Hilton Head Island, SC – July 17, 2016
The Chapel Without Walls
Psalm 22:1-5,19-21; Psalm 23:1-6
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Texts – My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? – Ps. 22:1 The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. – Ps. 23:1
The Proximity of God
Is God close to you, or is He far away? Do you feel His presence with you daily, or does He seem removed from your daily life? What, for you, is the proximity of God?
God is God, whatever we perceive his proximity to us to be, but how distant or close does He seem to us? My supposition is that there are basically three kinds of believers in God with respect to His proximity. In general, people feel that God is always very close, or that He is always very far away, or that sometimes He seems close and at other times He seems far away.
For many long years theologians have used two words to describe God’s proximity. The close God is described by His immanence. The distant God is described by His transcendence.
To understand “immanence,” we need first to be clear on the spelling of that word. It is i-m-m-a-n-e-n-c-e, and it suggests that God is everywhere, and all the same time. It is like the word “omnipresent,” although not exactly that. Further, to say that God is imm-a-nent is not the same as saying that He is imm-i-nent, although the two words are closely related linguistically. If someone or something is imminent, it means they shall very soon appear or it shall happen very soon. Nor is the word describing God e-minent, which means praiseworthy or noteworthy. God is eminent, and for a variety of reasons He may be imminent, but He is always immanent.
However, if we perceive God as being transcendent, it means that we see Him as being eternally distant or far removed from us. I thought of having us sing as one of our hymns “The spacious firmament on high, with all the blue ethereal sky,” but I decided against it, first, because it is less well known than our other two hymns, and second, because “Nearer, my God, to Thee” is both much better known and much more loved by many more people. I have discovered since we have been at The Cypress, as I discovered every other place where I served as a minister, that people prefer to sing only hymns they all know well - - - all seven of those hymns. And anyway, I concluded most of you would rather end the service singing about the immanence of God than about His transcendence.
I chose two Psalms which are purported to have been written by King David to illustrate widely varying views of the proximity of God. And because both were presumably written by David, then David was presumably one of the many believers who sometimes saw God to be close and at other times to be very distant.
Let us look at Psalm 23 first, because it is the best-known of all 150 Psalms, and in its opening verse it depicts the closeness of God in an ever-memorable image: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.” Admittedly, most of us know absolutely nothing about shepherds or sheep, but we surely can imagine that shepherds must stay close to their sheep, and sheep must stay close to their shepherd, or otherwise the sheep will get lost and the shepherd will therefore have no sheep.
What does the shepherd (God) do? “He makes me lie down in green pastures, he leads me beside still waters” (where we can drink without swallowing too much water too quickly so that it goes down our trachea rather than our esophagus), “he restores my soul.” The shepherd, the Lord, God, is here, He is right here, He is forever immanent! Even where there is great danger, we fear no evil, because God is with us, near to us, protecting and guarding and comforting us.
Then there is Psalm 22, which illustrates one of the many wide mood swings of David. By the way, David almost certainly did not write the 22nd Psalm and the next day he sat down and wrote the 23rd Psalm. Centuries after he died, the people who put together the Tanach, the Hebrew Bible, just happened to follow Psalm 22 with Psalm 23. Maybe they thought the second was a good antidote to the first, if Psalm 22 needs an antidote. It begins with these pained and painful words, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Those words were repeated by Jesus as he was dying on the cross. The God to whom David prayed in Psalm 22 was transcendent, not immanent. And He was very transcendent; He was far, far, far off.
Nobody will ever know specifically why David wrote Psalm 22. Whatever was the reason, he was feeling extremely removed from God: “Why art Thou so far from helping me?”
Have you ever felt like that? Has it ever seemed as though God had abandoned you, that He was nowhere to be found? The Good Shepherd was gone! He was the Deus Absconditus, the Hidden God, the God so transcendent He might never again be found!
Half the Psalms are attributed to David. If you read all of the Davidic Psalms, you see the Sweet Singer of Israel bouncing back and forth between images of God as either immanent or transcendent, with proximity so close that David seemed able to reach out and touch God, or with a distance so great as to render the word “proximity” almost meaningless. Part of this may have been due to David’s unique personality and psychology. Many people, I among them, have concluded three thousand years after he died that he must have been bi-polar. It may be an inappropriate analysis, without the benefit of interviewing or listening to the subject himself, but on the basis of what the Bible says about David, it is convincing to me, nonetheless.
On the other hand, David may have been like everyone else: blessed by much good fortune and buffeted by much misfortune, and his sensation of the proximity of God was determined by the one or the other. When your gaping maw is thrown as wide open as you can get it and the dentist is drilling into a tooth which feels as big as a softball which has a cavity as big as a baseball, God doesn’t seem to be present in the dental torture chamber, listening to the charming music of the drill as it rapidly rotates through resisting and assaulted formerly solid oral hardware. Under those circumstances, God has vanished. But if you got for your annual check-up or your semi-annual cleaning and your grinders are judged to be sound for yet another year, God’s in His heaven, which is right where you are, and all’s right with the world - - - until it isn’t, in which case God may have vanished yet again.
Situations affect divine proximity. If everything is going along smoothly, God may seem to be right beside you, deftly brushing aside adversities which otherwise might afflict you. But if afflictions come, especially major ones, God may seem to be beyond the utmost bounds of the ever-expanding universe, so far away that His enormity becomes incomprehensible.
I fled Him, down the nights and down the days,
I fled Him, down the arches of the years,
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
When Francis Thompson wrote The Hound of Heaven, I suspect he had gone through a prolonged period of adversity and/or heartache, and he attributed his troubles directly to God.
Up vistaed hopes I sped,
And shot, precipitated,
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after.
But with unhurrying chase,
And unperturbed pace
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy,
They beat – and a Voice beat
More instant than the Feet ---
“All things betray thee, who betrayest me.”
I used to think that was the whole poem, because that is all of it I have in one of my poetry books. But when I searched it out to use now, I found The Hound of Heaven in another book of poetry, and there are four more full pages. Suffice it to say that what Francis Thompson probably wanted was to put a great deal of distance between himself and the Immanent God, so that God would become the very Transcendent God to him. But God wouldn’t let it happen. Thompson used words and created new words in much the same way as his fellow English poet William (Tyger, tyger, burning bright/ In the forest of the night”) Blake. So the poet, who was an immanent-God person to begin with remained so by God’s relentless quest to corral the fleeing fugitive. Whether our primary perception of God is as immanent or transcendent, God will continue to seek and find us, regardless of our attempts to deflect or escape Him. That is the Gospel, and you can count on it.
I said early on that one of the three groups of believers with respect to the proximity of God are those who sometimes feel God is very close and at other times feel He is very far removed from them That can change from day to day, as it did for David. But among that category of people there are some who go for long periods of time feeling the immanence of God. Then something happens, and for other very long periods of time they may feel God is very distant from their person and from their perception. For example, a loved one dies, and it feels like a tragedy somehow caused by God. Or an illness comes to the individual believer, and again, there is an inescapable thought that God caused it. Perhaps the individual did something he or she knew was very wrong, and for months or years they feared God had deliberately absented Himself from them. He didn’t, of course, because He doesn’t, but that is how they see it.
In those circumstances it may be like that famous piece of writing Footprints in the Sand. The writer tells of walking on the beach, and there are two sets of footprints, one for the writer and one for God. Then, when times get really hard, the writer looks back and sees only one set of footprints. After going for many troubled miles farther down the beach, the writer asks God, “God, when my life was the hardest, I looked back, and You no longer were beside me. There was only one set of footprints in the sand.” And God answers, “O my precious, precious child, when you saw just one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you!”
God never leaves us: never. Whether we perceive Him as being immanent or transcendent, He is always with us, whether or not we are aware of it. But His proximity to us may be determined more by how we perceive Him than by where He actually is, because He is always everywhere. But our own personal theology, and also our psychology, determines His proximity to us.
There is a major factor in the Christian religion which leads multitudes of Christians to imagine God as being very close to them. A Hebrew term expresses one side of that factor: Yeshua ha-Notzri: Jesus the Nazarene. Because Jesus lived at one point in history, he lives forever in the very minds and hearts of Christians of this particular type of Christian. They are “Jesus-Christians” much more than they are “God-Christians.” No reasonable person can deny that Jesus lived in history. Therefore many Jesus-Christians feel Jesus’ presence with them every moment of every day. God is too nebulous and mysterious for many Jesus-Christians, so Jesus becomes the omnipresent God in their lives. Jesus is always with them, always in their God-consciousness.
There may be far more Jesus-Christians than God-Christians; no one could ever authenticate that beyond dispute. For whatever it is worth (which is not much), it is probably evident to anyone listening to me preach for any serious length of time that I am a God-Christian. That doesn’t automatically make me a “transcendent God” Christian, but in fact that is what I am. I have virtually never felt the immanent or the imminent presence of God in my life. I neither apologize for that nor proclaim it; instead I just acknowledge it. And I am sure there are many others like me. It is neither a badge of honor nor a scarlet-letter “H” for heretic; it is just the way it is. And maybe that’s the way it is for some of you too.
A few days ago I heard an amusing but profound story. A couple went to Mexico with their six-year-old daughter on vacation. While there the father was in hopes of visiting a friend he had met in college years before. After the long plane trip to Merida in southern Mexico, the father was anxious to seek out his friend, whom he remembered had lived in a very small village near Merida called Pariditas. His wife was too tired from the flight to go, but the father and his daughter drove out into the countryside to the village. The father told the girl the man’s name was “Hey-soos” Ortega, and that in Spanish Hey-soos means “Jesus.” As you know, many boys in Latino cultures are named Jesus.
When they returned to the hotel in Merida, they found their wife and mother revived. As she came through the door, the daughter exclaimed, “Mom, Mom; you’ll never guess who we saw! Jesus is not dead! He’s alive, and we saw him in Pariditas!”
To “Hey-soos”-Christians, Jesus is immanent in Pariditas and Sao Paulo and Portland and St. Paul and on Hilton Head Island. And to God-Christians, God is transcendent above all those cities and every other city or town or hamlet in the world - - - or the entire expanding universe. Each of us has our own concept of God’s “proximity.” To those who are primarily “heart” Christians, God is probably perceived mainly as being immanent. To those who are “head” Christians, He is probably perceived mainly as being transcendent.
I am not trying to convince anyone that God is either one or the other. Surely He is both, and both at the same time. But depending on who each of us is, we grasp Him in our own particular way.
Here’s the main thing to remember from all this: Either perception, transcendent or immanent, is OK with God. Therefore it should also be OK with all of us.