are inescapably related to this Mystery, which is immanent and transcendent…which is real and important beyond all else…. Surrounded by this Mystery,” he goes on, “we do a distinctively human thing. We gather together and tell stories of God to calm our terror and hold our hope on high.” The story begins with the pursuit of the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness”: through the garden of our discontent and the wilderness of our exodus, through the satiated temples of our settled worship and even in the abandoned cries of our exile. It is the story of a God who came so close as to rest a foot on a portable ark but stayed hidden in a cloud which settled over the tent of meeting far outside the camp…who refused a house for the sake of divine freedom and yet dictated every detail of Solomon's temple that he might dwell on earth. It is the story of God who quit the temple and banished God’s chosen ones until, by prophet’s word foretold, God’s cosmic game of hide and seek comes down to one silent night, one angel’s announcement, one mother great with child and one alone born in whom the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, one born in whose face the light of the knowledge of the glory of God shines for us. “How do we know [asks Dillard still in the throws of this paradox]--how could we know--that the real is there? By what freak chance does the skin of illusion ever split, and reveal to us the real, which seems to know us by name, and by what freak chance and why did the capacity to prehend it [our capacity to take hold of it] evolve?" Neither chance nor evolution nor our own capacity for faith but rather the mystery of the hidden God who chooses to be known in Jesus Christ split the skin of illusion and revealed to us the real who knows us by name. But if the God who meets us down on the ground is real, if it really is true that the God who said “Let light shine out of darkness” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ,” then after the incarnation we who would follow him must ask, in relation to all other claims about God, whether those claims coincide with the God who has come to us down on the ground in Jesus Christ. The scandalous particularity of the incarnation rules out much that the human imagination might believe were God if God were only a God who is up in the air. No longer can God be said to be a God who visits disease on people because, in the face of Jesus Christ, we behold the God who heals. No longer can God be said to be a God who sends earthquakes and hurricanes to judge a people because, in the face of Jesus Christ, we are met by the God who comes to us while we are yet sinners. But more, for we also are constrained to do business with what seems, at first, to be an exclusive claim about God’s immanence that would seem to limit God’s transcendence: that down on the ground, God has been revealed in Jesus Christ alone. Immediately religion takes hold of this to turn God on the ground into the private possession of those who believe. How quickly we exchange the gracious news that we belong to him for the grasping certainty that he belongs to us. How righteously we shut the door of God’s eternity in the face of those who do not call upon his name, pronouncing them forever cast away from God’s presence and thereby dividing the human race further in his name. “We could not be wise before the event [of Christ’s birth],” writes Scottish preacher and theologian John Baillie, “but perhaps we can be a little wiser after it….If it had been so that each could find God in his own way, then each would be finding [God] without at the same time finding [one another.] If the love of God were revealed to each in a different place, then we could all love [God] without meeting one another in love. If the various tribes of [hu]mankind could find salvation in different names, then the human race would be forever divided….” Therefore in the meantime, in this time Christ came to redeem, “Was it not a gracious ordering of things on God’s part,” Baillie asks, “…that we can meet with him only by meeting with one another; by betaking ourselves all together to one place…; by encountering there a single figure to whom we all together give our whole allegiance; by listening to the self-same story;…by being baptized in the same name into the same fellowship; by eating and drinking at the same Holy Table…; so that ‘there is no difference between the Jew and the Greek, for the same Lord over all is rich unto all them that all upon him. Here,” concludes Baillie from the perspective of the end of history rather than in the midst of our theological divides, here we begin to understand the zeal of those first Christians for the “propagation of a gospel which should transcend all differences of race and tongue and tribe and nation.” Two weeks ago, Brian loosened our grip on the God we think we know, the God whose backpack we weigh down with our wishful projections and our misplaced expectations. In saying that the God who is God is denied by rigid religious dogma, Brian spoke truly. God is greater than our highest thoughts—a truth that words like eternal, infinite, immeasurable, incomprehensible, omnipotent and invisible meant to convey before we used them to contain God in an orthodox straitjacket. But as I let go of my grip on the God who is up in the air, I know myself grasped by the same God who chose to be known down on the ground. Having wrestled all my life with the central paradox of the Christian faith—that God was in Christ--I invite you to the table set by him whose grace entered gravity, here to partake of the scandalous particularity that is the incarnation: take, eat, my friends, for this is his body broken for you. Thanks be to God. |