The Living God
Joel 2:21-27
Psalm 67
Acts 14:8-18
John 14:23-29
Tim
Christoffersen
St. Anselm’s
May 12, 2002
Listen
again to some of the words that describe Biblical man’s relationship
to the living God:
O children of Zion, be glad and rejoice in the Lord your God; for he has
given the early rain for your vindication…the vats shall overflow with
wine and oil…I, the Lord, am your God and there is no other.
May God be merciful to us and bless us, show the light of his countenance
and come to us.
May God, our own God, give us his blessing…may all the ends of the earth
stand in awe of him.
Do you feel the immediacy and ‘overwhelming-ness’, to coin a phrase,
of God’s presence in their lives? Their lives are openly and intimately
connected with the living God. They stand in awe of their living God.
These are not the words of modern, post Enlightenment man, assessing the probability
that God exists out there somewhere. What has happened to the immediacy and
awe in the face of God’s presence among modern men in the 21st century?
To have some insight into that question, I think we need to recall how the
Greek contemporaries of Biblical man understood their gods and the impact
of Greek philosophy. For those of us in western culture, we are descendants
both of Biblical man and the Greek heritage.
Greek philosophy focused on the question of the "good." The ‘highest
good’ was the objective of philosophical inquiry. The universe itself
was basically accepted as existing although Greek science asked questions
about the elements and structure that made up the universe. The belief that
God created the universe out of nothing would be dismissed.
The Greek gods, who were capable of treachery as well as mercy, behaved much
as humans and we get a sense of that in the encounter of Paul with the Lycaonians
in the reading from Acts. When Paul told the cripple who had been lame from
birth to stand up, and he did, the Lycaonians thought the god Hermes had taken
human form in Paul and the god Zeus had taken human form in Barnabas. They
wanted to offer sacrifices to Paul and Barnabas.
Today, like our Greek intellectual ancestors, we still seek the "good"
but we call it "values." It may be civic values, patriotic values,
family values, or other ‘values.’ Values don’t necessarily
require any god. We have progressed and now we also make gods out of things
as well as humans. Wealth or social status is a god for many today. People
magazine keeps us up to speed on the gods who have taken human form and are
objects of veneration by many in our fashion conscious culture.
Biblical man stands in awe and wonder in the face of the events of creation,
daily life itself, and God’s presence and covenant with them in the desert
at Mt. Sinai. He does not take creation for granted. The early rain, the wine
and the oil are from God. He asks God for the blessing of vitality, health,
longevity, fertility and children knowing they come from God. He knows from
the covenant at Sinai that faithfulness is expected of him as his part of
the covenant.
I believe that when we look at our attitude toward creation, whether we see
our lives as a gift or a given, we gain insight into whether or not we are
open to seeing and responding to God’s presence in our daily lives.
How do we respond to the events of creation and our own creation? From the
point of view of man, the universe seems to be without aim or purpose, and
it would appear meaningless if man were the measure of meaning. Paraphrasing
Abraham Heschel, a Jewish philosopher and theologian of this century, when
faced with the mind-surpassing grandeur of the universe, we cannot but admit
that there is meaning which is greater than man. There seem to be two courses
of our thinking: one begins with man and his needs and ends in assuming that
the universe is a meaningless display or a waste of energy; the other begins
in amazement, in awe and humility and ends in the assumption that the universe
is full of a glory that surpasses man and his mind, but is of eternal meaning
to God who created it.
Biblical man tends to follow the second course and stand in awe and wonder
at creation. The tragedy of modern man is that he tends to follow the first
course and believes he is alone in the universe.
Awe or wonder for Biblical man is, as Heschel would say, the awareness of
transcendent meaning. The world in its grandeur is full of a spiritual radiance,
for which we have neither name nor concept. Awe is an answer of the heart
and mind to the presence of mystery in all things, an intuition for a meaning
that is beyond the mystery, an awareness of the transcendent worth of the
universe.
Let me connect awe and wonder to an experience Susan and I had at the beginning
of this week. We had spent the previous four days with our daughter, Rogelio,
our son in law and Ethan, our grandson and Rogelio’s extended family
in a small village in central Mexico. It was a very special time. We spent
much time sitting together and talking in Spanish as best we could. I tended
to operate at the feeling level, since my Spanish is not great, and did not
seek help unless I did not feel in touch at the feeling level with what we
were talking about. We developed a strong bond of love and friendship in those
several days. Jose, the father, by the third day had asked me to put eye drops
in his eyes. He was blind in one eye and had severely restricted vision in
the other eye. I felt his acceptance of me in that act.
When it was time to go, the tears began to flow from everyone including Susan
and I. In an act that I can only now understand in awe and wonder, Socorro,
the mother, said quietly and gently to Susan, No nos olvida or Don’t
forget us. Our living God was present in that expression of trust, love and
hope. God is present and there is meaning in our lives.
AMEN.
