A thoughtful post on the blog Liberation Lutheran Theology, tells the delicate story of the Lutheran author’s yoga teacher introducing her to the Gods and Goddesses of her Hindu faith in their shrines in a space adjacent the place of yoga practice. The post goes on to explore how its author might introduce “the God I worship” to someone from another culture, someone as unfamiliar with Christianity in the cultural setting of 21st Century America as she with Hinduism. The author concludes: “If I said, ‘Come meet my God,’ where would we go? To my church? Perhaps. To some spot in nature? Perhaps. To the downtown church, when my suburban church brings dinner to the homeless and stays for chapel? I'd probably start with that option and work out from there.”
I think her’s is a fine starting point, one at which many of us who might consider ourselves “thoughtful, progressive mainline-Protestants” begin. But, as I too consider this most thought provoking question—how I might introduce the God who invites me, and us all, into deeper and more intimate relationship with each passing day, to one who is completely estranged from him —I think I might chose another starting point. I think it might be a good introduction to have the person join me as I sit with family members of patients who are dying doing not much of anything but sharing in their sorrow and their grief. Or have them present as I struggle to hold the holy words a young woman uses to describe her experiences of sexual abuse for the first time to another living soul. Or even bring them along to a group therapy session where I sit and wait and pray on Something bigger than myself to once again weave sacred strands into a compassionate container for the holding of the shattered fragments of the broken lives gathered there in search of hope.
The God I would introduce them to meets me in the Christ event, in the broken lives of people and in the brokenness of my own life. This is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15). Borrowing from Moltmann (The Crucified God), “this is God, and God is like this” I would say; the suffering, betrayed, abandoned, convicted God; never more glorious and powerful and divine than he is in his humiliation, self-surrender, helplessness, at the most dehumanizing moments of his humanity. This is my God crucified hanging there, God on the cross, the risen Christ. Here is the depth of the love of his entire being for us, come closer to us than we come even to ourselves.Here is the love which changed the history of the world and here is the love which can change our personal history too, if we would only accept the invitation.
How would you introduce "your God"? Amen.
