WHAT IS GOD LIKE

WHAT IS GOD LIKE?

Colossians 1:11-20

A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on

November 25, 2007

In the novel, Those Barren Leaves, a character named Miss Thriplow decides, in between love and affairs, that she needs to be more serious and spiritual: “She got into bed and lying on her back, with all her muscles relaxed, she began to think about God…God is spirit, she said to herself. She tried to picture something huge and empty, but alive. A huge flat expanse of sand, for example, and over it a huge blank done of sky; and above the sand everything should be tremulous and shimmering with heat – emptiness that was yet alive. A spirit, an all-pervading spirit. God is a spirit.”

But then her tranquil image is interrupted by the image of three camels traveling across that sandy dessert in their absurd, ungainly fashion, from left to right. Miss Thriplow tries to dismiss them from her mind and focus back on God. But all she can think of is what odd animals camels are, “with their protruding underlips like the last Hapsburg kings of Spain.” She tries to will herself back to thinking of God as “spirit, all-pervading everywhere,” but with little success and no lasting effect. Thoughts of the camels have ruined it.[1]

There are lots of well-intentioned Miss Thriplows in search of God and wanting to be more serious and more spiritual. Books on spirituality represent a growth industry even in our more secular age. As one observer has written, however, many of these books and their spiritualities are “both rootless and amorphous.” They are long on spirituality techniques but short on descriptions of the God or Spirit behind the spirituality.[2] In some cases, God is reduced to being nothing more than that voice or “God-Source within each one of us,” as one spiritual website puts it. (Elaine Murray, www.sideroad.com/New Age Spirituality).

This is not new. These modern spiritualities and their abstract gods are not too far off from the “Prime Mover” that the deists among our “Founding Fathers” used to describe God 200 years ago, or the notion of God as “Idea” that Plato used to describe God more than 2000 years ago. Indeed, when Paul wrote this letter to the church in Colossae, he was competing against teachers in Colossae who apparently spoke of God with such abstract ideas as “Light,” “Depth,” or “Silence.” They also taught that this vague God was unknowable except by “secret knowledge,” known only by a few.

The good news, according to Paul, is that God has made God’s self known to us in a very concrete way. It is not a secret. The invisible God has given us a visible image: Jesus Christ.

Rather than some ethereal “Spirit,” “huge and empty, but alive,” that a Miss Thriplow can only hold on to for a passing moment, we are given Jesus Christ, someone we can picture and hear, thanks to the gospels. Instead of remaining a vague “Prime Mover” or “Idea,” the Word has become flesh and blood like us. Instead of being an abstract principle that can only be known by the few with secret knowledge in Jesus Christ God was out in the open: where all could see and hear him.

Jesus is the image of the invisible God. What does this mean? Tom Wright, an Anglican bishop and Bible scholar, suggests this example. Picture yourself sitting in a room. You know there is someone in the next room, but you cannot see the person in the other room because there is a wall between you. But if someone places a mirror in the hallway, then you may be able to look out of your door and see in the mirror the mirror-image of the person in the next room.[3]

Jesus Christ is that mirror. We are created to know that there is “Something” or “Someone” there, but if we have nothing more than that, we will only have a vague idea of God in our minds and there will be a wall between us. But in Jesus Christ, God has opened the door and given us an image or mirror to see the One beyond the wall.

Jesus is the image of the invisible God. This is what is at stake when we claim that Jesus is not just a good teacher like Buddha, not just a prophet like Muhammad, not just a smart philosopher like Socrates. These teachers, prophets, and philosophers can help us imagine something about God. And we can listen and learn from them.

But what we believe is that Jesus Christ not only talks about God. Jesus also shows us God. Jesus is God. Jesus’ words matter – but so do his actions, his being. In Jesus Christ, we not only see the example of how we are to live; we see the image of the invisible God. We see what God is like. We know God by knowing Jesus. “For in him, the fullness of God was pleased to dwell,” Paul goes on to say.

When Jesus heals both the synagogue leader’s daughter and the nameless woman in the crowd, we see the “fullness of God:” that God wants to heal those who are hurting, not only the religious leaders but also the nobodies.

When Jesus feeds the 5000 “and all are satisfied,” we see the “fullness of God:” that God offers to us food that will fill the hungers in our lives – and that there is enough for all.

When Jesus stops and calls the sinful tax collector Zaccheus by name and goes to dinner with him, we see “the fullness of God:” that God calls each one of us by name and seeks a relationship with us, no matter what we have done or not done.

And when Jesus is tried, beaten, and dying on the cross, we see “the fullness of God:” that there is no length that God will not go, no burden that God will not bear, no cost that God will not pay, to save us and rescue us from the power of sin. And, we see that there is nothing that is a match for God’s love and power: not our sin, not all of the power of the rich and powerful, not even death. In Jesus Christ, we see God at work.

When storms or disease strike, when bad things happen to us or the wicked seem to prosper, we may well look around and draw from those appearances certain conclusions about God. If all we have to go on about God is some vague feeling, we may well find our faith shaken, or our belief in a good God challenged. But in Jesus Christ, we see and hear God. Look at life and the world without Jesus, we are like badly nearsighted people looking at a distant horizon. But when we put on the spectacles of Jesus Christ, then we can look past the calamities and setbacks in life to see God much more clearly. (John Calvin)

Jesus is the “image of the invisible God,” in him “all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.” This is the good news. But it may not be good news that we want to hear. A comfortably distant and amorphous divinity has its advantages, after all. As Michael Lindvall, a Presbyterian pastor and writer, notes, “When God is but an idea, the divine is safely confined to the parameters of what I would prefer God to be and what I would on my own imagine God to be.”[4]

When God is reduced to the “God within me,” I can create God in my own image. When I call God “the Force” or “the big guy upstairs,” I can keep God at a distance so that God will make few demands on me and will not push me beyond what I find comfortable.

But in Jesus Christ, God has come near. In Jesus Christ, we discover that God pushes us beyond “our comfort zones” and makes demands on our lives: to love God, to treat all people as our neighbor and to love our neighbor as ourselves, to obey his commandments, to take up a cross, to feed the hungry, to forgive, and to proclaim the good news.

In Jesus Christ, we discover a God who loves us too much to ignore us or to leave us as we are. Through Jesus Christ, we are given an opportunity to experience the abundant life that we cannot experience apart from Him. As Paul puts it in verse 13: “He has rescued us from darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son.”

Jesus is unique, Paul is telling the Colossians and us. Jesus alone is the mirror who enables us to see God on the other side of the wall. Jesus alone is the One through whom God rescues us from the pit of our sin and lifts us from the darkness into the light.

Jesus is unique – but that does not mean that we are – or that we have reason to be arrogant or boast. As Eugene Peterson, the author of the popular New Testament translation, The Message, observes, claims for the uniqueness of Jesus are “frequently made with an arrogance that is completely incompatible with Jesus himself….But Paul, although unswervingly confident in the conviction that Christ occupies the center of creation and salvation without peers, is not arrogant [here in Colossians]….He argues from a position of …humility [and]…with the energies of…love.”[5]

What Paul claims at the end of this passage, and what we are called to witness with humility and love, is that “through Jesus, God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things,” that is, all people, all creation, “whether or earth or heaven.” (v. 20). What Paul tells the Colossians and us is that Jesus Christ, present at the beginning of this beautiful yet broken world, is the One who somehow holds “all things together.” (v. 17).

Lloyd C. Douglas, author of The Robe and other novels, “lived in a boarding house when he was a university student. On the first floor resided a retired music teacher, infirm and unable to leave his apartment. Every morning they had a ritual: Douglas would come down the steps, open the old man’s door and ask, ‘Well, what’s the good news?’ The [music teacher] would pick up his tuning fork, tap it on the side of his wheelchair, and say, ‘That’s middle C! It was middle C yesterday; it will be middle C tomorrow; it will be middle C a thousand years from now. The tenor upstairs sings flat, the piano across the hall is out of tune, but my friend, that is middle C!’”[6]

Jesus Christ is our tuning fork, ringing out a “middle C” in a world that is often out of tune. Jesus Christ strikes the same note yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Through that note, we hear the true and unchanging tones of the eternal God, the music by which we are to live. And with that note, we hear the beginning of a song of great beauty and immeasurable joy that knows no end.

Thanks be to God.