Sermon:

We live in a ‘religious society’. Coming back from Europe last week, I can literally feel the difference in non-descript ways. But what is the nature of that religion? Our Epistle reading today speaks of God in very interesting ways; the Gospel reading brings our central issue to bear. I’d like to look more closely at these passages together, after reflecting for a moment about tendencies deeply embedded in us by our sin, encouraged by the world in which we live.

1. We’d like a god who would answer our questions; a god to justify our agendas; a god who will fit into our lives.

a. Our Epistle reading is the climax of Paul’s letter to the Romans. Time and time again Paul explodes his readers’ preconceived ideas of God’s action in the world. Has God forsaken God’s covenant with the Jews? No!! But God has used the Jews rejection of their own Messiah, their own King in order to include the Gentiles into the spiritual heritage of the Jews. God will not be drawn into a preconceived agenda; God will not subordinate God’s life to the issues and agendas of the creation. God will not allow God’s own Life to be used for justification of an agenda already within creation outside of God’s revelation in Jesus Christ.

b. Wow, this hurts. In our culture we’re really taught in very subtle ways that God exists for our agenda, to help solve our problems. Sometimes its personal agendas. You know, we can live without God until trouble arises, emotional, relational, or material problems. Then its, “Yo, God! Time to exercise your will and help me out of my bind!” God exists to solve our personal problems. Personal visions of divine aid come our way. God exists to help us! Or maybe our agenda is different – maybe it’s what our society calls the political. God exists to justify our public agendas in the world – O God of liberty, help spread democracy throughout the world by our violence! Or, O God of Justice, bring down the capitalist exploitation of the poor so that we might distribute material goods to bring forth your reign by our programs!

c. We think that we know God’s agenda – it’s obvious! God exists to justify our agenda; God exists to fit into the slots, the questions that we ask. God is exactly like us, except bigger, stronger, more loving, with a will that is not limited by having a body, by the material limits that we find in our lives. It’s easy to move from the world around us to God, to find a way to fit God into the world, into our private lives, into our public agendas. You know, I’m sure that God has really, really, really big glasses that God looks through to see the world as it really is!
d. Deep within our selves we really want a god that can fit into our lives.

2. Instead Paul points to the true God, a Mystery whose ways remain beyond our comprehension, Whose Life remains beyond our Language, whose very Being remains completely unknown to us outside God’s own Revelation to us.

a. There’s a biblical word for this god who can fit into our lives: it’s called “an idol.” We can wrap our minds around idols, whether we carve them out of metals, or shape them by our language, or honor them as “the cause”. We can control idols. We can acknowledge them as gods, as projections of our own desires, our own agendas, even as they justify our issues, our agendas in something beyond ourselves. We want to move from the creation as it appears to us to make God correspond to the creation in a one-to-one manner. God becomes one of the guys or girls, a really big, nice Person among all of us little, not so nice, persons – an idol.

b. “O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are God’s judgments, how inscrutable God’s ways! Who has known the mind of God? Who has been God’s counselor? Who has given a gift to God that the giver might be repaid?” Any God that we can wrap our heads around isn’t the true God. Any God that fits into our lives, our agendas, any God that we can reduce to part of our plotting is not the true God. God does not need us; we are utterly superfluous to God. God doesn’t need advice from us; there is nothing that we can give God that is not God’s already. We can’t reduce God’s ways to a rational agenda, a human movement within history to bring all things to an end by our actions, by our calculations, by our rationality or morality.

c. God’s ways transcend our ways, not only in extent, but in kind. God’s ways are different than ours because we are creation and God is not – God is Creator. There is not some standard that God shares with us that both we and God must live up to. No third category stands outside God that joins us with God. All standards find themselves in God, beyond our comprehension that we can participate in only as we participate in God our Maker. God is not an idol – God does not exist to justify our agendas, to fit into our issues, our problems, our agendas. God is, well, God, unknowable, unsearchable, except to God’s own Self. God is not some familiar object like an old blanket, nor some abstraction found within the created order like justice. We won’t control God, for God acts at such a different level that even saying that God acts has to take on an entirely different meaning for God than for us. God is ultimately Mystery – not against reason, but beyond reason, a Reason of a completely different order than that of which we can even imagine. God doesn’t fit into any category we can make – not even the word God. God explodes the word God in God’s very Being. God is Ultimate; God is Mystery; God is Other, so Other that God is not merely Other.

d. God is not some energy within creation to be controlled, not an ideal to be achieved; God is so far beyond us that God is intimate to us; God is Mystery.

3. Well, John, that’s hard stuff. Actually this is really good news. God does not fit into our lives; we are called by God to find our lives in God: the One from whom, through whom, and to whom are all things.

a. To say that we cannot know the mind of God is not to say that the mind of God is not. It is to say is that God is not our projection; God’s Life does not depend on ours. It is to say that our life, indeed all things, depend on God. All things find their beginning, existence, and end in God. God is not a “thing”, but the origin, medium, and end of all things.

b. Creation is moving; to be created from nothing is to be able to change. Created from nothing, different from God, superfluous to God, all that is, really is, is from God, existing as purely gift. God is Origin, Alpha, not a cause within creation, but the Origin like the idea of a work of art is in the mind of an artist. Everything – and God is not a thing – finds its origin in God. But more. God is not origin so that everything becomes independent of God. Every thing exists through God. Creation is not a one-time and over thing. All that is continues to be only as it, as we, find ourselves through God. Moving, changing as creation, this change occurs through God, in God, from whom are all things. And from God, through God, all things have an end, a goal, a purpose: to move to God. God is not merely Alpha; God is Omega, the beginning and the End. All things from God, through God, move to God. God doesn’t find God’s Life in creation as one thing among other things. All things find their true life, their true Being, their true Reason, in God!

c. Very simply, we are not created so that God can answer our questions, solve our problems, help us out, justify our agendas. We are created from God, to live through God, to ultimately find our truest selves as we move to God. How this happens, how God so moves us from God through God to God, is not for us to decide. God has given us life as gift, shear complete gift, utterly unnecessary to God, that we might participate in the Life that is God, our Origin, our means of being, the End of our Being as a result of the Gift that is Life. We are to live in God, from God, through God, for God. Not one of us, not one human being, not one molecule or atom, not one ameba or rock, exists that does not find its origin from God, its existence through God, and its destination to God.

d. This is wonderful good news: all things find their true being from God, through God, towards God.

4. As from God, through God, made in God’s image, we find our way back to God in God’s revelation of God’s own Self in Jesus Christ, the Son of God, fully God, fully human, in one person.

a. Perhaps you’ve already seen humanity’s problem. We are from God, live through God, but how do we move to God? We’ve seen our tendency to idolatry, to fitting God into our lives, not finding our lives in God. In sin, our lives become disordered. Our movement to God becomes distorted, twisted, perverted. We can’t find way home, even though we know we have a home from which we came, for when we try, we find ourselves sucked into idolatry because God’s ways are inscrutable, unknowable in and of ourselves within creation. We can know that God is, and that we are for God, but in our sin, we are stuck, perverse, malformed, unable to find our way home, like confused children separated from their parents at the county fair.

b. Our gospel passage speaks to us: “Who do you say that I am? Jesus asked. “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven.” God has shown us the way home to God by becoming one of us, assuming human flesh in the Jewish Messiah Jesus so that we might find our way to God. God participated in creation by taking on human nature without diminishing God – I told you earlier that God was Mystery – so that we, God’s creation, might participate in God, might find our true end in God, might have God restore us to our truest self, our fullest self, not according to our plans, our projections, our wishes, but to God. We live our own agenda most when it is not our agenda, but God’s, living fully by faith in God through Jesus Christ by the Spirit’s power. We can’t fit God into our agenda, because God is already there, behind it, through it, in front of it, always pulling us to God’s own self.

c. Our job in life is to be conformed to the image of God through which we were created, the image that we see revealed to us by God in Jesus Christ by the power of the Spirit, the image that is our truest self for it comes to be fully in God. Our job is to journey from God, through God, to God. This is an intensely inward journey – made by faith, intensely personal faith, in hope for love. It involves prayer, devotion, searching the Scriptures, fasting, watching and emulating the lives of the saints. It is an intensely bodily journey – love of God lived out in love of neighbor, those also from God, through God, for God, in the works of mercy, feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, visiting the ill, caring for the stranger, visiting those in prison, burying the dead. It is the journey seen in the journey of Jesus Christ, in utter obedience to God’s kingdom that Jesus himself began.

d. God has shown us the way home, the way to our true end in God, through God’s revelation in Jesus by the Spirit’s power.

Conclusion: At this Table is our true end, made evident even now as we anticipate God’s restoration of all things in God: the body and blood of Christ, the Eucharistic, Thanksgiving feast where God pulls us literally into God’s own Life through Jesus Christ by the Spirit’s presence. You are from God; you live through God – whether you admit it or not. You are for God, the unknowable God who has opened God’s own Life for us to participate in, to find our end, through Jesus the Christ, the Son of the living God. Come, friends, come. Come to find yourself, your life, in God from whom you came. Come in faith. And be thankful.