Sermon – May 30, 2010: Sharing the Glory
Sermon for Sunday, May 30, 2010 The First Baptist Church of Lewisburg
Sharing the Glory
Psalm 8; Proverbs 8: 1-4, 22-31; Romans 5: 1-5
Someone pointed out that British philosopher Bertrand Russell, who died in 1970 at
the age of 98, would have had an I.Q. of about a hundred at his death. This was a poke at
the whole idea of I.Q., which gives a ratio of physical age to mental age. Russell, who
boasted an intelligence quotient of 180 as a younger man, lived long enough that he could
hardly be considered precocious at the end. He’d finally achieved that potential the early
flourishing of which credited him with such brilliance. He might have been almost as smart at
forty-five as he was at ninety, and so close to an I.Q. of two hundred at that point–but by
the time he was ninety, if he was as smart as he should have been at ninety, his I.Q. would
have been a hundred. This observation about Russell reminds us that we begin our lives
as all potential and no achievement, and conclude our lives as all achievement and no
potential.
Nobody looks wiser than a baby. When a baby isn’t bawling or burbling, when it is
solemn, it looks as if it had the mysteries of life comprehended. Everybody’s baby strikes
one with wonder, and Garrison Keillor’s familiar joke about the children of Lake Woebegone
all being above average has its experiential truth. When Psalm Eight says, “out of the
mouths of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes, to silence
the enemy and the avenger,” it credits the murmuring of babies with great power.
This is true to that adult intuition that there is something profound in the wonder
evident in a brand-new consciousness, and it nicely joins with the wordless witness of all
kinds of marvels fresh from God’s hand–the heavens, the moon, the stars. The Psalm
celebrates God’s majesty, God’s sovereign glory, reflected in the mysterious
purposefulness of each of Creation’s parts, and the suggestive sense-making of Creation
as a whole. It is wonderful, and what is most wonderful to the writer of the psalm is that we
human beings are established by God with such powers ourselves–not only are our infant
voices made by God into a guard against God’s foes, but our more mature capacities are
enlisted to organize and oversee all the other creatures God has made.
The great paradox of natural religion–the intuitive response to the beauty of sunsets
or the solemn grandeur of wilderness–is that it makes people feel small and large at the
same time. The agelessness of dawn, the immensity of mountains, the intricacy of the
flower of even the smallest plant, at once reveal us as confused and passing creatures, and,
by our being reasoning witnesses to it all, masters of this domain. God is inferred from
experience of the world, and this God of Creation is the first way we know the divine.
The way our consciousness engages the significance of Creation, the magisterial
perspective we are afforded, tells us that we are privileged to share some of the Creator’s
intimate knowledge of the workings of the world. When you study religion you are
reminded not to make the mistake of anthropomorphism, not to make God in the image of
yourself or other human beings. Conceiving of God as a bearded giant with a burning eye,
supernaturally superintending Creation, is regarded as folkloric and mythic and natural, but
wrongheaded. It is inadequate, it is childish, perhaps–but it has the wisdom of all
anthropomorphism, that where we see evidence of purpose and passion, we see
something of ourselves.
The Bible personifies this combination of divine and human insight into the nature of
things as Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, and later as The Word of God Made Flesh in
the gospel of John. In both, it is a mediating and a saving source of human beings being
enabled to choose what God intends. The intelligence with which God brought everything
into being is not only to be inferred by observation and experiment, but God offers it
directly. In Proverbs it is offered to those who thirst after wisdom, by the call to become
suitors of wisdom. In John’s gospel is it offered to those who desire to become children of
God, by recognizing in Jesus Christ the One Sent by God to change the nature of
everything and everyone through resurrection.
Perhaps the motif of the Word of God which begins the gospel of John is now
taught in schools by reference to the readings we had today from Proverbs. It wasn’t
emphasized when I was a student, and I don’t know why, since the personified Wisdom of
Proverbs Eight has so much in common with the Word “without which nothing was made
that was made.” Listen again to the revelation of an active partner in creation made before
anything else and making everything else, from Proverbs eight: “I was set up as the first,
before the beginning of the earth.” “When he established the heavens I was there.”
“When he marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master
worker, and I was daily his delight.”
This strain of thinking in the Biblical tradition is the source of John’s theology of Jesus
as the Word which was from the Beginning. This is the link between the Creator God and
the Christian experience of Jesus as the Son. The human being Jesus of Nazareth is also
recognized as God’s timeless agent of achieving God’s purposes, and Christ’s bringing
into being a new creation through his life, death, and resurrection is seen as analogous to the
very first creation. Humanly speaking, in terms of John’s gospel, Jesus presents himself as
an emissary and an exemplar of God, but believers, upon his resurrection, recognize him
also as God made flesh.
This itself is a further revelation of the special nature of human beings. The puzzle
which mystifies and delights the author of Psalm Eight–which is how we can be part of
Creation and above Creation at the same time–is made a little clearer. God is, after all,
something like us–his creativity has its counterpart in his comprehending things in Words–
so that our own faculty for naming and the sense we make in our speaking have a true
connection with the world we experience.
The God who creates and the God revealed in Jesus Christ give us two of the three
traditional persons of God, two-thirds of the Trinity. The third person of the Trinity, the third
manifestation experienced by the early Church of the one God, is the Holy Spirit. Again,
just as the Word of God way of thinking about Jesus derived from what we saw in
Proverbs about wisdom, the Holy Spirit is not new. The Bible’s faith has long experience
of God’s spirit interacting with and affecting Creation.
So there is continuity with the Old Testament’s One God, even though Christian
thinking identifies three persons in the One God. Jesus is identified with the Wisdom with
which God conceives reality. The Holy Spirit is identified with the motivating energy
informing God’s works. The Spirit was at Creation along with the establishing Word, and
the Spirit shows up again and again to encourage people and guide their actions. Prophets
know the power of the Spirit, which is a deeper, more holy variation on the very breath of
God which animates human beings, according to the creation story in Genesis Two, when
God breathes Adam into life from the elements of the earth.
The Holy Spirit is not new with Christianity. It is distinguished in Christianity by being
regarded as part of a believer’s identity. Everyone who has faith in Christ has that faith in
part by gifts of the spirit, and further gifts of the spirit with which to live out that faith. Faith
itself is spiritual, and your spirit and my spirit can overcome great difficulties and achieve
great heights by the inspiration we receive from God.
What Paul has to say in Romans–about our having peace with God through faith in
Christ, and with that faith a willingness to regard our own suffering as acceptable and
constructive, relies on trust in the reality of the spirit and its power. The Holy Spirit permits
us to endure suffering, and to make of that endurance character, and with that character to
hope. The Holy Spirit enables us to regard that hope as certain and sufficient, and so not to
be disappointed–neither disappointed in our faithful attendance upon God’s deliverance,
nor disappointed in the end by God.
When Paul writes to the church at Rome about the power of faith in Christ and the
role the spirit has in making our faith real, he is not writing as a theologian as much as he is as
a believer. He has suffered, but endured, and he hopes. He regards, as we know from
another of his letters, present sufferings as nothing compared with God’s sure and
bounteous deliverance. He is a thinker, a parser of paradoxes and a player with traditions,
a rabbi by instinct as well as instruction–but he is a believer in Jesus Christ more than any
of those things. He knows that believers need encouragement, because he has needed
encouragement, and he knows that faithful living has to find a way to embrace the suffering
which is our common lot, and so he writes what he does. May the God further revealed in
Christ grant you such faith by the spirit that you yourself may live the life God gives you
graciously, counting on the wisdom and kindness of your Creator, and strengthened by
finding your own mortal powers supported by God’s breathing into you all the gifts you
need to be God’s person, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, Amen.
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