Hello Friends -
A few weeks back I was able to bring in the new year with Sebastopol Christian Church. It was an opportunity to explore the tension between our knowledge of God and the unending mystery of the divine. My main premise was that we can know God truly, but we cannot know God fully.
Author Anne Lamott said, "The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. Certainty is missing the point entirely. Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns." In a world riddled with pain and brokenness and hurt, certainty leaves us questioning. When we reduce God to our certainties we limit God's reach. The world is a strange place, filled with mystery and the unknown. The Christian assumes a certain element of mystery, we serve a God beyond our imagination. I am skeptical of those who claim absolute certainties about a God beyond description. The biblical authors go to great lengths to describe the God that is beyond description, continually reminding us that God cannot be reduced to our conceptions.
In Ephesians 3 Paul says, "Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen." It is a prayer to the God that is beyond our imagination, a prayer to the God that is beyond description, it is a prayer to the God we need.
May we embrace the mystery of God, not resting in our ability to define and reduce God, but embrace the God beyond out imagination.