The Experience of God

Propers: The Second Sunday in Lent, AD 2022 C

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

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

True faith is not blind. Blind faith is not true.

Contrary to the cliché, faith is not belief without evidence. Faith, in fact, is trust: a radical, powerful trust. And you do not trust someone whom you do not know. We know God. We know Him in Christ Jesus. And because we know Him in Christ Jesus, we have faith that God is good, that God is love, and that Jesus saves. Nothing can change that. Nothing can stop the love of God, who has literally gone to hell and back to bring us home in Him.

They say that our society is less religious because we’re becoming more rational. But that’s hogwash. The less religious we are, the less rational we are, because we put our faith in things that we already know will fail. We know that consumerism will not bring us happiness, yet we keep consuming anyway. We know that politicians will fail us, but we keep pretending as though they’re messiahs. We know that we are going to die, yet we continue to worship youth.

It’s ridiculous. And the one strand of hope I see is our postmodern obsession with the paranormal: with witches and sasquatch and cryptids and ghosts and UFOs. Yes, that’s right: I think it’s a good thing. It means that the religious instinct is alive. We are still looking to reënchant our world; looking beyond what we can merely see and touch and buy and sell to something wilder, deeper, magical, miraculous. I think it’s a little misplaced, but I thank God that the spirit world won’t stay dead.

Now, our readings today are all about faith: Abraham’s faith that God keeps His promises; the Psalmist’s faith that God is our stronghold; Paul’s faith that Christ is salvation; and Jerusalem’s lack of faith, refusing to trust in the God who is constantly calling her home. We will murder Jesus in Jerusalem. Yet not even this can quell His compassion for us all.

All well and good, we might say. But they had faith because they saw, didn’t they? They knew God personally, intimately. Abraham heard the voice of the Almighty; Paul saw the Risen Jesus on the road to Damascus. Their trust was well-founded. What about ours? How do we prevent our faith from becoming belief without evidence—that blindness of which we’re so often accused—and insure instead that true faith is our trust in the God whom we know and love for ourselves?

In other words, how can we know God today? How do we hear His voice, like Abraham?

Well, I’m a pastor, and this is a Lutheran congregation, so you know very well that I’m going to tell you to find God in Word and in Sacrament. The Holy Spirit works through the words of our Bible to bring us to Jesus, and Jesus to us.

A regular, disciplined, spiritual reading of Scripture brings us into the story of God: the story of Creator and Creation, of Yahweh and Israel, of Christ and His Church. By meditating on the Word, we become incorporated into the history of God’s people, the Body and the Bride of Christ. We eat the Bible as Ezekiel ate the scroll.

Keep in mind that the Scriptures will provoke you, offend you, astound you. The Bible has hands and grapples us, feet and chases us. It kills us and makes us alive again! And for as many times as we return to it, we will find treasures there old and new. People of the Book need to know the Book. And you don’t need a bunch of degrees or working knowledge of ancient languages in order to engage in sacred reading. You just need to trust that God is good, and God is here, and God is for you. The rest of it we can work out together.

And of course I’m going to reiterate the vitality of the Sacraments: of Holy Baptism, and Holy Communion. These are not simply rituals. They are means of grace and venues of the Incarnation. They make us into Christ. In Baptism, we are joined to Jesus’ own death, already died for us, and to Jesus’ own eternal life, already begun. His Holy Spirit, the very life of God, is breathed into our souls. Then in Communion—we consume the flesh and blood of God! And yes, that is every bit as scandalous and terrifying today as ever it was.

Together, when we have the Word of God, the Spirit of God, the Body and the Blood of God—what does that make us? Who does that make us? It makes us Jesus. As God and Man are one in Christ, so we are one in Him. That is the heart of Christianity. It is God come down from above. It is grace come in from without.

But here’s the thing. For as much as Word and Sacrament kindle in us faith, for as much as the implanted Word conceives in us God’s love, so too do we need faith in order to receive them in the first place. And I know that sounds like a paradox, a sort of chicken-or-the-egg situation. But if we don’t have faith, if we don’t know Christ, then the Bible is just a book—and rather a hodgepodge at that. It means no more nor less to us than Homer.

As for the Sacraments, well—should you not receive the Sacraments in faith, they are still the Sacraments. God’s promises are sure regardless. Yet what good does a promise do us, if we have no faith, no trust, in the one who makes it? St Paul warns that receiving the Sacrament without faith is not only useless but actually dangerous and detrimental to our spiritual health. “The unspiritual man,” he writes, “does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.”

So yes, the gifts of Word and Sacrament put God’s grace within us, put God’s faith within us, yet it would appear that we need some level of faith, some level of trust, in order to receive them in the first place. And this too comes from God, but not from without. This faith we find within.

I do believe there is a way for us to each know God: not simply be receiving tradition, not simply by taking an authority’s word for it, but to know God for ourselves, to experience Him within. Because really the internal/external division is false. God is everywhere and nowhere. He is in you, and you are in Him. And you may not think that you hear His voice, but this is largely because God’s first language is silence. It is in silence that “deep calls unto deep,” that God calls unto the soul.

How can we know God in daily life? What are some practical pointers for Christian spirituality? Well, for starters, we should each be practicing gratitude. And I know that sounds a little sappy—“count our blessings,” and all that—but it works. The human instinct is for gratitude: gratitude in response to beauty, goodness, truth, wonder, love, joy, bliss; gratitude simply for being alive, for being aware. We have an instinct for God. Cultivate that. Thank you, God, for this sunset. Thank you, God, for my children. Thank you, God, for this moment, this breath, this life.

Another, of course, is love. Practice love; not as a feeling, but as the choice to put another’s good before our own. Indeed, the solution to our problems is often found in helping others with theirs. Love takes us beyond ourselves. It’s not easy. It doesn’t just happen. Love comes with a cost, with effort, but with great reward as well. God is love, and every act of love is a little death and resurrection.

And finally, there is inquiry. Close your eyes, still your breath, and ask yourself: “What am I? Who am I? How do I know that I exist, that I live?” Seek out silence, seek out quiet, and deeply dive within. You will find that you are not your possessions. You are not your thoughts or your feelings. You are neither your body nor your mind. You are something deeper, grounded in the Source of All, grounded, yes, in God, “in whom we all live and move and have our being.”

There in the midst of the deepest part of you, you will ask who you are and you will hear: “I AM.” And that experience is beyond all words, all description. People speak of it as light and love and stillness and bliss and transcendence. And that is God. That is the experience of God within, which then prepares us, opens us, to the experience of God without. And this is generally not a one-time thing. It’s not a bolt from the blue. It’s a lifelong practice. It’s work. We walk the Way of Jesus Christ.

But in so doing, the question of “Do you believe in God?” becomes silly. We don’t have to believe. We know Him for ourselves. We trust Him. We have faith. He is within the deepest part of us, and all throughout our world. And once we know this, then can we look to a tree and say, “Christ is there in that.” We see another person, and realize, “Here is Christ before me.” We are saturated with Him.

Once we experience God for ourselves, belief isn’t part of the picture. And for that matter, neither is fear. There is only faith, and trust, and love. Thanks be to God.

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