Worship the LORD in the beauty of holiness. (Ps. 29:2)
We’ve spent fifty days celebrating Easter, last Sunday was the festival of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and now today we take a look at the whole fullness of God. Or, rather, we look sideways through a handful of metaphors for God, most of them pointing to the bigger metaphor of there three-in-one, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, three distinct Persons yet one God. This is why it is written on your bulletin covers that today is Trinity/Mystery/Heresy Sunday. We talk about God like we know what we mean when we use that word, and today is set aside to contemplate how little we actually understand of God even while we have spent generations hashing out in committee and confrontations and conspiracies of every sort what exactly we mean when we talk about the God whom we worship and serve. It’s kind of crazy, believing in this higher power, the concept of whom has been passed on to us through centuries of campfire stories and wars and famines and great victories and translations of translations. Ideas about God come from stories handed down and from personal experiences, both positive and negative. It has been said that we know we’ve created God in our image when God hates the same people we do, but there is also truth in the story of a God who does come into the world looking just like us to reach us where we are, as God did in the person of Jesus.
Hagar, Sarah’s slave who gave birth to Abraham’s first-born son, Ishmael, has the first recorded story of giving God a name: El Roi, “The God who sees,” and there are a myriad of tribal names for God based on the surrounding countryside, from El Shaddai, “God of the Mountains,” to the unpronounceable “Yahwheh,” which means something like “I am, I will be what I will be.” What are some of your favorite names for God? There are quite a few on the bulletin cover, but maybe your favorite is missing from that image.
We as Lutherans center our understanding of and relationship with God on the cross of Jesus Christ, God incarnate for our sake, and that means every image and explanation of God comes from and reaches back to that experience of self-giving love and forgiveness. When we think about the God who made the world, the source of our hope and vision for life, the root of our being, we come back again and again to the language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but even each of those illustrations holds a diversity of expressions. Some call God “Mother” on account of particular experience, some call God “Sneaky Trickster” or “Fire-breather” or “Companion” or “Divine Lover.”
It might be hard to talk about how we experience God, how God has met us where we are, or how we have expected one sort of faith experience and gotten another. Synod Assembly in Rochester these past few days was on the theme of “God’s Story, Our Voices” and centered on just this sort of conversation: How do we share God’s story? How do we know the love of God in our day-to-day living?
I imagine the prophet Isaiah, in today’s first reading, wrestled with the same question. “Woe is me! I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips! Yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!” Moses complained of a stutter when God called him. Jeremiah said “I can’t tell about God, I’m just a teenager.” And yet all of these, and so many more, were given the words and the presence for telling God’s story. They spoke very particular things to very particular people, which still speak to us today from their central truths: We worship and serve a God who cares about justice and who brings us from slavery into freedom.
For Nicodemus, going to Jesus under cover of darkness, there had to be something more, something he could grasp and comprehend, to explain how this man, Jesus, had been healing the sick and turning water into wine. Have you ever looked for answers in the middle of the night and been only more confused? Yet Nicodemus is not a character who disappears after this encounter with Jesus. This story of God’s love for the whole world works on him, and in the Gospel of John we will see him twice again, defending Jesus to the other Pharisees, and bringing spices to care for Jesus’ body after the crucifixion.
I wonder, then, what words Nicodemus would use to describe Jesus. What words we might use here in this place. What words and images and songs are sung across the world to speak of the many ways God reaches us right where we are? Sometimes the best words are silence, as the Quakers gather for prayer, sometimes the best words are actions, as we have been part of community meals and will be reaching out with hope for Heroin addicts in September. But whatever words we use to tell God’s story, to share the hope of the resurrection, the promise of new life, the gift of creation and the forgiveness and reconciliation which are ours to share, we worship, serve, and speak of a God who is bigger than our language can hold, so our storytelling is never done, because there is always more to the God of the universe who lives also in our hearts.
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