Godspace.com (Rob Gieselmann, November 5, 2006)

1. Theology means the Study of God. theos, of God, and ology, study. Because God cannot be studied in the abstract, Christian theology begins with experience, interaction, when heaven comes down, or earth rises up, when God and humans interact. In other words, theology, the study of God, is actually a practical study of the experience of God. At some level, all theology is experientially based.

Even so, some Christian theology seems more esoteric. For example, the doctrine of the Trinity. The Doctrine of the Trinity is inexplicable by natural rules – God is a unit – one God, monotheism – and God is three persons.

We call this more esoteric theology revealed. Revealed theology is still experientially based. We experience God simultaneously as One and as three separate persons: Parent, child, and Spirit. Two truths we can explain separately, but we can’t explain in parallel fashion. Most of us don’t like such truth – revealed theology – because we think we should be able to make sense of everything. Like the Nicene Creed.

Hence, most of us are more comfortable with personal practical theology – your experience. Your personal study and experience and definition of God. Or, to paraphrase John, our testimony is true – we know, because we have seen and touched and felt this man who is God.

Experience. Rubber meets the road. God in the crack.

Like the fellow said, there are no atheists in a foxhole.

When you meet mortality or God or life face to face, you believe. The foxhole: physical, literal dust and dirt, life and mess, meets the eternal. Here – as in the Cistine Chapel ceiling – the finger of God reaches across the chasm to touch humanity, to touch you. At your point of existence, your experience.

And so your experience in life becomes your theology, defines for you who God is. Your experience of the finite touching the infinite. Heaven to earth come down.

But there is no universal experience. No one experience fits all. God touches you in ways vastly different from the ways in which God touches me. We don’t all experience God the same way. For me to have depth, I must accept God experienced in you your way, not mine.

All of this assumes we pay attention to God in our lives. Or that God is easily seen, easily touched, easily apprehended. But most often, this is not the case.

2. God seems absent – MIA, or at least, elsewhere. We don’t see God at work in our lives – But just because the blind man cannot see the sunset does not mean there is no sunset. Just because we cannot see God at work in our lives does not mean God is not at work in our lives.

We suppose God to be remote, and yet, here God is (touch) – the spirit of God swirling about as at the Creation, hovering and blowing as breeze and breath and life. Frenetic activity initiated on your behalf, in your behalf, love all about you.

We don’t see this activity of God because we don’t make the time to see; we don’t believe deeply in God because we don’t make space to believe. We limit ourselves to our experience, and yet we decline further experience. It is as though life with God is about myspace.com and not Godspace.com.

And yet, experiencing God matters. What you do as a Christian matters. Who you are, who you become matters. Your experience. Your theology. Matters.

Life in your foxhole. No atheists. God interpreted into your life.

Pogo said – I have seen the enemy, and he is us. God can’t be interpreted into our lives because our lives have become myspace and not Godspace.

But interpreting God into our lives, understanding our lives, putting our lives into the context of the whole, requires space. Requires effort. Often painful effort.

You must look square in a mirror that becomes an Alice in Wonderland looking glass, with Cheshire cats and Madhatters running about. God’s world appears twisted like a Wonderland that is backwards and altogether frightening.

3. Jesus did this. Faced himself square. In the wilderness as a crazy man he imagined the devil as red dust and dry wind swirling about him, or was it himself? Was Jesus the devil, was Jesus’ looking into piercing red eyes a taunting look into his own soul, did he see himself instantly as Pogo saw himself, seeing himself as the potential enemy? Did Jesus face his own very human capacity for grandeur and self-aggrandizement head-on? Do you?

I don’t know what Jesus felt, but his temptations were nothing if not more temptatious than ours. He was tempted, pulled and swayed, unclear at any given point as to where God might be and where truth might lie – the world had become a haze of this red dust, and not a clear division of right and wrong. He was tempted worse than you and worse than I, but he emerged pure exactly because he faced himself.

What does it mean to be human?

What does it mean to be divine?

What does it mean to be Messiah?

What will it mean to die?

4. This god-man wrestled and fought and faced himself, and won -- and now, later, he looked out across the hillside at the crowd of people who hoped to find hope in a voice where they dare not hope – and proclaimed to them blessings. Blessings, truths, discovered in the skewed world of the wilderness, through the looking glass. Truths he could see, but the rest of us couldn’t. The rest of us can’t. Not yet.

Blessed are you who are poor in spirit.
Blessed are those who mourn.
Blessed are the meek.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed are the peacemakers.

These, by the way, aren’t prescriptive, they aren’t commands. They are descriptive, Jesus is simply stating truth: the world is not flat, and those who appear at the top are at the bottom, and those at the bottom are actually at the top. Gold is a different color in this world.

5. Sting story. The Rock icon Sting recently recorded a new album, Songs from the Labyrinth, music by John Dowland. John Dowland wrote the pieces about 400 years ago, in Elizabethan England. Sting performs the pieces with a fellow named Edin Karamazov. Edin is from Sarajevo and is a foremost lutenist.

Sting met Edin not too long ago backstage, after one of Sting’s concerts. A friend introduced them, and as Sting tells the story, Edin seemed embarrassed to meet Sting.

It wasn’t until later that Edin explained to Sting this initial embarrassment. As it turns out, Sting and Edin had met twenty years earlier, when Edin was a member of a trio of two guitarists and a tuned percussionist. They played Vivaldi and Mozart, oddly, as part of a circus performance.

Sting and his wife were in the circus audience, one day. After hearing this remarkable trio play, Sting sent them an invitation to perform at a birthday party Sting was throwing.

The trio sent word back that no, they would not be willing to play a birthday party, for they were serious musicians and not “performing monkeys at the beck and call of a rock singer and his wife.” Ouch, Sting says!

6. The golden nugget in this story is not Sting’s, but Edin’s. That Edin and his trio maintained their integrity – was willing to live a different life, a pure life – to be musicians rather than (as they called it) performing monkeys – is some of what Jesus is saying here –

Find out who you are, what you believe – wrestle with truth, wrestle like Jesus with yourself, or the devil, or God – but wrestle, wrestle to become a saint.

Too many of us don’t know ourselves. Not really. And we certainly don’t know God with us, this God swirling about as spirit, daily and minutely involved in and oddly ordering our lives. We don’t know because we won’t stand in front of the Alice in Wonderland looking glass long enough. But we must look in order to become, to experience God with us. Not grace, but life. Hard stuff.

7. All Saint’s Day -- as though a saint were someone special, when Scripture defines as Saints those who believe. All are saints, clothed in Christ.

And yet there is something special about the person who taps into that deeper underground stream, that person willing to live a life of integrity in Christ. You’ve met that person before. Often, you hear people speak of a grandmother in that way. Or an obvious saint – Mother Theresa, or Ghandi. Or, someone so selfless that you see through them and straight to their cause.

These people are you and I, only living a life through the looking glass.

Theology, the study of God. The study of you. Means that you wrestle, and believe anyway. Do you allow God to study you?

But too many of us would-be saints quit thinking about God, about the things of God, because it is too hard. The Nicene Creed seems archaic, or the Lord’s Prayer is unrealistic. Neither is as it seems.

A richer life is found there, in that way, the way of the cross. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall see God.

Amen.

Copyright 2006