God... for Dummies--May 12, 2022
"Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe." [1 Corinthians 1:20-21]
God, it turns out, is not like the list of state capitals you had to memorize back in fourth grade. Or the periodic table of elements you had to learn in your sophomore chemistry class. God is not deducible like geometric proofs about similar triangles or parallel lines, nor is God reducible to being an answer to win your team a prize at the local trivia night. In other words, God is not merely a subject of academic study that only the super-smart or highly trained can grasp.
And instead, according to the apostle Paul, God has chosen to be knowable and relatable to a world full of anybodies, regardless of higher learning, philosophical expertise, scientific training, or even the ability to recite all their state capitals. God doesn't stay hidden "up" there in the lofty heights of intellectual achievement, but meets us, of all places, in the lowliness of a peasant from Palestine whose closest friends were barely literate and had minimal formal education. God isn't limited to being known only to PhD cohorts or scientists with finely tuned divine-o-scopes. And instead, says Paul, God chooses to be known through a story that is simultaneously simple enough for a child and shocking enough to sound impossible. Not all that different from that series of books that came out a couple of decades ago, where any given topic was presented in basic terms so anyone could grasp it (you remember, it was "Such-and-such...for Dummies"), God has chose to be knowable and relatable by all of us, any of us, regardless of how smart we were in school or how clever we think we are now.
That really is a pretty big deal. Other fields of study require, well, study. You have to put in a lot of time and thought and learning to be one of the very, very few select scientists studying particle physics, and only the best and brightest of the bunch get to actually see firsthand evidence of the existence of things like Higgs bosons or antimatter or leptons or quarks. You have to have access to brilliant minds and easily billions of dollars to build and launch a space telescope like the new JWST if you want to see distant galaxies or the fingerprints of supermassive black holes. The same is true with just about every other "big deal" in other fields of study--the real prize finds are limited only to a small and select group of people who have the means, the money, and the minds to uncover them. And most of us just don't have the bandwidth to understand their findings when they do discover something amazing like gravitational waves or quasars or viral mutations.
You might expect God to be the same--or even more elusive, right? God, after all, is THE Mystery, right? The Mystery of Mysteries, the source from which all of the rest of the universe's secrets come in the first place. If it is hard to detect a subatomic particle or rare astronomical event, you would think it should be even harder to find or access the God who stands behind those things, wouldn't you?
But that's the thing with God--God turns the tables on our expectations and instead chooses to be found, knowable, and relatable, in a story--in the news that takes no advanced degrees to understand and does not require an orbiting telescope or an electron microscope to see. God comes to us in the simple announcement of Jesus: his life, death, and resurrection. God comes to us on our terms--human terms--so that any of us can hear, trust, and be claimed by the news. And God does this expressly for the purpose of NOT being discoverable only by a select few. Instead of being somebody's achievement ("I discovered God with this special God-o-meter! Now hand me my Nobel Prize!"), God chooses to be relatable to all, without any achieving, accomplishing, or impressing. God simply comes to us in Jesus and in the announcement that God has saved the world through death and resurrection rather than conquest and killing.
Part of the wonderful scandal of the Good News of Jesus is exactly that: it's for anybody. It's for everybody. You don't have to have gone to a certain school or attained an advance degree to know God. You don't have to have spent years in a monastery or gone on a pilgrimage to some holy site. You just bring your you-ness, and God meets us in the simple telling of a story. And God chooses to meet us that way so that grace can be grace, rather than a prize to be won by the smartest, the cleverest, or the most well-funded.
That's the wonderful news Paul has for us today. Unlike the state capital list from fourth grade or any of the other things we memorized once upon a time like an accomplishment of our own cleverness, God chooses to meet us in a way that seems preposterously easily and downright foolish to the people who see themselves as experts or masters of their field.
But that's just it: God isn't a subject you can master. God is always beyond our grasp and our comprehension--far beyond even the tiniest subatomic particle or most distant object in the universe. So rather than staying unknowable, God chooses to come in close and to be known in a story, a person, a face, a nail-wound in a hand. God chooses to be known in preposterously "easy" ways so that all of us can be brought into relationship with the Mystery of Mysteries... who also loves us.
What a beautiful, and surprising, truth.
Lord God, help us to know you--not by our studying, memorizing, or dissecting you, but as you come to us in Jesus, our crucified Lord.
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