Sermon
By Rev. Robert Shearer
5 Epiphany • February 7, 2021
Isaiah 40:21-31 • Psalm 147:1-2, 21c • 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 • Mark 1:29-39
In the Name of God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My beloved friends! I am so glad to be back with you this morning, after a
month of tussle with COVID-19. I am still very limited in what I can do, but
creeping back into activity, slowly, slowly, seems to be the way to go. I am
glad to be back!
I would like to talk about God this morning. About the ways we experience
God, about the ways we cope with our inability to see God, about the ways
we have invented, with our earthly limitations, to deal with that which is so
powerfully important to us, but also so far beyond us.
Isaiah this morning reminds us of what we’ve heard before, that God is
outside and above the creation in which we live. Then Isaiah stretches that
understanding, urging us to see God in ever-expanding terms, bigger and
bigger.
“It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are
like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and
spreads them like a tent to live in; who brings princes to naught, and
makes the rulers of the earth as nothing.”
This is the external God, the God who is beyond all limitations that
Creation imposes on us, transcendent, not a part of the Creation, but its
Creator. This is the God whom Isaiah encountered in the Temple,
powerfully present but with angels obscuring his form with their wings.
The one to whom the angels sang,
“Holy, holy, holy! Lord God of the armies of heaven! Heaven and earth
are full your glory!”
I want to suggest that Isaiah’s vision of God is an act of imagination. Since
this God is beyond all experiencing, it takes poetry to wake us up to what is
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possible. This is God Almighty, the Master of the Universe, Creator of all
that exists.
The Prophets introduce us to another side of God, the One who is loving
and compassionate, who cares about justice for the poor and who calls the
well-off to pay attention to their responsibilities. This is not particularly a
tender, gentle God, but a God who cares passionately about righteousness
on the part of his people, stern but just.
So far, the versions of God we have talked about are an external force. But
the God whom Moses encounters on Mt. Sinai is profoundly personal, an
experience that shakes Moses to the core and changes his life forever. The
God who spoke from the burning bush is similar to the God Isaiah
encountered in the Temple—both are external but personally experienced.
Visions, perhaps, but no simple dreams; they are life-changing and
powerful.
And then there is the God that Jesus became familiar with, a fatherly,
loving, wise presence who taught Jesus and guided him during the whole of
his life. This God whom Jesus called Daddy—“Abba” in the Aramaic that
Jesus spoke—this God was a loving presence, forgiving and nurturing,
growing the children in his household and remaining faithful to them
regardless of their bad behavior or rejection, always ready to welcome them
back.
It was this God that Jesus communed with in today’s Gospel, going up to a
deserted place to pray. This God, intimate and personal, gave him his
mission in life. And when his disciples searched him out, he said, “Let us
go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there
also; for that is what I came out to do.”
Someone once said that there is a “God-shaped hole” in us, waiting to be
filled. My own experience of God that has been with me my whole life is of
a Presence, just out of sight, but always there. In both of these
instances—God as a defined emptiness, a “hole,’ and God as an
undefinable, unseeable “something”—both of these are interior
experiences, versions of God that might be called “imminent” as opposed
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to the external “transcendent” versions of God. Immanent and
transcendent—God experienced from within and God experienced as
outside oneself.
So, which of these versions of God is the correct one? Which should we
validate and cling to?
Let me say that none of these can possibly be God. Each of these is a
feeble stab at speaking of God. But they are the best we can do. We are the
mere “grasshoppers” that Isaiah call us in today’s first lesson. We can no
more grasp and understand God than a grasshopper can than know and
understand us human beings.
Yet we try. Why? Why attempt talk about a God who cannot be spoken of
with any sense of accuracy? It is because we can do no other. For those of
us who know God, even a little, God will not let us go. In whatever
version, and there are surely many more versions than the ones I’ve
mentioned here, God continues to poke at us, to speak to us in dreams and
wake-up calls, in conversations with others, in events natural and social.
God will not let us go.
Amen.