Divine Humanity

Propers: Holy Trinity, AD 2023 A

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.

We find God in Jesus Christ.

That’s it. That’s Christianity in a nutshell.

The whole faith rises or falls on the notion that God is found in this man. If we cannot see that, then we are not Christians. And I don’t blame those who can’t, because it really is a radical idea, far more shocking than we tend to give it credit for. It’s easy to imagine Christ as a good guy, a wise teacher, a wonderworker even. But what does it mean to say that He’s God?

Well, let’s take a step back. Let’s define our terms. In the English language, there’s all the difference in the world between God with an upper-case G and the gods with a lower-case G. The gods are the most powerful beings in Creation. They are the fastest, the strongest, the smartest, the most beautiful, the most powerful. They’re Thor and Zeus and Ra. They live in the heavens. They dine on ambrosia. And they certainly do as they like. Oh, to be a god.

Yet they have limits, don’t they? For as much as they can do, there are things which they cannot. Their flaws, in fact, are what make their stories, their myths, most interesting. They embody primal forces of the universe and mind. But the gods aren’t God. God is something else altogether.

God is not a creature in Creation. He’s not the biggest bad on the block. God is beyond the created and intelligible world. He is eternal, beyond time; infinite, beyond space; transcendent, beyond knowing. God is the Source of All. As such, God is not a being, but Being itself, subsistent existence itself—which is a fancy way of saying that everything comes from God and is sustained by God in every moment of its existence: physical, mental, spiritual, theoretical.

God is reality itself at its deepest, truest, fullest level, the infinite substrate from which all else flows, the ocean of awareness in which we all swim. He is the Good, the True, and the Beautiful; Consciousness, Being, and Bliss. Thus if you believe that truth is true, that goodness is good, that reality is real, then you already believe in God, whether you want to or not. The question of God’s existence is nonsensical. God is existence. If He ain’t real, then nothing is.

Some people get upset when I talk like this. They accuse me of moving the goalposts, of changing the meaning of words. See, they don’t want to believe in God because they think of God as a god, a bearded superbeing, up on a throne on a cloud. And when I tell them that God is reality in its purest form, they balk. They think I’m cheating, redefining the terms. But I didn’t define the words in this way. Plato did, twenty-four hundred years ago. It’s not my fault if folks don’t do the reading.

So then, why is this important to us? Why do we need to get all philosophical? Can’t I go one sermon without bringing Plato into it?

Well, it’s because of that first claim, the Christian claim, that God is found in Jesus. If we mean a god is found in Jesus, then that isn’t all that big a deal. It just means that Jesus is special, that Jesus is the best—faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and all that. And this we can swallow, right? Jesus as an angel, Jesus as superhuman: it’s kitschy, but understandable.

Yet to say that Jesus is God, is a far more scandalous claim. How can a man encapsulate the infinite? How can a mortal embody eternity? —because that’s what He does. That’s who He is. Jesus is a Man in such perfect union with God that He is God on earth, God made Man, Emmanuel: God-With-Us. And no matter how you slice it, that’s scary. It changes all we thought we knew of God and humankind.

The truth is, everyone believes in God, and every religion gets there eventually. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Platonists—even Buddhists, I would argue—all agree that Absolute Truth exists and that we are all seeking it out. We all yearn for Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. We’re all born with a God-sized hole inside. And we all try to regain the union which we’ve lost, the transcendence that we’ve lost, through the many paths of faith. All of us are trying to get home.

Some trust in law, or devotion, or non-attachment, or love; some in wisdom, some in knowledge, some in wild ecstatic abandon; for we all want to know God. We all strive to find God, and to be found by Him, whatever the terms that we use. That’s why we’re all religious, why we all have gods, even if today our gods tend to take the form of the market or the government or mean old blood and soil. All of that is just misplaced love. All of that is our shrieking out for God.

And the problem is that God is infinite, eternal, transcendent, beyond all thoughts, beyond all worlds, an ocean without a bottom, a mystery without end. How then can we know the unknowable? How can we grasp the ungraspable? It has to be grace. It has to be God reaching down when we could not reach up. And for us that all culminates in the God-Man Jesus Christ.

Because God is the source of all reality, and man as well as Creation has been fashioned in His Image, God can shine perfectly through Jesus like light through a clear, cool glass of water. This not only makes Christ God; it makes Him fully Man. That’s the thing. He isn’t a chimera, some half-and-half monstrosity, like Herakles needing to burn the humanity out of himself. Rather, the fact that God shines flawlessly through Jesus, through His life and death and resurrection, makes Him more truly human than we have ever been.

All of which is to say: we all yearn to know God in the most intimate way that we can. And for Christians, God is found entirely in Jesus Christ our Lord. Not in the Bible per se, not in the Church by herself, and not in our Creeds and Confessions. I love all those things; I believe all those things; but only because they give to us Jesus. If you want to know what God is like, look to Jesus. If you want to know true humanity, look to Jesus. If you want to know if you are loved, look to Jesus.

See, we knew that God was out there—that He is the Father of all, everywhere and nowhere, everything and nothing, infinite and eternal. And then we found Him in Jesus, which means of course that He found us. We worshipped Jesus, rightly. And then when He left, or seemed to leave—ascending into heaven, there to rule and redeem all there is—we found that He was still with us, the Spirit of Jesus, the Spirit of the Father, was still with us, within us, amongst us, alive!

God was in our community. God was in our stories. God was in our sacraments, the mysteries of faith. God hovered over our Font and descended upon our Table. We found Him in each other now, found Jesus in each other, in our neighbor, in our church, in the beggar at the door. And this was not an angel. This was not any sort of lesser spirit sent from God above. This was God Himself, Christ Himself, in our breath and our blood and our bread.

We could hardly believe it, but knew it was true. God has come in Christ, and Christ has never left. The words we used for this mystery, the names received for this mystic encounter, were Father, +Son, and Holy Spirit. Not as three different gods, not as masks that He hides behind, but true Names for the One God; One Essence, revealed to us, in and as, Three Underlying Realities; such that the Father is God, the Son is God, the Spirit is God, and God is One.

That’s what we mean by Trinity. For all our philosophizing, for all our terrible analogies, all it really means is that we know God in Christ, and Christ is with us still.

And so we read our stories. And so we share this meal. And so we are given Jesus: His Word, His Name, His Spirit, His Body and His Blood. Such that we are Christians! Such that we are members of His Body, with Jesus as our head. And then we are sent out, to show the world what God has shown to us, to give to all what God has given us, namely Himself, His life, His love, His grace. When we are Christ together, the world sees Him in us.

There could be no higher calling. There could be no sweeter grace. There could be no greater God.

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

 

 

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