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| God's Transcendent and Intimate Nature on Display |
This
sermon was preached at St. John’s Church, Decatur, AL on Saint Thomas A Kempis
Day. The readings that inspired this message were the following:
How
do you know when you are near God? Presumably if we all were like Moses and had
a burning bush moment, then it would be easy to see. But, it’s not always so
easy.
How
do you know when you are near God? As our reading from Ecclesiastes reminded us
things do not always happen according to our own plans. The same can be said of
moments spent with God. Sometimes when we least expect to recognize God in our
midst, God shows up. And, other times we just know that we will see God, and
then we don’t. This can be eternally frustrating.
How
do you know when you are near God? Maybe that is the wrong question. For God
always resides within, beside, before, behind, beneath, above, and beyond us. The
trouble comes in our recognition, our comprehending, and our knowing this
Truth. We do not always get that God is nigh. So, how do we? How do we know it
and trust it?
There
are countless ways for us to keep aware of God’s immediacy. When I was younger
though I tended to think that God was not all that close. I thought that God had
wound up creation like a clock and then left it ticking along. Now though I see
the fallacy of this belief. There have been too many times, there have been too
many moments, there have been too many occasions when God has been closer than
my own heartbeat to me. I see things differently now.
God
dances with God’s creation at all time and in all places. God laughs with us,
weeps with us, walks with us, sits with us, and rests with us. God eats with
us, imbibes with us, listens with us, prays with us, celebrates with us, and
lives with us. This is not at all a new phenomenon. God has always been
intimately connected with the creation God made. Still, there are moments when
we may not feel any of this. Perhaps that is why we call God not only Father
and Son, but also Spirit.
The
Spirit of God often gets depicted in inconsistent ways. God’s Spirit is a fire,
a dove, a breath, or a gust of wind. This feels hard for me to comprehend. How
can a changeless being also be compared to these things? This is hard to say.
Still to say that God cannot change seems a fallacy for that limits God’s own
ability to move, grow, or decide something different. What may help us here is
knowing that it is us that move, grow, and decide something different—we are
the fleeting ones like grass that soon whither. Happy, I know! So what?
Do
we just go through life hoping for a glimpse of a God who may or may not speak
to us? What do we do? Do we think that God is flimsy and flip-flopping all the
time? That does not seem right. So what?
The
Good News is that we have been given in the life of Christ the great mystery of
God Incarnate, Man Divine. The mysterious and hard-to-behold Truth is that
Jesus was both fully human and fully divine. If this is truth, then what other
mysterious paradox might we hold about God? God is eternally changeless and
eternally changing? God is intimately close and yet ultimately transcendent? We
always receive comfort from God and yet are always being challenged to grow in
the way that we see God. This is the wisdom that the saint whom we celebrate
today shared with the Church.
Thomas
A Kempis was born in the 14th Century in Germany. He became part of
the Brethren of the Common Life, was a priest in Germany, and died in 1471.
That’s about all we know about him. But, he left us one of the greatest
Christian works of his day, The Imitation
of Christ. In that book he invited followers to live by the example of
Christ Jesus. More than that he let readers know that God’s gracious will does
not always conform to what we expect. The following is from his work:
When God bestows Spiritual comfort, receive it
with a grateful heart; but remember that it comes of God's free gift, and not
of your own merit. Do not be proud, nor over joyful, nor foolishly
presumptuous; rather, be the more humble for this gift, more cautious, and more
prudent in all your doings, for this hour will pass, and temptation will follow
it. When comfort is withdrawn, do not immediately despair, but humbly and
patiently await the will of Heaven; for God is able to restore you to a
consolation even richer than before. This is nothing new or strange to those
who know the ways of God, for the great Saints and Prophets of old often
experienced these changes. ...Indeed, the temptation that precedes is often a
sign of comfort to follow. For heavenly comfort is promised to those who have
been tried and tempted. “To him who overcomes,” says God, “I will give to eat
of the Tree of Life.”
The
consolations God gives to us do not always look the same. Sometimes they are
more challenging. But, all is gift from God. We are called to persevere and remain
faithful as God continues to love us and be faithful to us.
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