Simple Christianity pt 2: "God"

It’s an awesome task for a preacher to take on a subject so weighty as “God.” Theologians have written books and books on the subject of how to understand and respond to God so it seems a little risky for me to try to talk about God in the short time we have this morning.

My task this morning isn’t to convince you of some new theological truth about God. And that wasn’t what Jesus talked about either when he talked about God. Rather, Jesus when he would talk about God always tried to demonstrate to those who would listen that God was a lot closer than they thought and cared a lot more about there lives than it might seem to them. If I do nothing else this morning but help you to see that God is a lot closer than you think and that he cares deeply and intimately about your life, then I will have succeeded in today’s message.

In fact, our first impression when we talk about “God” is so often confusion. On the one hand we know that the images of God that one might find on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel are just that – images or impressions of the artist Leonardo Davinci. A white bearded muscular God with outstretched arm to touch the hand of his created man – Adam.

Take that image a step further and we have the image of God that many of us had when we were teenagers. Imagine the same grey bearded God with one hand outstretched while the other readies a thunderbolt poised to hurl down at those who rebel sinfully against the creator. Come on now, admit it! How many of us when we were growing up had THIS image of God – the God whose sole purpose was to keep count as if on some divine chalkboard the number of times we danced, smoked, drank a beer, or said what our moms considered a “bad word.” How many of us STILL have that image?!? Confession time!

The activity that most brings into focus the kind of God we worship is Prayer. Have you ever thought as you prayed where God was when He listened to your prayers? Or how your prayers actually made their way to God? Did God read your mind when you prayed or did you need to speak out loud? If God knows what you need before you ask him, then is it necessary to pray? Or how about this… if God knows what you need before you pray and if God is in control of every part of the universe and can make anything happen, do we really need to pray and do we really need to do anything at all except just sit back and watch God make everything happen?!? Dizzying, isn’t it.

You’re fortunate this morning that we’re going to cut the proverbial Gordian knot, going through many strands right down to the core – to the essence of who and what God is as we continue our sermon series on “Simple Christianity.”

And let me say outright that this is a very, very, very (did I say “very”?) practical question – with huge import for our spiritual life. How we think about God and who we think God is carries a lot of weight for how we live our lives. Let me say that again, because it is incredibly important. What we think about God matters very much. And how we might describe God to ourselves and to others is a very practical matter. It might be the realm of theology (which translated literally means “words about God”) – but let’s not kid ourselves – our answer to the question, “Who and what is God” could completely change your life today and change it forever! So this morning, if you’ll allow me, I’m going to take up just a little it of your time as we reflect together on who and what God, well, …. IS.

As a friend of mine said the best place to start is at the beginning! Turn in your Bibles to Genesis, chapter 1, verse 1 – the very beginning of the Bible. If you’re having trouble finding Genesis, it’s right before Exodus. Look with me how it starts out. “In the beginning, God.” Now for the purposes of our talk this morning we could stop right there. “In the beginning, God.” If we were to read on, we’d read about how In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth – and then how God separated the waters from the land, light from dark, stars from sun and moon and then created plant life, the fish of the sea, animals and then as if he didn’t have enough on his hands to worry about – he created man.

The Hebrew Bible, though, is always very meticulous in the language chosen and so it very carefully places God at the beginning of all things – before the world, before the heavens, before the creatures, before humanity. “In the beginning, God.”

Let’s reflect on the importance of that statement for just a moment. It may be the most important phrase in the Bible. Human beings like to play with that verse a little bit, don’t we. There are lots of things we would just love to place at the beginning – in order to give priority to them or honor to them or just simply because we’d rather see them come first. So we might come up with a list of “in the beginnings…” In the beginning…money. In the beginning… my work. In the beginning… relationships. In the beginning… status. In the beginning… my needs. In the beginning… ME! I wonder if the Biblical author of Genesis – some believe that Moses himself wrote these words – actually thought that human beings needed some help remembering and acknowledging who was at the beginning.

The Bible contains so many examples of human beings vying for position at the beginning and usurping the power and authority of God. The section in Genesis that begins with “In the beginning… God” ends in chapter 11 with those living on the plain of Shinar building a monument to themselves – otherwise known as the Tower of Babel. “Nothing they plan to do will be impossible to them,” God says in 11:6 – or so they think – and so to help them understand how much they depend on God he “confuses their language” so that they can’t understand each other as they attempt to build.

Unless there is a common bond – a central core – something always gets lost in translation, doesn’t it. A guy had a similar question and did something fun. He took the song "Take Me Out to the Ballgame," typed it into the computer, and translated it into German. Then he translated it back into English to see if anything got lost in the translation. You know the song:

Take me out to the ballgame. Take me out to the crowd. Buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack. I don't care if I ever get back.

Let me root, root, root for the home team. If they don't win, it's a shame. For it's one, two, three strikes you're out at the old ballgame.

He translated it into German and then back into English. Well, something got lost in the translation. It sounds a little militant, like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Execute me to the ball play. Execute me with the masses. Buy me certain groundnuts and crackerstackfusig. I'm not interested if I never receive back.

Let me root, root, root for the main team. If they do not win, it is dishonor. For there are one, two, three impacts on you at the old ball play.

Not quite the same thing, is it!

And it still holds true today – the areas in the world where there seem to be the least amount of cooperation and progress are those places and countries where there are literally hundreds of languages spoken. Lest you think God did this simply to punish –remember the words at that lead off Genesis – “In the beginning… God.” All throughout scripture, God reminds us that all life begins with Him. All human endeavor, rightly devised, begins with asking ourselves the question – is this what God wants? Does this fit with God’s plan as I understand it? Is MY will submitted to the perfect will of God? Now imagine being a member of a community where the whole community is actively seeking to submit to God’s will in their life. Is that picture one of chaos and confusion? Or is it one of perfect harmony?

God’s nature is what it is. That sounds like a truism, doesn’t it. Something that is obviously true. Turn in your Bibles to Exodus, chapter 4 where we find the story of Moses and the burning bush.

What excited me as a young child reading this story in Sunday School was the cool pyrotechnics. I can’t tell you the number of times I wanted to go into our backyard as a child and light one of the bushes just to see if OUR bush would burn indefinitely like Moses’s bush did.

But even with the fire that never burned out – the center of this passage of scripture is again, God. God’s the one on center stage. In fact, after capturing Moses’s attention with cool bush trick – he commands Moses to get past his fear of the Egyptian pharaoh and go and tell the Pharoah that it’s time to let the Israelites be free from their 400 year slavery.

Moses doesn’t consider himself to be that much of an eloquent speaker – or so he says – and so looking for some sort of calling card he asks God in 4:11, “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah and bring the Israelites out of Egypt.”

“I will be with you,” God says.

Moses’s responds – and you can tell he’s trying every way he can think of to get out of this task – well, let’s say that I go to the Israelites and tell them about the bush that burned and that I’ve come to free them from slavery… who exactly should I tell them sent me?

It’s at this point in the narrative that God gives the name that he will be known by. In most of our Bibles, the word is translated simply “The Lord.” But in the Hebrew the word used consists of a simple four letters which sounds like “Yahweh.”

“I am who I am,” God says – which is how Yahweh can be translated or alternatively, “I will be who I will be.”

Now it might seem almost sacrilegious to mention the pop-singer-icon Madonna in the same sentence with God – but just hang with me for a second. If you were to ask Madonna “who are you, Madonna” – you’d get a different answer depending on which “reinvention” year you’d caught her in. In the eighties she was the material girl. In the nineties, she became Dick Tracy’s side-kick. More recently, she’s experimented with different kinds of spirituality. Who is Madonna? Who knows? She changes with the culture. Likely, she doesn’t even know who she is.

But God, in the form of a burning bush says that he simply “is who he is.”

I have to tell you how I encounter that statement. One of the things that is most frightening about the world we live in today is how fast-paced change occurs. Gas prices two years ago were still under two dollars. Five years ago, we were still innocently pre- 9/11 disaster. Ten years ago, we were just discovering what the Internet could do. Fifteen years ago – if you owned a cell phone you likely had to carry it in a backpack it was so big. If we could have seen into the future fifteen years ago and what our lives in America would be like today – how many of us would have opted to find some deserted island somewhere?

But God, who has remained with the Israelites for 400 years of Egyptian captivity and is now readying His leaders to deliver His people proclaims with the voice of certitude and truth – I AM WHAT I AM. In Moses’s time, this perhaps would have been understood as – Pharoah’s come and go, Moses, armies conquer and then are vanquished, nations rise and fall, crops grow, are harvested and then return to the soil, cities develop and then are razed to the ground – but I – Yahweh – your God, Moses – I am what I am. I exist beyond this fleeting change you see before you. I am what I am.

Never could a message be more timely for us today. Because you see, things in Moses’s time didn’t change near as rapidly as they do today. And if you’re like me you’re reaching out for some anchor, some point of stability in your life that transcends all the things we know in the end are merely… fleeting. Like I said last week, we hear the voice that there is something better, something more permanent, something more loving and joyous – a voice that strikes our heart with a chord of harmony and authenticity. The voice, in spite of all that is fake and in flux around is sounds very real to us. It sounds, in fact, much more real than even our own lives at time. And the reason that it sounds so very real is because “I AM WHAT I AM.”

Jesus was asked that question. He was. “Who are you, Jesus?” The Jews ask him in John’s Gospel, 8:25. They wanted a name, they wanted a label by which they could pigeon-hole Jesus – and Jesus evades the question by talking about how he is only doing what he has seen his Father doing and that if they were “legitimate” children of God – they’d hear God’s voice clearly and do what they see the Father doing.

The Jews become indignant at Jesus – they don’t want to be told that they aren’t hearing God and because they can’t hear God they don’t really belong to God.

But Jesus has been in the Father’s presence and has heard from the Father and has seen the Father and is ministering and living and teaching as he has observed his father, minister, live, and teach. In fact, for Jesus – God is the beginning, God is the great “I am.”

“When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will know that I am the one I claim to be and that I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him.” (Jn 8:27-29)

Again, the Jews ask – Who do you think you are, Jesus – telling us that we don’t belong to God and that we are following the devil. You must be demon possessed they tell Jesus! Who do you think you are!

And then Jesus delivers the crushing blow. He tells them precisely who he is and by whose authority he is teaching. “My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me… I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am!” (JN 8:54b, 58)

In the next sentence it says that the Jews picked up stones to stone Jesus. For them, Jesus had just uttered the greatest blasphemy. He had equated himself with God. “I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am.” “I am who I am.” I am one with my Father.

If you study world religions, Christianity stands apart from the rest in at least one major respect. Judaism says that we come to know God through the Torah – the teaching of the law. Islam says that we know God through the Koran – the dreams that were given to Mohammed in a cave on the Arabian peninsula. Hinduism says that we know God through myth and story about minor gods and goddesses as they reenact in story the drama of life. But Christianity… Christianity says that the way we know who God is and what God does is very simple. We don’t have to have a PhD. We don’t have to attend a thousand seminars or go to hundreds of conferences. We don’t even have to be able to read. We can know God simply by knowing the son – Jesus. For in Jesus, we see the son who is a perfect mirror image of God, the Father. Jesus DOES what he sees the Father doing. And for Jesus… in the beginning, there was God. And for Jesus, God is the great “I am what I am.”

Do you want to know the heart of God at its very essence – at its most profound depths? Come to know Jesus. And what does it mean to know Jesus? It’s to know Jesus as Jesus is revealed to us through the gospels about his life. It’s to know that Jesus loves. It’s to know that Jesus heals. It’s to know that Jesus sacrifices. It’s to know that for YOU, Jesus died. It’s to know that against hope – Jesus was resurrected from the grave.

My friends, this very morning we can put aright the things that are out of place in our lives. We can. We can respond to God’s voice to reorder our lives so that in how we live our lives and in the decisions we make – God is at the center and God is our anchor – the great “I AM.” Our God is not far away off in the heavens gathering dust on a cloud. He is right here, right now, in this place where we as the body of the faithful have called out to him in worship, word, and prayer.

And God has made it easy for us to restore our center in Him. He’s given us his son, Jesus, in whom we can place our total faith and trust.

And you know what Jesus says will happen when we do that? When we look to his life and see the embodiment of the voice of God – the perfect mirror of God’s love… do you know what will happen?

“If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, streams of living water will flow from within him.” (John 37-38)

Streams of living water will flow from within him. Or her. I like that. I don’t want my life to be a pond that stagnates. I want my life to be a river of living water. Water that nourishes the lives of others. Water that gives life to those around me. Water that flows swiftly and powerfully into the larger river of God’s love. And all we have to do is believe as we see the person of God reflected in his only son who gave his life for us.