The Back Side of God

“Were the Whole Realm of Nature Mine”

1. The Back Side of God

Exodus 33:17-23

First Presbyterian Church of Jamestown , New York

The Reverend Thomas A. Sweet

June 27, 2010

The parable of the prodigal son may be my favorite portion of scripture but I think the most important truth of the Bible is found in a single sentence nestled in the middle of the book of the Acts of the Apostles where St. Paul declares that “in God, we live and move and have our being.” That has become a recurring mantra around here but it is no less true or far-reaching for all its familiarity.

That means to me that one way of thinking about the creation all around us, what we call the natural world, is that it is God’s body. Nature is God’s body. The world is God’s body. The universe is God’s body. Chautauqua Lake lives and moves and has its being in God. The Allegheny Forest lives and moves and has its being in God. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico lives and moves and has its being in God. The Congress lives and moves and has its being in God. You and I and we live and move and have our being in God.

Theologically, we call this perspective panentheism. Panentheism means that pan=everything is en=in theos=God. Everything is in God. Panentheism differs from its popular counterpart pantheism that claims that everything is God. The tree is God. The ocean is God. The mountain is God. You are God. The problem with pantheism is that it leaves room for nothing else. It negates the reality of anything other than God. It precludes any genuine response to God because you and I are somehow illusory in the sense that we are not really ourselves, but God in human guise. We just appear to be who we are. Pantheism smothers the possibility of the genuine existence of anything but God because all is God.

Panentheism is different. Panentheism says that God is all-encompassing and contains everything and everywhere within God’s self, but also that we really are ourselves, creatures who can respond to the Creator’s invitation to be a part of the ongoing creative process, people who can help, or not, to bring to fruition God’s dream of a world.

Santiago Sia in his God in Process Thought says it better:

“Panentheism . . . holds that God includes the world. But it sets itself apart from pantheism in that it does not maintain that God and the world are identical. . . . God is a whole whose whole-properties are distinct from the properties of the constituents (creatures) . . . The part is distinguishable from the whole although within it…The whole has properties that are not shared by the parts. Similarly, God as whole possesses attributes which are not shared by his creatures. . . . We perpetually create content not only in ourselves but also in God. And this gives significance to our presence in this world.”

Okay, whew! Big words and big thoughts. But important ones, I think. If, as panentheism says, the world is God’s body (though God is more than the world), then how we treat the world obviously is important. But it also means that the world, nature, creation have much to teach us about God and life.

I long have loved the story from Exodus we read today. Moses has led the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt , through the Red Sea, across the desert wilderness, and now they arrive at Mt. Sinai . Moses goes up the mountain and carries down the Ten Commandments, but upon his return he discovers that the Israelites have begun worshiping an idol – a god they can see and control.

Furious, Moses stomps back up the mountain to talk to God. He does not hold back. Moses wants some reassurance that he is not being played the fool. He wants to know who God is. So, in a moment of great audacity, Moses asks God to show him God’s glory, to make a full revelation, to show Moses everything. God tells Moses that no one can see God’s face and live because the fullness of God is too much for a human being to bear, but God does agree to give Moses a glimpse – not full on face on, but the back side of God. (Back side, by the way, in the way that I am using it, is two words, not one!)

There are at least a couple of meanings we can adduce from this metaphorical God-sighting:

The first is that human beings are not able to see or to know God fully. So certitude about God not only is out of the question; it is a spiritual danger. If we claim to know God and God’s ways with surety, we limit God to the extent and shape of our own mind. How much trouble is the world in today because of the tendency of religious people to speak and act as if they (we?) have seen God’s face? Fred Craddock, that erstwhile country preacher who wowed Chautauqua on the several occasions he preached there, once said that to hear the way some people talk so “knowingly” about God, you would think they had circled God three times and taken photographs. Some churches’ doctrinal swagger suggests that they have God all figured out, under control, and in their pockets. How easily we forget that none of us has seen God’s face, but only, at most, glimpsed God’s back.

At our best, we are humble and restrained when speaking of God for scripture speaks not only of God’s presence, but also of God’s hiddenness. We know that for every certainty we think we can trumpet about God that there are ten mysteries. We have no foolproof way of knowing God’s will. I remember with some relish the scene in the first sermon William Sloane Coffin’s preached after the death of his son, Alex, who drove his car into the Boston Harbor after having had too much to drink. Coffin tells how a day or so after Alex’s death, he was sitting in his sister’s living room when a woman came to the house with some food she had made and as she walked past Coffin on her way to the kitchen, she muttered, “I just don’t understand God’s will.” Coffin writes: “Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. ‘Ill say you don’t, lady!’ (I knew the anger would do me good, Coffin wrote, and the instruction to her was long overdue.) I continued, ‘Do you think it was the will of God that Alex never fixed that lousy windshield wiper of his, that he probably was driving too fast in such a storm, that he probably had had a couple of frosties too many? Do you think it is God’s will that there are no streetlights along that stretch of road, and no guard rail separating the road and Boston Harbor?’”

We do well to remember that we have not seen God face on but only modestly from the back side. I appreciate a poem by an Israeli poet who in the bitter Israeli-Palestinian conflict has experienced firsthand the damage and devastation that is wrought when we think we are unquestionably right about God’s will and ways:

From the place where we are right

flowers will never grow

in the Spring.

The place where we are right

is hard and trampled

like a yard.

But doubts and loves

dig up the world

like a mole, a plough…

It is our humility, our doubts and loves rather than our certainties, that dig up the world and make it a garden where beautiful possibilities and peace may grow.

So that brings me to the other point to make about our story from Exodus today in light of our sermon series on what the natural world can teach us about God and life. I think it entirely possible that the back side of God that Moses was given to see, and we are given to see it as well, is this blessed and sacred creation in which we live and move and have our being. As Moses looked out from the cleft of the rock and God put his hand over Moses’ eyes so that he could not see the full-on glory of God that would have been too much for him to bear, when God’s hand was taken away I think what Moses saw with new eyes is grandeur of what John Calvin called “the theater of God’s glory.” The universe becomes a university in which God becomes known.

So, the psalmist says, “The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words; their voice is not heard; yet their voice goes out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world” (Psalm 19). The creation, the psalmist exclaims, teaches and instructs. No words, but the creation offers deep wisdom nonetheless to which we should pay our heed. If “the universe is God’s body” then we stand to see from this “back side” of God what we could not bear face to face. Just as cannot look directly into the sun, but we see the sun’s presence and prescience in everything that grows, so with God as we look at God’s “back side.”

We can take up on another occasion the matter of whether we need more than the creation in order to know God and what role scripture and Jesus play for us in our knowledge of God and ourselves. It seems obvious to me that they contribute mightily. But, they also can be the source of strife and division. So it profits us to learn what we can learn from “the whole realm of nature.” Jesus himself said things like, “Look at the birds of the air…” “Consider the lilies of the field…” He tried to explain to Nicodemus about the Spirit of God by telling him it is like “the wind (that) blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.” The book of Isaiah claims we can learn to have confidence in God’s word and will by noticing that “the rain and the snow that come down from heaven do not return there until they have watered the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater and that in like fashion the word that goes out from God will not return to God empty, but will accomplish the purpose for which God speaks it.” And, have you, like the psalmist, ever felt a spiritual aridity in your life that is like being “…in a dry and weary land where there is no water” but then there came relief and restoration as surprising and welcome as “streams in the desert”?

I want to encourage you through these summer months to pay rapt attention to the natural world all around you as Jesus himself did, to slow your pace sufficiently to see what you might learn about God and life and yourself by viewing more intently the “back side” of God. Our gathering song for the summer says that there is much more to God than nature, that God is so great and good that even if we were responsible for calling forth the magnificent creation, it would be a present far too small to give to God for all God’s grace toward us. Yet St. Paul reminds us that in our days on earth “we see as in a mirror dimly” and that though “we shall some day see as face to face” that time is not yet. For now, the “back side of God” is a great gift by which we can come alive to God and God’s ways.

Amen.

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