Monday, October 23, 2017

The Face of God

            I’ve always been leery of preachers who want to show me the face of God.  The ones who know so very well what God looks like.  When you look a little closer, their god looks a lot like what they want you to believe.  I think of people like the ones from the Westboro Baptist Church in Kansas who love to picket veteran’s funerals with signs that say hateful things.  Their god is not one of love, but of hate and condemnation.

            They, of course aren’t new at this.  During the inquisition, many people were executed for beliefs that were contrary to what the church at the time professed.  In recent times, many African-Americans were lynched in this country simply for being black and free, contrary to the ethos of slavery that existed in many people’s minds.  When I consider these things, it makes me wonder why it is that people want to attribute to our God these things that they believe that are so contrary to what God taught to all of us through Jesus’ ministry and through the works of the church through the centuries when it wasn’t trying to contradict the Word of God.

            Up on Mount Sinai, God gave to Moses the Ten Commandments, God’s word spelled out so that people could understand it.  These were the ways that God wanted humanity to behave.  They are simple rules that we all understand and really don’t want to argue with.  Yes, it is hard to keep them. We all covet, bear false witness, fail to honor our father and mother and to have no other gods before the God who loves us all. 
           
            I spent a number of years with prisoners in the penitentiary who all had committed murder and were paying for that with life sentences.  They had broken one of the most significant of the commandments.  We spent a lot of time talking about that and trying to find ways that they could find forgiveness.  I always thought, while I was doing that, how much we all need to find forgiveness for the commandments that we have broken.  I notice that God doesn’t ascribe any particular importance to any of these commandments.  They are all important to be followed if we are going to do the will of our God.  When we break them, as we all have, we need to find forgiveness and get ourselves back to the place where God’s Love surrounds us.

            After Moses received the commandments, Moses asked God to show him more so that he could describe the person who gave him the commandments.  God told him that he would show to Moses his Glory, but God’s face he could not see.  Moses was tucked into a crevice in the mountain while God passed by.  Moses could see God’s back, but not God’s face because as God said, “to see my face is to die.”

            I know that God was trying to help Moses to understand the depth of God’s glory and the strength and power behind the issuance of the commandments.  It was simply moments later that God told Moses that his people down at the base of Sinai had constructed a golden calf that they were worshipping, and that Moses needed to put a stop to that. 

            It is certainly fascinating the way that we lift up our own prejudices in our worship life.  Like the Westboro people, we want the whole world to come to our way of thinking.  In Matthew’s gospel, the Pharisees seek to trap Jesus, so they ask him a subtle question:  Is it lawful to pay taxes to the emperor or not?  Jesus recognizes the trap and asks them for the coin which they use to pay the taxes.  They show him a denarius, which has the face of the emperor on it.  Whose face is this? asks Jesus. When they reply, the emperor’s, Jesus says to them, then give to the emperor what belongs to the emperor and to God the things that are God’s. This quieted the Pharisees and they left Jesus.  An amazing exchange.  We need always to remember that all that we have and are belongs to God and to create another authority and declare that it is superior is always wrong. We live in a time when hatred is showing up all over the place.  God is Love and Love is how we defeat hatred.  When we remember that, our God is blessedly served.

             

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