“The Two Sides of God” (Exodus 3:1-6; Philipians 2:5-11)
September 28th, 2008
Rev. Dr. David Andersen, English Language Sabbatical Interim Pastor
To me there is a universe between the Old Testament passage we read this morning and the New Testament passage we read. The Old Testament passage represents the Otherness of God. God is not like us. God is apart from us. To be near God is to have to divert our eyes or risk blindness, and to take off our shoes because the ground we stand on is Holy Ground.
The New Testament lesson speaks of God in a different way. It focuses on the approachability of God. God is with us. God comes near to us. God’s presence before us is no more threatening than that of a slave, someone who has no authority, someone who has no power.
Two radically different notions of God, yet it is the same God. This morning I don’t want to synthesis the two, but to look at each and how the one follows from the other and how we need both in our understanding of God. We need to know both the Holiness of God and the Friendliness of God.
Let us pray:
God is not like us. God is above us. God is beyond our ability to fully comprehend or define. Whatever we might say about God we must recognize there is always more that could be said and even then we would not have exhausted all that could be said. God is God.
When orthodox Jews write out the word for God, they never fully spell it out because the word is too Holy, so in-between the first and last letter there is a blank. It is in that space we as well must recognize something so totally other we do not have the capability in our limited being to fill it in.
It is in that space we are filled with a sense of awe and mystery. It is there that we are left speechless. It is the sense of transcendence, the sense that life is more than its moments, that there is something beyond the veil that is terrifying and wonderful, fearful and enticing, all at the same time. It is this sense of the transcendent the architects of the Gothic Cathedrals sought to capture in their vaulted ceilings.
God is not like us. God is above us. God is Holy. Most of the psalms are hymns to the Holiness of God. Psalm 30:4 says, “Sing praise to the Lord, O you his faithful ones, and give thanks to his holy name.” Psalm 99:5 says, “Extol the Lord our God; worship at his footstool. Holy is he!”
The problem with a lot of our modern culture is that there is nothing transcendent about life. Life is flat. The reason that I believe we are so obsessed with sex is that there is so little transcendence in our life. There is so little beauty. There is so little mystery, so little awe, all elements of transcendence, that sex at least generates a little excitement. But, this sense of excitement cannot compare to the idea of the Holy, the sense of being on Holy ground as Moses experienced. It is so powerful that even though it speaks of what cannot be known it also illuminates everything around you.
Read the psalms. Also, become better acquainted with nature, for paradoxically, nature in its rawest form can lead you toward the Holy. All through the centuries there has been a correlation between sacredness and holiness and our awareness of the majesty and mystery and awesomeness of God and our human touch with nature.
I think every parent has experienced this in the birth of their child. It is at once the most earthly occurrence and the most sacred. Childbirth parts the curtain between us and the sacred. We stand in awe each time it happens. The speechlessness, that lump in the throat, that overwhelming sense of great humility in the presence of new life is transcendent. It is standing in the rays of God’s holiness.
I love the way Thomas Merton writes about holiness in his book, New Seeds of Contemplation. He says, “The forms and individual characters of living and growing things, of inanimate being, of animals and flowers and all nature, constitute their holiness in the sight of God.
“The special clumsy beauty of this particular colt on this April day in this field under these clouds is a holiness consecrated to God…
“The pale flowers of the dogwood outside this window are saints. The little yellow flowers that nobody notices on the edge of that road are saints looking up into the face of God.
“The leaf has it own texture and it own pattern of veins and its own holy shape, and the bass and trout hiding in the deep pools of the river are canonized by their beauty and their strength.
“The lakes hidden among the hills are saints…The great, gashed, half-naked mountain is another of God’s saints…”(p.30)
Nature in its holiness points to the holiness of God. If you simply read about nature and the advances in biotechnology and the latest animal to be cloned you can perhaps lose this awesomeness but if you do as I have had the privilege, watch a nest of eggs from a mother robin be hatched and see how the featherless birds grow, the mother feeding them and eventually encouraging them from the nest and to flight, if you are in nature and still enough, never will that sense of awesomeness leave you. The world is filled with lighting rods pointing to heaven and receiving the light from heaven.
Silent, empty churches can have the same effect. Places dedicated to the worship of God, places that have used the finest architects and the most skilled craftsmen and been inspired by the hopes and visions of a people can lead you into the realm of the Holy.
Why is the natural inclination of men and women to tone down their speech, speak in whispers or not at all when they enter a structure dedicated to the worship of God? What stills them? I believe it is in the idea of being the presence of the Holy. Someone told me of his mother, visiting a cathedral in Germany. Standing beside her was another woman who spoke only German. The two of them gazed upon the stone arches and stained glass and so overwhelming was it to them, they spontaneously embraced and tears came to their eyes.
It must have been something of the experience of Moses before the burning bush and the hearing of those words, take off your shoes for the ground upon which you stand is holy ground.
“O Lord, our Lord,” we sing, “how majestic is thy name in all the earth.
SONG
The God above us. The God of mystery. The God who can never fully be explained or defined. The God who is too Holy to have His name written out in full. The Unknown God, as Paul discovered written upon a stone in Athens. The God of creation. The God who was and is and ever shall be. The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The God who knew you before you were born. The God of the clapping sea and roaring thunder. The God who says to Job, “I don’t need to explain myself to you.”
This God, the very God of gods, the God who gives you breath and counts eons as though they were seconds. This God who says no one can look upon me and live. This God who commands Moses to bare his feet. The God all knowing, all seeing, all powerful…is the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
This is the message of the New Testament. God emptied Himself. God became as we are that truly we might look upon Him and see Him as He is and live.
Sometimes in our palsy wellness with Jesus we forget who Jesus is. To take the holiness out of Jesus and make Him only our buddy is to diminish the role of Jesus in our life. We need a Jesus who is our brother but we also need a Jesus who is able because of Who He is to forgive our sins, a Jesus who can take us by the hand at our death out of death, a Jesus who while in every way was as we are is at the same time everything we are not. We need a Jesus both human and divine, truly one with us and truly God.
Then and only then can we truly respond to his invitation, “Come to me and I will give you rest.” Jesus is that bridge between the Old and New Testament image of God. I want a Jesus to whom I can not only talk but one who leaves me speechless. I want a Jesus to whom I can not only share my burdens, but one who can lift my burdens from me. I want a Jesus who can not only empathize with my weakness but a Jesus who can heal me with his touch.
Now, if Jesus is just a buddy, buddy, you might have a friend but you might not have a Savior. Jesus is both friend and Savior, and it is both His Love and His Holiness that makes Him such. Majesty and Love are combined in Jesus Christ; the Old and New Testament reveal one God and we see that God in Jesus Christ and that God’s desire is our well being. We know that by Jesus Christ and it is made possible by Jesus Christ in whom is pleased to dwell all the fullness of God – His majesty and His love.
This is the God you are asked to believe in. This is the God you are asked to place your trust in. The God of Moses who is the God you see in Jesus Christ, and to know that God is to know that the ground you stand on is sometimes Holy Ground.
God is Awesome. God is Holy. God is Love and you meet that God in Jesus Christ. Belief, trust, faith, it all centers in the Christ who emptied Himself, taking on human form, that you might know God in all God’s fullness, including both His Holiness and His Love. The only thing I can entreat you to do is to say Yes to the God you meet in Jesus Christ.
Let us pray: God of the burning bush and the stark cross, God of Holy Ground and empty tomb, help us to come to a point that our word to you might always be one of saying Yes, both to Your awesomeness and Your love. Amen.
