Sermon for Epiphany 4C
January 31, 2010
Texts:  Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30

Have you ever wondered about God?

What does God look like?

If you have, then you are in good company
As people throughout the ages have tried to picture or describe God.

In Scripture, you can find dozens of word descriptions for God.
In the psalm today, the psalmist describes God as a rock

In other places, you can find God described as a tree, peace, father, mother,
And the Holy One of Israel,
Among a multitude of other images.

There are 50 or more names for God in the Bible,
Which, even taken together, only give a partial picture of God. 

People today are still trying to envision God.
If you do a Google image search for God
You will come up with thousands of images,
Pictures from nature, art work, creative photography and movies. 

I am going to flash up a small sampling of those images
While I ask you to think, in your own minds’ eye
About what God looks like to you.

Think about whether any of these images support or clash
With your own mental picture of God.

(9 slides)

I think this last slide (slide 10) may say it best

“Google can’t satisfy every search”

We all try to draw a picture God in our mind’s eye,
Based on the stories we’ve heard and the pictures we’ve seen
From the time when we first heard about God,
Right up through what we think we have learned
In much more sophisticated studies.

Yet this search to understand God
Is one which is doomed to be incomplete in our lifetimes. 

The people in Luke’s Gospel text which we heard this morning,
Thought they knew who God was.

These are the people in Jesus’ hometown synagogue
You may remember from last week’s lesson
That Jesus had gone home to Nazareth
And worshipped in his home synagogue.

While he was there,
He was asked to read the Scripture for the day,
A passage from Isaiah
That begins “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
At the conclusion of the reading,
Jesus tells the gathered crowd
That the Scripture has been fulfilled today in their hearing.

With this statement, Jesus is challenging
His friends’ and neighbors’ views
Of who God is and what God does.

His neighbors were having trouble connecting the dots
Between Jesus, son of Joseph, the carpenter
And the one upon whom the Spirit of the Lord rests.

How could they reconcile their image of God,
The great and powerful God,
With the thought that God might choose their hometown boy,
For some kind of special assignment. 

But Jesus didn’t leave it there.
He pushed his friends and neighbors a little further.

He challenged their ideas about whom God chooses
By reminding them that God sent Elijah
To save a foreign widow,
And God gave Elisha the power
To heal a foreign leper.

In neither case, did God intervene
Among God’s supposedly chosen people.

Jesus’ friends and neighbors were incensed by these challenges
To their picture of God choosing the Israelites for special treatment.
Their images of themselves
As God’s chosen people
Didn’t leave room
For the possibility
That God might favor the outcasts
And the people on the margins of society.

How about you,
Can you absorb a picture of a God,
Who has a preference for the poor and oppressed?

The people of Nazareth didn’t want to picture a God
Who might let widows in Israel starve
And lepers in Israel suffer
While the outsiders were saved.

Rather than amend or broaden their picture of God
Jesus’ neighbors were so threatened by his preaching
That they became enraged and tried to kill him.

How about you?

What images of God do you hold dear?

What challenges your image of God
And do you let those challenges affect your faith?

Are there Scripture verses about God
That either support or challenge your foundations?

Do certain passages make you even a bit uncomfortable?

For instances, if one of those Google pictures of God as a powerful man
Matches your view of God,
Does seeing artwork picturing the female aspects of God
Or hearing scripture about God as a mothering hen
Or as Lady Wisdom cause you to sit up and take notice?

Or are you so vested in the New Testament images of God,
That hearing the Old Testament stories makes you a bit skeptical?

Is your view of God so heavily weighted toward God the Creator
That you have trouble absorbing the Son and Holy Spirit parts of the Trinity?

If you believe strongly in the characterization of God as all-powerful,

Do tragic events in the world,
Or in your own life cause you
To question how God can be both all powerful and all good?

Our images of God are all, necessarily, faulty and incomplete.
We not comprehend the full picture of God.
Who would want a God that can be reduced to human understanding?

As Christians we believe our limited knowledge of God
Can come only through Jesus Christ, crucified and risen.

As Paul writes in the first chapter of First Corinthians,
“For since, in the wisdom of God,
the world did not know God through wisdom,
God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation,
to save those who believe.
For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified”

Even Moses, saw only the back of God in passing.
Elijah heard only the sheer sound of silence.
Peter, James and John, who were present at Jesus’ transfiguration,
Only heard God’s voice.

When Jesus reminds his friends and neighbors
Of two Old Testament stories about God
Intervening in the lives of foreigners,
He is giving the folks of Nazareth, and by extension us
A glimpse into the nature of God.

Our limited understanding of God
Is framed by Jesus’ witness and testimony.

As described in today’s Gospel lesson,
Jesus drew from Old Testament imagery
To give his neighbors a picture of God.

Jesus also sent the Holy Spirit to guide and lead us,
But we can not actually see the Spirit,
But only can sense the presence.

All of the views into God,
From Old Testament descriptions
To Jesus’ witness
Only give us little strobe point insights about God.

But in this life, as mortals,
We will never be able to integrate all of these little glimpses
To get a full picture of God.

We should not let this frustrate us,
Because we have the promise that in the future,
Beyond this time and space,
We will understand God much more completely.

Paul told us, also,
In his letter to the Corinthians,
Which we heard this morning,
That “now we see in a mirror, dimly,
But then we will see face to face.
Now we know only in part,
Then we will know fully.”

“When the complete comes,
The partial will come to an end.”

For now we have a limited partial understanding of God,
Shared with us through the witness of Jesus Christ.

As humans and mortals,
We could not bear the full image of God.

However, in the promised future,
We will see God face to face.

For now our understanding is by necessity incomplete.

But, then the partial will come to an end
And the complete will come.

As the last picture from the slide show indicated
There are some things you can’t find with a Google search.

You can search and see now, a glimpse of God
Only in Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for you.

The Good News for you
Is that the time will come
When through Jesus Christ,
You will see God face to face.
Amen