GOD'S CALL TO US
February 2006
article for the Collect, publication for St. Thomas Episcopal Church,
Medina, WA
As we stumble through life, it’s important to remind ourselves that God is always with us. God created us, knows us to our innermost depths, and understands how we tick. God knows our pitfalls and also offers a hand to pull us out of them.
And yet, our understanding of God as a friend, as a person, as a helping hand, as a father or mother, is always a metaphor. Sometimes, when I get a little too self-assured, I revisit C.S. Lewis’s sonnet “Footnote to All Prayers,” and it brings me back to humility again:
“The
one whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou
And dream of Phaedian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskillfully, beyond desert;
And all are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.
Take not, O Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.”
The cross is not God. The Bible is not God. Even our current understanding of God is not God. We must never forget that God is unknowable.
But if this makes God seem remote, disconnected, “out there” somewhere, we must remember again that God truly knows us. It is not a relationship between equals. But God’s incarnation in Jesus is God’s way of treating us as if we were equals.
If God, the Creator of the Universe, treats us as if we were equals, then how should we treat each other? Here is the ultimate example of God’s call to us. It’s the message Jesus brought, and it’s the mission we struggle with to this day.