Would You Like to Be a God?

Propers: Whitsun Pentecost, AD 2022 C

Homily:

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

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 would you be, if you could be anything? Would you be rich and powerful? Would you seek out fame and glory? Would you dedicate your life to helping others? Or might you simply retire, to live out your days as a peaceful, self-sufficient sage? Well, then, how about this: How would you like to be a god?

From before the invention of writing, humanity has longed for the divine, for the good, the true, and the beautiful. We have longed to pass beyond this vale of tears, the conflagration of this world, to live beyond hunger and want and fear and death. We have dreamt of flying through the heavens, of moving mountains, of curing diseases. We have dreamt of immortality, to break free from the shackles of time.

No other animal does this. No dog sits around and thinks, “I wish I could fly.” No cat stays up nights fretting over its purpose or its destiny. No gorilla wonders, “Am I living up to my full potential as a gorilla?” No, it’s just us. Everything else is happy being exactly what it is. Only humanity yearns to be something more than human. Only humanity sees for itself a destiny divine.

And we’ve always done this. The Egyptians deified their pharaohs, the Greeks their heroes, the Romans their Caesars. The Chinese diaspora have erected more than 4000 temples to the goddess Mazu, who was but a poor and simple village girl, revered upon her death. Our Jewish brethren speak of great prophets such as Enoch, Elijah, and Moses as being taken bodily into heaven, to live there as angels, to live there as gods. The whole purpose of the Jerusalem Temple was to give anointed priests and kings access to eternity, to make them sons of God on earth.

Why would we dream of this? Why would we long for this? Again, other creatures don’t pine to become more than they are. A dog is perfectly content to be a dog. Only humans ache to become more human than human, to become something divine. Perhaps it is because in us a self-aware universe yearns for her destiny, yearns to return to her God. Or perhaps it’s because animals are wise enough to know that they already have God in this moment, that they are one with Him even now.

Regardless, we cannot shake this intuition that we have an immortal destiny. No culture on earth has ever believed that death is truly our end. We just don’t. As C.S. Lewis reminds us: “It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.” We are all of us potential gods and monsters.

And this is not at all to say that the rest of Creation has no place in the world to come, no role beyond bodily death. Yet they are content to live in the now, while we seek the vision to come. Animals have no existential anxiety. We could learn a thing or two from their faith, their trust, their gratitude, unconscious as it may be.

Christ is the culmination of this vision, of our longing. In Christ are God and Man made one. I don’t mean god here with a lower-case G, the way I’ve been using it to speak of immortality. No, here I mean the One God, the True God, the Creator of us and of all. In Jesus Christ has God come down, to share in our humanity, to share in our mortality. In Christ has God confronted death and trampled it under His feet.

Thus is heaven now opened to all of humanity, all of Creation. And by heaven here I do not mean simply some far away fantasy place, some pie in the sky by and by, but I mean the divine life itself: the infinite Goodness, Truth, and Beauty that is God. God is Life and Light and Love, infinitely merciful, infinitely generous, such that His Spirit, His Breath, His Being fill us up to bursting and overflow from us to all the world around us. Only God can be fully human. Only Christ can be fully God.

That’s why the Resurrection is the spark that lights the fire, the firstfruits of the harvest, the beginning of our end. Christianity has always been apocalyptic in the sense that we’ve always looked forward to the end of all things, the destiny and the purpose of this cosmos, which you know is nothing less than eternal bliss in God. But see, we mustn’t simply get stuck in thinking about this in time. It’s not that the world will necessarily end tomorrow, or anytime soon. Rather, it’s that the end of the world, the purpose of the world, has been revealed to us in eternity, beyond time.

Right? Eternity isn’t just time on and on and on. Eternity is free from time, above and beyond and before all time. Eternity was always first; eternity is always now. So yes, these are the last days; they’ve always been the last days; because a Christian is a pilgrim in this world, a sojourner upon the earth. We always have one foot here in space and time, and the other in infinity. We aren’t just citizens of a foreign land. We are alien beings, half in and half out of reality.

You will live forever. You are one with God. Your every wound will be healed, every tear wiped away, every loss restored, and every wrong set right. Your every single sin will be exposed in the light of God—and sterilized away! You will become something greater than angels, veritable gods upon this earth, wanting for nothing, eternally growing, eternally blissful, eternally loved. This isn’t harps on a fluffy little cloud. This is theosis, the forging of gods! “Is it not written,” Jesus taught us, “I say you are gods!” John’s Gospel, Chapter 10.

But now here’s the crucial part: What does godhood look like? What does it mean for God to say that “I say you are gods”? Enter Pentecost. Enter the Holy Spirit.

50 days after His Resurrection, 10 days after His return and Ascension to heaven, Jesus sends His Holy Spirit unto His Apostles. The Spirit falls on them as fire, as the burning bush of old, which thrived amidst the flames. And the Spirit ignites inside of them, blazing within like a star, and fills them up to bursting with the light and life of God, with boldness and brashness and bliss. And out they run, these men who formerly cowered, out into the streets to proclaim with joy the truth of the Gospel, heedless now of any cost.

What does it look like to be immortal? What does it look like to have little gods and goddesses running about on earth, free from fear, free from death, free from greed or wrath or lust? It looks like Pentecost. It looks like fishermen and tax collectors who cannot contain their excitement, who speak to all peoples each in their own language, who proclaim the Jubilee of Jesus Christ, the forgiveness of all sin.

Here there is no Zeus, no Thor, no Ra, no little godlings strutting about and smiting folks with lightning. Here there are simply people made fully alive, who have found the hope of us all, who have been found by the true divine life here upon this earth. And it looks like generosity, and justice and mercy and truth. It looks like people who can give without fear of scarcity, and live without fear of death, and love without the predations of the insatiable human ego. By God, what they’ve become!

We speak of Christ, the Holy Spirit, and the Church as though they were three separate things, but really they are one. Christ is manifest in His Holy Spirit and realized by the Church—this community of believers, which is His Body now. Therefore, to believe in the Spirit and to cherish the Church is to have faith in Christ; and to have faith in Christ means to believe in His Spirit and to cherish His Church. Thus are we liberated and enlightened by our faith, which make us one in Him.

Salvation comes not simply to individuals, but to all of us together, and through us to this world. The Savior has made us into little saviors, little christs, offering Him to all.

Christianity is an entirely new way of being human: one that can share without being lessened; one that can move in time without being worn away; one that can walk with us even into death and not be destroyed, not be enslaved. This is what has come to us in Pentecost, and to each of us in Baptism: the life of God, the end of the world, the fulfillment of every good and true desire. I say to you, you are gods. I say to you, you are free. I say to you, you are loved, in eternity.

What more could we possibly want? What more could there possibly be?

Alleluia! Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia! And we shall rise immortal.

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

If you liked this, check out Introduction to a Goddess Who I Have Known from Childhood.