Please Click Here For Sermon Video
To say that we can know God is a bold statement that can seem a difficult pill to swallow, but we can. One thing that makes that such a bold thing to say is that we have all been enculturated by a particular philosophy of science that boldly says that everything that exists can be known and understood by us because we have the ability to know, to seek, to learn, and understand. Yet, what we mean by known and understood is that it can be observed and measured or at least proven to exist by mathematical formula or by its effects on other things. Also, it can be proven by experiments. Here’s an example of our philosophy of science.
This cookie is an object that we with our ability to know and understand things can know and understand. We can know and understand its ingredients right down to their sub-atomic make-up. We can know and understand the processes of chemical interactions that take place as it is transformed by heat from a doughy mixture of ingredients to what we call a cookie. We can know its smell and most importantly its taste. We can know it as intimately as taking it into ourselves by consuming and digesting it so that it becomes part of what we are; and if its effect on us is profound enough, if the cookie is good enough, it will change us. We can say that before I was agnostic about cookies meaning I didn’t know for sure what a cookie was or if it existed, but now, I am a devoted cookie lover with a waistline to prove it.
Unfortunately, the tragic thing about this way of knowing and understanding something is that the thing we want to know and understand sooner or later ceases to exist simply because we destroy it with our wanting to know it. We find ourselves consumed with the desire to know the pleasure we derive from the cookie and we create technologies to become more efficient in producing cookies and we produce cookies and consume them until all the resources needed to produce them are gone and we find ourselves buried in the unusable by-products of our consumption…and we’re fat. This at least has been my own experience of the cookie.
Well, that’s a cookie. This philosophy of science begins to break down a bit when we apply it to how to know a person. Rule number one: human persons are not objects to be known the way we know a cookie. To attempt such a thing would be cannibalism. The human body can be known as an object, but the human person, the human “being” is a mystery. A person is not an object for us to observe, manipulate, or consume in our efforts to know and understand them. I think by nature we all feel very violated when we sense someone is trying to objectify us or manipulate us or consume us. A person is a thinking, feeling, and willing subject who cannot be known in the way that we know and object. We can know things about a person, their likes, dislikes, and habits as they reveal them. But there is a limit to what we can know of a person. We cannot know what it is to be that other person. If we could, only evil would result because that would mean we could objectify, manipulate, and consume them at the core of their being for our own pleasure.
Martin Buber, a Jewish biblical scholar and theologian from the early twentieth century wrote a book called I and Thou, in which he says we cannot really know another person. We can only know the change that comes about in ourselves from having encountered that person. We as persons know one another by the way we have been changed by relating to one another. If my relationship with you has not changed me, then I have not let myself be vulnerable enough to let you truly be a part of my life. You would be just an object in my life. Your thoughts, abilities, giftedness, love, support, and even your dysfunctions all have an effect on me that changes me. Thus, we can never know what it is like to be another person. We can only know the change a person has caused within us by means of personal relationship.
Now let’s talk about knowing God. God is not knowable as an object. God never offers himself to us as an object to be known, God cannot be observed and manipulated. God cannot be seen or measured. God cannot be proven by reason or mathematics. God is not part of what makes things make sense nor is God a part of the equation. God cannot be known by his actions nor the effect he has on things. God is not knowable as an object otherwise God becomes nothing more than an idol.
God makes Godself known to us as a Person. God is Person and what we know of God personally is the change that encountering God brings about in us. This entails that we must have an encounter with this God who does not have a physical presence that we can know other than as Jesus Christ whom the Scriptures reveal to us and whom we encounter by the presence of the Holy Spirit who causes us to feel that we are God’s beloved children, God’s family. So, we say God is spirit, meaning a Person, a personal presence to whom we can be in a relationship with. Just like any of us in relationships to others, we cannot know God apart from God’s revealing of Godself, a revelation that we can only know because it causes a change in us.
Let me wind down by saying that if God is a Person whom we know through relationship, then we must do those things that foster relationships. Relationships are built on time spent with another and communicating and also, I have to emphasize that communication isn’t just a one-way street where all I do is talk about myself. We have to be open to the other, listening and looking for the subtle ways in which another person reveals their self. Be open. Set aside time to be with God. I’ve spoken before about giving Jesus a chair at the table or there in the room to give the sense that he is sitting there. Read the Bible listening for God to speak to you. You folks have been around the bakery long enough to know that the Gospel of John is a good cookie to start with. If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus, study Jesus, walk in his ways. Give God time. Spend time with God and sooner or later a light, the Light, will turn on and you will know God is with you, that Jesus is with you. The more time you spend with him, the more you will begin to learn that he is for you, that he wants to hear your hurts and to heal, that he bears your burdens with you. You will begin to know that God knows exactly what it is like to be you. That God has always been listening to you. There’s a Psalm that says God has kept your tears in a bottle.
God can be known. We can know God. But watch out, God actually does love you and that will change you like nothing else can. Amen.
