Sunday, September 15, 2013

God's True Attributes



Sermon preached on September 15 at the Church of the Ascension, Munich
Exodus 32:7-14, Psalm 51:1-11, 1 Timothy 1:12-17, Luke 15:1-10

One of the papers I had to write for my course in systematic theology at seminary was titled ‘Explaining the Faith’ and in it I had to describe, over at least 10 pages (I wrote more), my own position on doctrinal topics such as the evidence for faith and for God, on the place and meaning of revelation, on the attributes of God, on the Trinity, the nature of Incarnation, and the role of the Church….. Now don’t worry, I’m not about to read it to you now. But I was reminded of this paper, and especially of what I wrote about the attributes of God, by this week’s readings. One reason is because the last verse from the extract from the letter to Timothy contains a list of some of the classical attributes, God is “the King of the ages, immortal, invisible, the only God.” (1 Timothy 1:17) This, by the way, is the inspiration for that beautiful hymn (#423) “Immortal, invisible, God only wise” that we opened the service with. The other reason is that the story from Exodus seems to raise questions or doubts about another important traditional attribute of God, the idea that God is unchangeable, or impassible to use the technical term. This has two aspects: that God’s very nature, character or being does not change and also that God cannot be influenced or manipulated by creation or God’s creatures. Change, whether from within or without, is not considered compatible with the idea of God’s perfection: a perfect being cannot be improved on.      

But why do we even attempt to describe God and God’s attributes? Why do we want to know just who or what God is? There are theologians who think this is a waste of time, for example the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth wrote that “God is not only unprovable and unsearchable, but also inconceivable.” (Barth 1949, 38) And of course anything we describe about God can only be, at best, an approximation. However, this has not stopped us from trying!  One reason is simply curiosity, the human need to understand. The other is a little more profound. We need to know that our own and the documented experience of God, in Scripture, is reliable, that there is no hidden side to God, and no question about God’s truthfulness and faithfulness in God’s interaction with humanity.

That’s what makes the passage from Exodus a little troubling and also what worried Moses. God is really angry. God disowns the people, calling them “Your people whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 32:7)And God seems willing to destroy the Israelites, despite God’s earlier promise to “deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them … to a land flowing with milk and honey.” (Exodus 3:8) Punishing the Israelites would be a breach of this promise and, as Moses points out, also of the older promises God had made to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob or Israel as God had renamed him, to multiply their descendants and to give them the ‘promised’ land. This God seems fickle or untrustworthy, even though Moses gets the Lord to relent and to change “his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people.”  (32:14)

So is this angry and seemingly capricious God the same as the one described in today’s Gospel, who rejoices more over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous persons?  Yes, it is the same God for God’s essential nature has not and will not change. What has changed however are not God, or God’s mind, but our perception and knowledge of God.

I think that the Exodus story tells us less about God, and more about human expectations of God; of how people thought God must act. The Israelites had not disobeyed any old commandment or law, of which there are total of 613 in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. They weren’t just having a party with food that was not kosher or had been sacrificing in the wrong way. No, they were disobeying the very first and most important of God’s commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me!” (Exodus 20:2) They had made themselves a god of gold to go before them on the journey to the promised land that they wanted to continue now, without waiting for God and God’s messenger, Moses. They had created a god that would serve them. Surely this was an unforgiveable and inexcusable sin and so something special must have happened to prevent their destruction, God would not have let them survive without Moses’ intervention. I believe God would have done. For it is God’s own Son who was sent to remind us of God’s limitless mercy, just as we heard in the parables in today’s reading from Luke.

The Pharisees we meet in Luke’s Gospel were clearly still working with a different perception of God. They seem certain that some behavior is simply unforgiveable, working as a tax collector for one, which I suspect some people still think today! We know that tax collectors were despised both because they served those who oppressed Israel, King Herod and the Romans, and because they often took even more money than the rulers required, to line their own pockets.   As for the other sinners we are not told what their sin was, but we can assume that in some way these were people who were not keeping to the Law and were therefore not religious and not pure enough for the Pharisees to mix with. So how can Jesus, a rabbi, a teacher of the Law, welcome and share the table with these and other sinners, they ask. That’s impossible. That’s a step too far.

Similarly in the Letter to Timothy we read how the former Pharisee, Paul, is also surprised and amazed that he, the foremost or chief sinner, a blasphemer, a persecutor, and a man of violence, had been welcomed by Jesus and had received mercy directly from him. Before his conversion, he too had assumed that there were limits to God’s mercy.

God’s Son became human and was sent to change this very perception and to reveal God’s true nature, not that God had not tried many times before! Both in the parables Jesus told, like todays, and through his life and death we are given a very different picture of God. Jesus’ life and teaching show how God’s mercy breaks through our human expectations of how God should act. They show a God who cares passionately for every human being, and always has done. They show a God who cares for those who are lost or who think they are lost, as much as for those who already know God. They show a God whose mercy and capacity for forgiveness knows no bounds. They show a God who rejoices whenever someone turns away from sin and back to God, when they repent. They show a God whose reaction to being rejected is not punishment, but a patient longing for us to return and an open invitation to do so. These are God’s true attributes.

What does this mean for us, apart of course from the assurance and reassurance about what we can expect from God? Our role in God’s project is to bring Jesus’ Good News of who God is and what God does to everyone we can, especially to those who think they are beyond forgiveness. There are still plenty of wrong perceptions and expectations around.

Nor should we leave forgiveness entirely to God. We cannot just preach a forgiveness that knows no bounds; we must also try and model it: both in the societies we live in and in our own lives. For example, neither capital punishment, nor life imprisonment without any possibility of parole fulfill this condition. As the European Court of Human Rights recently stated in a strangely theologically justified ruling against the UK: imprisonment without any prospect of release or review means that the person imprisoned “can never atone for his offence: whatever the prisoner does in prison, however exceptional his progress towards rehabilitation, his punishment remains fixed and unreviewable.”[1]

On a personal level: If we are honest, I think most of us will have to admit that we have felt that someone who has hurt us very badly is also beyond forgiveness: I’ve certainly done it! And if we cannot forgive, are we then still one of the ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance? Probably not! Forgiveness does not mean forgetting or denying a wrong. And while we want and we hope for repentance, that cannot be a condition for us offering forgiveness. We won’t know whether the other is ready and willing, until we try, until we take the first step just as Jesus did when he welcomed sinners and ate with them.

I promise that if we share in dispensing God’s love and forgiveness, then we can also share in God’s joy. According to Jesus, heaven throws a party every time someone sees the light and turns to follow God’s way. Let’s join the party!
Amen

Barth, Karl. Dogmatics in Outline. New York: Philosophical Library, 1949.



[1] http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/07/10/2282321/top-european-human-rights-court-deems-life-in-prison-without-parole-inhuman-and-degrading/