240 Who Is God?

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for “Who Is God?”, originally shared on November 16, 2022. It was the 240^th video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   What do you picture when you think of God? Take a minute, (and then read on).

   An old buff guy? The Force? A kindly grandparent? An absentee parent? Today, we’re going to find out who God is, and I guarantee that it will shock you!

   What do you picture when you think about God? A giant, old buff guy sitting on a golden throne? Long, flowing beard and puffy hair?

   A kindly, impotent, grandparent who just loves you exactly as you are, asks nothing of you, and who just wants to love you and give you gifts?

   An impersonal essence? A principle? A generic higher power? The Force?

   Your personal vending machine who you can ask to give you whatever you desire but who you can walk away from anytime you want and is otherwise uninvolved in your life?  

   A wise harmless old guy, like George Burns in the movie? Do you ever picture God as being young?

   What do you think God thinks of you? Does that very thought make you feel guilty? Is God always judging you, waiting for you to get out of line? Violent and vengeful? Kindly and indulgent? Unavailable? Indifferent? Loving? A spying Elf on A Shelf? Watching like Santa, who knows when you’ve been sleeping, who knows when you’re awake, who knows when you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!? Ohh!

   If you conceive of God as any of those things, get rid of them. I’m about to blow your mind!

   Do you think of God as cosmic royalty?

   This coming Sunday is “Christ the King” Sunday in most churches throughout the world.

   One of the titles given to Jesus at his birth was “Prince of Peace”. How did he get promoted to “Christ the King?”

   This coming Sunday is the last Sunday in the Church year, and in it we get to see who God is.

   The Gospel reading for this Sunday begins like this, in Luke 23:33,

³³When they came to the place that is called The Skull, they crucified Jesus there with the criminals, one on his right and one on his left. 

   This is where we find out who God is. At the cross.

   Everyone has a belief about what the world is and how the world works. It’s called our “worldview.”

   The Christian worldview takes many forms, but they are all founded on the belief that the world is not the way it’s supposed to be. That human beings messed up that perfect relationship with God and the perfect world that God gave us by rebelling against God. We thought we knew better. We still do, and that’s how evil enters the world.

   God sought out people to return to the personal relationship with God for which they were created: destruction and renewal, slavery and liberation, a chosen people blessed to be a blessing, the religious Law, victory and defeat, nationhood, disunity and hope, prophets, priests, and kings, and more! Nothing worked, or it didn’t work for very long.

   Then, in what the Bible calls the fullness of time, God became incarnate, God came in human flesh, fully God and fully human being in Jesus Christ. And God was rejected by the humanity he came to save and they crucified him.

   But they did not take Jesus’ life. He gave it. He who committed no sin, took the punishment for our sin on himself to restore the relationship with God for which we were created to all to receive that relationship as God’s gift.

   That is our worldview. Our message is our world view in our increasingly secular culture. Our challenge is that it means nothing to say that we need a Savior if the world doesn’t know that it needs to be saved. The cross means little to people who don’t know their need for it.

   But, the world does sometimes have a vague interest in God.

   And what do we learn about who God is at the cross? We are reminded that God’s disposition toward humanity is personal. We see God’s love in action in God’s suffering for us.

   Where do we see the kind of king that Jesus is? In John 19:1-5,

1Then Pilate took Jesus and had him flogged. 2 And the soldiers wove a crown of thorns and put it on his head, and they dressed him in a purple robe. 3 They kept coming up to him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” and striking him on the face. 4 Pilate went out again and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you to let you know that I find no case against him.” 5 So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe. Pilate said to them, “Here is the man!”

   We learn that, in what Martin Luther, the 16^th century church reformer, called the Gospel (the good news) in miniature, in John 3:16,

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

   The logo for the church that I am serving now, part-time and in retirement, consists of an open Bible revealing a cross. It is an expression of the Lutheran belief that everything in the Bible points to the cross and that the Bible’s purpose is to lead us to a living relationship with the one true living God in Jesus Christ.

   Here’s how it happens, as the Gospel reading for this Sunday continues in Luke 23:34-43,

³⁴Then Jesus said, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.” And they cast lots to divide his clothing.

 ³⁵And the people stood by, watching; but the leaders scoffed at him, saying, “He saved others; let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God, his chosen one!” 

³⁶The soldiers also mocked him, coming up and offering him sour wine, ³⁷and saying, “If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!”

 ³⁸There was also an inscription over him, “This is the King of the Jews.” 

³⁹One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 

⁴⁰But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 

⁴¹And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” ⁴²Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” ⁴³He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”

   Augustine of Hippo, one of the great theologians of the early Church, is attributed with the saying, “If you were the only person on earth, Christ would have still suffered and died for you.”

   God’s love for us is personal, but it is never private. We exist as a part of the human race that is now reconciled to God, by God in Jesus Christ.

   Jesus is God. When he lived incarnate on the Earth, he was young. He became human flesh as an infant, was a little kid, a teenager, and did not begin his public ministry until he was 30 years old. He was 33 when he gave his life, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven. Imagine Jesus as someone you know who is about his age. Imagine Jesus in occupied territory as a first-century skilled worker at the far eastern end of the Roman Empire. Imagine Jesus on the cross.

   That is who God is. Humanity is reconciled to God by God.

   God is neither male nor female. Our references to God are how we express our cultural identity, not God’s identity. There is no race in God.

   And yet, God is personal because God has made us for and given to us a personal relationship with God. That’s why Jesus, who was a middle-eastern Jew, often looks black in African Christian art, Chinese in Chinese Christian art, Latino in Latino Christian art, and European in European Christian Art.

   In James McBride’s book, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother, he tells of the time when he asked his mother what color God is. His mother replied, “God is the color of water.”

   There is no way to describe God. We can only know what God reveals to us in the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, one God in three persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

   God knows everything, God is everywhere, and God is all-powerful. God is always the same, including what God reveals in both the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.

   God is wholly other. God created everything out of nothing. And when I say “nothing” I don’t mean empty space. I mean nothing, no height or width or depth. No time. Nothing. God does not exist in any way that we can conceive of existence.

   That’s why the people of God receive this command in Exodus 20:4-5a.

4 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them;

   That’s why God does not have a proper noun for a name. The “name” of something was believed to contain the fundamental reality of the thing it named in Bible times. That’s why when people went through some life-changing experience their name had to change, i.e. Abram and Sari to Abraham and Sarah and Saul to Paul. When Moses asked the voice from the bush that was burning but not consumed for its name, God answered “I am”. He gave a verb not a noun because it is impossible for a human being to know anything of God’s fundamental reality, except that which God choses to reveal to him or her.

   Who is God? We can only know what God has revealed to us. We see what God has revealed to us most clearly on the cross.

   How does Jesus’ reign as Christ the King? He reigns as God, who emptied himself to be our suffering servant, and will return in his second advent to receive all who believe, who receive God’s gift of himself into the perfection of his kingdom, the perfected Reign of God.

   Meanwhile, we too are called to serve the world in God’s name, God’s fundamental reality within us, with all that we have and all that we are as servants of all people, who God continues to love personally.

   I spent a summer when I was in seminary doing a quarter of Clinical Pastoral Education. CPE is a program training prospective pastors to do hospital visits and counseling. It’s very intense and exposes seminarians to a lot of different kinds of life experiences.

   The program I was a part of was held at Lutheran General Hospital in Park Ridge, Illinois, right outside of Chicago.

   One night, there was a humongous thunderstorm and a lightning bolt hit a transformer and knocked out power to the hospital. The emergency generators kicked in and all essential services like the operating carols, the Natal Intensive Care Units, the  respirators, and so on, received power.

   Almost immediately, the switchboard was lit up with calls from very agitated air traffic controllers from the nearby O’Hare International Airport asking what had happened to the florescent cross on the top of the hospital.

   Pilots coming in for landings had used that cross as a visual reference point as they descended and, seeing no cross, had been thinking that they were coming in from the wrong side of the airport. They were pulling up and flying in stacks over O’Hare.

   From that night onward, the cross was included in the emergency power network.

   The cross is our reference point. We see the love of God on it, what God did to restore the living relationship with God for which we were created.

   It is at the cross that we see who God is.