Last week’s Baptism. I personally find God here, and quite powerfully!
“We have found the Messiah,” Andrew said. He was confident about this despite having very little information: Andrew and his companion assumed that this stranger was a teacher; they knew another teacher was shouting to passersby that this person was “the Lamb of God;” and the stranger invited them at 4:00 p.m. to come and stay where he was lodging, late enough in the day to have reasonably put them off until the next morning, when he could have met them more conveniently, and in a public place. And so this teacher was open, patient, hardworking, and willing to meet with them privately. By the next day, Andrew knew: this is the One. “We have found the Messiah.”
Where do you find God? Where does God feel close to you, or important to you?
I don’t often have powerful God-encounters like the one the apostle Andrew experienced, but last summer, when the sun rose over Lake Michigan as I ran down the Chicago Lakeshore Trail, I saw many, many people sitting on the ledge, watching in silence. Surely many of us feel close to God in such moments of breathless beauty.
And these days, when I walk into church and see that our member Houston has spent hours raking leaves and packing out trash, leaving our parking strip and outer garden tidy and clean, I sense God’s powerful presence, God who walked through the first garden at the time of the evening breeze, looking for the first humans.
And when I examine the delicate face of an incomprehensibly cute puppy dog, I can feel close to God, who wonderfully forms all living things … until that same puppy dog plunges his tiny fangs into my hand.
But perhaps even in the pain of a dog’s bite I can draw close to God. Say what you like about Christians, we share with our Jewish cousins a reverence for the fearsome, unsafe, provocative God of Israel, whose voice shakes the wilderness and makes the oak trees writhe. Surely we are not surprised that even a puppy comes equipped with the power to injure.
More than a decade ago, one of my professors at Seattle University, Mike Raschko, taught our class an easy way to remember where three particular theologians found God. They all lived many centuries after Andrew and his companions. This was Raschko’s way of introducing us to Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, and Karl Rahner.
“Thomas Aquinas found God in the gymnasium,” Dr. Raschko said. In its original German meaning, the gymnasium is not a big room for sports; it is the whole secondary school, the location for all higher education. Thomas Aquinas found God, then, in the life of the mind, in the devotion of one’s whole powers of reason to prayerful inquiry and contemplation – of God, and of the universe God made. (To study the universe, scientifically or otherwise, is to pray faithfully to God.) Finally, at the end of Thomas’s Summa Theologica, his great work, the human mind falls silent in the wondrous presence of God. There is finally nothing the human can say, or do; there are no more questions to ask. The mystery of God forever eludes our comprehensive understanding. And yet, until that final moment of silent awe, Thomas teaches us to ask question after question, and even work out a few answers.
But “Martin Luther found God in the courtroom,” Dr. Raschko continued. Luther was profoundly preoccupied by human fallibility and finitude, and spent his life working out how God responds to human problems — serious problems that merit serious response. Luther took everything seriously: he took human nature seriously, he took self-inflicted human problems seriously, and he took God’s grace extremely seriously. Grace, for Luther, is not just a pretty sunrise or puppies gamboling in the field. The sword of God’s grace pierces the convicted human soul. The guilty party (that’s us) is vindicated, but not painlessly. Surely we can think of a few persons – perhaps, on a good day, we can think of ourselves – who would benefit from Luther’s searing courtroom drama.
“And Karl Rahner?” Raschko concluded. “Karl Rahner found God in the bedroom.” That is to say, in Rahner’s work we find God alive and active in relationships: ours with one another, ours with God, ours with all creation. This is an essentially relational theology: God is found in how we all relate.
And before I go much further, I will say clearly that these three theological locations for finding God — gymnasium, courtroom, bedroom — they are obviously not the only locations. Are you a liberation theologian? Then you might find God in the detention center at the border, where creation can begin again in the restorative justice done there, or creation can be destroyed again by the atrocities committed there. Remember: we find God in many places, not just those of these three deceased white men.
And yet, I remember hearing this all those years ago and thinking, Oh! I’ve found my home. All three are intriguing, but that last one about relationships — Rahner finding God in the bedroom — that resonates deeply for me. I have spent my career working on relationships, and particularly on relationship repair, as a therapist, deacon, and priest. God in the “bedroom,” God in relationships: yes, I get it.
And it’s not just for romantic couples. Yes, Israel and God are married; Jesus is the bridegroom of the Church; passionate, romantic love is supported in scripture as a gift of God, and those particular relationships tell us something essential about God. But all relationships reveal God’s presence and power in the universe. Friends and co-workers participate in the re-creative power of God set loose in the world. Neighbors and siblings, doctors and counselors and teachers: we find God in our encounters with one another. “Come and see,” Jesus said, and with that, he invited his new friends into relationship.
But this is no casual acquaintance, this new connection Andrew makes with Jesus, and hurries to share with his brother. “Look!” John the Baptist had shouted. “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” It’s likely that in hearing this, Andrew and his friends heard all the intriguing and troubling nuances of such a title. Lamb of God: the lamb, not just one of the animals used in temple sacrifice, but the one that takes them all the way back in their faith memory to the ultimate story of liberation: the Exodus from Egypt. In this liberation, the Israelites found God in their homes one dreadful night, just as a liberation theologian might find God at a detention center at the border: creation can begin anew here; creation can be destroyed here. The Exodus is the re-creation of the world. And in the center of that story is a lamb.
The lamb is consumed by the frantic slaves, who do as they are told and brush some of its blood on their doorposts. They’re standing up, dressed for a night-time escape, when God passes over their lodging places. God sees the blood, and spares their first-born sons. Blood carries life: the lamb’s blood is poured out, and the Israelites live.
Now hear John the Baptist’s cry again: “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” A new lamb; a new liberation. A new lamb; a new outpouring of saving blood. A new lamb; a new relationship with God, a new creation. And don’t miss the ‘first-born son’ nuance in this story: on the night God delivered the Israelites from the house of slavery, their first-born sons are spared while those of the Egyptians are struck down; but this time, God’s own first-born child, Jesus, is struck down, once for all, restoring all people in relationship with God.
This is atonement, a problematic word for many of us who rightly object to distorted interpretations of Christ’s death, interpretations that find God not just in a courtroom, but in an angry, violent courtroom, with God as an enraged patriarch demanding blood sacrifice. We say No to all of that. But atonement properly understood is profoundly graceful: we proclaim in our faith that God so loved the world that God poured out God’s own self, God’s own life, in extravagant love, seeking lodging nearby, inviting us even at the end of the day into friendship, into relationship, into communion, into re-creation and liberation.
If we find God in the bedroom, that is, in relationships, then we find God most powerfully in costly relationships — relationships that flourish when we pour out ourselves in self-giving love. That’s what this bloody lamb image from the late Bronze Age is all about. “Look! Here is the Lamb of God!” John shouts; Andrew and his friends are intrigued, and decide to take a look; Jesus invites them to “Come and see,” leading them to his lodging place; and from there, a community of self-giving, costly love begins to form. We, in turn, are invited to pour ourselves out here and now, on this block, in our workplaces, in our homes, for the re-creation of this good world God made, for the liberation of all people, for the life and health of all living creatures.
Come to this Table and consume the Lamb of God. This very night, God will pass over the house of this whole world with God’s Spirit of liberation, reconciliation, justice, and peace.
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Preached on the Second Sunday after the Epiphany (Year A), January 15, 2023, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Seattle, Washington.
Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 40:1-12
1 Corinthians 1:1-9
John 1:29-42