God Cannot Become Present

Invocations have always puzzled me. I value prayer and I would hope that we all would “pray without ceasing” but invocations seem a bit off. Contributing to my unease with invocations is the idea that we give the impression that we “summon” God to the gathering. Maybe this is not what others feel is happening, but many invocations I have heard use phrases like, “we invite you into this place” and “be here, O God.” These prayers are not evil or “bad” they do however hold an implicit theology of where God is.

There is a story in the Bible where a prophet named Elijah is in a weird contest against different prophets of a different deity to rain down fire. These other prophets cut themselves and yell for a long time in order to “invoke” their god. After a while, Elijah jeers them and suggests… well just read how the Contemporary English Version tells it in 1 Kings 18:27:

At noon, Elijah began making fun of them. "Pray louder!" he said. "Baal must be a god. Maybe he's daydreaming or using the toilet or traveling somewhere. Or maybe he's asleep, and you have to wake him up.

This god never shows up. Elijah then prays that God would answer his request to light a fire and the fire is lit.

Elijah knew something that invocations fail to understand.

God cannot become present because God is never absent.

Examine our prayers and listen for the implicit theology. Is this person praying that God would “please, just be present”? Are we aware that God cannot become present - God is presence.

Love You More Than The Things You Lack

When I listen to people who are seeing marriage I hear them discuss all the ways that they love one another. Most of the time the list of things are all the things the other person does or is. Expressions of kindness, generosity, humor, and care are tops on a lot of couples’ lists. It is easy to list off all that we love about our partner, and so it catches people a bit off guard when you ask, “tell me what your partner lacks.”

There is a little fear that comes into the room. Perhaps the assumption is that what one lacks the other fills (I lack attention to detail but my partner is great at details). Maybe the assumption is that if we express the lack then we are prone to see the negatives in our soon to be spouse. It could also be that the couple is acutely aware of the lack in the other and this is the root of all their habitual fighting.

When we are dating people we often find what the other person lacks to be a “deal breaker”. “This person is not educated/funny/tall/handsome/young/old/etc. enough. Loving another person in a covenantal relationship means that we love the other person more than the things they lack.

Loving one more than the things they lack is not uncommon in a marriage, however we tend to overlook this in our love for God.

Many times we are disappointed in the ways that God lacks. God does not talk loud enough. God is not visible enough. God is not real enough. And so, because of the lack we see in God, we do not fall in love with God. We love what God lacks more than God who lacks.

You may be thinking, ‘I thought that God does not lack.” In this case we might be holding onto the idea that God lacks the lack. Because if God lacks, then God is imperfect. And, if God is imperfect the God is not God. See where this takes us? We are saying that if God does not “lack the lack”, then God is not God.

Putting it in a question, do we love the idea of a lack-less God more than an incarnate God in Christ who lacks?

There are many examples in the Bible where God lacks. For instance, God is unable to find Adam and Even in the garden when they hid. God regrets making humankind pre-Noah. God’s mind is changed several times throughout the Biblical stories. God in Jesus lacked in the garden prior to his arrest. God dies (the ultimate lack) on the cross.

Perhaps of all the things that makes God different from humanity is that God does not fear the lack. God is at peace with lack. If God is good with having lack, the question is are we okay with God having lack?

Do we love God more than the things that God lacks?

God Winks and Blinks

Recently I received a letter and the author shared a story. The person described a series of events and then concluded that the sequence of events was what they might call a “God wink”. Some people might encounter the same sequence of events and see no connection, only random and serendipity at play. And maybe that is all that it is, random.

This is where cultural anthropology might be helpful.

Clifford Geertz is a Anthropologist who argues that anyone studying a culture needs to have a “thick description” of that culture. The thick description gives robust descriptions of behaviors with the hopes that the anthropologist might understand the significance of these behaviors. It was described to me that a thick description is being able to tell the difference between a wink and a blink. The movements are the same, but the meaning is different.

While one person might see someone randomly blinking their eyes, the one who has sat with this culture does not see random blinks, but winks of communication.

Photo by Conner Ching on Unsplash

If I can stretch the metaphor just bit more: It takes a long time to develop a thick description of a culture. You have to sit, listen, observe and watch. It takes years of intentional work to learn a new human culture and even then there is still more to discover.

Maybe the actions of the world or in the relayed story are random blinks, I don’t know. What I do know is that I am only now beginning to discern that God winks.