The God Who RSVP’s

by David L. Johns, Ph.D., Earlham School of Religion
Opening Convocation Address: ESR/BTS (August 29, 2002)

One of most foolish things we can do when we gather together in worship or when we gather together at the beginning of a new academic year is to invite God to be with us. Of all the actions within the Christian liturgical repertoire that ought to be banned, banished, or otherwise locked away and guarded by burly men with automatic weapons it is the prayer of invocation. In this prayer, often uttered recklessly by cavalier professionals marching through conventional patterns, we are just asking for trouble. When our order is established, our direction set, when our plans are all mapped out, our vision determined, our schedule/agenda ‘set in stone,’ be advised: Do not invite God to the party!

With her characteristic frankness, Annie Dillard stares fully into the face of realities many of us soften through euphemism. She writes:

On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.[1]

It is ironic, but there is probably no place on earth where God is more tamed, managed, and controlled than in our churches, our meetings, and I will whisper this so as not to disturb those who think otherwise, perhaps even in our seminaries.

C. S. Lewis once wrote: “There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion [then, perhaps anticipating our evasive religious talk, Lewis interjects with tongue in cheek and not a little sarcasm (‘[Hu]Man’s search for God!’)] suddenly draw back. Supposing we really find [God]? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing [God]…found us?”[2]

I think we know this. We’re not sure what God might do…God is a loose canon! The Spirit does not always play by our rules. We are not in control of a living God, not even in the church and not even in the Christian seminary.

I think we know this. And I think this is why we expend so much energy building our edifices, constructing our systems, even building our own micro-societies all in our own strength and often for our own glory. We know that to invite God into the fray will certainly mean that our grand designs will be modified, amended, maybe even replaced.

“Come, let us build us a city!”

I learned about hubris as a young boy growing up in northeast Ohio. Perhaps my father was trying to teach me a life-lesson he could not convey otherwise when we would drive the twenty-three miles together to gaze upon what is referred to on the City of Cuyahoga Falls website as the “Mystery Tower of Cuyahoga Falls.”[3] Thirty years ago a wealthy and ambitious preacher hired a Houston-based firm to begin construction on a tower that was to duplicate the Calgary Tower in Alberta. The completed project was to include a gift shop, an observation deck, and a rotating restaurant. With a broadcast tower topping off the conical wonder, the completed edifice was to be 750 feet tall, nearly two hundred feet taller than the Washington Monument on the Mall in DC (555’ 5 1/8”). For a host of reasons legal and spiritual, the project was abandoned years ago and was sold at a sheriff’s sale in 1989 for $30,000. Each time we drove past this tower my father would mutter, “stupidity.”

“Come, let us build us a city!”

Samuel Beckett’s Estragon and Vladimir plan to build their own futures (or plan their own demise) because they are convinced Godot will never show up; sometimes we plan our futures by our own unconsulted efforts because we have a suspicion that if invited, Yahweh will actually RSVP.

A brick wall will never disagree with even your most outrageous arguments; ah, but a flesh and blood conversation partner, someone real…now, that’s when things get interesting. Likewise God. The many gods of our theological construction are often tethered close to the garage where they can’t bite us and where they won’t embarrass our guests. But the God who spoke to Job out of the whirlwind and the God who met Moses in the blazing shrubbery, this God is wildly alive and will not stay tethered for long. After all, it is only when Aslan is on the move that the chill of winter begins to fade.

It is futile to try to restrict the movement and presence of God. Rudolf Otto once remarked that the Scripture never speaks of a God who is omnipresent and that the classical doctrine of omnipresence is an effort to “tame” God by binding God to every time and every place just like a force of nature—God may be everywhere, but at least that way we know where God is! Rather, Otto observes that the scriptures speak of a God “who is where [God] wills to be, and is not where [God] wills not to be, the deus mobilis [the God who moves about], who is no mere universally extended being, but an august mystery, that comes and goes, approaches and withdraws, has its time and hour, and may be far or near in infinite degrees, ‘closer than breathing’ to us or miles remote from us.”[4] Recall also Jesus’ remark to Nicodemus: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 NRSV). If there is anything predictable about God it is that God is unpredictable.

It’s a little scary. Yet, it is also terribly exciting. mysterium tremendum et facinans!

The writer of Ephesians speaks of his prayer for the readers of the letter, a prayer that speaks to the work before us for the coming year.

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:18-19) A close parallel to this dimensional language appears in the wisdom literature as a way of expressing the deep things of God, the infinite scope of divine wisdom:

It is higher than heaven—what can you do?
Deeper than Sheol—what can you know?
Its measure is longer than the earth,
And broader than the sea. (Job 11:8-9)[5]

If not a reference to God’s unpredictability or the wild freedom of God, this is a recognition of the expansiveness of the divine and an invitation to look beyond the limited range of our customary line of vision—“if you usually focus here, trying looking over there, and then along here.” Integral to this text is the paradoxical invitation to comprehend what expands infinitely beyond the range of our vision, and to know that which surpasses knowledge. How do we do this?

I don’t think it is the author’s intention to deliberately frustrate us by placing before us a tantalizing invitation that is humanly impossible but rather, to push us to the boundaries of our understanding in order to make a point—that whatever the larger Christian community is about, whatever its occupation in its many expressions, it is always about something much larger than itself and something much greater than the provincial micro-societies we name as our little communities.

If we ever forget this, we are invited to follow the trails that lead to the end of God—Job 11:7: “Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty?” Follow the length of God, then follow the depth of God; if we are still not clear that our work is larger than our own understanding, we are invited to follow breadth and then the heights of God. Wonder of wonders, after we have followed these paths to the far flung ends of God, after we have comprehended the heights, the depths, the lengths, and the breadths (if this is even possible!) and after we come to know that which surpasses knowledge (if that is even possible!), then rather than possessing God and holding God in our hand or in our theological constructs, we will find that this alive God, this Deus mobilis, this God who RSVP’s, has instead moved into us so filling us that we are overflowing with the fullness of divine life. …and, in our being filled the “ends of God” are expanded once more.

But why consider such matters today, on the first day of class in a new academic year?

My reasons are two.

First, many are the sins of the seminarian and of the professional theologian; perhaps one of our most pervasive besetting sins is assuming that things really are as we say they are. It is a kind-of hubris, I suppose. In the rapturous abandon of theological cogitation, some of us believe we have single handedly laid bare the inner movements of the divine life. When we make icons of our words or when we pretend that our abstract images are actually representational art, this is when we forget that even after our best and most careful and most vigorous intellectual work, at best our words merely point in the direction of … at best our words serve as a kind-of theological graffiti spray-painted on the underpass: “Yahweh was here!”

My second reason for reminding us of the wild aliveness of God is more complicated:

The convocation planning committee wisely selected as this morning’s theme: “gathering in community,” and this is indeed what we are doing and what we intend to do. Certainly, among the many positive visible features that mark our life in these seminaries, is a shared commitment to a kind-of community.

Yet, I wonder if some of our efforts at creating community, building community life, run perilously close to a hubris that imagines we are something we are not and that presumes to do what is ultimately beyond what we could ever do on our own.

“Come, let us build us a city.”

We will scale the heavens on our terms; after dinner we will pet the tame, tethered god next to the garage. O, foolish Bolerathon, Pegasus is so much wiser than you. She knows who lives atop Olympus!

The readings this morning from Ephesians contain several statements that suggest something happening to us and statements that are actually cast in the passive voice, this means someone other than the subject is the acting agent. “May God grant that you be strengthened,” “you are being rooted and grounded,” “so that you may be filled,” “Christ may dwell in your hearts.” Even the wonderful hymn we have sung this morning based on the early 2^nd century Didache: “seed, scattered and sown, wheat, gathered and grown…may the church of God be gathered into one” reflect this. Each of these acknowledges the presence and activity of someone else; the rootedness and groundedness, the strengthening and filling, the scattering and gathering, these are not accomplished by the “free choice” of an autonomous individual, nor are they accomplished by the good intentions of a community. These come to us as gifts from the hand of God. In fact, it is quite interesting to note that when these texts delineate particular roles and functions within the church—equipping ministries, the occasion for actual effort—these roles and functions are carried out through the generous and faithful exercising of gifts.

As simple as this notion is, it is easy to forget.

If our “community” efforts fail to recognize, acknowledge, and live into the wildly alive gifting presence of the Spirit of God, if our quest for “community life” results in abandoning our vocation of being a learning community entrusted with the task of preparing women and men for ministry broadly defined, if this community simply becomes the work of our own hands for the sake of ourselves, then the community will be little more than an amplified version of our own neediness. If the community is our own creation, the fruit of our own labors, the projection of our own neurosis, for the sake of ourselves, it will cave in on itself—it will implode—and we will abandon the tower project uttering non-sense that none of us will be able to understand.

As the Psalmist writes: “Unless God builds the house those that labor, labor in vain.” (Psalm 127:1)

Christian community requires work, to be sure, cooperative work with each other and with God, and to assure that such a community exists will require something from each of us. Yet, something dangerous is afoot when we forget that genuine community is—like all good things—a gift to us from God. Making community itself our goal, I think, is a certain strategy for never achieving it. However, if we set our efforts to the calling before us in this community of faith, learning, diversity, and hospitality,[6] the tasks of scholarship and learning, of reflection and critical engagement, of integration and imagination, of prayer and spiritual discernment, we may be surprised by what follows from such faithfulness. In fact, if we devote ourselves to trying to comprehend the “breadth and length and height and depths” of God, and if we give ourselves this academic year to trying to “know the love of Christ that surpasses knowing,” I suspect that we will find ourselves in very good company: filled we will be with the fullness of the wildly alive God who RSVP’s, standing together with all the saints.

“I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:18-19)