The Un-Needy God

The Un-Needy God--June 11, 2019

"In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while the spirit of God swept over the face of the waters." [Genesis 1:1-2]

In the beginning, the old poet says, there was God.

And if you give a listen to other voices from the Scriptures, like John the Gospel-writer, the God who was there in the beginning--the one God who is the Source and Ground of all Being--also includes Christ the Word, who came among us in Jesus.

And then, if you dare to give a second read to the opening verses of what we call Genesis, there is another Presence mentioned--the "spirit of God" who broods over the waters like a mother hen.

One God who does all the creating, the Scriptures all insist.  And yet by the time the New Testament was written at least, the chorus of biblical voices says that this One God is not a lone, miserly fellow, twirling his long white beard in a sad solitude.  Rather, God is a communion of... well, Persons.  And while the Bible itself doesn't use the word "Trinity," the raw materials for the idea are there, hinted at even in the opening line of the storytelling, from "in the beginning" onward.  God exists as a community--and a community of perfect, always flowing, ever-moving, unrelenting love.  Even from before the first words, "Let there be light" is spoken, God--who includes the Word (Christ), and who includes the Spirit who swept over the waters--lives in relationship... with the three-in-one-ness we often call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

So what, right?  

After all, this Trinity business can sound like a lot of inside baseball--just a lot of overly complicated theologizing that defies good object lessons and illustrations.  And to be sure, it might seem like it would have been easier for Christianity to have settled for a message that said, "There's only one God, and Jesus is God's Number-One Best Creation, the Vice-President of Human Affairs... oh yeah, and the Spirit is in there, too, as some kind of energy-charge to give you a warm religious feeling from time to time, kind of like the Force in Star Wars."  That kind of a message would have been more palatable.  That wouldn't have required the nit-picking and fighting over precise wording that the early church got entangled with when it was hammering out the Creeds.  And yet, those early saints were convinced, when they read the Scriptures, that God's own Being is wonderfully mysterious as a life in relationship--as Trinity.

And that turns out to be the big deal.  When we recognize that God is a communion of Persons, it means that there is never a moment where God is lonely... where God makes the universe simply to have an object of God's affections.  The God of the Scriptures does not have to sing the old Cheap Trick lyric, "I want you to want me... I need you to need me... I'd love you to love me," and therefore make the world to have someone to offer love back to God.  Because God already lives in complete self-sufficiency as a community of Father, Son, and Spirit, God didn't need to make us in order to fulfill some cosmic psychological need, or to quell some divine loneliness, or just to have someone else to talk to.

In other words, the Triune God didn't create the world to fulfill some need in God--God creates us out of a choice of sheer grace, without a need to "get" something in return.  The God who was already perfectly satisfied and complete--not lacking in anything--chose to make something that was "not God," simply for the joy of giving us life, but without some need on God's part to have worshippers, or to stroke the divine ego, or so that God would always have a Plus-One to go to social functions with.  Part of the grace of creation itself is that God didn't have to create at all... and yet God did.

Jut let that sink in for a minute.

That's different, quite honestly, from about every other kind of relationship in your life.  We need to be needed.  We do resonate with the Cheap Trick lyric.  We do seek out relationships because of some need in ourselves.  Whether it's the revolving door of the dating scene, the search for a mentor in your professional field, the widower who gets a dog to fill the empty chair in the living room, or the empty nest parent who realizes how much they grew accustomed to having their kids around, there's an edge of self-interest in our relationships.  We seek relationship from others, in part, at least, because of what we want to get from others.  Even when it's not manipulative or crooked, even just the quest for affection, affirmation, or attention we get from others has an inescapable "what will I get out of this?" component.

But not God.  God doesn't need us to feel complete--God just makes us because love does that.  God loves you--and this whole cockamamie world--just for the sake of loving us, and not because God was lonely, or emotionally needy, or wanted someone to go to the company Christmas party with.  Maybe we can't escape that level of self-interest in our other relationships completely--although in the best, most grace-filled moments of our lives, I suspect we get a glimpse of what it is to love someone so fully and selflessly that we wish their good even when it comes at the cost of our own.  But with the God who creates in Genesis, that is always how the relationship works: God makes us and loves us and redeems us, not because of what God will "get" out of it, but because that is simply how God's love works.

This, then, is how we are loved: without a catch and without a condition.  We are loved for our own sake, not in order to comfort the loneliness of God, because God isn't lonely, and God never was.  The God who is also Son and Spirit knows already what it is to love and be loved, in God's eternal three-in-one-ness.  The fact that you are here--and that you are beloved!--is a choice of God's for you and for every atom in the universe, regardless of us meeting some need in God's emotional state.  You are beloved, simply for the sake of love and simply for the sake of you in all of your you-ness.

The Bible, it turns out, was dropping hints about this kind of selfless divine love, even from the opening sentence, as the Spirit of God is named in the act of creation.  

How will it change your day to consider that, apart from all the other folks in your life who are basically looking to "get" something from you, God simply loves you for you right now, just as you are?  How will that change your whole life?

O God beyond our grasping, let us trust your selfless way of loving us, and let that free us from needing to seek attention from the lesser, conditional kinds of love on sale around us.