Beyond Gods

Scripture: Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (Lectionary 19), A.D. 2015 B

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I don’t like the word “god.” It’s too imprecise, too confusing, to be of much real use. “God” can mean too many different things to too many different people, and so all of us—pagans, Christians, atheists—we all end up talking past each other.

In traditional mythology, a god is the highest creature in Creation. There is a hierarchy of being, with rocks towards the bottom, animals somewhere in the middle, and gods up at the top. The gods are stronger, faster, tougher than any other beings—yet ultimately they are just other beings, like us, but shinier. They have a beginning, often born from beings even more primordial and titanic than they themselves, and they usually have an end somewhere on the horizon.

The best analogy for us would really be superheroes—or in many cases, supervillains. What makes the gods true gods is that there’s no one above them, no one to whom they must answer. A god can pretty much do whatever he likes, morality be damned. These are the sorts of gods we encounter in Thor or Zeus or Osiris. They aren’t supernatural in the strict sense of the word because they aren’t “above” nature. They’re part of nature, part of the mechanism of the universe. Medieval minds thought of these gods as elves or angels: high up in the created order, but still part of Creation. Sacrifice to them, flatter them, they might cut you a deal.

People sometimes confuse this brutish sort of god with the God worshipped by religious believers. Indeed, both atheists and Christians make this mistake; they think that God is just a big critter, the largest object amongst other objects in the universe. That is not the God we seek. Indeed, Christians agree with atheists in that we don’t bow to such deities. Even if we looked up Thor and Zeus at their home address and found them to exist, well, they wouldn’t really be gods in the capital-G sense.

Every major religious tradition—every civilization that has developed a self-reflective culture of philosophical and religious thought—has done away with these sorts of proto-gods, these little fairies with their little fiefdoms, and looked beyond. There is something more out there, Someone more. The Jews see Him. The Hindus see Him. The Muslims and the Sikhs and the later forms of classical paganism all see Him. There is a God beyond our concept of what a god is. He is not a creature within Creation, but is in fact the Creator—the Source of all Being.

He is the reason that there is anything at all, not just in the past, but in every moment of every day. He is beyond the universe, not an object to be known, but the font of all existence, in whom we live and move and have our being. Yet He is knowable, in mysterious ways, and we experience Him whenever we encounter goodness and truth and beauty—or, as the eastern traditions like to put it, consciousness and being and bliss. And when we encounter this God our response cannot be to wheel and deal, but rather to kneel in humility, gratitude, and awe.

This is the God Who made the gods, Who is not a being but Being itself, the great “I am.” He is farther from us than the farthest star, yet closer to us than our own jugular. And it pleased Him for a time that we should all seek Him out in our own way. This is not to claim that religions are all equivalent, that all faiths have equal access to revealed Truth. Yet everywhere we go, wherever we find humanity, we find this mystical and spiritual connection to being and consciousness and bliss—to God.

Now, in addition to all this, there is yet a third way to understand the word “god,” and that is to speak of what it means to have a personal god, what Socrates called each man’s greatest good. Simply put, there is something in your life that you value above all else—something that you fear, love, and trust more than anything in the world. It could be money or strength or sex or patriotism. It could be family or entertainment or a particularly precious possession. For most of us it’s just straight-up ego. But whatever that thing is, that object, whatever it is that you fear, love, and trust before all else, that thing is your god. It’s what gets you out of bed in the morning. It’s what makes your world go ‘round.

The goal of Jesus Christ is to make sure that your personal god, that good to which you bend the knee, is none other than the One True God, the Source of all being and goodness and truth and beauty and love. Any other god will fail you, but the true God—the capital-G “I am”—He is the One for whom your heart has longed. He is your alpha and omega, your beginning and your end. In Him we lack nothing, and He holds nothing back from us.

On this all the great theistic traditions agree: that God is Love. Not simply that He is loving or lovely or beloved but that He is, literally, Love itself. We disagree on how that love is to be embraced and expressed and lived out in this world. We squabble over the primacy of mercy vs justice, of universality vs holiness. True love can be tough love. But God, the One God, is Love, and in the end Love wins. This is not to say that everything will be roses and sweet cream in the gardens; love, after all, cannot force you to accept and to reciprocate and to participate freely in love; there is a devil in hell as surely as there is a God in heaven. Yet we must never doubt God’s deepest intentions towards each and every one of us: that He wants us truly to love and be loved, that we and all the world may thrive.

The Bible uses all kinds of images to express this. In order to enter the world, God becomes a helpless Child within the womb of His chosen mother—He becomes, in essence, one with her. Creation grows pregnant with her Creator. God speaks to Israel and to the Church of a great wedding feast, when God and Man are fused into one just as a bride and groom become one flesh. This is the intimacy, the complete self-giving, that God pours out for us. Paul writes that Christ is the head and we are His Body, knitted together by sinews and flesh, woven as seamlessly as are the spine and its nerves. Revelation speaks of human beings as though Jesus has swallowed us and we live now within Him; the Church Fathers talk of His wounded side as the womb from which we are born.

Every image, every story, every promise has to do with God desiring to be One, perfectly One, with each and every one of us, woven into a single garment, whirling into the same dance. He wants to marry us, eat us, birth us—and have us do the same for Him. It is a mystical vision of such intensity and glory that we find it impossible to fathom, let alone digest.

And clearly we are not alone. In our Gospel this morning, Jesus says, “I am the Bread of Life,” the living bread come down from heaven to give life to the world. And He uses that very specific term, “I am,” the Name of the One God, the Name of Being itself. And the people think He’s talking about food. Food! But what Jesus is offering is nothing less than union with Being Himself, Love Himself, Goodness and Truth and Beauty Himself. Think about that. You cannot die if you are one with Being, because then you can never not-be. When you are one with the great “I am,” there cannot be a time when you are not. You are given God.

When we come up to this Table for Communion, we aren’t simply sharing a little crisp of wheat and a tiny sip of wine. Jesus Himself holds up this bread and says, “You aren’t just eating bread. This is Me. I am the Bread of Life. And when I live in you and you in Me, miraculous promises are yours. You are drawn together by the Father; you are taught by the Wisdom of God. From this moment eternal life is already yours and you will be raised up on the last day. Eat of Me and live forever. Eat of Me and never be hungry again.”

It’s okay if that doesn’t quite make sense. The love of God is much too vast for us to comprehend, and any preacher who claims otherwise is only fooling himself. Please know that wherever you go, whatever you do, you are forever surrounded by the inexhaustible Source of love that creates and sustains every one of us and all things. And that Source loves you so much that He is willing to be born, to be killed, to be eaten, to be yours.

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