Letting God Be

“You shall triumph by stillness and quiet; your victory shall come about through calm and confidence.” (Isaiah 30, 15, JPS translation).


Among the many problems of the Church in our time, there is one overriding problem: the disappearance of God from our world. This is partly a problem of cultural representation. If you had lived in an earlier age, say five hundred years ago, you would have been reminded of God at every turn, from the great religious festivals of the year to the statues of Christ and the Virgin along the public highway to priests going about in clerical garb to the constant invocation of God in the public utterances of rulers and dignitaries. Now that has almost wholly gone. The visual texture of our world is relentlessly secular; most churches are closed most of the time, and even the great festivals of Christmas and Easter have been detached from God. The resurrected Christ has been replaced, for the majority, by what one of David Sedaris’s more pedantic characters calls ‘the rabbit of Easter.’

But the problem goes deeper than this withdrawal of visual prompts and cultural reminders. God has largely vanished from the conversation of our society, from that level of thought and argument which forms our understanding of ourselves. Public references to God tend to be embarrassed or jokey. Insofar as he does survive, he survives in the language of the Church; he is real for us because we go on talking about him. But step beyond that language, talk to someone for whom the familiar words absolutely do not work, and even that reality begins to seem wishful and insubstantial. You may quite soon begin to feel, with them, the emptiness and incoherence of most religious language.

So: how can God be real for us? Tonight’s readings suggest two different approaches. On the one hand we have St Paul, encouraging the Christians at Corinth to contribute to the collection for the church in Jerusalem. He tells them that if they show active love to their fellow believers, do something real to help them, they will receive every blessing: possibly material, but certainly spiritual. Through love of their neighbour God will come closer to them. On the other hand we have Isaiah, telling the Jewish people that they have trusted too much in activism, in plans and strategies, and that this has led them away from a God who can only be known in stillness and quietness.

We live in the age of an activist church. Churches are busy with the love of their neighbours, from coffee mornings for the homeless to collections for disaster victims to street pastors to offering a listening ear to those with unmanageable problems. We are often told that we will know God in loving our neighbour. And no one is going to speak against that, partly because Christ enjoins us to love our neighbour and partly because doing good to others is about as objectionable as motherhood and apple pie.

But this pointing to our neighbour as the place where God is found may be an evasion. In an age when the Church has real difficulty in talking directly about God, it can be easier to point to something that no one questions: human neighbours and their need. But sometimes this move can sound glib. What, in reality, is the link between loving one’s neighbour and a closer sense of God? After all, many care for their neighbours without any such expectation, and not all Christians find themselves drawn closer to God through problematical humanity. Think of Mother Teresa, whose heroic life of care was not, apparently, rewarded by any sense of the closeness of God. Caring for others, taking up even a small part of the burden of human misery, can leave you drained, diminished in yourself, less sure of your spiritual footing than you were before you began.

This is not an argument for closing your chequebook and forgetting the suffering in Pakistan. There are compelling human reasons for doing good. It is an argument for saying that the Church needs to look more directly at the problem of God’s disappearance. It needs to look hard at the fact that the God who is assumed in our churchly discourse may be a diminishing reality for many in the Church, not to speak of those outside. It needs to address the questions that lie at the heart of the religious crisis of our times: what do we mean by God and how do we know him?

At which point, of course, I am about to chicken out and refuse to answer the questions that I have just put. My excuse—and it is an excuse—is that those questions can’t be answered in a short, or even a long, sermon. But I will offer some proposals as to how each of us, for ourselves, might go about finding some answer. I have three points.

First: try to look beyond the inherited stereotypes of God. For more than fifty years, ever since John Robinson’s Honest to God, the Church has been assuring the contemporary world that it no longer believes in an old man with a white beard seated on a cloud. But the image that most of us have of God the Father, that rather remote and certainly elderly first person of the Trinity, is really not very different. If I investigate what goes with my use of the word ‘God’, something abstract and distant, grand and slightly featureless still tends to come to mind, more a theoretical possibility than anything I can relate to.

The German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber spent some years in the 1920s translating the Hebrew Bible into German; and when he came to the passage in Exodus chapter 3 where Moses speaks with God on the mountain, he made an important translator’s decision which is also an important theological insight. You will recall that after God has commissioned Moses to go to the enslaved people of Israel in Egypt, Moses asks God to name himself: who, Moses asks, shall I say has sent me? God answers cryptically, with three words, in Hebrew ‘Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh.’ The King James Bible translates them, solidly and emphatically in capital letters, as ‘I AM THAT I AM’. But Hebrew is much less precise about tenses than English. The same verb can refer to the present or the future. Buber’s translation, or its English equivalent, is ‘I will be howsoever I will be.’ In other words: when Moses asks God to define his being, to name himself for the benefit of humanity, God refuses. Instead he says, ‘my being will be whatever my being will be. You cannot fix me, you cannot define me, you cannot pin me down to this form or that, however religious, however much sanctified by your tradition.’ Buber, incidentally, thought that Christianity was at fault on precisely this point, for having tried to fix God definitively in the figure of Christ. So: try to look beyond your stereotypes, remember that God is absolute freedom and that he will be for you whatever he chooses to be.

My second point: experience of God is always a part of the experience of something else. The experience of God does not come in a pure form. Which is to say, if you feel you have no direct experience of God, this doesn’t mean that you are not experiencing God. That experience may be hidden in your experience of something else. In searching for a pure knowledge of God, we may be making the mistake of trying to separate and isolate something that can’t be separated or isolated.

But if God is a part of other experiences, we would expect that his presence would leave some trace, some odour or flavour that would point to his being there. That is my third point. The closest I can get to describing the trace of God in experience is that it has something to do with an excess, an overflowing; in theological language, a transcendence. I mean something like this. We can make a description of an action or situation in what I would call local terms. I am giving this man two pounds. I am sitting in silence in this church. I give him two pounds so that he can buy a sandwich. I sit in the church to allow some of the debris of my life to fall into shape. Those descriptions of what I am doing work perfectly well, in local terms. But in each case I may feel that something has been left out. The giving of the two pounds was more than a practical act. The sitting in the church was more than a moment of self-therapy. There was an excess, something larger, something that overflowed both the act and the moment, something that I can’t describe in local terms. To talk about it, I have to reach, however hesitantly, for language which begins, at least, to enter the territory of talk about God.

That moment of overflowing can occur as we help others, as it no doubt did when Paul’s converts in Corinth gave to the Church in Jerusalem. But in order for the flavour of God to emerge in the texture of our experience, there has to be what we can only think of as stillness and quiet. We should listen to Isaiah as well as to Paul. Perhaps the first duty of the Church in this age, when God has disappeared for so many, is to be that place of quietness and stillness where the flavour of God can be found, where we and those around us can begin to rebuild a sense of the reality of God for our age and in our lives.