Sermon preached at Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church 7 June 2015
Who is God?
John 14.1-14 "Do not let your hearts be troubled.
Believe in God, believe also in me. 2
In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I
have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place
for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am,
there you may be also. 4 And
you know the way to the place where I am going." 5 Thomas said to him, "Lord,
we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" 6 Jesus said to him, "I am
the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through
me. 7 If you know me, you
will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen
him." 8 Philip said to
him, "Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." 9 Jesus said to him, "Have I
been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has
seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, 'Show us the Father'? 10 Do you not believe that I am in
the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak
on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the
Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of
the works themselves. 12 Very
truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do
and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the
Father. 13 I will do whatever
you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. 14 If in my name you ask me for
anything, I will do it.
Exodus 3.13-15 But Moses said to God, "If I come to the
Israelites and say to them, 'The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,' and
they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" 14 God said to Moses, "I AM
WHO I AM." He said further, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'I
AM has sent me to you.'" 15
God also said to Moses, "Thus you shall say to the Israelites, 'The LORD,
the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob, has sent me to you': This is my name forever, and this my title for all
generations.
You can listen to this sermon here:
It may be a function of my line of work,
but
it seems to me that a lot
of people
seem
to spend a lot of time talking about matters of belief.
‘Do you really believe in
God?’, I’m asked,
often
by people who are struggling to understand the perceived inconsistency
of
an apparently rational and sane human being
believing
something that appears irrational, and quite possibly insane.
Sometimes the question is more nuanced,
and
comes from a place of personal questioning:
‘Do
you believe in miracles?’,
‘Do
you believe in the power of prayer?’
‘Will
you pray for me?’
Sometimes the question feels designed to test me:
‘Do
you believe in the virgin birth?
In
the resurrection? In the Trinity?’
And sometimes the question seems designed to trap me:
‘Do
you believe in the ordination of women?’
‘Do
you believe in same-gender marriage?’
And so I could go on…
Do you believe…?
Do
you believe…?
Or, perhaps more pertinently:
‘In what
do you believe?’
Or even,
‘In
whom do you believe?’
This is an important, and surprisingly contemporary,
issue.
And our
passages this morning take us right to heart
of
this question of belief.
We come to this question today,
as
part of our post-Pentecost sermon series,
in which we’re looking at what it means to be ‘the
church’,
and,
perhaps more specifically,
what
it means to be ‘this church, here, in Bloomsbury.’
Last week, Ruth started the series
by
inviting us to consider what it might mean to say
that
‘God calls a church’
And today we’re taking a step back from that,
to
ask the question of who this God that
calls us might be,
I mean, it’s all very well speaking of the church as
‘the people of God’
but
if we don’t have at least a working hypothesis of who God is,
we’re
going to struggle to work out what the church of God might look like.
And whilst at one level, this might seem like a
straightforward enough question,
at
another level it’s a very difficult one to answer.
So, Who is God?
Or, perhaps even more basic than ‘Who is God?’,
we
might just start by asking ourselves, ‘Is
God?’
‘Does God exist?’, says the person from their
death-bed?
To
which I will say: yes, I do believe that God exists.
The questions of what God is like, of who God is, and of
how God can be known,
are,
it seems to me, subsidiary questions
to
the most basic question of whether God is.
It’s not without significance here,
that
when God was revealed to Moses,
the
name of God was revealed to be ‘I Am’.
God is;
and
what God is, is not just the first person of the Trinity,
but
the first person of the verb ‘to be’.
‘I Am’, said God to Moses,
‘and
because I am, you are.
‘And
so is he, and she, and they, and we.’
The God whose name is ‘I Am’ is a first-person God;
the
God of first principles.
If God is,
then all else follows.
So, for me, belief in God is my starting point for
faith.
Let me put this another way…
It’s a bit like the John Wyndham novels I used to read
as a teenager.
I
don’t know if you’ve read them too?
Books
like The Day of the Triffids,
The Kraken Wakes, and The Midwich Cuckoos?
Anyway, the thing about John Wyndham’s stories,
is
that they are all incredibly logical outworkings,
of one
initial basic conceit.
As a reader, you’re asked, fairly early in the story, to
believe one thing that isn’t true,
and
then everything else follows logically.
All that is needed for his stories to work is that one
initial leap of faith,
and
then all else falls into place.
And for me, belief in God is that one initial leap of
faith.
‘Is
God is, or is God ain’t’, as Louis Jordan might put it.
For me, God Is.
‘I
Am’ said God to Moses, inviting him to believe.
And that same invitation to faith echoes down the
millennia to us,
inviting
us to make the same leap of faith,
to
see where it gets us.
I have long concluded that it is only my belief in
God,
my
focusing on something outside of my own existence,
that keeps me from being the utterly self-centred,
self-absorbed, person
that
I know I have the capacity to be.
It is only my conscious decision to worship the God
that is other to me,
that
challenges my tendency to the sin of idolatry,
It is only as I offer devotion to the God who is,
that
my desire to place myself, and my own concerns,
at
the centre of my universe
is
confronted.
But who, or what, is this God?
Part of the problem with trying to articulate the
nature of God
is
that all language about God is inherently metaphorical,
and
therefore also inevitably provisional.
God’s essence cannot be captured in finite human
language,
and
no words can do justice to the infinite heart of the divine.
God is a verb, not a noun,
and
so God cannot be defined by a proper name.
The description of God as ‘I Am’, is a statement of
God’s activity;
it is
not a name by which God can be summoned.
But this God who ‘is’ can, it seems, be experienced.
God’s
actions can be encountered
more
surely than his name can be known.
And I think that it is in the love of God,
that
God is most surely to be encountered.
‘I Am’ says God to Moses,
and
what God is, is love.
If God is, then God is love.
And
to assert this is to speak a powerful counter-testimony
to those who would speak into
existence
the
many gods of hatred, violence and division.
The mystery of the God who exists in love,
is
made known to us through loving relationship.
And this, of course, is the mystery of Trinity;
the
insight of the early church that the God who is, and the God who is love,
is
also the God of eternal community.
The first person of God, the ‘I Am’ of the leap of
faith,
is
not the end of the story,
because the ‘first person’ sits alongside the second
and third persons.
God
is not just divine Father, but also eternal Son and living Spirit.
The God who is beyond us, is know to us:
in
our world and in our lives,
speaking
salvation into being in our midst,
as the word that was in the beginning, calling all
into being,
becomes
the word made flesh in Jesus Christ.
And it is through a living, loving relationship with
Jesus Christ
that I
believe God is to be most fully known,
as the
Spirit of Christ bears witness to God-made-flesh
in
the stories of our own lives.
This is where our initial leap of faith takes us,
certainly
within the Christian tradition.
Of course, people believe for all sorts of different
reasons:
some
of us have simply inherited our belief system,
while
others will have arrived by a process of conviction,
some
of us have latent belief, which we’ve not quite managed to lose yet,
while
others of us, myself included,
have what I can perhaps best define
as ‘reluctant belief’.
It can all be very troubling, very confusing, very
divisive,
and
that’s before we even start to address the question
of
whether some sort of belief is necessary for salvation.
Well, says Jesus in John’s gospel,
‘Do
not let your hearts be troubled.
Believe
in God, believe also in me.’
It seems that, for the author of this gospel at least,
belief
in God is intimately connected to belief in Jesus.
How do we know God?
We
know him through Jesus.
And how do we know Jesus?
We
know him by his Spirit at work in our lives.
Belief in God is not based on belief in creeds,
confessions, and catechisms.
Neither
is it based on security, stories, or scriptures.
Rather, belief emerges as the outcome of a lived
relationship
with
the one through whom God is made known,
and in whom God is revealed.
Belief is the product of a relationship,
it is
not the outworking of a theological conviction.
And here I think it’s important to take a moment to
clarify something significant:
Not
all beliefs are equal.
Sometimes, the concern for ‘balance’ in our
post-enlightenment society
means
that we end up giving equal weight
to
very different orders of belief.
So, for example, on the television news
the
scientist representing the weight of scientific opinion,
may
find themselves given equal billing
with
the lone representative of the minority view that disagrees with them.
It’s the same with matters of faith and belief:
Asserting
belief in God as revealed in Jesus,
is not the same thing as, for
example,
asserting belief in the
effectiveness of homeopathy;
despite
the best efforts of some new atheist polemicists
to equate belief in God
to
the equivalent status
of belief in fairies at the bottom
of the garden.
Francis Spufford makes this point eloquently.
He
says:
‘Whether
God exists or not is unprovable,
so for an individual person,
whether He exists or not is always
going to be a matter of belief.
But
at the same time, quite independently,
he either exists or he doesn’t,
irrespective of whether He’s
believed in.
He’s
a fact, or a non-fact, about the nature of the universe.
So if you believe, you’re making a
bet
that God exists whether you believe
or not.’[1]
So it is that Jesus says:
"I
am the way, and the truth, and the life.
No
one comes to the Father except through me.
If
you know me, you will know my Father also.”
Here, we meet Jesus offering the readers of John’s
gospel
a new
and radical path to God.
The Jews of the first century believed that the way to
God
was
to be found in careful observance of the Jewish Law
as
revealed in their written scriptures (Pss 86.11; 119.30).
While the Graeco-Roman religions of the time
believed
that the complexities of the pantheon
revealed
the path to divine knowledge
Over against both of these, Jesus offers something
new, something radical.
The
way to God, says Jesus, is to be found through lived relationship
with
the one in whom God is revealed,
and
through whom God is known.
God is not encountered through obedience, observance,
and ordinances,
but
through relationship, friendship, and revelation.
Jesus opens the way to God
because
in him is to be found life in all its fullness,
and
in him is the truth that shatters all our defences,
and
disarms all our pretences.
In Christ there is nowhere to hide,
because
in Christ we are most fully known,
even
as we come to know that which is most fully other to us.
When we open our eyes to see the revelation of God in
Christ,
we
are united with the life and the truth
that is at work in this complex,
fallen, broken world,
drawing
all of creation into God’s loving eternal embrace.
When we join our voices in worship, and name Jesus as
Lord
we do
it not to make God feel good about himself,
but because we are sharing with
Christ in the re-centering of creation.
When we pray to Jesus, we do so not to abase ourselves
before the almighty,
but in
order to align ourselves, our lives, and our world,
with the one in whom all earthly
principalities and powers
find their completion and
fulfilment,
and in
rejection of all other claims on our lives
that
might otherwise demand our allegiance.
Belief for belief’s sake is, frankly, pointless.
But
belief that emerges from a lived relationship with Christ,
sustained
by his Spirit at work in our lives,
is
something that changes the world.
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