How do we talk about God?
Sermon on the Fourth Sunday of Easter at the Church of the Holy Trinity, Llandudno in the Ministry Area of Bro Tudno
The Ministry Area’s order of service with the lections, including a poem in addition to the First Reading and the Holy Gospel, can be found here.
How do we talk about God?
God does not exist… like you and I exist.
You and I are created things. Dust we are, and to dust we shall return, earth to earth, ashes to ashes.
God was not created. God was in the beginning, and is, and is to come. God is not an object, a person or a thing. From God, through God, and to God, all things have their being. God is source, and measure, and fulfilment.
You and I — we exist. God is. You and I are alive. God is life itself.
Alleluia — that Easter word — means “praise God,” “boast in God,” “overflow with joy at God.” But how do we do that if God does not exist like you and I exist? How do sing “alleluia” when God is this mystery — so difficult to get a hold of? How do we talk about God?
In our passage from the Acts of the Apostles this morning, for the second week running, Saint Peter talks about God. Today, he has been called before a council of religious leaders. He and the church that he is leading — that first community of Christians — have been causing a disturbance because of their energy, their joy, their distinctive way of life marked by faith and hope and love. “In whose name are you doing this?” the religious leaders ask Peter. Imagine Peter stood there, in this kind of a court. Put yourself in his shoes — put yourself in the shoes of this Galilean fisherman thrust into the heart and power of Jerusalem; put yourself in the shoes of this man summoned before the same rulers, elders and scribes who had been happy to condemn your teacher to be crucified a few weeks earlier; put yourselves in the shoes of this man who, in dawn’s twilight, in a nearby courtyard, those few weeks earlier, had denied even knowing his Saviour three times before the cock crowed twice. “In whose name are you doing this?” the religious leaders ask Peter. “Talk about God,” the religious leaders ask Peter.
And Peter answers them immediately and clearly — that must have taken some courage and conviction. He replies by telling them about Jesus Christ — there’s no obfuscation, no denial this time. And he replies by telling them the story of Jesus’s life in a way that ties in his questioners — he turns the tables on them by becoming a story-teller, by trying to convince them, by using what matters to them, too, as common ground. “All that I do,” Peter says, “I do in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead. Jesus is the stone that was rejected by the builders, who is now the cornerstone for everyone.” The author of Acts says that this is what it’s like to talk about God filled with the Holy Spirit.
How do we talk about God? Like Peter — convincingly, simply, persuasively.
But that isn’t the only language — that isn’t the only way of talking about this mystery, of talking about God. In our Gospel this morning, we hear the words given to Jesus, to God incarnate, asked to explain himself. “I am the good shepherd,” says Jesus. Peter, before the religious leaders, was so concise, so focused, speaking to the ordered part of our minds. Jesus, here, offers an image, a picture, a poem, almost. “I am the good shepherd” — just hear those words, and the mind whirs, the connections spark. What do you hear; what do you see?
“The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; thy rod and thy staff comfort me. Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it? Then David took his staff in his hand, and chose five smooth stones, and put them in his shepherd’s bag, his sling in his hand, and he drew near to the Philistine. He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms. In that region there were shepherds living in the fields, keeping watch over their flock by night. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. The Lamb at the centre of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”
All those associations are there, intentionally, when Jesus says “I am the good shepherd,” their abundance an effort to capture something of this God too big to define. How do we talk about God? Sometimes convincingly, simply, persuasively. At other times, with memory and poetry, from experience and unknowability, with patience and plenty.
How do we talk about God?
God does not exist like you and I exist. You and I are created things. Dust we are, and to dust we shall return. God was not created. God was in the beginning, and is, and is to come. God is no object or person or thing. And so all of our talk about God will be inadequate, imperfect and insufficient.
Yet “Alleluia” is still our song — we praise this God, we boast in this God, we overflow with joy at this God that we will never fully be able to comprehend.
And we do that because, deep within us, deeper than our knowledge and our experience, deeper than our thoughts and our explanations, deeper than our organised mind and our poetic mind, deep within us is the very image and likeness of God — planted in each of us at our creation, sustained in each of us by faith and hope and love, the destiny of each of us when talking is done.
How do we talk about God? Inadequately. Convincingly, simply, persuasively. With patience and plenty. But, above all, with our lives, and from the image and likeness of God within us that is the morn and measure and maturity of our being.
