Spirited Away

Propers: The Sixth Sunday of Easter, A.D. 2020 A

Homily:

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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

What is God like? What do we know of Him, and more importantly, how can we come to know Him for ourselves? There are a number of ways to answer that question.

Those of a philosophical bent will tend to emphasize God’s transcendence: that He is utterly beyond us, beyond any human comprehension. He is infinite, without limitation. He is eternal, without change. He is perfectly simple, meaning that He has no pieces or parts, that in God all is truly One in ways we cannot even imagine—because no matter how brilliant we are, however educated, however mystical, we can never be any closer to Infinity.

This understanding of God is called classical theism, and it is shared to one degree or another by all major world religions. God, with a capital G, is not at all like the gods, with a lowercase g. God is not simply the biggest being in Creation. He is beyond Creation. He is Being itself. And the rest of us, to the extent that we exist, exist only in God, in whom we all live and move and have our being.

This is a Big Idea, perhaps the biggest humanity has ever had. And it points out the limitations of our theological categories. No matter how we describe God, we must always fall short, for God is always bigger, always better, always truer than anything we can ever say. God is like the moon, which we can never grasp, but only point to. And so many great thinkers have claimed that since we cannot say what God truly is, we can only say what God is not. God is not cruel. God is not petty. God is not false or weak or wicked or stupid. This is called apophatic theology, the way of negation.

But others have argued that we can speak meaningfully of God by speaking analogously; which is to say that if we cannot know what God truly is, we can know what God is like, by speaking in analogies. Analogies express real truths, if only in part. And so, for example, we call God Father, meaning that He loves and guards and guides and provides and protects us, all of us, as a loving father ought. But we cannot take this literally—for God is more a true Father than any father we could ever know here below. It is an analogy, and a good one.

Keep in mind that in this understanding of God, this classical theism, God is not a person in the way that we are people. He is not a limited psychological subjectivity. He does not change His mind. There are no things He does not know. Yet at the same time, in all the ways that matter—in will and power and love and relationship—God is more a true person than we could ever be. In other words, God is not impersonal; He is transpersonal. He is not less than us; He is more.

For many, however, this will all be too inaccessible. We don’t want a God aloft and aloof in the heavens, ever the enigma, ever theoretical. We want a God we can handle, a God we can know and embrace and love. We want a more human God. We want to walk with Him in the Garden of Eden. We want to sing of His approach, as a young stag on the spice-laden mountains. And so we look to Jesus, who is God-With-Us, God made flesh, the visible Image of the invisible God. To paraphrase Luther, the Father is too big and so we must cling to the Son.

So we have then the transpersonal God beyond what we can imagine, beyond anything we could ever know; as well as the personal God, whom we can know and love and to whom we can relate as we would to a friend, a brother, a beloved teacher. But there is a third understanding of God, and this is that God is everywhere, in everything. God is in the rain. God is in the earth. God is in the beggar on the street. God is the Spirit within and throughout, above and below, all peoples and places and things and beasts.

God is the very breath that gives life to Nature. He is the muse who inspires the poets. He is the sense of the all-pervading divine that we feel within the sanctuary, within the forest, within the bassinet. God is within the world, vivifying the world, sanctifying all of Creation and making all of existence holy at the root. “I will ask the Father, and He will give to you another Advocate,” sayeth the Lord, “to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees Him nor knows Him. You know Him, because He abides with you and He will be in you.”

It’s interesting to me to see the rise of admittedly small communities of neopagans in the modern day; whose practices, it must be said, tend not to be truly pagan in a pre-Christian sense, but rather a reclaiming of medieval and early modern folk traditions—folk Christianities—which carried religious faith out from the sanctuary into field and forest, into hearth and home. People, it seems, are yearning for divinity not in some lofty philosophical or formal ritual sense, but for the immanent and intimate Spirit of God; the God of everyday life, the God—or Goddess, as they like to say—of magic, enchantment, and wonder. They are reclaiming a God whom we as Christians used to know.

So which of these appeals to you? The transcendent God, infinitely mysterious, infinitely inexhaustible? The personal God, loving and tender and all-too-human, human even in ways that we can never quite seem to be? Or the wild and winsome God who moves beneath the surface of things, making life real and rich and invigorating?

The beauty of Christian faith, of course, is that we need not choose between the three. All are true; all are God. And I do not mean that there are three gods who work well together, or that there are three parts of God who together make up the whole. No, God can be many things at once and still be One God. He can be the transcendent Almighty Father; the relatable, loveable Son; and the wild and woolly Holy Spirit, the very breath in our lungs; all at the same time, all real, all true.

The Father is God, the Son is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. All Three are One.

So often we think of God as this invisible Emperor up on His Throne, with Jesus as His affable deputy or sidekick, and the Spirit as the shy member of the Trinity who takes care of the life of the Church, sweeping up the details. But this is in error. Jesus and the Spirit are not representatives or appointees or sub-gods. Jesus is God in the flesh. The Spirit is God in our lives. And the Father—the Father is the infinite Source, forever giving life, forever giving gifts, made known to us in the Spirit and the Son. All Three are who God truly is. No masks. No delegations.

Our faith is far greater, far richer, than we ever give it credit for. And Lutherans, I think, have done a decent job focusing on Jesus; as well we should—we being Christians and all. But by and large we have done a disservice to the Spirit. We acknowledge the Spirit as the soul of the Church, the presence of God who actualizes all the promises made in Jesus Christ. It is indeed the Spirit who gives life, who makes us the Church, who forgives us our sins and raises us up from the dead.

But we neglect the Spirit when we exit the sanctuary and think that Her work is complete. No, indeed. It is when we are sent out—the very meaning of the word “mass” in the divine liturgy—that the Spirit’s work has only just begun. This is why the fastest growing Christian movement on the planet is the Pentecostals, who embrace the living Spirit of God in their lives, however wild, however free. And that Spirit is truly our Holy Spirit as well. That Spirit is our God.

Pray in your homes. Read Scripture together. Take a moment of thanks at every meal, every rising, every lying down to sleep. Seek out God in nature, in family, in moments of blissful, stolen silence. Breathe Jesus in every day of your life. For Christ has sent to us an Advocate—our Counselor, our Helper, and our Guide—who is none other than His own Holy Spirit, His own Breath and Life, who is with us always, because He abides with us and He is in us.

Thus is the infinite mystery of God manifest in the flesh, and then sent out in Spirit to be manifest in us. God is still at work, in you—working through water and through fire, through flesh and through blood. You are Jesus Christ for this generation. Go then from here, in His Spirit, and be Jesus for a world still very much in need of Him.

Alleluia! Christ is Risen! He is Risen indeed! Alleluia!

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