Sons of Gods

Scripture: The Second Sunday of Christmas, A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.

What does it mean to be children of God?

For a little more than a year now I’ve been having fun with genealogical records. It ends up that our family tree is a massive and motley array of adventurers, miscreants, killers and kings. One branch of the family traces our roots back to Sigurd the Stout, a Viking conqueror of northern Scotland, who claimed descent from Odin.  Another branch takes us back to the Normans, who carved out a section of France and married into the royal families of Europe. Here we have four solid lines to Charlemagne, who claimed descent from Julius Caesar, who in turn claimed descent from Venus and Mars. Yes, it seems we have divine ancestry!

Odin, Venus, and Mars. Boy, you’d think that my kids would pick their noses less.

Let’s start off by admitting that the word “god” is a very loaded term, whether we capitalize it or not, so we’d best define it. I’m afraid that as soon as we start talking about gods, people’s minds immediately go to, in effect, superheroes. That’s what Odin and Mars and Zeus and Osiris really are, right? They’re just like you and me, only writ large. They have better technology, and they live a lot longer than we do, but basically they’re superheroes. Thor made the transition easily.

But the word “god” means something much simpler and much wider than superheroes. A god, in the broadest sense, is whatever is most important in your life. Luther said that our gods are whatever we “fear, love, and trust above all else.” Philosophers talk about our summum bonum, our greatest good. What is most important to us in this world? That’s your god. For some folks it’s money or power or sex or fame. For some it’s country or honor or family or friends. For many it’s just straight-up ego, whatever we think is best for ourselves. And that’s what we worship. That’s what makes us bend the knee.

Now granted, the more spiritually minded amongst us may worship Mother Nature, or elemental spirits, or even the restless dead. That’s why folklorists often have trouble separating ghosts, gods, and fairies in various ancient religions. What mattered most to the old pagans were their lands and their clans, so naturally it’s hard to distinguish between grandpa, greenwood, and godhood.

Of course, when the Bible denounces false gods, it’s not just talking about specific mythologies, like believing that Zeus is actually up in the clouds hurling about his thunderbolts. That sort of idolatry is relatively easy to avoid. No, the Bible is talking about gods in the broad sense, the things in which we put our trust. If we fear, love, and trust money above all else, we’re setting ourselves up for a fall. If we worship—not just value but worship—strength and sex and society as the greatest of all goods, we will find nothing but pain in the end. This remains as true for us today as it was back then. Perhaps even more so.

Keep in mind that the false gods people worship are not in and of themselves bad things, so long as they are treated as secondary. Reverencing nature is laudable; she reflects her Maker’s glory. Remembering the dead is an honor; we owe much to our forebears. Money serves a good purpose. So do family and friends and sex and ego and, yes, perhaps even fame. These things make for excellent blessings, but terrible gods. Like fire, they are of immense benefit, if only we can keep them within their proper bounds.

So if all these things take second place, what properly belongs in the first place? We need to worship something; we need some greatest good to orient our lives as to a guiding star. What ought we properly to fear, love, and trust above all else? Show us a real god, a god who won’t let us down! Here’s where things get interesting.

Every culture seems to have this notion that we all come from the same source. All people and all things, even time and space, are created by One Who is eternal. Everything else in this world comes from something else, has a beginning and an end. We have parents, and we have a grave. But in the beginning was One without beginning or end, Who had no parents. This Creator is not a being, like you or me or Osiris or Thor, but He is actually Being itself, the Font of all Being, the Source of everything that is or was or ever will be. He was never born and never dies, but as He famously said unto Moses: “I (Just) Am.”

This One, this Creator, is whispered of in almost every mythology and philosophy we have ever found. He is not spoken of in detail because He is too infinite, too great, too glorious to imagine. He is beyond anything we can know. And so most peoples have worshipped instead lesser spirits: personifications of nature or the memory of departed kings; angels and demons and ghosts and sprites. These things, these ideas, are closer to us, more down to earth. We can relate to them. But always we have this memory, this notion, this intuition of the One Above All.

Then about 4,000 years ago came Abraham with perhaps the most bizarre and revolutionary idea in all of human history. Abraham had a god, of course. Everybody back then had gods: family gods, personal gods, regional gods. Things you trusted, tried to deal with, even if you couldn’t see them. But Abraham claimed that his god was different. His god wasn’t just a ghost or a goblin or a lofty idea. Nor was his god a superhero, like the famous ones up on Olympus. No. His God, Abraham claimed, was the Source, the Creator, the One Above All—not just a being like us but Being itself, above and beyond the world, beyond nature, beyond death, beyond anything we could know.

And in Abraham this God—Who was really so much more than a god—was reaching out with love and forgiveness to the humanity that had forgotten Him. He was reaching out to us, stooping down to our level, when we could not stretch up to His. And He revealed to us that His Nature is Goodness and Truth and Beauty. He revealed to us that His deepest heart is unfathomable Love. And He championed the too old and the too young, the widowed and the orphaned, the downtrodden and enslaved. And so He has continued to forgive and to love and to woo us throughout four thousand years of biblical history down to this very day. Here at last, brothers and sisters, is the One we can fear, love, and trust above all else! Here at last is the one true God, Who will never let us down.

Of course, a God like this does not have children. He is neither male nor female; He is One, infinite, unbounded. He is not a physical being like us, who may produce other beings of the same nature. Like the angels, God is spirit. And if two spirits are of the same nature then they are not two but one spirit—just as two identical thoughts are really one thought. So how then can we speak about children of God? How can we call Jesus the Son of God?

Long have we known that God can be many things at once and still be One God. From the earliest chapters of Genesis, we read of a God Who is infinite and cosmic and transcendent, while simultaneously personal, intimate, walking beside us. Jews and Greeks alike spoke of how God could be both in this world and beyond this world at once; how He can be out there and right here at the same time, and still be the same God. We use names like the Wisdom of God, or the Word of God, or the Son of God to talk about how God draws near to us while still remaining God. When we encounter the Son of God, we’re not encountering a second God or a fake God or a lesser God. We’re encountering all of God, right here, even while He’s still God out there.

So when we read about the Wisdom of God, or the Word of God, or the Son of God, remember that they’re all the same guy. They’re all Jesus. Jesus is both God and from God. He is the eternal Son of the eternal Father, and together with the Holy Spirit they remain One God. It can be confusing, I know. But it’s also unspeakably beautiful. In Jesus God becomes true Man so that Man may truly become one with God. That’s what Heaven is—not just being with God, but being one with God.

When the One Above All calls us His children, it is because He longs to draw us to Himself in the deepest way possible, deeper even than the bond between parent and child. He offers us not simply what He has made but Who He most truly is. He has died for us. He has poured out His very Being for us. The God of Abraham is Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, infinite, perfect and eternal. He offers this all to us, offers His only Son, purely out of grace, purely out of love.

This is our destiny. This is our inheritance. This is what it means to be children of God. And I dare anyone to continue living in the same way, knowing that we are truly the sons and daughters of the King.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. AMEN.