Faces of God: God the Unexpected

Today in the Church of England's lectionary (it was also read in The Episcopal Church), we read two important lessons that I think reveal the face of God the unexpected.  The Old Testament lesson was from I Samuel 17:32-49 and the Gospel was Mark 4:35-41.  In both cases I was struck by the imagery of being caught unprepared and called out by God. I heard the story of David and Goliath the Philistine in a new, unexpected way this morning.  If one of Israel could kill Goliath, then the battle should end.  David, being chosen, is clothed by Saul with armour, "mail" was the translation we read today.  Something about the clothing remains powerful to me--it wasn't David at all.  He couldn't walk in the heavy suit, it was silly. How often do we put on images for ourselves only to be taken as ridiculous?  We try on things that our not suited for us in an effort to protect ourselves.  All the while, God calls on us to come out as we are and into the unknown with faith.  It seems no coincidence, here, that David cannot wear the protective armour, but must go out in front seemingly vulnerable and possibly on a suicidal mission.

Armed with his stones, the only weapons he knows, David relies on God's faithfulness and ultimately slays the giant with a single stone.  I've heard this story many times before but I never considered the idea of being called out by God to perform this task by ordinary means by ordinary people.  The image of one shepherd going out in front of the army lines, leaving behind the protection of the masses, David goes alone with God to meet the giant for what seems to be an impossible task.  Fear, yes, fear would be coursing through me at that point.    

Saul clothed David with his amour; he put a bronze helmet on his head and clothed him with a coat of mail. David strapped Saul’s sword over the armour, and he tried in vain to walk, for he was not used to them. Then David said to Saul, ‘I cannot walk with these; for I am not used to them.’ So David removed them. Then he took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones from the wadi, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, in the pouch; his sling was in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine."

I Samuel 17: 38-40

The Gospel lesson from Mark follows this same parallel.  Jesus is asleep in the boat with his disciples when a raging storm happens and causes great consternation among the sailors.  Our Lord simply asks them whether or not they have faith in God's providence.  Fear of death was all that they could think of in their future.  Jesus calms the waters and instantly their faith is restored.

Why is all this important?  God comes to us in the unexpected ways of storms and giants, calling us out of our spheres of comfort, out of our false clothing, to confront those fearful things that keep us from the love of God.  Testing?  No, I don't believe that God puts tests in front of us to see what we're made of, but rather God calls us to be authentic and stand for what and who we were created to be.  God the unexpected is the one who wants us to live fulfilling, happy lives, lovingly being who we are.  We stray from this out of fear, fear of acceptance, fear of the unknown, or worse to gain false comfort from money, job security, or anything else our culture deems important and necessary.  We do this for our will, not God's.  Thus, the storms and giants rise up as a way to strip away those things that are fleeting, like chaff in the wind. God's will and God's faithfulness is the foundation of our being, straying from that means trouble looms on our horizon.

God may act in unsuspecting ways, but I believe that all things come to some certainty in God's providence.  God the unexpected is trying to fulfill our expectant hope of eternal life in the Kingdom of Christ.  So mind those giants in your life.  Stand up and fight.  The storms will cause titanic waves to flood your sense of security, so stave them off with the faith from above. Be at ease knowing that you strive in your everyday life to live deeply into God's will.

Faces of God: God the Friend

If God was on Facebook, would you send him a friend request?  Since I don't have any "naughty" photos of anything at all, I would not hesitate to friend him!  As of this writing, there are currently 524,033 fans of Jesus Christ on Facebook, I wonder why there aren't more? Would God be the old-fashioned sort who would shy away from all things social-networking? Or would God be an i-Phone toting hipster? Perhaps both.

God seeks out relationship in any form possible.  God the friend is the sort who is comfortable in both groups and individually.  What would God's Myers-Brigg personality be, I wonder? Either way, I sense that God's idea of friendship is lasting.  As Christians, we believe that through the waters of baptism we are re-born into a new life in Jesus Christ.  We are bound to him as he is to us. The Body of Christ, the Church militant on earth, is where we strengthen those bonds as we move through the process of life.  That friendship is a bond that sustains heartaches, peer-pressure, and all the anxieties of social life in community.  

God is the chief friend, the "best" if you will.  The model is forged throughout the whole of Scripture.  As it is, God acts first and always first and relieves us of any anxiety of acceptance. God's will is to bind us into the common humanity in the life of the Kingdom.  There is no pressure from God to buy certain labels or behave differently in or around certain people. God's will is to be the friend who frees us up to be who God wants us to be--who we were created to be.    

I doubt there's any double-crossing, gossiping, or even the ultimate betrayal with God as friend. If anything, we're quick to claim that God has disappeared or somehow abandoned us--Our Lord's cry of dereliction from the cross, for example.  The reality is, and proved only by one's own journey of faith, that God is present in the darkness too.  It is easy to see and feel the presence of God in the good things of life, blessings are always nicer than pain.  Yet my own experience has shown that the pain of life we sometimes experience leaves wounds that are transformed into blessings.  Henri Nouwen's "wounded healer" concept nails this down succinctly. God is in the darkness and sometimes so close to us that we believe we've been left for dead.  Friendship, relationship, and covenant are bonds that bind and last forever.  God as the instrument in forging such bonds reveals the powerful love that links us to our creator.

I need God as my friend and confidant.  I need to know that someone cares for me while catching me every time I fall down.  God never seems to grow weary of me and all my peculiarities, much less my poor decisions and sin.  God never gives up on me while I have given up on God at certain times in my life.  It is when I discovered God quietly in the darkness that I learned God's deep well of mercy and grace.  How often have we heard that when really bad things happen you discover who your true friends really are?  Enough said.

Faces of God: God the Enemy

We need God to be the enemy.  Why?  It's the age old question of theodicy:  God and justice. Why does God allow bad things to happen?  Job knows plenty of this.  God the enemy, God in the clouds playing puppeteer with creation.  Popular thought often portrays the Old Testament God as the God of anger, wrath, and destruction.  And somehow, with the flip of the page, the New Testament God is all-loving and now wants to enter into the course of human history. 

The reality is that we want to have a reason when something happens.  In Islam, the Arabic expression is insha' allah, or "if God wills."  Unfortunately, this idea gets applied equally to the tragic death of a child, news of cancer, and the unknowing depths of endless human suffering. Does God really will death and destruction for creation?  I believe the answer is an emphatic "no."  Following the days of creation in Genesis, God blesses the work by calling it good (Gen 1:31). The pain and suffering in the world is the result of sin--turning away from God's will and looking to our own for comfort and happiness.  Cancer is not from God, nor is HIV/AIDS, or even genocide for that matter.  From my experience of Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) and working with death and dying in a hospital, I can speak from the depths of my faith that God is present somehow in the suffering and tears of humanity.  God's presence, whilst at times seems far away, is so close that we fail to recognize the comforting love of a friend.  God does not will destruction for creation, the rainbow set in the sky affirms God's promise to Noah that never again will God destroy the earth (Gen 9:8-16).

The only comfort that I can find in the problem of theodicy is simply that we find God's tears falling with our own.  We need to make God the enemy to rationalize why or how something so terrible could occur in our lives.  Again, see the Book of Job.  But even in Job's ordeal, he maintains faith.  Perhaps that's why this bit of the Old Testament gets a lot of attention because we cannot comprehend how and need to hear it over and over again.

There is no question that even in my own journey of faith I have blamed God for this or that offense, discovering only in the end that I am my own worst enemy.  I have also discovered that the more helpful route is to simply investigate where God is present in all my calamities.  That is the true question that we should be asking and the one that most likely contains the raw, painful answers that we cannot bear to face. God was not absent at Auschwitz; God was there amid the Hutu and Tutsi genocide.  God was there when I baptized 16-week old Jesus (Spanish) following his death.  God suffers with us because the suffering is not willed.  Yet, we do know that suffering and pain can serve as the furnace of transformation for our faith and life, but we cannot romanticize the tragedy.  

Living with the problem of theodicy is hard, faith-testing matter.  There is no one answer that completely satisfies the human heart, nor fills the cavernous voids of painful loss.  The only example we have is that of Our Lord on the cross, crying out in dereliction.  In the end, we do believe that God's justice is wrapped up in the Kingdom.  The Kingdom is where we live for God's will and not ours, where justice flows down like waterfalls, and everyone has just enough to eat.      

Faces of God: God the Lover

"God became man so that man might be engodded" 

~ St. Athanasius

The Oxford Movement of the nineteenth century did a lot for the Church of England.  In it, the reformers were harkening back to the age of the patristic Greek Fathers, that age of the Church when there was nothing "popish" within the institution.  One idea, however, that never seemed to gain much ground in Anglicanism despite the claims of the movement, was that of divinization or properly called theosis.  Known quite well in the Eastern Church, the concept of humanity's process towards becoming divine is deeply rooted in the Incarnation--some may easy say that this is the completion of that moment when the Divine and Humanity intersected in the womb of the Virgin.

What does this have to do with love?  Moreover, what does this have to do with seeing the face of God as a lover?  God creates out of love; humanity being formed in God's likeness and image is a powerful measure of God's love.  Eros, not agape, is the burning desire of God and humanity.  Eros is the Greek principle of a deep, erotic love which surpasses the mere physical limitations of human flesh.  Descending into the womb while exulting our human nature is the fullness of that love.  Episcopal priest Phillips Brooks, the legendary composer of the Christmas hymn "O Little Town of Bethlehem," is noted as saying that in this act of Incarnation we find, "the condescension of divinity and the exultation of humanity."  Ascent meets the descent and in that we know more about our God as the ultimate lover.  Interestingly enough, this may be the most erotic imagery in the whole of the Christian tradition.

So now let us move forward one more step.  God as lover woos us.  God woos us in the very wilderness we often find ourselves.  God creates, God provides, and God woos.  Even when Adam and Eve were kicked out of Paradise, God makes and provides clothing for them (Gen 3:23).  God is the constant lover of creation, bringing and calling it into the fullness of that lover.  We are no exception to this but often stand in the way of feeling God's tenderness or being tantalized by God's scent.  Thus, to accept theosis, one has to be willing to see inside the love that was born from above and to accept God's invitation to step onto the dance floor to take a spin with the Almighty.  I doubt that the principle here is to create millions of little gods and goddesses running around the Kingdom, but rather bring humanity to its fullness, to its completion which can only be found in God.  God took the first step in creation; the invitation has been issued and a reply is requested.

As is the case with any lover, there are the warts that we try to cover over and hide.  We don't want to be naked in front of the one that we try to seduce or vice versa.  The seduction of God is to be perfect bliss and causes the ultimate "release."  This release is complete and total freedom of the Kingdom of God which dawned in the coming of Christ, but alas is not yet fulfilled.  As we move closer with God in the dance of our lives, we take down those barriers and uncover the painful areas of lives.  Trust is the result of knowing that there is another hand out there supporting and guiding your spins.  The music is endless and so is the dance.  But there is always that fear of tripping over your feet or looking rather foolish with stiff legs.  

Will you fight?  Will you always accept God's advances?  Can you resist the heavenly aroma? We will certainly try!  We are human after all.  Theosis gives me hope that I'm always in process, always moving to a beat that my soul rhythmically gets even when I try and stand in the way. 

Personally, I can identify this image in my life.  The times when I have left the dance floor because of anger or simply lacking the courage to accept my own acceptance.  Each time I come back, I find that God is ready to pick up the beat again.  Ironically, there never seems to be the cursory, "I told you so."