John 1:18 No One Has Ever Seen God
Sermon January 4, 2009: People's United Church of Christ, Dover, DE: The Rev. Dan Griggs
It’s hard for parents ever to see our children as who they really are. We always have in the back of our mind their birth, their childhood, the trouble they had in school, their learning curve, their sports, and so on; so when they become adults and have lives of their own, far away from us, those old memories dominate the way we think of them. Last year when Beth’s husband Jon finished the classwork for medical school he was assigned to follow practicing physicians on hospital rounds—in surgery, psychiatry, gerontology, all the major fields of medical practice. So last summer they moved near the hospital where he is doing most of this work, in Norton, Virginia, in the mountains of southwest Virginia so far west that the next county over is in Kentucky—real Appalachia. Beth got a temporary job as a Rite Aid Drug Store clerk. Now Beth has taught English as a Second Language for years, and she is multi-lingual. One day a rather scary-looking man came into the Rite Aid and all the other employees moved away from him. He seemed to be having trouble finding what he wanted, so Beth approached him. She first asked him in English what he needed, but he looked Latin American so she asked him again in Spanish, and his eyes lit up, a smile came over his face, and a torrent of Spanish came flowing out of his mouth. He has a son living nearby, and he had come from Mexico to visit; but nobody around there could speak Spanish so he felt helpless and nervous. Beth helped him find the items he wanted and they talked some more. She later told me about this on the phone—she said, “Dad, he had a good sense of humor and was really a very pleasant person.” So they talked and laughed for several minutes, she checked him out and he left. The other employees said, “Isn’t he a very rude man?” Beth told them, “Not at all. He’s funny, and he likes people. He just doesn’t speak English.”
Here were two separate worlds, two languages, two ways of behaving in public, two standards for clothing. There was a great chasm between the mountain people of southwest Virginia and this Mexican. They needed a bridge-person. Beth, my little girl who could never stop talking, who wanted to be a ballerina, whose favorite rock star was Rick Springfield, and who struggled with math in the seventh grade—well, she’s 33 years old now: and she became that bridge-person. Amazing!
A bridge-person. This last verse in the Gospel Lesson today is about a bridge-person.
No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is close to the
Father’s heart, that man has made God known.
The Second Commandment forbids “graven images” to be used for worship. About sixty years ago archaeologists were digging in the ruins of the ancient biblical city of Megiddo, where King Solomon had placed a fortress and cavalry. They found the signet ring of a wealthy man who had lived there about 800 years before Jesus, and on the ring was the picture of a lion with the man’s name inscribed around it. What made this signet ring different from all the other signet rings archaeologists have found in Rome, Greece, Egypt, Babylon, is that all the others had some god standing on the back of the animal, but this lion had no god standing on its back. There was no graven image of God. I’ve often wondered how those ancient Hebrews thought about an invisible god. I can certainly see why so many of them preferred Baal, whose idols were everywhere in Canaan. How do you deal with a god you can’t see? When you bring your young bull to the temple for the priest to sacrifice, how do you know if this invisible god is even around to know about it?
Well, we could say the same for ourselves: when we receive the Offering in church and the ushers bring the plates forward and we pray the Prayer of Dedication and place the plates on the Communion Table, how do we know if this invisible god is even around to know about it?
The fact is, God is not just “invisible”: God is mystery. This is a very important teaching in both the Reformed and the Lutheran traditions that make up the UCC. The greatest Reformed theologian of the twentieth century, Karl Barth, wrote a 12-volume systematic theology in which the first several volumes were about God, and yet Barth never described God. In our technological age when facts are so important, God remains mystery, unknown to us except as God self-reveals. And, of course, that’s what the Bible does—we learn about God by what God does. But no one ever sees God. The greatest Lutheran theologian of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich, suggested that we can’t even say anything about God—not even use the word “is” in the normal sense. That’s not new: the church’s teachers of prayer all the way back to the fourth century have said the same thing. The best we can do is take the common noun “god” and capitalize the first letter: “God.” And now we can at least talk about it. But God remains mystery—and mystery is an important aspect of worship. The ancient doctrine of the Trinity isn’t meant to explain God, it’s meant to highlight mystery and draw us into worship.
We have an even bigger problem than those mountain people had with the Mexican: we need a bridge-person. The Gospel of John says:
No one has ever seen God. The only Son, who is close to
the Father’s heart, that man has made God known.
Jesus was born of a woman—he was a flesh-and-blood man, not a half-breed. That means that just like every one of us, Jesus’ life was particular—he was born at a particular time and died on a particular day, he lived in a particular town, ate particular foods and not TV dinners, and he traveled the way the people of his day and class traveled—he walked. He could stub his toe, and if a Roman soldier hit him with a whip it would cut his flesh and he would hurt and bleed. He was one of us: never let anybody tell you that Jesus was not a man.
And Jesus is our bridge-person to God. What is God like? See what Jesus was like. What does God think? See what Jesus thought. What does God want of you? What did Jesus want of people? Is it worth staking your life on God? Look at Jesus’ staking his life, and losing it in full trust that before God death is not your end.
The only Son, who is close to the Father’s
heart, that man has made God known.
And if what Jesus has made known is still mystery, well—that is the way it is with the real God.
AMEN
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