Where is God?

How can you believe in God with everything that’s going on in the world at the moment? A big question. And one I want to reflect on in a very personal way today.

Becky and I have planned out the services and themes we want to share from now until the summer. We felt it would be good to tell the story of some of the people whose stories are told in the Old Testament and find in them inspiration for the living of our lives in the real world today.

Moses was born into a very troubled world, but by a curious set of circumstances grew up in a very privileged position. Until one day he saw something he found deeply troubling. He saw for himself the way his own kinsfolk were being ill-treated. He intervened to stop an Egyptian guard beating a Hebrew slave. The outcome was the death of the Egyptian guard.

Moses fled far from the security of what had become his home to the land of Midian. There he is accepted as a refugee, an alien residing in a foreign land. He settles. And he marries. He has a child. He finds himself looking after his father-in-law’s sheep when he comes to what is regarded as a holy mountain, the mountain of God.

It is there he has a remarkable experience of the presence of God. Faced with the burning bush and that overwhelming sense of the presence of God. The God he encounters is the God who wants Moses to do something to bring about the freedom of his people.

Moses feels totally inadequate and not up to the task. He senses that when he goes to his people they will have many questions to ask about God – where is he, what’s he like, who is he.

Moses wants to know the name of God.

In that whole experience Moses has I recognise something of the dilemma I have been very conscious of these last few weeks as once again we come face to face with very difficult things going on in our world that prompt us to ask all sorts of questions about God. Where is God? What’s God doing? How can you believe in God. That’s the pressing question.

If we had a clear answer … how much easier our response would be.

Moses wanted to know God’s name. That would provide him with a clear definition. That would help him join with his people and pin God down.

The response Moses gets I find very moving, very powerful, and it speaks into the way I feel at the moment.

God said to Moses, I AM WHO I AM. Or I AM WHAT I AM or I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE

No name is given.

God simply is. He is who he is. He is what he is. He will be what he will be. The word in the Hebrew is the most basic of all the verbs ‘the verb to be’. It is as if God is Being, Being Itself.

It’s one of the remarkable insights into the very nature of God that the Bible gives us is that this response becomes the way God is identified. The four letters Y H W H are never uttered by a Jewish reader of the Scriptures. They are indicated in our English bibles by a word that bears no resemblance to the mystery of the meaning of the original Hebrew word, and it always appears in capitals as LORD.

God is simply the one who is. God is BEING, BEING ITSELF. Let’s not start with some philosophical idea of the omnipotence of God, that starting point is not a biblical one and it leads us into a dead end. Let’s start with God as being, being itself.

When Greek-speakers translated this sentence in Exodus into Greek they didn’t simply use the first person singular of the Greek verb to be. They used an emphatic form of that phrase which in Greek is quite unusual. For this ‘I AM’ they translated it as EGO EIMI.

As the story of Jesus unfolds John notices how Jesus makes use of this phrase not once, not twice, but over and over again. I AM the light of the world. I AM the bread of life. I AM the resurrection and the life. Is there a link with this response God makes to Moses in Exodus 3. When on one occasion Jesus breaks the rules of grammar and says, Before Abraham was, I am, there is the sense that Jesus is identifying himself with this I AM that was so significant for Moses on this occasion.

When does it all start? Remarkably enough the very first of these I AM sayings of Jesus comes in the course of the conversation Jesus had with the woman of Samaria by the well. He offers her living water. He then looks into her heart, sees her as she is, and still accepts and loves her. He speaks of breaking barriers down and the way God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

At this point the woman has the feeling that she is in the presence of someone very special. She has a sense of awe about her. I know that Messiah is coming, she says, When he comes, he will proclaim all things to us. Jesus replies by using these very words from the Greek translation of Exodus 3;3. I AM is who is speaking to you.

The Samaritan woman is the first to hear Jesus identify himself as ‘I AM’. She then becomes the first to tell non-Jewish people about Jesus as she returns to her home town and tell everyone about Jesus.

As a Christian I do not want to start from first principles with someone else’s definition of God. I want to start with the simple thought that God is. I take that from that story of Moses.

But in understanding God I as a Christian want then to turn to Jesus.

I first notice the teaching of Jesus – love God, love your neighbour, love your enemy. And I think to myself that taking that teaching is exactly what we need to bring into the world with all its troubles. What a difference it would make!
Next I notice that wherever Jesus encounters people who hurt he seeks to alleviate their pain and bring healing. In a world filled with such suffering that gives me an imperative to do my part in bringing healing into that hurting world.

But then as I look to Jesus I sense that he opens up for me a way of seeing God the God who simply is, the God who is I AM

Jesus comes alongside people in their suffering and he feels that suffering with them. At the death of his closest friend Jesus wept. It is on the cross that he plumbs the depths of human suffering, crying out, My God, my God why have you forsaken me?

The God Jesus opens up for me is the God who comes into a world of suffering and is alongside us wherever that suffering happens. For me it is the 23rd Psalm more than anything that has it: Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.

God is with us in the midst of the awfulness of the world, stays with us, and draws us through to something beyond in his glory. God is simply being itself, but more than that God is in Jesus Christ and so wherever we are in the world, God in Christ is there, taking his suffering upon ourselves, sharing our suffering at its worst.

I found myself this week returning to a novelist I first encountered about ten years ago. It came as something of a surprise to me then discover that one of the leading Japanese novelists was a convert to Christianity in his young years. After studying in France he returned to Japan and set about the task of writing novels that would seek to present Christ in the context of Japanese culture. Then I had just supposed it was a quirk of Shusako Endo as a Japanese novelist that volcanoes should play such a significant role in his novels. After all, the image of Mount Fuji is something that is associated with so much Japanese art. I had always thought it a beautiful, rather romantic image.

It is only now that it begins to dawn on you how Japanese people constantly live with the reality of volcanoes and earthquakes.

I turned this week to his novel Volcano as it tells the story of a seismologist and a de-frocked priest as they live in a town that sits in the shadow of a volcano which might erupt at any time.

What caught my attention right at the outset was a comment by Richard Schubert, the translator.

For Endo … the quintessence of Christianity lies in God’s loving compassion for his wretched children, His willingness to share with us in our suffering. The Japanese heart and mind seek a merciful mother-image of God, rather than the stern, demanding, threatening father-image which (in Endo’s opinion) has been unduly emphasized by the missionaries, and which accounts in great part for the failure of Christianity to strike deep roots in the ‘swampland’ of Japanese culture and religion. Endo is attracted to Jesus the suffering companion of all men and women, more than to Jesus the wonder-worker; he is obsessed with Jesus the human reject eventually crucified, rather than with Jesus the glorious pantocrator.

How remarkable to discover in a Christian Japanese novelist an insight that goes so far in responding to the awful question posed by so many in the wake of all that has been happening this last week or so.

Let’s start with a God who is as he is. And then let’s turn to Jesus who maps out for us a way of living in the face of that suffering which involves love for God, love for neighbour, love for enemy too and which seeks to bring healing wherever we meet suffering. But at the same time let’s see through the Jesus who speaks of himself as the I AM to the God who comes alongside us in our suffering, remains with us no matter what may befall and always us sees us through.