GOD WITH A HUMAN FACE John M, Buchanan
John 1:1-5, 14-13 Broad Street Presbyterian Church
December 18, 1977 Columbus, Ohio

The issue is simple. It is put, in all its simplicity and profundity, in a
vignette which is told about the late Paul Tillich, Tillich was one of the two or
three theological giants of our generation, His definition of faith, which has
become quite popular, was "ultimate concern", The story, then, is told of an old
man with whom Tillich was conversing, "What is your ultimate concern?" the professor
asked, And the man replied, "Whether the ultimate is concerned about me," The
issue is simple, and that is it,

There are easier things to deal with on Christmas Sunday, I suppose, The
agenda, after all is quite full: there are parties to attend, cookies to bake, gifts
to purchase, trees to decorate, families will be gathering and the several days
ahead will be busier and happier than any others, But beneath it all, just under
the surface, is the most profound question - the question of God. Not, if you please,
the question of His existence, Atheism is not the issue and never has been, After
all there really aren't many of them, Madalyn Murray O'Hare makes a great deal of
noise to be sure, but her paranoia about being maligned and attacked from the pulpit
is a bit exaggerated, Mostly, from the pulpits I know at least, she is ignored,
Most people continue to believe in the existence of a supreme being, The question
is "what kind?"

It is not an easy question to talk about today, Traditional concepts, tradi-
tional ways of thinking about God are no longer convincing. Thoughtful people don't
envision God on a throne up in the sky any longer. We may still pray for rain in
the midst of a drought and thank God when it finally comes, But there is a certain
"tongue-in-cheekiness" about it all, Meteorologists know very well why it does not
rain. And we all know that while it won't hurt anything to pray, our time is better
spent building bigger reservoirs. But beyond the difficulty for belief created by
the scientific sophistication of our age, we have real problems seeing the evidence
of God's presence and His activity in the world around us, Once again the simple
concepts of the past don't help, What kind of an omnipotent God would allow or
cause a DC-3 to crash into an Indiana cornfield last week: or a young man to die
of a heart attack, or a little child to contract leukemia? George Arthur Buttrick
had a little fun with his fundamentalist brothers down in Louisville at the time of
the Tornado in 1975, He wrote, "A group of preachers said in a public statement
that it was God's judgment on our sins, Unhappily for those preachers the storm
missed the saloons and brothels and hit the Baptist Seminary." (The Meaning of
These Things, Mann: Miracle on Main Street, p.67).

The existence of evil and tragedy and suffering in the world challenge the
veracity of a simple-minded theology. The son of the South Side woman who was killed
earlier this fall in a robbery attempt on her neighborhood store was asked by a
reporter how he felt, There was no way to make sme kind of moral sense out of what
happened to her. Her son said, “the world's a rotten place,"

Every theologian worth his salt has dealt with the issue in the period which
has elapsed since World War II. Rabbi Richard Reubenstein in a vock, After
Auschwitz, announced, understandably, that it no longer makes sense to think about
a God whose will and presence may be scen in histery. Frederick Buchner, in a
brand new book writes: "The world ides God from us, or we hide ourselves from
God, or for reasons of his own God hides himself from us, but however you account
for it, he is often more conspicuous by his absence than by his presence,"
(Telling the Truth, p,42-3).

~ 2 -

As a result one of two things ordinarily happens to us and our theology: we
either go off helter-skelter on a frantic search for an answer, or we Lower cur
sights and settle for a God so safely abstract that His existence is merely
academic, Proposed answers are coming at us so fast today the individual has to
be a speed reader simply to know their names: Transcendental Meditation, Zen, Yoga,
Transactional Analysis, Scientology, Astrology, Group Therapy, Gestait, even
jogging, At the level of the fad our culture has become a veritable supermarket of
theological alternatives to the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Or ~- we settle for the safety of abstraction, Karl Barth wrote, "..,when we
pronounce or hear the word 'God' we think of the highest, the deepest, the absolute,
the ultimate force,,.We are in constant temptation to think of some abstraction,"
(Deliverance to the Captives, p.111)}.

I thought about Star Wars when IT read that, One of the best motion pictures
of the year, Star Wars is a space fantasy which provides the staging for the
eternal conflict between good and evil, Behind and on the side of the "good guys"
in Star Wars is something called "The Force", "The force be with you", they say to
one another; which while similar to a traditional Christian statement such as "God
be with you" or "God speed", is vague enough to be palatable.

We live in a time which has made believing in God difficult, The individual
must cope with the abundance of alternatives clamoring for attention and the very
real temptation of abstraction, And that, beneath tinsel, tree and wreath, is what
is on the agenda at the time when we propose to say something distinctly Christian
about the birth in Bethichen.

Et ig an occasion, I believe, for rediscovering our roots, When we look to
our history we may be surprised, From the time men and women could think, speak
and write, they have thought, spoken and written about God, The intellectual
history of the human race is the story of people drawing pictures, dancing dances,
writing philosophies to deal with the ultimate matters of death and birth, good and
evil, The results are magnificent art but theological silence. It is within the
history of a remote group of semite tribes that people heard a voice: God was
addressed: God became a "thou" for Israel, Professor Hans Kung writes: “From the
first to the last page of the Bible there is talk not only about God, but constantly
also to and with Ged, praising and complaining, begging and protesting." (On
Being a Christian, p,304},

Qur roots are radical, Unlike everybody else's favorite diety, the God of
Esrael is not confined to splendid isolation in the far reaches of the universe, or
the depths of the human spirit, or Mt. Olympus, or even Heaven, The God of Israel
mixes it up with His people, hears their erying, lobbies on their behaif, leads them
through a wilderness, weeps when they are disobedient, punishes them and then loves
them back into their covenant with Him, Again, Professor Kung: "He is not apathetic,
unfeeling, impassive, but a sympathetic, compassionate God, In brief, He is God
with a human face." (Ibid, p.308).

In the fullness of time, this God, perfectly consistent with His history of
involvement with His people, came among them again - by becoming one of them!
Christmas celebrates that - the incarnation, the ‘enfleshing" of God, Matthew and
Luke tell the story of a birth and give us something with which we are comfortable,

-3-

But the New Testament's resident philosopher, John, approaches differently, While
Luke is reaching for our heart, John is reaching for our mind, “In the beginning
was the Word," he wrote, ' and the Word was with God and the Word was God," And
then incredibly, radically, awesomely, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us,"
There are two words translated "flesh" in the New Testament, One of them means
flesh as opposed to spirit and is a very broad word: "humankind" would be an apt
rendering, The other word ordinarily means "skin" - good old epidermis. The
philosopher - evangelist chose this word, which is to say that God not only makes
common cause with humanity, identifying with the human race, He actually gets in
our skin, becomes one of us in our individual humanness, That remains the basic

and radical claim of the Gospel, That is why we have something to shout about
this week,

It is not always a comfortable idea because it isn't at all abstract, When
Christians talk about God, post Christmas, we're not talking philosophical concepts,
but a man, a life like ours, The Christ of the New Testament is fully human, accused
by His contemporaries of drinking too much wine and eating too much food. He got
tired, angry, laughed and wept and He died as every human being must dié, In Him -
not just His birth story - but His Life and death and resurrection we see the very
face of God,

He taught those around Him that the best word for God was a very human word -
"father", He uscd it constantly, and on occasion made it even more intimate by
invoking the Hebrew household term - "abba", the best translation of which is
"Daddy", That's how human the face of God is,

The Gospel of Christmas suppests that it proclaims a God as personal as a
father and as intimate as the birth of a baby. The important ideas at Christmas
are God's love and His intimacy and His dependability and also His vulnerability.
There is something about the haman constitution that understands that intuitively,
Parents Love in a way that becomes more vulnerable the more they love, Parents
don't exercise omnipotence over the lives of their children, In fact, the very
essence of parenting is to leve enough to let go: to love and then grant freedom
which always means risk and danger. Wo parent wants a child to get hurt: every
parent knows the exquisite pain of watching a little one toddle off to school - out
into the world when accidents happen and people hurt one another, Every parent
knows the painful paradox of wishing desperately to protect a Little one from that
and yet knowing that to love fully is precisely to grant the freedom im which it
might, and probably will, happen. Every parent knows the necessity of patient
love which holds its tongue and waits and hopes and prays and then loves some more,
Every parent knows the task of simply "being there’ when needed, the blessed
presence to which the child may return any time,

The birth of Jesus in Bethlehem proclaims a God like that: a God who makes no
guarantees about our destiny, our well being, even our safety, not because He is
powerless, but precisely because He loves us so much: a God who does not give us
ansWers to every question, but gives Himself and stands with us as we struggle for
the answers, Christmas celebrates a God with a human face,

-4-

Whether we acknowledge it or not our ultimate concern is whether the ultimate
is concerned about us, In the most beloved account of the nativity an angel
announces the birth in Bethlehem to a group of shepherds. In terms of what we
know about public relations it was a curious way to announce the birth to the whole
world, But the account, on second look, is not global, but personal, The birth
of Jesus Christ comes at us as individuals: "to YOU" it reads: not to humanity in
the abstract, not to the whole human race, but to “you - is born this day" - which
means you and me,

The Gospel of Christmas is good news because it addresses us where we are
most human: at the point of our highest joy, fondest hopes, greatest loves and
deepest hurts, A young widow wrote the Advent Meditation in last week's Christian
Century, a high-powered theological journal not given to sentiment, She wrote
about how it was when her husband died unexpectedly, how she survived somehow, how
the questions came” "Why? Why? Why?'' Listen to her testimony: it is the Gospel.

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth,"

"The woman believes that this mystery holds the answer, Because the manger
led to the cross and an empty tomb, all of life is forever changed, Because the
sweet little Jesus boy of the carols became the Lord of life, God can be trusted to
Meet our needs, no matter what they are,

"Some say to the woman, ‘This first Christmas without your husband will be
hard for you,’ Probably it will be, but without Christmas, her life would be
impossible," (The Christian Century, December 14, 1977, p,1L57).

So let us celebrate, Let us come once again to the feast, Our God is a God
with a human face,

"Rehold, I bring you news of a great joy...to you is born this day.,..a Savior,
who is Christ the Lord,"
Amen,

Father, we come again: with ail the customs that are dear to us, Bless our
celebrating: bless our reunions and happiness: bless our poignant memories: and
in and through it all help us to hear again the tidings of Your love, Through
Jesus Christ our Lord,

Amen,