{"id":251,"date":"2014-06-15T14:53:34","date_gmt":"2014-06-15T21:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/?p=251"},"modified":"2014-06-15T14:53:34","modified_gmt":"2014-06-15T21:53:34","slug":"god","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/god\/","title":{"rendered":"Who is God?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf God wants to get through to us, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive in us, that\u2019s when God has the best chance. God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than the logical mind can think. Perhaps much of the weakness of the first 2000 years of reflection o the Trinity\u2026.is that we\u2019ve tried to do it with the logical mind instead of prayer<\/em>\u2026.\u201d Richard Rohr.<\/p>\n

Many clergy avoid the celebration of this Sunday\u2014Trinity Sunday. They will complain that it is doctrine, or too complicated to speak about, or it is just a mystery we will never understand. I will not bore you with any of those approaches. I want to speak about the heart of what it means to be human and who is God. First principle, we cannot speak about one without the other.<\/p>\n

Ever since human beings have first asked questions, we have realized how incomplete we are\u2014how incomplete our knowledge is: we want to know how everything originated, how we got to where are, and where we destined? Destined usually means what happens to us after we die. Does something survive the death of our bodies? What is the purpose of life? Why are we here? Why should we live our lives morally? You get the idea. All those questions –you have asked sometime during your lives.<\/p>\n

I would boldly suggest humanity is God\u2019s scripture. What does that mean? It means that the clues for comprehending God are found in the deepest part of who we are. We write down our heart experiences, and these become scripture\u2014the Bible. Does this mean that God does not reveal God\u2019s self in the Bible? Not in the way you may have been taught. God is not literally the words or the truths of the books on the pages or particular verses of the Bible. I will say the Bible give us clues to find and experience God. God reveals God\u2019s self in personal and communal encounters, and the scriptural text provides us a doorway to experience. For example, I take a biblical text, I read it a number of times, I use it in prayer, and it becomes the means to encounter God in prayer. God is experienced in the prayer and context of your life. The word starts the process, but something more happens in prayerful awareness of God\u2019s presence.<\/p>\n

When Moses was called to the top of Mt. Sinai, we read in Exodus 34:5-6, that the Lord came down in the cloud and stood there and proclaimed God\u2019s own name: \u201ccompassionate, gracious, slow to anger, slow in anger, abounding in steadfast in love and faithfulness, forgiving, and so on.\u201d This is God whose extravagant love is poured out in grace, love, and forgiveness upon us. God\u2019s reveals that loving kindness is at the very heart of who God is. But these are words written down in scripture by an unknown author. They are not real to us until we experience this nature of God for ourselves in our hearts, in the experience of our lives. God reveals who God is in prayerful and human encounters.<\/p>\n

Once we have had an experience of the loving kindness of God for ourselves, we can presuppose that there are other clues to question, \u201cwho is God?\u201d One of the simplest and most profound answers is: \u201cGod for us.\u201d God for us has created all that is, and we are part of that creation. If God is for us, then we have another intimation that God created all this universe and continues to create in evolutionary processes. Jesus tells us that God is boundless compassionate care and love that reaches out to us humans but compassionately cares for every sparrow that falls to the ground. God cares for us and for other created life.
\nI was at a pool party when a group of guys were denying the existence of God because of evolution. I jumped into the midst of the conversation, with the hope of mischievously subverting the line of conversation by claiming that evolution, indeed, proves the existence of God. And it was no fundamentalist answer! As they looked at me, I said God was to be found in the chaos and the dead ends of evolution because those complex moments create something anew\u2014something novel. The Creator Spirit is the power that brings the novelty of evolution and life.
\nWhenever something new in the creative evolutionary process arises, whenever life is awakened to something beyond itself in new birth, the Creator Spirit is at work. God is always creating something new, and God\u2019s self was not out there but within each of us and all life and the processes starting from the big band to evolution in the present. What is the nature of human experience of God if it is not relationship? Or what I want to describe as God for us.<\/p>\n

If God for us is found in the ever new situations we find ourselves, God reveals God\u2019s self as relationship to us. God is for us, for life, for the Earth, and for the universe. God is unspeakably close to us and the life processes of the Earth, and God continues to reach out and invite us into relationship with God\u2019s self. How does God relate to us? Our human existence is encompassed by abundant divine grace and extravagant love\u2014it is the presence of God freely oriented to creation and all. One of my favorite authors Denis Edward expresses a deep truth: \u201cGrace is the heartbeat of the universe. It is God bent over us in love.\u201d Grace is directed to us from everything in creation, and as we think about it,<\/p>\n

God\u2019s Spirit is that amazing grace there in the midst of the universe. We are never abandoned by God, we swim in an ocean of God presence within us and without.<\/p>\n

Specifically, the Spirit communicates the divine invitation to live in a world of grace. We can accept that invitation or ignore that invitation by filling ourselves or focus in on our own importance or the details of life. Yet we live in a cosmos full of divine invitation, presence, and self-giving in the experience of the wonder of the universe, every act of human kindness, every choice for life and compassionate care for those less fortunate and hungry, for other life, and for the Earth. We can encounter the Spirit\u2019s invitation to be in relation with God and all there is if we take the time to be mindful and listen to the within ourselves. . We experience God in friendships, companionship with our pets, in loss and death, suffering with others in pain, in beauty and solitude with God.<\/p>\n

God relates to us through the capacity of God\u2019s taking on material flesh and blood. We learn that God wanted to know what we know, feel what we feel, suffer what we suffer, experience death as we experience death. There is no question in my mind that God\u2019s loving kindness, compassion, and love meant that God for us intended to incarnate God\u2019s self not because of some primordial original sin but because of God\u2019s original love for us and for all life before the big bang. Most Christians would say God became human and flesh to save us from our sins or redeem us from an original sin passed on genetically ever since. I would claim an alternative grace perspective: God became incarnated in Jesus to communicate God\u2019s grace and love for us. God\u2019s love existed before human sin, and out of that love, God for us intended to become one with creation, with us. I know that God\u2019s love for us is stronger that our straying away. God wanted to participate in human and fleshly life, for God wants to tell us that God rejoices with us and suffers with us. God is with us and always near us.<\/p>\n

God\u2019s incarnation is the most intense expression of the compassionate Creator for Christians who feel a need to express the experience of the nearness of God or the within nature of God in our hearts. To throw out this is to lose that the most visible and extraordinary expression of God\u2019s love in the world. The incarnation writes God\u2019s love not only into the DNA of the human Jesus but onto our own hearts and our human DNA into God, for God\u2019s incarnation is embedded in the DNA of all life everywhere. God\u2019s DNA was created in the proto-gases of the first seconds of the big bang and continued to pervade in the universe in all the DNA of life. The God of the living is the God of all life. If God is anything than personal, there is no relationship with us. If God for us is love in action, this means God for us is the giver, the gift, and the giving.<\/p>\n

The God we worship is so relational\u2014relating to all that is, in all processes of the universe, in evolution, and now incarnated in a human belonging to God: Christ. We find in the ministry and life of Jesus the compassionate face of God. Jesus said and lived his teaching: \u201cBe compassionate as your God is compassionate.\u201d Jesus, God\u2019s incarnate face, reveals the God is compassionate care.
\nSo who is God? God is for us when God created the universe in the big bang. God is for us in placing the Spirit inside that process of big bang and the novelties of creation. God\u2019s power is one of love, not power over; God is relational, erotic in our desires to merge with another and merge with God, God is playful and persuasive when we realize that God is speaking to our hearts and inviting us to deeper communion with God. God has been described as the liberating connectedness of love that is within and without the universe and all life. God\u2019s DNA incarnates in the womb of Mary, taking on human flesh. There is God\u2019s enfleshment in Mary\u2019s womb, in the birth of Jesus, his compassionate life and in his forgiving and welcoming ministry, in his feelings of joy and sadness, in his disappointment and hopes, in abandonment and torture, and on the cross. God is for us when Jesus is raised to the full aliveness of God and God\u2019s interrelationships with everything. God\u2019s incarnation did not stop with Jesus becoming flesh. It continued with Easter and the giving of the spirit to impregnate each of us with Christ. We carry Christ in ourselves as Mary carried him in the flesh in her womb. It is up to us, like Mary, to say yes to God\u2019s Spirit to incarnate Jesus the Christ in each of us. The compassionate, relational human is now carries the risen Christ in herself and himself.<\/p>\n

God for us is love in action, compassionate care. The divine community of love is present in every action from the big bang and expansion of the universe, in the creative novelty of evolution, in the birth of Jesus in Mary\u2019s womb, in his care for the poor and the sick and the outcast, on the cross, and the fullness of resurrection from the tomb.<\/p>\n

God for us is expressed in the gifts of unexpected love. It is a contagious love within our human biology, and if we humans allow ourselves to realize that we are the life scriptures that God writes compassionate love to us, then we become daily surprised God\u2019s love in us.<\/p>\n

As many of you know, I have faced health challenges with the production of my blood cells. When I met with the bone marrow specialist at Kaiser and the City of Hope, he outlined a strategy to restore the production in body. He set a strategy of the last resort, and we are far away from this option at this time, is a bone marrow transplant from siblings, my two sisters. When I spoke to my sister Karen, and she without a thought, said \u201csure, I will do whatever it takes.\u201d To hear those words choked me up, and I walked into our garden and cried at the unselfish offer of life-giving bone marrow. She called me the next day to tell me that my other sister Debbie would do likewise. I experienced God\u2019s compassionate care, God for us in the generous actions of self-giving and gift. This is what I mean by God writes scripture in our hearts and actions. How often God for us writes in your hearts and loving kindness in our feeding program, in acts of generous and abundant welcoming, care for the garden and for this church. You are the living scripture of God for us as Jesus Christ and the Creator Spirit, continue to surprise the stranger and the person in need with the gifts of love and self-giving. God bless you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIf God wants to get through to us, and the Trinity experience wants to come alive in us, that\u2019s when God has the best chance. God is not only stranger than we think, but stranger than the logical mind can think. Perhaps much of the weakness of the first 2000 years of reflection o the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sunday-sermons"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s3Cgaj-god","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=251"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":255,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/251\/revisions\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com\/tgt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}