Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
March 7, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

If you’re like me and like most people of faith—and in this regard anyway I suspect that you are—you probably think that you know a thing or two about God. God is love, right? It says so in the Bible. God is all about grace, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness, right? We learn that about God from Jesus. We know all that about God, don’t we?

Well, maybe not. One of our scripture readings this morning suggests that we shouldn’t be so fast to conclude that we know who God is. It’s our reading from Isaiah. In that text God says: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways….For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9 This text says God is different. God is “higher,” as much higher than we are as, in the ancient understanding, heaven is higher than the earth. There is a gap, a chasm, between God’s ways and our ways as wide as the gap, the chasm, between heaven and earth. God is different, so different that we can never truly know God or God’s thoughts and ways. That, I think, is what this passage from Isaiah is telling us this morning.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Christian tradition has always insisted that this is true, that God remains ultimately unknowable. God must remain ultimately unknowable by us creatures because anything we can know must be finite, limited, less than absolute. That’s because we are finite, limited, less than absolute. We can dream of that which transcends us, but we cannot ever truly know what that which transcends us really is. We may not usually think of God that way, but the great minds of the Christian tradition have always insisted that this is true, that God is ultimately unknowable.

Yet the Christian tradition has at the same time always claimed to know God. It claims to know God primarily because it says that we see who God is in the person of Jesus Christ. We say that Jesus Christ is God Incarnate, God become flesh. So to know who God is all we have to do is look at Jesus. So, the tradition says, we do know who God is.

And we don’t know who God is because anything we can know must be less than God, who is totally other than us, who totally transcends us. So what do we have here? An incomprehensible contradiction? Yes, an incomprehensible contradiction. But a better way to think about it is that what we have here is a paradox, something that manages to be two things at the same time that our finite minds find completely contradictory. Here we have reached the limits of human logic, the limits of human reasoning, the limits of human understanding. We have reached the point where the life of faith must always be lived, in the intersection of two impossible truths, truths that cannot both be true yet truths that are both true. It can’t be, and it must be.

It must be, that is, if God is truly to be God and not a mere projection of our human way of being and also be a reality with which we can relate. It is so easy for us humans to project our own understandings, desires, and prejudices onto God. It is so easy for us to make God a giant-sized version of ourselves, so easy to make God a funhouse mirror reflection of our own image, blown up much bigger than us but still recognizably a reflection of us. And Isaiah reminds us that that funhouse mirror reflection of ourselves is not really God. God is different. God is higher. God is beyond anything we can comprehend.

So what are we to do? Give up? Say we can’t know who God ultimately is and so what’s the point? Not at all. Here’s what we are to do. We are to understand that being a Christian means making a commitment to live our relationship with God in and through Jesus Christ. It means to say that we perceive God through Jesus Christ. It means to live into the God we know in Jesus Christ in trust that what we see of God in him is not false, that he does not lead us astray. And then it means to remember at the same time that not even what we see of God in Jesus Christ is absolute, is definite, that not even what we see of God in Jesus Christ defines God ultimately, locks God up in a particular way of being, puts God in a Jesus-shaped box. We see God and connect with God in Jesus, but Isaiah tells us that we must always remember one thing: Our way of seeing God is partial and incomplete.

And that means that we must be a bit modest in our claims about God. We must never say “God is this, that, or the other thing.” Rather we must say “As far as we know God is for us this, that, or the other thing.” We must always leave room for others to see God differently. God’s ways are higher than our ways, and we can never be so sure that we’ve got God figured out. And we can never tie God down to our puny human ideas and perceptions.

As finite humans we live at the place where knowing and unknowing collide. We know God. Yes, in Jesus we know something of God for us, but we don’t know the fullness of God. We don’t know God’s ultimate nature. We can’t. God is too far above us for that. That place where knowing and unknowing collide is not always a comfortable place, but it is where God has put us. It is where we need to be if we are to leave room for the true greatness of God. It is where we need to be if we are to allow other people to be who God created them to be and not try to force them to accept our limited conceptions of God. It’s a difficult place to be. We humans time and again fall into the error of thinking our truth is God’s absolute truth. It isn’t, or at least we can’t know that it is. May we have the courage to live in that intersection of knowing and unknowing. It’s where God has put us. Thanks be to God. Amen.