Naming God – David Brubacher – May 18/08

Introduction:   Based on your experience with God, how would you name God? How would you describe the God you know to someone who has never heard about God?

According to the Christian calendar, today is Trinity Sunday. The Christian doctrine of the Trinity which formulates belief in God as triune: traditionally names God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, or as Creator, Saviour and Sustainer. Christians are often criticized as believing in three Gods, not one. In some respects the criticism is justified. Just listen to people as they pray. To pray to God as Father, Jesus or even as some do Holy Spirit is only to acknowledge part of the divine presence we know as God.

Together with our Jewish faith partners we believe God is one. The Shema recorded in Deuteronomy 6:4 and recited daily by Jews states, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.”God is one but experienced in at least three different ways. God is creator. Genesis one begins, “In the beginning God created….” That’s all I need to know. How and when God created is not important in shaping my faith and confidence that God is creator. God continues to call humanity to be stewards and co-creators of all creation.

In our sin we walk away from God and God’s intention for creation. Still God continues to come to us again and again to lead us back to the path of salvation. In these acts of God throughout human history we come to know God as Saviour. The Bible records God’s coming to humanity in acts of salvation: In the Exodus from Egyptian slavery and in Christian conviction, in the person of Jesus.

I marvel that God trusts us with the care of creation. It is like a potter entrusting her best and most delicate creation to the kid down the street that is always in some kind of trouble. In divine wisdom God knows that we need help in doing what we have been called to do. Last Sunday we celebrated the coming of the Holy Spirit, God present among us, to guide and empower us in God’s mission.

Now I know I have not given an adequate consideration of the profound theological implications regarding the Trinity. My primary interest today is considering the ways we come to know God. Trinity Sunday is an opportunity to reflect on the dynamic tension between what we know of God and our attempts to formulate that experience. There is a danger of imagining God as totally mysterious and hardly to be known by humanity. The other danger is to assume that we can know God fully, thus capturing God and domesticating God according to the images of our experience. Within this tension my interest is that people come to know God in a way that informs and transforms life. A God that cannot be known will not do that. A God that is simply an extension of our own thinking likewise lacks any creative power to shape and direct our lives.

Before I consider the scripture texts read this morning I want to share several short vignettes from my own journey of coming to know God as one who informs and transforms life.

My childhood name for God was something like “condemning judge.” I was not in a hurry to know this God. It certainly was not a God I wanted to snuggle up to.

As young children our parents read to us from Hurlbert’s Stories of the Bible. There was a picture of Moses as an old man with a long white beard. A short stocky preacher with a load booming voice in our Old Order Mennonite Church routinely reminded us that the word of God is sharper than a two edged sword. These images combined gave me a picture of God as an old man with a long sharp tongue that was out to get me. I lived with that image of God until my mid teens.

I had my first airplane ride in my mid teens. It was an Air Canada Vanguard with two huge turbo prop engines on each wing. Perhaps it was a mistake that I sat right by the wing. I recall the horror I felt when I saw how much the wings flopped up and down. I was sure they would break. Obviously they didn’t and some time later it was explained to me that the plane was actually designed for the wings to move up and down. If not, then indeed they would break. I was also aware that any faith I had in God was breaking.

Our family began to attend the St. Jacobs Mennonite Church about that time. I began to hear sermons about a God of love and compassion. I heard these sermons from a young pastor who took us hiking and played broomball with us on Sunday afternoon.

Some years later, in Bible College, my first assignment was to read the book of II Timothy and develop my own outline. We were allowed to read commentaries. I was dismayed to discover that most commentators suggested the Apostle Paul did not actually write the book but it was written by his disciples. I went to our respected New Testament professor, Doc Schroeder, confident he would tell me the commentators were wrong. I was shocked when he said they were probably right. Seeing my dismay he continued, “But does that have to change anything. I accept the Bible as God’s word by faith.” To this day I consider that to be one of the most profound things I learned in all of my theological education. It has given me the flexibility needed for my faith to survive.

Now many years later I comfortably say the more I know the less I am sure of what I know for sure. But the more confident I am that God is in it all. I finally feel that I have a faith that connects me to God in a way that informs and transforms life.

Our scriptures for this morning help us to name our experience with God, in life giving and life shaping ways. First they remind us the God of the Bible is not distant, nor a mere extension of ourselves, but a gracious God to be trusted above all. The Trinitarian formula hinted at but not articulated as such in our texts represents a unique feature of Christian theology. But in the end, it is not our theological formulation, but our embrace of all that God is that impacts our lives. As a community of faith it is our task to struggle endlessly to know more fully the God that is both disclosed to us, yet remains profoundly “other.”

Psalm 8 is one of the most poetic expressions in the entire Bible connecting us to God and to God’s purpose for us in creation. It holds together the gracious sovereignty of God and the glorious dignity of humanity. At beginning and the end the Psalm confesses, “O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth.”  That sounds and feels much better to me than “condemning judge.”

The text suggests there are those who resist the sovereign rule of God. But it goes on to show that God has a different way of approaching resisters than the barrel chested preacher in my childhood church. God comes to us in the simple and innocent songs of praise of suckl
ing children. In such songs we come to know the sovereign rule of God our creator, redeemer and sustainer. God’s mode of being sovereign Lord is modest, even weak by the standards of the world.

In the early 1970’s I served as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer at the infamous Wiltwyck School for Boys. It was a residential school for black and Hispanic boys, 8 to 16 years old, from ghetto communities of New York City. Behaviour and crowd control was always an issue. Several of our staff were tall black men, veterans of the Viet Nam war. When they cracked their belts they could gain the boys attention. Then there was John Lewis, white, pudgy, straggly long hair, slightly cross-eyed and soft spoken. He could walk into the room lift up his hand and say, “Boys!” and you could hear a pin drop. Well, almost. The boys knew John Lewis loved them and was highly invested in their well being.

Psalm 8 articulates God’s care for humanity. Even though humanity pales in comparison with the rest of creation God has elevated humanity to a place of dignity and authority. The Psalm cuts to a central claim of biblical faith. In the beginning and end, all sovereignty belongs to God. In between creation is entrusted to humanity. According to some commentators Jesus is the ultimate human being in Psalm 8 and serves as a link between the sovereign rule of God and our human mission in God’s creation.

What is traditionally known as the “Great Commission” Matthew 28:16-20 offers a biblical perspective on how we stumbling humans come to be commissioned to carry forward God’s mission in the world.

Matthew’s recollection of the resurrection concludes with Jesus’ words to the women in the garden, “Do not be afraid; go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” The words read from Matthew 28 are in fulfillment of that directive.

When the disciples met Jesus on the mountain, “they worshipped him; but some doubted.” Earlier they had worshipped Jesus when he walked on water. The women worshipped him on that first Easter morning. One might think that now when they stand in the presence of the resurrected Jesus about to ascend to heaven all doubt would be removed. But worship was mingled with doubt. It was precisely these worshipping and doubting disciples that Jesus commissioned to carry forward God’s mission on earth. Doubt does not disqualify us from beings agents of the good news made known in Jesus.

Jesus announces the premise on which the commission of disciples, then and now, rests. The imperative to make disciples rests on the authority given by the sovereign God of Psalm 8. In this commission followers of Jesus are given credentials for the mission and power by which to carry it out. Such power is demonstrated time and again in the life and teachings of Jesus. As Jesus is about to ascend to heaven disciples are commissioned to exercise this same power, a power that exceeds human imagination. God’s mission is not jeopardized by our weakness nor by our uncertainties.

Jesus continues to outline the awesome scope of the disciple’s commission. They are to make disciples of all nations. Earlier in Matthew Jesus sent the disciples instructing them not to go among Gentiles or Samaritans but only to the “lost sheep of Israel.” Now at the end of Matthew’s gospel and in light of Jesus’ death and resurrection, the scope of the mission is universalized.

The commission continues to this day. In baptism we respond to and proclaim the divine authority of God. In repentance and denouncing of sin baptism is a confession that we belonged to God experienced as triune: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The formula declares that we belong to a God who is known and experienced in more than one way. This God sustains us in their times of doubt and confusion. Nothing will stop God’s purpose in the world. Not even doubt.

Along with baptism we are to teach people concerning the Kingdom of God and the way of Jesus. Teaching and response in obedience serve to protect Jesus’ message from being reduced to cheap grace or to private faith. The intent is to nurture a community that does not take God’s kingdom lightly, but desires to live it out in the world.

I am struck by the parallels of what is expressed here in Matthew 28 and the values we have articulated as central to TUMC as a community of faith. There is a clearly an expressed desire to be followers of Jesus in our busy urban lifestyles, to be formed and transformed by presence of Jesus so that we can be a part of that which gives life to each other and the world in which we live.

Jesus concludes with the promise that God’s divine presence will always be with the church. In the beginning of Matthew we heard Jesus’ name, Emanuel, God with us. Now at the very end we hear the ongoing commitment of Jesus to accompany his beloved, though not always comprehending, disciples.

The promise reaches us at TUMC as walk into a future that is not fully known. Jesus walks with us into that future, which will include the calling of a new pastor. We seek to move forward with God even as we ponder what to take with us into that future. As we move forward we discern the best of God’s spirit shaped in what we know as TUMC. The church has not been abandoned after Easter. The crucified and risen Jesus is with us.

Conclusion:   How do you see God present? How would you name your experience with this God? The God we have encountered today does not come to narrow and restrict our experience with God. God comes that we might have life and see the ever broadening way God is present among us. Today I think I would name my experience with God as “gracious creator/playful healer/generous enabler.” Amen.