Vicar’s sermon 2.6.24 2 Corinthians 4.5-12

A couple of weeks ago at Diocesan Synod a friend of mine told the story of how God met up with a bunch of experts in Artificial Intelligence (AI) who told Him that advances in the industry meant that they could now create a human being just as God had done with Adam. ‘I’d like to see that’ said God, ‘show me’. And so, the scientists set to drawing together their combined knowledge whilst a few of them started scrabbling around to get the dust of the earth from which their new Adam would be made. ‘Ah’ said God, ‘I should have told you. You’ve got to bring your own earth.’
It is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ said St Paul, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.
I’ve been pondering this verse all week and struggling with it. Who do we imagine this God to be, this God who has bothered to reveal His glory to us…us of all people…in the face of Jesus Christ? It seems important to try to describe this God, but how do we do it?
My problem is that I don’t really have the words. Thankfully it is a problem shared by the whole of humanity down the ages. Why? Because one thing that we can say of God is that God is not a being like other beings. Putting it simply I, only partially, can grasp who I am, so what hope do I have in describing God? It can take years on the psychiatrist’s couch to peel back the layers of a person’s character and being to arrive at a sense of ‘self knowledge’. We can, in part, understand something of other human beings – but only in part. Because there is, as the Rabbis say, ‘a whole universe within each one of us’ and only through the closest of our relationships do we, with another’s permission, get to enter that universe and explore it with them.
At a different level, we stand a better chance understanding the other things or beings that share this planet with us. The scientific endeavour probes and questions, divides and categorises everything from plants and insects through to animals, fish, birds, rocks and planets.
But we cannot do this with God. For God is unlike other beings or things: if we try to categorise Him then we have placed ourselves at least as His equals, possibly even above Him: that cannot be so for then He would not be God. And so the God who creates is not a ‘first cause’ in a chain of beings that react one upon the other. He doesn’t ‘wind up creation’ as I do my carriage clock in my study and ‘set things going’. He created (past tense) but He is and does more: He is …and always has been. And He creates and is creating (present and continuous): His being is an eternal presence (with no beginning or end) that makes room for other beings to ‘be’. This, needless to say, is nothing like the range of gods on offer in the ancient world: Mars, Jupiter, Mithras and the like.
‘You’ve got to bring your own earth’. Not so with God. ‘Something out of nothing’ is the way the theologians who wrote Genesis described it: stars, planets, universes and galaxies, flying fish, dolphins, great whales swimming through the seas, plankton, butterflies, grizzly bears, mountains and deserts, the beasts of the forests and jungles, the cat on our lap, minerals, atoms, compounds and muons, neutrinos, protons and electrons – all of it not just created and set going but being created, held, sustained, quickened by the One who is.
This God, who we struggle to describe, this God is the God who has shone in our hearts to reveal His glory in the face of Jesus Christ.
What a verse this is! This God, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God who met Moses at the burning bush, the God whom ‘heaven and earth cannot contain’, whose thoughts are ‘not our thoughts, whose ways are not our ways’ – this God reveals Himself to human beings…to ordinary people. He makes Himself known. ‘Why bother?’ you might think? Why bother at all with creatures who can be petty and narrow, who fight and war, and deceive and hurt. Who seem so small and yet have within themselves the capacity to destroy the created order through neglect or intent – neither of which is particularly endearing.
He makes Himself known again and again, it seems to be in His nature, to want to be in relationship with His creation, most especially with those made in His image, ‘who He is’. I’m reading Marilynne Robinson’s book ‘Genesis’ at the moment. If you don’t know her novels then seek them out, but this latest of her books is a reflection on the first book of the bible: a reflection from someone devout and intelligent, someone whose words stretch and challenge the mind and spirit. Her wisdom, as she comments on the dealings of God with the Patriarchs is that the whole of scripture is a theodicy, that is a ‘meditation upon the problem of evil.’ Not for the writer of Genesis some imagined heaven where God or the gods have their own existence or fight for supremacy (as did the gods of the middle east, Greece or Rome). No, our God is…And He is for us. He is involved with humanity in all its wonder but also in all its mess…He seeks out a relationship with His creatures.
He is so involved that He allows us to know Him, not just to know about Him. He is a God of many names: Yahweh, LORD – I am who I am: Adonai, The LORD Almighty, The LORD my righteousness, Alpha and Omega, The LORD who sees me, The One who heals, the Ancient of Days. He is Immanuel …or He is Immanuel (God with us) in the person of Jesus.
Do you see how our verse holds the great doctrines of creation, God’s generous purposes for humanity through his revelation to us His creatures and also the doctrines of Incarnation and of God’s Spirit (pneumatology) in just 36 words? He makes Himself known in the face of Jesus Christ. To see the face of God was a rare thing. Some scriptures suggest it is not possible: Moses on Mount Sinai could only see God’s back! And yet Moses also met with God ‘face to face’ in the Tent of meeting. The Psalmists encourage us to ‘seek God’s face’: to know Him intimately. Our verses says that God’s innermost nature, His Glory has been made known in the face of Jesus Christ: Jesus, the One anointed with God’s Spirit (Jesus Christ).
What does all this mean? Where does our verse leave us?
I hope it leaves us with a sense of wonder that God’s purposes have embraced you…that, whether your faith is small or great, the light that has shone in your heart is no small thing. It is the work and gift of God, encouraging, lifting, cajoling you into a deeper relationship with Him. Everything here is a gift to be gratefully received. No one has deserved or earned God’s attention. No. He it is who always makes the first move. All our faith is a response to His grace, His generosity. Our being here in church is a miracle not a favour we grant to the Almighty. He is the One who called us into Being. He is the One ‘in whom we live and move and have our being’ and without his continuous loving mercy and strength we are nothing, not even the dust from which we are made. He is the one who shares our life with us, who makes Himself known to us in the person of Jesus, whose revelation invites us to share in His life filled with his light and reflecting something of His glory (treasure in earthen vessels St Paul will go on to say). There is then only one true response. Worship – the only thing (as Geoff said the other week) that we human beings can offer to God that He doesn’t already have.
So let us stand and worship God in the words of our creed.