One of Us?
One of Us? |
With
whom, then, will you compare God?
To
what image will you liken him? (Isaiah 40:18, NIV)
“If
God had a name, what would it be?
And would you call it to His face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?”
And would you call it to His face?
If you were faced with Him in all His glory
What would you ask if you had just one question?”
It’s
been 24 years since Joan Osborne recorded Ed Bazilian’s song, One
of Us. I’ve
got it on a CD and played it in the car as we drove through northern
New Brunswick. The haunting chorus (“What if God was one of us /
Just a slob like one of us / Just a stranger on the bus tryin’ to
make his way home”) stays with you; a fantastic backup band helps
with that.
Isaiah
goes on to answer his own question beginning with what God is not:
not a man-made replica of an imagined god by a craftsman in gold or
wood. What God is, though, is a creative force in the sky, so far
above that the people of the earth appear to him as grasshoppers. Not
a “person” who
walks to and fro upon the earth either.
From his lofty position, nations and kings are insignificant entities
which he elevates or brings down at will. A transcendent God.
The
movement in scripture writers’ image of God is striking, and
overall in one direction: the creator and sustainer of the universe
does not live in the metal and wood that limit our imaginations to
what our senses can apprehend. That becomes obvious in the
ineffectiveness of the idols worshiped by the Children of Israel’s
neighbours.
And in their descriptions of mankind/God encounters, the
physical presence and the speaking voice of God fades and returns,
fades and disappears (from the visualization of a God of physical
presence and conversation in the Creation allegory and in the Job myth, for instance, to David’s repeated cries for God to reveal himself
in Psalms 5,6 & 7.)
And
then there’s today. Struggling with the limits of our human
imagination, we go back and forth on the “God as person, God as
spirit” imagery. Some of us claim that God speaks to us personally
while others (including Billy Graham and Mother Theresa) claim no
such physical or sensory communication.
It’s
why the incarnation of Christ is so significant, even though
basically misunderstood by our small imaginations. What it was meant
to reveal is that God dwells within us, in human consciousness, in
our convictions and commitment to follow in Christ’s footprints.
The “spirit” Christ left behind for us is manifested in the parable
of his life: justice, mercy and the humility borne of our gratitude the gift of life . . . for us and our neighbours.
Perhaps
we will never fully comprehend what Jesus said to the woman at the
well: “But the hour is coming and is now here, when the true
worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the
Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit,
and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.”
(John 4: 23 & 24, NIV) (Emphasis mine)
Isn’t
it true that the spirit exemplified by Christ is more evident in the
embraces in the foyer than in the routines in the sanctuary, in the
doing
for the poor, the sick, the imprisoned, the refugee, the addicted
than in the sermons and songs of what we call “worship?”
I
don’t think there’s any arguing that when compared to Jesus’
prayer for unity, the church is an obvious mess, a mess of
doctrinal introspection and division, of a competitive spirit, of
ineffectiveness in its core mandate, i.e. to be salt and light to the
world. Maybe, just maybe, our divided focuses stem from the question
with which I began, Isaiah’s “With
whom, then, will you compare God? To
what image will you liken him?” or from Joan Osborne, “What if
God was one of us?”
But
out of clay pots the spirit of Christ has been known to fashion fine
China . . . from time to time.
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