The God in You

Somniodellic Workshop

Propers: The Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 24), AD 2024 B

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.

People make God credible.

There are of course many philosophical proofs for the existence of God—ones that I find quite convincing—but I was already there, wasn’t I? I already believed. Such arguments simply gave me permission to embrace my religion as something logical and rational; indeed, faith as the necessary foundation of all reason.

There are miracles, wonders and horrors alike, that still occur with unnerving frequency. We all have experiences that we cannot quite explain. I really do believe that our world is every bit as weird today as ever it was in the past; we just talk about it differently now. But the thing about encounters with the devilish or the divine is that as the years go by, the miraculous fades into memory, and memory feels mundane. We start to rationalize, to compartmentalize, to explain away what we knew to be true. We do not trust our senses.

Then there’s intuition. Some seem born with the comprehension that life is filled to bursting with meaning and purpose and value; that there are wonders far beyond what we can see or hear or touch; that some Presence is always with us, some all-pervading Love, and so none of us has ever truly been alone. Those with this conviction cannot shake it. Those without it cannot understand.

Least of all, we have fideism: the blunt assertion that we should believe in God because somebody said so. But that isn’t faith. It’s just brute authoritarianism, the abrogation of reason and of critical thought. This appeals to many, though it outright baffles me. “I’m right because I’m right” is not a creed that I could swallow. Those who do, I fear, conflate stupidity with security. And I’ve never had much use for stupid religion.

No, it’s people who make God credible. Logic, experience, intuition, and even authority all have roles to play within the greater life of faith. But people are the image of God; people are the word made flesh. We believe because we have been loved.

I credit my Christianity to the congregation in which I was raised. Naturally this involves some sentimentality; like everyone else, I view my youth through rose-tinted glasses. But my church was a second home to me, in a way that school was not. I had good friends there, fun activities, and endless opportunities to learn. Church was a place where I could ask any question, especially the big ones: life, morality, eternity, &c. Ours was an open-minded, big-hearted, deep-thinking, outward-looking community of faith. It still is. It’s still going strong while so many churches struggle.

The people there made God credible. They were thoughtful and faithful and kind. They embraced education and music and liturgy and art. They were always reaching out to help their neighbor, always optimistic in the face of many challenges, never afraid to tackle a topic whatever its baggage might be. Sure, there were conflicts. And sure, I was just a kid; I romanticize. But I had such a positive experience of religion that I have tried to pay it forward. I have tried to see it through.

Christ is alive, His Body and His Spirit. And I didn’t learn that just by reading, or by arguing, or even by the wonders I have witnessed. I learned the Gospel from normal people coming together to share the love of Christ. That made all the difference in my life. I believe, because He lives in them—just as He promises to live in you, and in me, and one day in us all. At this point I’m not even certain it’s belief. I don’t need to believe, because I’ve seen.

Skeptics often wonder why God doesn’t rend the heavens and come down, why all the skullduggery, why everything in religion seems to pass through human hands. Wouldn’t it be simpler if He told it to us straight, riding in on a cloud with all the technicolor angels? We do love a good show. But the people are a feature, not a bug. God reveals Himself to us, through us. We are part of God’s self-revelation to Himself.

Here’s what I mean. God is infinite Being, infinite Knowing, infinite Love. We have fancy words for all of this. “Trinity” refers to God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: He is Himself, He knows Himself, He loves Himself. And these Three all are One. We call it “perichoresis,” which means a spinning sort of dance; being and knowing and loving all tied up together, all drawing from one another; perfect Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, world without end. It is an image of joy and peace and ecstasy beyond all words.

And this dance of the Trinity spills out in superabundance, creating all possible worlds, to know and love and be. God doesn’t create because He has to; He lacks nothing; He doesn’t get lonely. Yet it is His nature, to create, to redeem, and to sanctify. Another fancy word: “kenosis.” It means self-emptying. God, in a sense, has to make room for there to be something other than God. Creator retreats to open up Creation. Yet even the emptiness, the space of possibility, is God. The One becomes the None to be the Many.

And so are we created, in freedom, love, and joy, made in the Image of our Father. We, too, are part of the life of God—not in that you or I or the whole of the universe is God, but in that we are rooted in Him; that we draw our knowledge, our being, our love from Him. When we go astray—when we stumble, when we fall—God does not abandon us in sin, nor even force us to be good. Rather, God joins us in our exile, follows us east of Eden. He becomes one of us, one with us, in the person of Jesus Christ.

Jesus is the one true human being through whom God shines so clearly and perfectly that we cannot tell where the Creator ends and Creation begins. Christ is fully both. Indeed, the only way for us to be truly, fully human is to be as one with God in Jesus Christ. We are the universe becoming aware of itself. That’s why the Scriptures treat humanity as an entire species of priests, leading all of Nature back to God, who is the source and ground of our being. Salvation comes through Creation, not separate from it.

This is what we mean by Incarnation. God becomes human, the Creator becomes Creation, because everything we long for—salvation, redemption, perfection—all of that is only found in union with our God. Christ is that union. And by giving us His Spirit, by making us His Body, He sends us out to save the world together as His Church. We sainted sinners are the hands of Jesus Christ, receiving His infinite life through the gift of Word and Sacrament, then going out to share Him with the world.

The Incarnation comes to us in Christ. The Spirit splits it open in the Church. And one day, at the eschaton, the life and love of God shall then encompass all the cosmos. Yes, God saves us, but He saves us through each other. We are sinners in that we fall short of this calling. We are saints in that He loves us nonetheless. Every time we fall, Jesus raises us again. Love, then, is not some prerequisite for salvation; love is salvation! Love sets us free.

This is why St James, in our epistle read this morning, insists that we must ever tame our tongue. Because our words belong to Christ, to Christ who is the Word. We are set apart to proclaim His Good News to the world: not to curse, not to harm, not to slander. Who will save mankind if not those called by God? Salvation is entrusted unto us, so that the world can still know Jesus, still see Jesus, through our lives. None of us is perfect, but together we possess the love of God.

Likewise in the Gospel reading, Jesus rebukes Peter for thinking of salvation in purely worldly terms, as something merely political or unavoidably militant. Our vision must be higher: to live for love of others disregarding every cost. That’s what the Cross is. The Cross is the burden of doing the right thing in a broken, fallen world, for the sake of that world, for the sake of the healing of the ones who do us harm. That sort of living shocks people, offends people, angers and enchants people, because they see Christ in it, in us.

People make God credible. Every one of us is here because we were loved. Now we are called to go and love another, to share the life of Christ with all the world. You are Jesus’ hands and feet and voice now. You are the salvation He has sent. Such is Law and Gospel, terror and elation, death and resurrection. Such is eternal life in Christ. Go and love as you are loved and know that Christ is with you.

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

Pertinent Links

RDG Stout
Blog: https://rdgstout.blogspot.com/
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St Peter’s Lutheran
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Website: https://www.stpetersnymills.org/
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Nidaros Lutheran
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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nidaroschurch6026