Sermon for Sunday, August 27, 2023 || Proper 16A || Matthew 16:13-20

I want to start today’s sermon off with a preemptive apology. I’m pretty sure it’s too early in the morning and too hot in here for the amount of heavy thinking I’m about to ask you to do. But I hope you will forgive me for the possible confusion I am about to place in your brains. This confusion has to do with what we mean when we say the word: “God.”

There are two big challenges that we must confront when we talk about what we mean when we say “God.” First, God, as a concept, is too big for us to define in a way that does not limit that which is, by definition, limitless. And second, we can only speak about God from our own perspective, which is narrowed by our particular identities and socialization. There is no way to speak about God without speaking from our collective stockpile of metaphors and stories.

We see this second challenge in today’s Gospel lesson. Jesus asks his disciples who people say he is. “Some say John the Baptist, but others Elijah, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.” All of these answers come from the stories and culture of that particular people in that particular place and time. Even Peter’s “correct” answer is freighted with cultural baggage: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.” When Peter identifies Jesus as the Messiah, Peter has a certain understanding of the type of leader the Messiah would be. And it was not a leader who died on a cross at the hands of the Roman Empire.

Likewise, when we say “God,” we unconsciously invest this concept with the weight of history, both personal and collective. For example, the religion we have received from our ancestors is patriarchal, and so God is all too often spoken of with male language – in the Bible, in our hymns, and in our liturgy. Because of this history, for many of us, in our mind’s eye, the idea of God conjures up the painting of God in Michaelangelo’s “Creation of Adam” on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel – a pale skinned, white haired, elderly (but still musclebound) human male.

But while we have that image in our minds, we also know that that’s not God. We know that God isn’t human or male or pale-skinned. We know that God is God – we just don’t quite know what we mean when we say that. And so instead of physical attributes, we reach for less concrete characteristics. We describe God using more abstract concepts: God is eternal, God is everywhere, God is the Creator of all that is, God is love. And these descriptions certainly help us come closer to God, but they will only ever get us part of the way there because they hinge on what we mean when we say “eternal” and “everywhere” and “Creator” and “love.”

So, we have to be careful when we are conceiving of God, because our image of God will always be cramped by the window through which we see the world. We will only ever see a piece of who God is, never the entirety of God, just like you might see the frothy tide of the ocean from the beach, but you could never see the whole ocean at once.

I say all this not to make us despair of ever knowing God, but as a caution against reducing the True God into a box bounded by our human limitations. People have done so much good in this world in God’s name, and people have done so much bad in this world in God’s name. We naturally associate God with the good and bad that are closest to us, as perpetrated by people who cloak themselves in God’s authority. We tend to construct our images of God as both illumined by and distorted by the actions of other humans. So, we always come at God through a human point of view because there’s no way for us to come at God through God’s point of view.

Okay. Let’s get back to our original question: “What do we mean when we say God?”

We’ve established that nothing we say, think, or imagine is actually God. With this awareness in hand, we can try again, recognizing our limitations and asking God to illuminate us anyway. When I get to this place, a lesson from English grammar helps me. You might have noticed in listening to my preaching for almost ten years that I never use pronouns when I talk about God. I bend over backwards in my sentence structure to say “God” every time, instead of “He” or “She” or “They” or whatever. I do this because I think the word “God” is a pronoun.

Pronouns stand in for a noun that has come earlier in the paragraph. So, if I said, “Adam is preaching a sermon right now,” the next time I refer to Adam, I can use the pronoun, “He.” This English convention keeps the writing from getting weighed down by the repetition of names. When I think of the word “God” as a pronoun, I use that word – “God” – as a stand-in for that Deeper Power within and beyond the universe that my human mind cannot fully comprehend. The word “God,” then, becomes a reminder that the Creator-of-All-That-Is is bigger than any thought I can think.

Medieval theologian Anselm of Canterbury conceived of God in this way. He imagined God as something than which nothing greater can be thought. The argument goes on from there, but it gets really confusing, and I think this sermon is already confusing enough, so we’ll leave Anselm with just this one premise. God is the One than which nothing greater can be thought. In other words, God does not fit into any of the boxes where we try to place God. God is always and forever beyond. (Like Buzz Lightyear…)

But the problem with this thought is that, if God is always and forever beyond, how do we have any conception of God at all? Our faith teaches us that God reveals God’s Being in a particular revelation. A revelation is a “revealing,” a pulling back of the curtain to see the depths of reality undergirding all the material stuff of creation. For us Christians, this revelation happened in the life, death, and resurrection of a particular person from a particular time and place. The prologue to the Gospel of John begins with the Word that is both God and also the organizing principle behind creation. This Word becomes flesh and dwells among us as Jesus of Nazareth. The prologue ends like this: “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made [God] known.”

This “making known” is the revelation of God in Christ. We know God, not because of any superior mental capacity of ours, but because God desires to know us. In his famous poem about love, St. Paul says this about meeting God at the culmination of all things. Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.”

We know God because God knows us. We love God because God first loved us. We praise God because God animates us and all of creation into being. This God is beyond any thought we can think, and, at the same time, is closer to us than our own hearts. Both are true. So, when you come to God in prayer, remember that God is bigger than any box our limited imaginations can devise. And remember that God is right here in our very breath, always desiring to reveal to us more and more of God’s loving and eternal presence.