This may seem like an odd way
to start a sermon on this great and glorious Feast, but let me ask us all
individually a question:
Who is your God?
I
don’t pose this question to be argumentative, nor to simply be rhetorical. Really – Who is your God? Who is MY God?
As
I look at my own life, I can see phases in my life when my “God” was my job, my
house full of nice things, my education, my pleasure…. There have been quite a number of “things”
that I’ve allowed to creep into my life and become, at least for a time, my
“God”.
The
First Commandment says, “I am the Lord
your God. You shall have no other gods
before Me.” (Ex 20:1) So, clearly, I have sinned, I have violated God’s
law, and I have shared in Adam’s failings by not obeying what is a rather
simple set of rules for life.
But
to answer the question, “Who is your God?”, we must first, I think, define the
characteristics of God, so that when we encounter Him, we recognize Him. What are the characteristics of our God, so
that we can know Him?
First,
there are a number of items that we should describe as “natural
attributes.” These things we ascribe to
God from our own limited conception of creation, with God being outside space
and time.
Natural
Attribute #1 – God is at all times and in all places present. He is not confined in space. And He is everywhere at all times. In Acts 17:27, we are told “He is not far from each one of us.”
Natural
Attribute #2 – God is eternal, and it is by way of this characteristic that we
can in some limited fashion understand His ability to be in all places at the
same time. 2Peter 3:8 teaches us that, “With the Lord one day is as a thousand
years, and a thousand years as one day.”
Since God is eternal, we also come to understand Him as
‘unchangeable’. This is a very difficult
concept for us as humans, for we as beings constrained by time know things are
constantly changing, different. Tomorrow
will not be like today. Tomorrow even I
will not be like I am today. Yet, for
One who is eternal, there is neither tomorrow nor today. There is no time. And therefore, if there is no time, then
there can be no change, for change is something measured as a function of time.
Natural
Attribute #3 – God is almighty. Luke
Chapter 1 Verse 37 teaches, “For with God
nothing will be impossible.” Hebrews
1:3 teaches, “The universe is upheld by
His word of power.” Now, I know that
skeptics offer absurd arguments, “Can He create a rock so large that even He
cannot move it?” But such questions are
not in line with the meaning of this attribute.
God can do whatever He WILLS. He
does not do whatever He can. Saint John
of Damascus teaches that God CAN destroy the universe, but He does not WILL to
do so, and so He upholds it by His will.
God
also has what we can describe as “logical attributes.” These include:
Logical
Attribute #1 – God possesses all knowledge.
From the book of Job (28:24) we learn, “God sees everything under the heavens.” And from Psalms (94:11) we learn, “The Lord knows the thoughts of man.” This applies to things that we see as in the
past, but also those things that we will see in the future. This characteristic is often described by
those same skeptics as “pre-destination”.
Their thesis is that if God already knows you’re going to do something,
then He must have somehow “made” you make that choice. But nothing could be further from the
truth. The fact that His Natural
Attributes show Him to be in all places and at all times indicates that we
continue in time to have our own “free will,” but in His timelessness He knows
what paths we have taken, even before we choose those paths.
Logical
Attribute #2 – God possesses all wisdom.
From Proverbs (3:19)
we learn, “The Lord by wisdom founded the
earth; by understanding He established the heavens.” Wisdom indicates that God knows the most
excellent of means by which to effect His excellent purpose. The greatest display of this wisdom is in His
effecting our salvation through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.
God
also has what we can describe as “ethical attributes.” These include:
Ethical
Attribute #1 – God is holy! From Isaiah
(57:15) we hear, “Thus says the Most
High, who dwells on high forever. Holy
in the holies is His name, the Most High resting in the holies.” Holy means one who is totally separated from
that which is unclean and/or sinful. It
coincides with that which is totally good.
His holiness binds His will to His goodness.
Ethical
Attribute #2 – God is love! From 1John
(4:7-8) we hear, “For love is of God, and
he who loves is born of God and knows God.
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Love shows that God gives takes that which
belongs only to Him and gives it to His creation, and especially to
humanity. Love gives its riches to
someone else. Love is meaningless
without giving, regardless of the recipient.
It is the antithesis of selfishness.
Love is a living part of God’s essence.
It is within love that we come to fully understand all of the other
attributes ascribed to God.
Natural,
logical, ethical – these are the terms we’ve just used to in some fashion try
to describe our conception of God. Yet,
there is one more that somehow doesn’t fit even into these categorizations.
God
is Trinity, three Gods are in fact One God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. These are separate and distinct, and yet
unity, undivided. This as a concept is
even more difficult for the human mind to comprehend than His timelessness and
His eternal nature. And so, the best we
can do is to relegate these characteristics to the category of “mystery” –
things that, while we believe them to be true, we have no way within our human
frame to understand, except in imperfect analogies.
And,
this is our God!
Now,
why are you focusing us on these attributes today, Father, as we are here
witnessing the Transfiguration?
Let
us look at Christ on this day. What do
we see with the senses He has given us?
Natural
Attribute #1 – He is everywhere at all times.
We see Christ on Mount
Tabor, with His Apostles,
and yet also fully with Moses and Elijah.
Neither Moses nor Elijah knew one another as they walked this
earth. And yet by this power of God, the
old and the new are united, here on earth, His creation, His handiwork, by
virtue of . . .
Natural
Attribute #3 – His might. Our Lord works
this miracle to bring joy to His Apostles, to sustain them AND US through the
Cross, through the Resurrection, and through the years until we await His
Glorious Second Coming. He works this
gift by His nature as almighty and…..
Natural
Attribute #2 – His eternal nature. If
the Lord Himself were not eternal, He would have no ability to connect past to
future, to bring Moses together with Peter, to show Elijah to John and
James. He does this because…..
Logical
Attribute #1 – He possesses all knowledge.
He knows that without this gift, His Apostles will lose heart at His
crucifixion, that they will have no glimpse of Him in His glory as God, and
thereby be subjected to greater temptation to lose their own faith. In His….
Logical
Attribute #2 – Wisdom. In His wisdom He
grants this gift to them as a sustaining element of their faith. And it not only sustained them, but it
continues to sustain us, as we await His return. He could do none of this if He were not…..
Ethical
Attribute #1 – Holy. In His holiness,
His goodness effects His will. And
because He ……
Ethical
Attribute #2 – Loves. Because He loves
us, He gives to us freely that which is His alone. He shows to us, as far as we can come to
understand, His glory. This is His
alone, and yet He shares it with us, showing us the level to which He calls us
through His love for us. He fully
reveals Himself to us as…..
God
in Trinity! The Father’s presence is
known in His voice. The Son is
Transfigured and we see Him in His glory.
The Spirit is known in the Radiant Light that illumines Tabor.
THIS
is our God. THIS is whom we serve. THIS is the God who supplants all those
things that tear at us from this life, which attempt to bind us to this earthly
life so that we ignore and thereby lose our way to our own eternal life.
And
that eternal life is a gift of love, of wisdom, of knowledge, and of every
other attribute we’ve named.
