We Worship, We Cook!

Worship is the core of all meaningful theology.

This is sometimes difficult for those born and educated in the Western world.

In our culture, we tend to begin a spiritual journey by trying to “figure God out.”

Once I heard a popular preacher refer to the Bible as a “maintenance manual.”

“Just read it, praise God, it’s all here in the maintenance manual,” he said.

With all due respect to the preacher, the bible is not a maintenance manual.

Reading the Bible doesn’t give us a relationship with God any more than reading a cookbook produces a romantic dinner for two. Preparing a romantic dinner involves action and intention. And, it may involve a cookbook! However, we can study the cookbook all we like, learn the language in which it was written (French, most likely) reflect on its different recipes and talk about the origin of its preferred herbs and spices. All of that can be interesting and informative. None of it will prepare a dinner.

If we want a romantic dinner, we have to actually chop up garlic, marinate shrimp and chill the wine. We have to sit down. We must look into the eyes of our loved one and have a conversation. The meal becomes a setting in which a relationship may develop.

Reading about a relationship -- even studying intently about it – cannot be the main thing.

Western culture reaches us to define things.

I’m glad it does!

Defining terms and clarifying concepts is essential if one’s study and research is to result in science, technology or mathematics. These sorts of cultural developments have been the fruit of Western civilization because of its commitment to measurement and definition.

In the last four hundred years however, Westerners have learned to abhor mystery.

That is a spiritual and emotional disaster.

Somewhere along the way, we learned to define mystery as “something we haven’t figured out yet.”

However, God is—and will always be -- a mystery.

We cannot fit God into our minds.

Even if we were to learn everything that God has chosen to reveal about Himself, He would still be an incomprehensible mystery.

God is God.

He is beyond everything that is, seen and unseen.

How could we possibly understand this –at least understand it in the way we understand geometry or the use of a remote control?

What God reveals to us about Himself -- whether through nature, Holy Scripture, or any other vehicle of revelation – remains beyond our intellectual abilities.

Therefore, our spiritual journey always begins with, and continually leads us back to, worship.

Among other things, worship involves contemplating God’s revelation of Himself to us.

Worship involves our heartfelt expression of the awe that God’s presence invokes.

Worship leads us to meditate upon God’s perspective about the world and human nature.

Worship involves growing desire to trust God.

Worship gradually changes our behavior.

Above all, worship is a commitment: to keep stretching our understanding, emotion, actions; indeed, our entire being, toward God.

Worship involves reading the “cookbook,” but leads to gathering the ingredients, making a mess, cooking the food, setting the table, and sitting in the company of those we love. We do all we know to do to understand God and His people.

We know that we will never fully figure out what God is all about. However, it is a real question whether we ever really ‘figure out’ anyone.

Worship is a form of love. It is profound trust and mystery. It is awe and longing. It is an investment of time. It is listening.

Being with God in these ways is the way we “study God.”

Worship then is the only meaning the word “theology” can possibly have.

It is “stretching toward God,” emotionally, behaviorally, and intellectually.

Since worshipping God involves loving Him with our whole mind, soul and strength, theology becomes an essential ingredient of our relationship with Him. It is, as one great theologian put it, “faith seeking understanding.”

This year, the members of our church are planning to read the Bible together. As we do, we will learn how to allow the scriptural stories and lessons to penetrate our hearts and minds. That will lead us into worship. In worship, we will experience the presence of God. Experiencing the presence of God will raise new questions about life, vocation and eternity. That will point us back to the scriptures where we encounter mystery, presence and relationship with God.

It’s the journey of our life – knowing God, learning His ways and being transformed from glory to glory.

The Mind Boggleth: Bugs Bunny and the Nature of Theology

I once owned an old computer that simply couldn’t handle complicated programs. Anytime I tried to download software, it would whirl and buzz (I was going to add the word “smoke” here but that would have been artistic exaggeration). Finally the old computer would send a message to the screen: “inadequate capacity”.

That’s what we humans experience when we try to understand God: inadequate capacity.

The experience of hitting an intellectual wall can serve a very useful purpose in Christian life though. It can lead us to worship.

Discovering the limits of our intellect leads us to the door that opens us up to worship. The door is called humility, the most basic prerequisite for worship.

How can we really worship without humility?

Could we really worship a being that we totally understood? Wouldn’t such a “god” be anything more than human?

Would that “god” really be God?

Much of what passes for theology is just that: making a god in our own image; reducing the Creator to our own level of thought.

Such “theology” is useless and cannot lead us to worship.

Since worship is the central goal of theology, intellectual inquiry alone will not suffice. True theology is the fruit of a humbled intellect. A real theologian should be a saint, someone who is enlightened by God’s revelation through nature, human conscience, Holy Scripture and the communion of saints.

Without a doubt, the intellect is a vital component of spiritual walk. When ignorance reflects upon God it doesn’t get us anywhere good. Neither does an arrogant intellectual reflection upon God.

Christianity does not require us to park our brains outside the church. However, the intellect has its limits. We discover those limits when we try to understand the nature of God. We discover that we have “inadequate capacity.”

That discovery is what leads us to worship.

Worship leads us on to an authentic theology if we humbly apply our intellect to consider the implications of our faith.

Theology, then, is “faith seeking understanding.”

This approach to theology is certainly necessary when we ask questions about the nature of God.
We have been talking about the creeds and the early Christian formulations about how the One. True, God is at the same time Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

As Bugs Bunny once said, “the mind boggleth.”

Once the early church counsels agreed about how to describe God, you would think that things would have settled down!

Hardly.

We Christians can be a fractious lot.

That’s why there were more councils.

Each of the early councils struggled with questions about the nature of Christ.

Was Christ “God,” or a “god?”

Was Christ a human being, or did He only appear to be a human being?

Was God created, or had He always been?

After years of struggle, the councils determined that the Scriptures teach that Christ is both “fully God and fully man.” They were saying, in other words, that Christ had two natures, one human and one divine.

Christians believe that Jesus is God who became a human being.

In other words, Jesus is the visible manifestation of God.

The Bible expresses it in Hebrews 1:3 by saying that Jesus is God’s “expressed image.”

When we try to imagine God’s face, we see the face of Jesus. When we talk to God, we use the name of Jesus. “Jesus” is the name of authority through which we address the entire Godhead.

When we pray in Christ’s name then, we are addressing God.

Jesus is Emanuel, “God with us.”

The Holy Spirit is the most difficult “person” of the Godhead to describe.

Jesus spoke about Him from the very beginning of His ministry.

St. Luke’s gospel (1:35) records the angel telling Mary that she will soon be “overshadowed by the Spirit.”

The Bible describes the Holy Spirit as the creative force of God, God bringing life, action, even a certain sense of divine unpredictability into the universe and into human affairs.

As you think about the One and Triune God, perhaps you will find it helpful to think of the Father as “God above us,” the Son as “God with us,” and the Holy Spirit as “God inside of us.”

Or, you can think of God consisting of “One who loves,” “One who is loved,” and “One who is Love.”

The Lord is the “God who creates us,” the “God who redeems us,” and the “God who transforms us.”

Thankfully, a day is coming in which we will understand all of this much better. In this present life we hit intellectual walls.

That’s because God is God and we are not.

We should keep that in mind as we enter this New Year.

Many of us are reading the One Year Bible. We will begin in Genesis and St. Matthew’s Gospel and work our way through the entire text this year!

Keeping a good attitude about mystery, holiness and awe will help us as we wrestle with the words and meaning of the Holy Scriptures.

God Becomes A Man: Part Two

Christians believe that the birth of Jesus, or the nativity, was the ultimate revelation of God.

In Christ, God became intimate with His people. (Intimacy is appropriate self-disclosure within a personal relationship.)

In Christ, God opened Himself up. He invited us to peer into His being because He wanted us to know Him better.

To our surprise, it turns out that not only is God different from us -- which we knew from the Old Testament -- think about how the word ‘holy” means “alien!” – His differences from us are beyond our comprehension.

In the Old Testament, God’s central message to His people was: “I am One.”

Israel’s God was unique.

One rabbi says that when God told Moses, “I am what I am!” He was saying something like, “If I told you what I was really like, you would never believe it!”

Another rabbi, writing about the shma, (“Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One”) explains that He is saying in essence, “I am in a class all by myself. There is no one like me.”

God wanted His people to understand that He was not some celestial pagan king, capable of being bribed and manipulated. God was above all of that. He was in a class by Himself. One!

In the nativity however, God revealed Himself as a baby. As time went on, we discovered that this baby was not only God, He was also fully man. Not only that, this fully man/fully God person prayed to God and promised to pour out the Holy Spirit who will be “another Comforter.”

We have never understood it.

We never will!

God is beyond our understanding.

(I can hear God saying something like, “I told you that wouldn’t believe it even if I tried to tell you!”)

The bottom line is that we, like Jews, believe that God is One. Since the incarnation, we know that in some sense beyond our comprehension, He is also three.

It makes me think of the old book, Flatland. The circles try to understand spheres, who, in the two dimensional world of the circles, appear to mysteriously shrink or expand without explanation. Of course, the explanation is simply that the spheres come from a higher dimension where the apparent paradoxes and contradictions make perfect sense.

The baby came into our world from somewhere else. Plato called that other place “the realm of forms.” The writer to the Hebrews has this idea in mind when he tells us the Christ came from “the temple in the heavenlies that was not made with hands.”

It’s all beyond us.

Fortunately, we are not called to understand God. We are called to worship Him.

We make a decision to believe what He has told us about Himself. However, that is not the same thing as understanding what we believe. We make these choices about belief because we know that if we could understand everything about God, there would be no need for faith.

God is God and we are not. Our intellect will always struggle with the great paradoxes and mysteries of God’s nature that are beyond our capacity to figure out.

Faith is about trusting that our God will not deceive us.

He actually is what He reveals Himself to be.

After our Lord came to the earth, it would take Christians about three centuries to develop a language of faith to express what they believed about the nature of God.

Sometime in the second century AD, Christians begin to recite what we now call the Apostles’ Creed. It confessed a belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who was One God. However, the creed did not attempt to clarify the issue further.

As the years went by, Christian leaders and thinkers gradually began to use a new term to express their belief about God; 'trinity', a shortened form of tri-unity, or 'three in one'.

Then the Church Fathers (people who participated in early church councils) borrowed a Latin word from the theater to express how Father, Son and Holy Spirit were distinctions within God’s nature: 'persona'. Although we normally translate that word into English as 'person', the original word 'persona' never referred to an individual, as it does for us today. It meant 'mask' (as worn by an actor), 'character' (as in a play), station, rank or condition.

Obviously, when they decided to use the word 'persona', the Church fathers were using a metaphor. They wanted to help us understand the nature of God as He had revealed himself in The New Testament.

Like all metaphors, the word 'persona' has both strengths and weaknesses.

A mask hides the real face of a person.

A role is something an actor assumes, not his own personality.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit however, are not God’s masks; they are who He is.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit are not roles God assumes; they are revelations of His actual nature.

So, the word 'persona' has often confused as well as enlightened people about what we believe.

Greek speaking Christians decided not to use the word persona for those very reasons.

However, Western Christians have continued to use the word, despite its limitations. We really have no other word that works nearly as well.

I once heard an Eastern Orthodox theologian say that 'Father', 'Son', and 'Holy Spirit' are the interior names of God; they tell us what God is like inside Himself.

Anyway, if your mind is turning around and around, don’t feel bad! The fault is not with your intelligence. The best minds of the Christian church throughout history have found it difficult to express what the divine Godhead is like. They still do!

If God is really like the being that the Church Fathers proclaimed, it is important that we try to understand them. And if He is not, the sooner we know that, the better.

All Christians have to deal with the issue sooner or later though because it is so central to what most believers throughout history have confessed about the nature of God.

The important thing to know is that early Christians struggled with all of this and finally brought it to a conclusion. God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, is One.

He is also, in some sense, three.

He is, to put it another way, a Triune being.

All Christians believe this, including those who deny it. Because even if we were to reject the 2nd and 3rd century terminology about the nature of God, we are left with Biblical passages like this one in Acts 2:33 to explain:

“This Jesus, being by the right hand of God exalted, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, has poured forth this which you both see and hear.”

And just think: all of this once “lay in such mean estate, where ox and ass are feeding.”