Sermon Cloud

THE BIG REVEAL

           There is a popular television show on ABC called, “Extreme Home Makeover.”  In each episode, some deserving family is chosen to have their home drastically remodeled, because they have some hardship or special circumstances and their existing home doesn’t serve their needs.  Sometimes it will be a family made up of a group of foster children with special needs, or a veteran who has returned from the war as an amputee.  The family is taken to another location for a week’s vacation while armies of electricians, carpenters and decorators demolish most of their house and rebuild it to specifications that fit their particular needs, all at no expense to the family, as a gift from the community and the show’s sponsors.

             On the last day, before the family is brought back to see their renovated home, a large bus is brought in to block their view of the house when they return.  In a moment known as “The Big Reveal,” the family arrives, excitement builds, and finally the host shouts, “Move that bus!”  Everyone cheers as the bus pulls away and we get to share in the family’s surprise as they see their new home for the first time. 

             We learned last week that the Greek word for truth, alētheia, means “unconcealing, uncovering or revealing,” and that’s what God does for us through God’s word.  Our God is not a completely transcendent spiritual “Other” who leaves us guessing.  Our God is a particular and personal God who desires to be known, and has taken the steps necessary to make himself known to humanity. 

             Since Advent, the lectionary texts have been leading us through the unconcealing, uncovering, and revealing of God’s plan for the salvation of the world.  From Christmas through Ascension Sunday, the text selections reveal God as “God with us” in the person of Jesus, the Son; then last week at Pentecost we learned about the revelation of God’s Holy Spirit, and this morning, we read about one of the “big reveals” of the Old Testament where God in all of the glory of the Trinity is shown to the prophet Isaiah in his vision of God in the heavenly temple.

             Isaiah sees an enormous royal being, so huge that the train of his robe fills the entire room of the temple.  The moment is full of incense and smoke and angels, and disembodied voices crying out “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts.”  It is the same picture that John will use to describe his vision of heaven at the end of time in the Book of Revelation.[1]  The vision causes Isaiah to fall on his face in the presence of the holiness of God.  When he cries that he is “a man of unclean lips living among a people of unclean lips” he means that he recognizes that God is the source of all holiness, the One who sets all of the standards for righteousness - right living – and Isaiah immediately sees that he is a sinful human who can’t live in the presence of a perfectly holy God.  Simply put, Isaiah expects to die.

             The Hebrew Scriptures teach that God is Spirit, but they also teach that no human being can look upon God and live.[2]  So whenever human beings encountered God, the Old Testament describes these events as happening totally on God’s terms, and the moments are full of dread for the humans involved.

             When Moses was called by God to lead the rescue of the Hebrews from Egypt, he received his call from God in the form of a burning bush, and the Bible says that when Moses realized that it was the voice of God coming from the bush, he turned his face away in fear.[3] 

             Mt. Sinai was the mountain where the Hebrews believed God lived, and it is described as being shrouded in smoke and clouds, like a volcano; an inhospitable and frightening place where the ground shook with earthquakes.  When Moses went up Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, he asked God to show him his glory.  God told him: “When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen."[4]  This image of God showing Moses his back is even on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, near the altar where the priests look heavenward:  Michelangelo painted an image of God with his robe falling away, revealing his naked backside, effectively “mooning” the clergy when they looked up!

             Now neither the vision of Isaiah nor the painting by Michelangelo is how most of us would describe God to anyone.  We don’t talk in terms of God’s glory so much anymore, and our understanding of God has suffered for it.  In the absence of a way to hold the figure of God in our minds, we create our own images of God – John Calvin called our minds “idol factories” forever churning out gods that look like us – god on our terms instead of God’s terms. 

             In the 19^th century there was paleontologist by the name of Edward Cope.  He was quite famous for his many scientific papers, and he was responsible for naming over 1,000 vertebrate species, dinosaurs and ancient reptiles. But like many others in history, he is unfortunately best remembered for his biggest mistake:  he assembled the bones of an Elasmosaurus backward, installing its skull on its tail, instead of on its neck.  He had all the parts he needed, but he had no image to work with and he got it spectacularly wrong.

            It is the same for human beings who try to envision God without all God’s “parts” in the Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The results are incomplete, primitive and spectacularly mistaken.  Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill wrote this about Adolph Hitler:

If every direct record of Adolph Hitler had been destroyed, it would still be possible to draw a convincing portrait of him by working backwards from what the Nazi movement became to its origins in that single person.[5]

            Likewise, the hopeless violence demonstrated by much of modern Islam can be traced backwards to its understanding of god presented as Allah; and the impersonal nothingness of Buddhism can be traced backwards to its understanding of god as having no substantive self.

            The god of Islam is completely transcendent and apart from creation, has no personal characteristics at all, and is not to be called “father” by anyone, for Allah has no son.[6]  While the Qur’an – like the Bible - teaches clearly that Allah is one, for a Muslim, the Holy Trinity remains a mystery.  Muslims are taught that the only Trinity is Allah, Jesus – who is not God, but merely one of his prophets – and his mother, Mary.  The resulting understanding of Allah is that of an impersonal, capricious god who does not love sinners,[7] only acknowledging those who fear him. 

            For this reason, no Muslim can ever be certain whether he will be received into paradise or if he will be consigned to hell.  By denying the reality of Jesus as the crucified Son of God, there is no sacrifice for humanity, no one can receive redemption and everyone abides in their sins.  This is the main misunderstanding that has paved the way for the belief that it is righteous for a Muslim to kill “infidels” - unbelievers – in order to punish them for their unbelief and to rid the world of the insult of their lives; and the uncertainty of one’s afterlife leads some Muslims to seek to ensure their eternal reward through martyrdom.

            Buddhism has no concept of god having a “self” at all.  Buddhas exist in a state of self-less Nirvana, where the possibility of “self” is considered to be a delusion.  There is no hope of an eternal life for a Buddhist, for everything ends in the shedding of self.  The Gautama Buddha taught that those who reach Nirvana find that,

“There is that dimension where there is neither earth, nor water, nor fire, nor wind; neither dimension of the infinitude of space, nor dimension of the infinitude of consciousness, nor dimension of nothingness, nor dimension of perception nor non-perception; neither this world, nor the next world, nor sun, nor moon. And there, I say, there is neither coming, nor going, nor stasis; neither passing away nor arising: without stance, without foundation, without support [mental object]. This, just this, is the end of stress."

            There is no Buddhist hope of a relationship with a God who loves, there is no providence of a God who cares for humanity, or a creator who longs for us to be where he is.  The motive for charity is not love for the Other, or a response to what a loving God has done, it is only another effort to shed one’s self of materialism and greed as that person strives toward freedom from the corrupt created order.

            The God of the Bible is the God who tells us his name is “I AM” – the source of everything, the epitome of self, the original “ego.”  Without the Triune God there is no source of love, no reason to love anyone else, no humanity created in the image of God, no love of one’s self – only a despairing journey through a garbage heap of life to a place where even “nothingness” doesn’t exist.

            But the great I AM has revealed the invisible qualities of God’s self to humanity through the majesty of the cosmos and the created order – so plainly that Paul said that unbelieving humans are “without excuse”[8].  Our God has revealed himself in his Word, both written and preached,[9] and in the Word of God in the person of Jesus[10], our Savior, who is “the radiance of God's glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word.”[11]

            Jesus, as the Son of God, is not just an invention of the writers of the “New Testament.”  The pre-incarnate Christ – the Son of God before he was born as a human - was present at the creation of the world[12], and there is nothing that is not subject to him, just as it is subject to God the Father.[13]  “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”[14]

            It is through Jesus that we can look upon the face of God and not die, but live.  It is only after generations of idolatrous artwork depicting Jesus as an eternal infant; or as a blond-haired, blue-eyed adult with an otherworldly expression on his face; and centuries of singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” that Jesus is seen today not as “the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being,” – the being described by Isaiah as  sitting on a cosmic throne, hidden behind smoke and lightening, and guarded by angels – that being has instead been too often reduced today to “Jesus, my buddy.” 

            Now if we continue to apply the technique of working backward from what a movement has become in order to understand the source of the movement, we will find that the tepid shallowness of most contemporary Christian churches is a result of misunderstanding the glory of the Triune God – we have grossly underestimated the Son of God.

            Bishop Neill once interviewed a diplomat who knew Hitler personally.  The diplomat told him that, “Our great mistake was in underestimating that man.”  He went on to say, “You could lead me blindfolded through ten rooms, and I could tell you without error in which of them the Führer was standing.  There was an electric power that sparked out of him.  If you have to deal with a man like that, there are only three choices before you – to give up politics and retire to your estates in the country, to sell yourself to him body and soul – or to bump him off.   If you are confronted with Jesus Christ, there are no estates in the country to which you can retire; the choices are not three, but two.”[15]

            As much as we want to see God's face, as much as we want to hear Him explain so we can understand, we cannot grasp His glory. We cannot understand His ways.  They are above and beyond our feeble minds.  Calvin wrote that God speaks to us in the same kind of “lisp” that we use in speaking to an infant.  So the Father and the Son have sent the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, to live in believers in order to illumine our minds to understand the things of God, to understand the written Word of God, to open our ears to the preached Word of God, and to share the mind of Christ, the incarnate Word of God.[16]

            The glory of God that Isaiah saw is God in God’s triune glory.  The Unknowable One has made himself known to us, not in smoke, or fire and earthquakes, but in the theophany of the relationship between the Trinity of God the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.   God the Father is in relationship with the Son, who is relationship with the Holy Spirit, who is in relationship with God the Father:  self-communicating, self-giving, self-receiving.  Jesus comes from God and returns to God.  The Holy Spirit comes from God to us, and will return to God with and through us, the people of God. 

            It is the essence of God to be in relationship, and God is searching for those of us who will complete the relationship by participating in God’s life.  We have it backwards when we say that God participates in our lives, because it is not our personal transformation, our circumstances, our worthiness or our sufficient understanding of the glory of God that leads us into relationship with the giver of life.  It is not, as Nicodemus supposed, that we should be born again of the flesh.  It is, as Jesus said, that we are reborn in the Spirit from above – a gift of pure grace – God’s revelation of God’s self, as God draws us into the circle of God’s dance.

© 2009 Deborah Hollifield

[1] Rev. 4:8

[2] Exodus 33:20; Judges 13:22

[3] Exodus 3:6

[4] Exodus 33:22-23

[5] Stephen Neill, The Supremacy of Jesus, (Downer’s Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1984) 21.

[6] Sura 18:4-6

[7] A principle that is recorded 24 times in the Qur'an, Sura al-Baqara 2:190ff

[8] Romans 1:20

[9] Hebrews 4:12

[10] John 1:1; Revelation 19:13

[11] Hebrews 1:3

[12] John 1:3

[13]Hebrews 2:9

[14] John 1:14

[15] Neill, 22

[16] I Cor. 2:16