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The Influence of Our Understanding of God Upon Our Discipleship
Rev’d Catherine Thorn, Priest Assistant
29th January 2006
Readings: Jonah 3: 1-5, 10; I Corinthians 7: 29-31; Mark 1: 14-20
Before I begin I want us each to take a moment, to pause just for a short while and to consider God.
What is it that comes to mind when we say this word, when we use this word to speak of this important, yet perhaps ill defined ‘Godness’ thing? Maybe it’s an image, a feeling, a word, maybe a phrase, a scent, simply a sense of something, or maybe, my having rather put you on the spot, your immediate reaction draws a complete blank.
Potentially we now have more than a hundred versions of God present with us in this place. So next I want to ask – how sacrosanct is this God you are sitting with? How many or what kind of situations in life would it be OK for you to let this God out in? Perhaps it’s easier to consider this a little differently, how many situations wouldn’t we think to let God out in, for a multitude of perfectly valid reasons – time, relevance or appropriateness to the context, because it doesn’t occur to us to do so, or even happen to cross our minds.
Come to think of it, how many situations in our life is this God is actually, consciously present in? Might this suggest that for many of us ‘real life’ is one thing and ‘God’ another, we bring the two together when we have the space, time and leisure to think about it but, we don’t instinctually look to God to assist us as we manage the demands of daily living or take God seriously as a practical resource.
“How might all this relate to today’s readings?” you may well be wondering. In Jonah today we meet God portrayed as a rather remote, somewhat parental figure (albeit exercising a parental style of an earlier generation). God is in relationship with his people but reserves the right to mete out punishment or reward according to his judgement of the correctness or otherwise of his peoples conduct. It’s not exactly an intimate relationship between God and his people.
From Mark’s gospel, immediately following his proclamation of good news, Jesus walks by the lake and calls his first disciples to follow him - to join him, to walk with him as they learn to fish for people. For us, as a Christian community now, this Jesus portrays a God of more intimate relationship, who calls us to follow, to walk with and minister alongside.
The Old Testament and Gospel readings provide us with contrasting understandings and images of God. First we encounter a God of parental, distanced relationship reserving the right to stand in judgement over his people and to decide to change his mind at will. Then we’re introduced to a God who invites companionable, intimate relationship who meets us where we are and calls us to join in following him. It almost as if the contrasting understandings and images of God has a direct effect upon the consequent relationship between God and God’s people.
It may be tempting for us to, perhaps rather smugly, say “Yes, well we know that through Jesus we now have a new type of relationship with God, all these two passages show is how this relationship has changed.” And perhaps, unconsciously, we assume that we’ve moved on from the old to the new, that we know we live in this new intimacy of relationship, so the old way of relating to God no longer applies, as if we’ve ‘grown up and out of that way of relating’.
Yet, if we’re honest, we know the way we relate to God is not as singular or as simple as this. It’s not as if we can only choose between relating to God as distant parent or as intimate companion, our experience leads us to realise, depending upon our context, depending on our need, at different times we find ourselves relating to God in both these ways as well as a multitude of other ways. Part of the delight we can take from hearing these stories of our faith, is the affirming connections we can make between them and the experiences of our own journey.
However, rather than remain here, considering the many nuances and ways we can relate to God, let’s move a little to reflect on something of perhaps greater concern - the many people who do not consciously engage in their relationship with God at all.
It has become my experience in relating to a number of people with what might be described as a peripheral relationship with the church, and the Christian faith tradition, that the image or relationship with God they formed as a young person, perhaps through Sunday school, certainly often at a preadolescent stage, this is the one that remains with them. There is no doubt that the relationship is important, yet as they talk of their God relationship it appears at odds with the apparent maturity of the rest of their professional and personal lives. It is no wonder they struggle to locate the relevance of the church within their adult lives or consider the possibility of an ongoing relationship with God.
Most of us would hold God as sacred, holy, we know there is something always untouchable about God, always unknowable, God can never be fully measured, contained or controlled. To make something sacred is to set it apart, to place it beyond the reach, the potential contamination of the everyday. Even though we know God as sacred we also understand it is through our relationship with God that we know God. Like any relationship that doesn’t engage in regular conversation or communication, if we don’t spend time developing our relationship with God, we can forget how to relate and we can forget why we were in relationship to begin with. And God, whom we set apart because of God’s value, because God is sacred, can simply become something that is remote and other, no longer familiar to us. Alienated, we can become indifferent to this God who’s irrelevant to our daily living, or defensive of this God who we’re afraid to allow to change for fear it’ll destroy the God we’ve carefully preserved – to be precious and holy and sacred – but so long ago.
The distance of God in Jonah, the closeness of God in Mark’s Gospel, reflects perhaps the distance and the closeness of our relationship with God, the distance and closeness we allow God to have in our lives. God finds us, as we are, where we are and calls us each by name. There are times when we might rather keep a measured distance from this God, limiting God’s influence, managing our relationship with God with careful bargaining etiquette. Then there are the times when we willingly give all of ourselves over, trusting God to treat us gently as we are transformed.
We call ourselves Christian - people who profess a faith of incarnation, who bring to life, in our own flesh the things we proclaim. We are called to make God present in our world, not alone but in community and not without God. The way we relate to God influences the way we understand and live our lives, it influences how we understand ourselves as disciples. It influences how we relate to the world, to people and to each and everything that surround us.
If in all of our living we take God seriously, pay attention to and invest time in our relationship with God as we find ourselves transformed we may continue to bring to life Jesus’ words “the time is fulfilled; the kingdom of God has come near.”
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