How do you imagine God? Is he watching us from a distance, or is she closer than our breath? Is she an eagle or is he water?
The way we think about God makes a big difference. God is unknowable in their totality – we can never know everything about another human and even more we can never know everything about God nor fully comprehend God’s essence. Every way we describe God is always a metaphor – God is like a rock, God is like a hen with chicks. Even God the father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit is a metaphor, a way of talking about God in human terms. But the metaphors we use mediate our lived experience.
At present in the Tuesday Spiritual conversation and in the Thursday study of the Lord’s prayer we have a stark reminder of the difference. For Marjorie Suchocki, a process theologian, God, who is deeply involved with the world, is working with things as they are to bring them to where they could be, and our prayer is an important part of this process of becoming. On the other hand, John Purdy, traditional Presbyterian author of the Lenten study, thinks that God is necessarily distant and declares that “Prayer is our admission that we were made for obedience, that duty is the core of blessedness.”[1]
Two different views – God is in and through every particle and prayer opens the world to its own transformation[2] versus God is distant and prayer is admitting that our duty is obedience and the result is blessedness.
In our readings this morning we heard three different ways of understanding God. First, the God of the burning bush, secondly the God who punishes, and thirdly the God who applies a bit more manure. Let’s look at each of them in order.
Don’t you love this story of God coming to Moses in the burning bush? God is like a bush which burns and burns but is never burnt. You may have read of the discovery in the desert near Egypt of a solstice phenomenon, where the sun hits the sides of a cave in such a way that it creates a pattern of light flickering like flames on the rock wall. Maybe this, or something like it is the physical cause of the burning bush, but God’s self-revelation to Moses happened quite independently of the bush. The bush attracted his attention, but once God knew that he had Moses’ attention, he called to him. We might have the experience of God calling to us from a beautiful sunset or a spring morning… it is when we give God our attention that things happen.
God tells Moses to come no further and to take off his shoes because he is on holy ground, and Moses hides his face because he is afraid. And so begins the great friendship between God, known as Yahweh – the Great I Am and Moses, the murderer turned shepherd. As in most direct encounters with God in the Old Testament, Moses careful not to get too close because he is sinful and might be burnt up in the holiness of God. And thus we get the idea of necessary distance. In this manifestation of God’s glory, human failing leaves us vulnerable to being incinerated in the presence of total holiness.
Just a quick sidebar here: in the New Testament, when Saul sees the blinding light on his way to Damascus, he is blinded but there is not the same injunction to keep distant. If we read scripture through the lens of Jesus and his teaching and resurrection, then our relationship with God the Great I Am in the New Covenant can be quite different than that experienced by the prophets of the earlier covenants. God’s substance has not changed but Christ’s work has changed the way we connect. One is not incinerated by closeness to one’s parent.
Back to Moses. Even though Moses is standing on the line between human survival and too much proximity to holiness, Moses does not flinch from asking questions. The exchange about God’s name shows how their relationship will develop over the course of Moses life. Yet God’s response is mind-blowing. This is not metaphor, this is a statement of eternal Beingness. “I am who I am”. And from the Hebrew, we get the name Yahweh. The One who is.
Perhaps this is the closest we will ever get to the true nature of God, “I am who I am” – complete Being. The Being and Essence of all.
Now, leaving Moses in the ecstasy of a mystical mountaintop experience, let’s go to the Gospel reading.
In the opening, Jesus is a little harsh with those who are suggesting that because terrible things happened to some Galileans they must have in some way been super sinful. This is the “somewhere in my youth and childhood” mindset – as Maria and von Trapp sing in the Sound of Music:
Perhaps I had a wicked childhood
Perhaps I had a miserable youth
But somewhere in my wicked, miserable past
There must have been a moment of truth
… For here you are, standing there, loving me
Whether or not you should
So somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something good.
Conversely, when something bad happens we say “somewhere in my youth or childhood
I must have done something very bad and now God is punishing me.”
There is for sure a voice in the scriptures that concurs with this approach. The historians who wrote Deuteronomy were very clear that if a king obeyed God good things happened, but if they did not, bad things happened to them and the people they ruled. But there are other voices that counter that; Job was a very pious man but terrible things happened to him and his family. Just because.
Terrible things happen. We cannot say that the people of Ukraine must be more sinful than Americans. We cannot say that those who died in the twin towers on 9/11 must have been more sinful than the ones who were late for work or the ones who made it out. The nature of this world is that terrible things happen.
Jesus tells those who raised the issue – do not think that somehow you are better than these people, that somewhere in your youth or childhood you must have done something good and that will keep you safe. No, he says, you need to repent. You need a change of heart. You need to be reconciled with God. You need a Moses moment.
Yet even repentance does not keep us physically safe. Towers fall, cancer happens, wars erupt, bombs and bullets maim and kill. God does not use these to punish us for our sin. They are just part of the way the world has evolved. Yet there is a relationship, because these things are to a greater or lesser degree the result of corporate human sinfulness. God does not punish us, and God walks with us through the dark times. As spiritual teacher and psychologist James Finlay says, “God never protects us but always sustains us.”
In the second part of the gospel reading comes the parable of the gardener and the fig tree. A man plants a fig tree in his vineyard. This is a symbol of peace and prosperity, of life in the shalom of God. The prophet Micah spelled it out, “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid, for the LORD Almighty has spoken.” (Mic 4:4) In the end, when all is said and done, when the reign of God is fully realized there will be equality and plenty and each one will sit under their own fig tree.
But that hasn’t happened yet. So, a man plants a fig tree and it isn’t fruiting after three years so he tells his gardener to cut it down – it is clearly not a good tree. But the gardener says, no wait – lets give it one more year with extra care and maybe it will fruit.
I wonder which one is God? The owner, the gardener or the fig tree?
My vote is with both the owner and the gardener. The owner is the apparently punishing God who some of us believe in – the God who watches your behavior and sees that you are not producing and so disciplines you, even to the point of cutting you down completely and throwing you on to the burn pile. Just a quick disclaimer; I don’t think this is really God but a God of our imagining.
I think Jesus is giving us an alternative picture of God – the gardener who says let’s give it some manure and see if it can respond. This is the God who is with us in creation. Just like oil and water will blend but always separate again because they are different substances, so God id distinct from God’s creation but is in it, animating every breath. In this metaphor, God is always offering us the best possible alternatives for flourishing – it is up to us to use them. A bit like driving with GPS navigation – the Holy Spirit offers us the opportunity to turn right but when we choose the lesser route and go straight forward, the Holy Spirit rapidly recalibrates and suggests a u-turn.
I did not finish this sermon before the 8 o’clock service and so I can share with you a couple of insights from that discussion. Carol McPhee pointed out that the repentance Jesus calls for is like Moses giving his attention and saying “Here I am” and that the fig tree responding positively to the manure is repenting. I find that very helpful because often we think of repentance as a negative thing, not a positive response to God’s call. And Lisa Gonzalez said that although the gardener only asks for one year of grace he would probably be advocating for the tree again the next year, “Look it has some new shoots, it has a little fruit.”
So this morning, let us imagine God as the gardener who is constantly offering us the opportunity to grow; the opportunity to turn to God with attention and “here I am”; the opportunity to grow in the Spirit. And as we continue with our worship service, let us consciously choose to turn to God in this moment and in every moment of our lives, knowing that God, the Great I am, is cheering us on.
[1] John Purdy, Lord Teach us to Pray, Kerygma
[2] In God’s Presence, Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, p.19
Photo by Delia Giandeini on Unsplash
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