Sermon 7/19/2020 “Who is God?”
Preacher: Jo J. Belser
Location: Church of the Resurrection at VTS in Alexandria, VA
Text: Isaiah 44:6-8
Day: 7Pentecost, Proper 11, Year A, during a pandemic
The lessons today—all the lessons today—tell us who God is.
Well, technically God is not a “who,” not a person, but a “what.” However, it is hard to talk about God without visualizing him as a person. But, literally, God has no body:
- no body male or female;
- no body white or black;
- no body gay or straight;
- no body Republican, Democrat, or other;
- no body but ours, as St. Teresa of Avila famously said in the 16th century.
We think of God as a “who,” a human person, possibly because we know we are “made in God’s image.” However, the theology of creation says it takes ALL of creation to represent God, not just one tiny piece of creation, not just humans. All of creation is made in God’s image.
So, even knowing that God has no body, I want to talk today about “who God is,” specifically, who God is according to today’s scripture lessons.
Turning to our lesson from Hebrew scripture, we find that these three verses contain eight points about who God is. Our lesson begins by identifying God as the “King of Israel,” as well as the king’s “redeemer.”
This is surprising. Today we are so used to separating church and state, we’ve lost the sense of this statement about God. You will recall, though, that God hadn’t wanted Israel to have a political leader other than himself. God gave them their wish for a king, though, first with Saul and then with David and then with Solomon.
Saul let power and jealousy separate him from God and he became mentally ill. His successor David became the great ruler of Israel, but even David’s actions were not always in accordance with God’s desires. The very best thing about God, though, is God redeems kings and even us. “God is not willing that anyone should perish,” we read in 2 Peter 3:9, the explanation about why it is taking Christ Jesus so long to return. God is patient, and God redeems.
I wondered why God found it necessary to explain that he was both King of Israel and the redeemer of kings. I discovered that, in our first lesson, the people had just been taken to Babylon after having been defeated militarily. The people in exile wondered why God had allowed them to be conquered and taken from the land God had promised to them forever. Did this mean that God was impotent, or that another, more powerful god—the god of Babylon—had defeated their own God?
And so, the people had put God on trial, in a way, blaming God for their situation. This is the very God who had sent prophet after prophet to warm them that their repudiation of justice, that their treating immigrants and foreigners as inferior people, that their fixation on acquiring wealth at the expense of the poor, that their distain of God would all lead them to this very place of exile—if not death. God’s chosen people were being humbled, and they blamed their predicament on God!
This lesson is God’s “defense.” As God told Job, although not in these exact words, “Who are YOU to question me, I am who I am, there is NO other God, just those things you worship instead of me. Only I know the outcome of these events; hadn’t you better be praying to me, like King David did some 400 years ago?”
How did David pray? Our Psalm today gives us a clear picture. He was running for his life from terrorists and would-be assassins, and David asked God for instruction on how to be in right-relationship with God. “Knit my heart to you,” David prayed.
From David’s prayer we learn that God is full of love and grace and truth and compassion and mercy and comfort. These are the things David reminded God were God’s essence, as if GOD had to be reminded of who God is. But maybe, David was reminding HIMSELF who God is, what God is like, as he turned the mess he had made of his life over to God.
In our epistle lesson, Paul invokes the image of God as Father, Abba, good father, whose Spirit we share. Paul reminds us that when we suffer—the very suffering that God allows, although we know not why—that when we suffer, we share in God’s glory and receive hope for the future.
In our gospel lesson, we learn that God is long-suffering, and can gently redeem even very bad situations. But God takes the long view—the very, very long view. Jesus’ parable says that God doesn’t rip the weeds from the crop to avoid damaging the crop, to avoid wreaking undue havoc on creation. Any separating to be done will be at the “end of the age,” when we will have to give an accounting to God about our lives, an accounting of whether we spent more time as wheat, or just pretending to be wheat.
In any case, Jesus said the Kingdom of God is like the one who sews good seeds. God is the one who waits patiently for us to be in relationship with him, now and forever, to be redeemed, restored, and weed-free, with God having rooted out all causes of sin.
Our gospel lesson says that then the righteous will shine like the sun in the Kingdom of their “Abba”—restored, adopted, set free from decay, living in the hope God gives.
The 2008 British television play “God on Trial,” tells of an incident during World War II when Jewish prisoners in Auschwitz put God on “trial” after they found out about the ovens. At the trial, the prisoners found God guilty of having “abandoned his people.” And then—spoiler alert—they recognized the ultimate reality about God, “There is no other,” so they ended the trial by praying to God, worshiping God.
As we are doing today. Would that we, like the Israelites in Babylon, like King David of old, like the apostles Paul and Peter, come to understand that whatever suffering comes our way, our only real business in life is thanking God for our existence and for our redemption.
