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The Indelible Sign of God’s Presence

December 11, 2011, 9:00 am & 11:15 am
Third Sunday in Advent
The Rev. Dr. Fred R. Anderson
Pastor

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11; Psalm 126; 1 Thessalonians 5:16-24; John 1:6-8,19-28;

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What is the indelible sign of God’s presence? If you had to find one condition in life, one characteristic or dynamic that could serve as a permanent marker or means of identifying that it is God you are experiencing, what would it be? What comes to mind?

Would it be love? I suspect that would be the word that first comes to mind for most of us. In the Pauline triad of “faith, hope and love,” love is identified as the greatest. Paul dedicates the whole 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians to making that point, setting it as the highest form of behavior among the faithful–more important than even faith itself. And certainly the Evangelist John would agree, who said “God is love and those who abide in love abide in God and God abides in them.”1 Within those five chapters of the first letter of John, he uses the word “love” some thirty-five times, twenty-one times in the fourth chapter alone. And we are told that, in his later years, John, when among his people, said to them over and over again, “love one another.”2 “Little children, love one another.”3 Jesus himself said, “that loving God with all that we are and our neighbor as our self, is the fulfillment of God’s law.”4 Yes, love must be high on the list.

Yet, “love” in English is a slippery word, most imprecise to be sure. Lovers love one another differently than they love their own parents or their children, and love their children differently than they love their friends, and can love dancing, running, skiing, travel or chocolate in a different way altogether! Here, Greek is far more helpful, for in Greek there are four separate words for love, three of them appropriate to one of the kinds of love I have just mentioned, whereas in English we use one word to cover all four.5 It is that fourth word that appears so regularly in the New Testament, one that was relatively scarce and largely unused in the Hellenistic world of the first century. It is not a word to describe desire, as lovers long for one another, nor is it a word that describes familial love, nor a word that would be used in relation to a craving for chocolate. It was a word that describes what fills us to overflowing–a love that expresses itself by helping the other, rather than by desiring or trying to possess or enjoy the other. The word, of course, is agape, and is used to speak of God’s love for us, a love that, as the psalmist reminds us, continues to pour itself into our lives even when they have reached the brim of our capacity to contain it and, therefore, overflows out of us and into the world around us.6 Surely, such love is a strong contender here. Yet, early on, John warns us to be careful and selective with this love.7 For it can be focused on the world in such a way that it is the things of the world that we begin to long for, and the things of the world that fill, consume and addict us. So, even with the Greek’s distinction, and even though it is identified by Paul, and even Jesus, as the highest form of faithfulness, it is still not the indelible sign of God’s presence in us or in the world.

What then, if not love? Is it justice?8 It, too, is a dominant theme, especially in the older of the two testaments, where the emphasis is upon being just–in a right relationship with God. And the word “just” has a corollary: “righteousness.”9 In fact, occasionally the words are used interchangeably.10 Those who are just are defined as righteous, and those who are righteous are so because they are in that right relationship with God and others. The word is dominant among many of the prophets who regularly rail against the people’s practices as other than just.11 Micah reminds us that God wants this righteousness from us more than religious behavior, and nothing more than to be just, love kindness and walk humbly with God.12

But what is just? The book of Job is preoccupied with that question as Job suffers at the hands of a test between Satan and God that is anything but fair to Job.13 In a more contemporary context, what is just to those who tried to occupy Wall Street is quite different than what is just to those who spend great portions of their time, and risk significant portions of their wealth, as they work there. Justice, in our culture, is a lot like beauty; it is shaped by the eye of the beholder. One person’s justice can be another person’s vengeance. And, interestingly enough, in the Bible justice has no single definition. It is simply what God does. To behave as God behaves is to do justice, and one who does so is named righteous. Our first lesson today says the Lord loves justice, but does not define it beyond complaining about those who have offered sacrifices in place of behaviors that the Lord finds just–honesty, giving the other a fair share, and so on. Justice is, to be sure, one of God’s concerns, but this may surprise you: the word “justice” itself never appears in the New Testament, and rarely does so in the Older of the two.14 Further, justice can be perverted–offered for the wrong reason, in search of a personal end. The prophet Amos laments that the people have turned justice into poison and righteousness into wormwood, using it as a tool for their own ends, rather than God’s.15

Our second lesson today offers forms of behavior that can lead to justice, and is an echo of the charge I give us, Sunday after Sunday. In fact, if you back up and read the two verses before today’s lessons, you find, “admonish the unruly, encourage the fainthearted, help the weak, be patient with everyone. See that no one repays another with evil for evil, but always seek after that which is good for one another and for all people.”16 This is more than ethical admonition to justice. This is Paul’s way of reminding the Thessalonians that they are Christ-bearers and that such behavior is a sign of Christ’s presence working in and through them. But absent God’s presence, justice is difficult to define. As I said, the word never appears in the New Testament, and like love, is unreliable as an indelible sign of God’s presence. What, then, is? Is there such a sign?

Joy! “Rejoice, always!” says Paul. What are the things that give you joy? Notice I did not ask you what you like to do, or what it is that makes you happy. What gives you joy and makes you rejoice–often quite unexpectedly–and fills you with ecstasy, elation, delight, and bliss? What is it that causes that wonderful sweetness that grasps your heart, catches in your throat, and brings moisture to your eyes? It often happens seeing your child for the first time. It can be from discovering that the one you so love and long for loves and longs for you as well. It can be seeing justice done where it has been perverted, when good triumphs over evil. It can be a moment of esthetic beauty, a Bach fugue, a Beethoven Sonata, a Brahms ballad, a Chopin Intermezzo played exquisitely, an anthem whose sung harmonies lift you into plateaus that are otherwise indescribable, or a movement of a concerto or symphony that lifts us into heavenly places.

It happens in the sacraments. The tears we see in eyes at the moment of baptism are more than sentimentality. True, for some it can be simply that. But if you have an inkling of what is taking place at the font, it is the joy that comes from knowing that before a child is even old enough to speak her name, Christ is laying claim upon her, clothing her in Christ, and marking her as Christ’s own forever. It will be later in life, when a child’s behavior becomes a potential source of despair for parents, that I find joy in being able to remind his parents that this is far less about him than it is about God and God’s love for him. And though our children may have given up on God for the moment, even declared that they no longer believe in God, they have been baptized–God still believes in them! God has not given up on them, and will love them into new life. So, too, for this table; while giving thanks to God for the gift of the Son, by the power of God’s Spirit we can experience the joy of being joined to Christ afresh, continuing to be nurtured, strengthened and sustained by him.17 Each of these points leads to one thing: God is present in and to us, giving us the gift of God’s self, and making us, forming us, shaping us more fully into Christ as members of his new creation.

This is why Paul can say, “Rejoice in every circumstance.” Surely, life is full of moments and situations that, in and of themselves, call forth anything but joy. But even in the depths of despair, Christ is present to overcome evil with good and transform despair into joy.

Joy, you see, is not something you and I can conjure, no matter how we might try. It is always a gift, and though it has many contexts, it has only one source. Joy, as C. S. Lewis once said, is the indelible sign of God’s presence and touch in life. Rejoice! The Lord is near!

The Word of the Lord; thanks be to God!

 

  1. 1 John 4:16; there is debate in the scholarly community over whether the author of 1 John is John the Evangelist, who wrote the Gospel of John, or another John of the same community, who is thought to have written 2 & 3 John, John the Elder.
  2. The community seemed to be fractured by theological positions under the influence of Gnosticism, consequently, the letter’s insistence that every spirit that confesses that Jesus has come in the flesh is from God and every spirit that denies that is not from God. 1 John 4:2
  3. 1 John 3:11, 23; 4:7, 11, 12
  4. Matthew 22:37; Mark 12:30; Luke 10:27
  5. Erao (eros, sexual love), philia (friendship or social love), stergo (love within a family, between brothers and sisters, and agape (neither the warmth of philia nor the intensity of eros), the word was largely unused until the Septuagint writers, used to translate the Hebrew word for God’s love for humankind, aheb. Consequently, the word came to convey the idea of a love that expresses itself by helping the other, rather than by desiring or trying to possess and enjoy the other for one’s own sake.
  6. Psalm 23:5
  7. 1 John 2:15-17
  8. מִשְׁפָּט mishpat
  9. צְדָקָה tsedaqah which can also mean justice, honesty, justice, what is right, righteous, and so on.
  10. For instance see Deuteronomy 16:20. The root of the word, צֶדֶק tsedeq, is often translated “justify.”
  11. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Micah, Amos, Habakkuk, Zephaniah and Malachi. In Deuteronomy and the Psalms, justice is what God does.
  12. Micah 6:8
  13. Job 9:19; 19:7; 29:14; 32:9; 34:17; 35:2; 36:t6; 36:17; 37:23. And in the end, though Job has been the victim of such unfair treatment, he too confesses that he has been obscuring knowledge without council and speaking things he did not understand, things too wonderful for him to know. Job 42:3
  14. See “Justice” N.H. Snaith, and the associated article on “Just, Justify and Justification” by the same author, in A Theological Word Book of the Bible, Alan Richardson, ed., (New York, Macmillan Publishing Company, Inc., 1950), pp. 118f.
  15. Amos 6:12
  16. 1 Thessalonians 5:14-15
  17. Granted, some do not, which is why Calvin always insisted that the efficacy of sacrament was not necessarily tied to the moment of reception, but was a promise of God’s continuing presence and work in the one who received it in faith.

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