In God we live and move and
have our being
for we too are God’s offspring.
How do you think of God? Where do
you believe God is located?
For many of us, we think of God as “up there” or “out there,”
but definitely far away.
In the haunting refrain from a popular song twenty years ago, we
heard that “God is watching us…from a distance.” That song
became popular in part because it resonated with something that
we all feel. Life often looks good until we look a little
closer. If God does exist, we struggle with understanding how
God can allow the world to exist as it is, unless he is far away
and not involved—only a distant spectator in our lives.
Paul and Jesus offer us a different view.
Paul states, “In God we live and move and have our being for we
too our God’s offspring.” His description of how we exist in God
is like how an unborn child exists in her mother’s womb. Nothing
happens to us that does not in some sense happen to and in God.
This tumultuous creation and our lives within it survive like a
growing fetus dependent on a pregnant woman. God is not at a
distance, though from our perspective and awareness inside God’s
womb, it can sure feel that way.
(As an aside, the last time I used the image of pregnant women
in a sermon, a woman who was about eight-and-a-half months
pregnant came up to me afterward and said, “You can tell a man
preached that sermon.” As is often the case, I was not sure what
I said or how I said it that made my being a man so obvious.
With that inadequacy in mind, I ask all mothers to please bear
with me as I try my best with this powerful metaphor.)
In the Gospel according to John, Jesus also offers a view of God
and our relationship with God that reveals a surprising
closeness and intimacy. Jesus uses a series of phrases in the
Gospel today that can be confusing. We hear:
Now if we think that God is
someplace “out there” or “up there”—these phrases make no sense.
Let’s take a moment and see if we can better understand what
Jesus was saying.
Let’s use our holy imagination: Imagine Jesus the Son of God
existing within the womb of God. Imagine that humanity exists in
a similar way within Jesus. This obviously strains the natural
metaphor of a human mother and unborn child. But the womb image
can still be helpful. From eternity, God conceived of a
relationship with humanity that was like a loving family. In
Jesus, that conception was given new birth. The relationship
between Jesus and God is what life in the family of God is like.
In Jesus—through his life and teaching, through his death and
resurrection—humanity is brought to new life within that same
womb-like existence in God. We exist within Jesus as Jesus
exists within God.
So far, so good—I think most of us can follow the logic of this
imagery. But how does Jesus exist in us? This is where we—or at
least I-- get confused. In our modern scientific view, how does
a parent exist in her child? The parent exists in the child
through her DNA. And in a similar sense, Jesus exists in us
through the “DNA” we receive from him. From the beginning of
human life, we were created in the image of God. When our life
together distorted that image, Jesus came and restored the
divine image in us through the Incarnation and through the
example and the grace of his life. So we can say, “We too are
his offspring.”
So what does this mean to us? Why does it matter whether God is
watching us from a distance or whether we exist within the womb
of God? This is where my being a man limits the depth of my
understanding. But I have been a father to three children, so I
have enough experience to be dangerous. After the sermon, you
mothers feel free to set me straight and talk among yourselves
about how I didn’t “get it.”
But here is my good faith effort—if we exist within God like an
unborn child exists within her mother’s womb—God feels what we
feel in a way that we cannot even begin to understand. There is
a connection between God and us that is primal and beyond words.
There is never a moment that God is not aware of us or when God
does not care about us. Like a pregnant mother, God wants us to
be healthy and perfect in every way. God loves us like a
pregnant mother loves her unborn child.
Now that child within the womb of God is not only each of us
individually, but all of us together as humanity. That maternal
relationship that God has with us is connected to all of us. The
nurture that God provides like a pregnant woman to her child is
not limited to individuals or only to Christians. As Paul said
addressing the pagan Athenians, “We too are God’s offspring.”
This is where the metaphor of living within God’s womb—like all
metaphors—can begin to break down. Because unlike an unborn
child, we make choices and do harm to one another in a way that
not even Jacob and Esau did to each other within the womb of
Rebecca. This is where the first part of the Gospel today helps
to inform us about how to live within God.
Jesus speaks about two things at the beginning of this passage.
-
Keeping his commandments
-
Receiving God’s Spirit.
We know that in the context of
this Gospel, Jesus’ commandments are to “abide in (his) love”
and “love one another” as Jesus has loved us. We are also told
that the Spirit is given to us so that we are able to follow his
commandments. Jesus gives us his love as part of our DNA.
Through his love, humanity is given a miraculous existence, even
more amazing than the life that grows within a pregnant mother.
So how does this understanding of God’s involvement in our lives
help us to live and to love? How does it help us when we are
stuck in traffic and someone cuts us off? Or when a parent dies
from cancer? Or when we see little children starving in a
distant land and we simply do not know what to do or how we can
help? How does this help us with so many things that make it
seem that God is watching us from a distance? All of those
things that are so difficult in their own way, some of them
devastatingly so.
Here is the help—our world and all of us exist within God. There
is nothing that any human being experiences that God does not
feel and understand. That has always been the case. God became
human in Jesus to help humanity know that God is with us—God
experiences our suffering in a way we cannot begin to
understand. Like a good friend, God “gets it.” God understands
our lives. When we feel helpless, devastated by our lives, God’s
love surrounds us so that we can survive and endure. And because
God is intimately involved in our lives, we do not have to
remain helpless forever.
For you see, as God’s offspring, we have God’s DNA in us. Within
our limited capacity as human beings, we can feel in part what
God feels. We can share in God’s compassion for all of humanity
and for each one of us. We can begin to love one another as God
has loved Jesus and as Jesus has loved us. Then we can know what
it is like to live in the family of God.
Yes, God is doing much more than watching us from a distance.
Today, this moment, in worship and in the world, we exist within
the womb of God. We are God’s offspring. In the power of God’s
Spirit, let us live as God’s children, loving one another as
Jesus has loved us. Amen.
