Overcome by God
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Link to video: https://www.facebook.com/stlukesferndale.org/videos/454273798878986
Clare L. Hickman
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, Ferndale
October 18, 2020—Proper 24A
Exodus 33:12-23; Matthew 22:15-22
Jesus would have killed it in a presidential debate! He’s excellent at evading the traps people set for him. More than that, though, he says things that cause people to expand their thinking. First, by getting them nodding along, sure that he’s saying just what they’ve been thinking, but then … pushing them further.
Take this gospel: at first, it SOUNDS as though he’s saying that it’s totally fine to split yourself, as the religious leaders have been doing, in order to answer to two masters. Sounds as though he’s saying that we can divide our loyalties and priorities between the state on the one hand, and our religious duties on the other. And goodness knows that’s the way we often hear it, even today. “Render to Caesar,” we say, as though that were permission Jesus gave us, rather than a warning!
The warning is clearer when we retain the other half of the sentence: “Render to God what is God’s.” “… what is God’s” … What does belong to the Creator of the Universe, the King of kings and Lord of lords? What is God’s? When you say it, it’s obvious. Everything is God’s!
So, when it comes to conflicting calls, when it comes to the pull of nationalism, when it comes to those times when we are tempted or compelled to live in ways that run counter to the ways of the reign of God, we too might find ourselves (like the Pharisees) with the shameful coin of Empire in our pockets. It will happen, and it IS hard to avoid. But what Jesus is reminding the Pharisees (and us) is that we should not allow ourselves to get too comfortable with that … we need to remember, always, the claim of the God of all things on every part of our lives.
For this is the God who made us, the God who sustains us, the God who liberates us from all that seeks to enslave us. It is the God whose very Presence is more than we can bear, who must shield our face from his (hers, theirs) lest we be destroyed by the immensity of who God is.
“For none shall see God and live,” we hear in Exodus.
Why is that, I wonder? What is it about the presence of God that would destroy us if we encountered it in full force, unshielded? I mean, we get it, in our guts, when we hear it … but I rather wonder whether we are imagining a whole Raiders of the Lost Ark scene, in which all those Nazis are literally blown up by the presence of God emerging from the Ark of Covenant. But as satisfying as that scene is—Nazis, blowing up!—I’m not sure the presence of the One who Creates would be a source of destruction like that.
What is it about God, then, that would unmake us?
Many of us might imagine standing before God, and being utterly undone by our own failings. The guilt of our sins, the pain of our inadequacy, the ways in which we have fallen so far short of the ways of God would overcome us, perhaps. As the Rite I Confession states so evocatively, “the burden of them is intolerable.” Intolerable: to know our sins, to know that God knows them, and to stand there in the Presence. We might well, indeed, be unmade.
None may see God and live. But God will shield our eyes, and pass us by, and we will see a reflection of the Almighty. That, we can survive.
The image of Caesar is on the coins. The image of God … is everywhere! And most particularly, we believe, the image of God dwells in the richness and breadth of humanity. And so we encounter a reflection of God’s compassionate call in the faces of the suffering, those who long to be fed, who hunger for healing. We hear the echo of God’s voice in the cry of the prophets calling for economic justice, for a world that lives up to God’s radical concern for the lowly and the stranger. We cannot bear the full face of God, but we see this glimpse and it calls us to a deeper life.
We are convicted by the presence of God. But that’s not all that threatens to undo us in the face of God. We might well be overcome by pure and unadulterated AWE. Awe that makes the angels sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” in unending praise when they stand before him. Awe that threatens to explode us with wonder, with a sense of immensity, with a glory that is too bright for our eyes, our minds, our hearts to bear. Awe, in the face of the Creator of the Universe.
“Oh God, we cannot look upon your creative power and survive, can’t take it all in. And so we are shielded. You show us your creation, as a reflection of yourself. You show us its beauty and its power, its infinite complexity, its mind-boggling diversity, and we catch a glimpse of you. And we see those who create in their own right, those who seek beauty, who explore truth, who make meaning, and we know that we have caught a fraction of your glory. We see you in the makers, the builders, the menders of this world … and sometimes, it is enough to stop us in our tracks with a sense of awe: The Creator of all things has passed us by.
And then again, it might just be the ecstasy that does us in. To encounter the Source of all Being with nothing coming between us, nothing to distract or shield us, nothing to save us from falling utterly and helplessly in love: this could very well unmake us … Mystic traditions speak of union with God, and there is almost a warning there: the rapture of it can loose the ties that hold your spirit to your own body, the spark of God within you will recognize and reverberate to its Source, and your very self might just dissolve into the Divine Presence.
We cannot survive the Presence unshielded, cannot bear such complete and unutterable union. But God gives us a reflection of this ecstatic connection in … well … in sex, actually. In the physical and emotional intimacy of touch, in its overpowering joy and its shattering ability to break down our protective walls, we catch a shielded—sometimes it seems only just—glimpse of the face of God.
Like Moses, we long to see God, to be assured of God’s presence with us. And like Moses, we can only bear to witness the reflection of that presence. The good news: it is all around us. Even when we decide we would rather not notice. Even when we have allowed ourselves to be distracted by the calls of empire, seduced by the promises and compromised by the demands of the world. Jesus reminds us of all that we owe to God, of the endless gratitude and gift and calling of God, and bids us to look around. To remember that all is God’s, including our very self.
It is all around us, if we can only bear to see it. If we can brave the call to repentance and action, if we can surrender to the wonder, if we can open ourselves to the vulnerability of such complete union. It is there: the face of God, the image of the God of All Things. Brushing us with its glory and filling us with power. Open your eyes, and you just might catch a glimpse. Amen.