The Fourth Church Pulpit

IN THE IMAGE OF GOD

September 18, 1994

John M. Buchanan

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A LIGHT IN THE CITY

126 East Chestnut St. Chicago, IL 60611-2094
Phone: 312.787.4570
John M. Buchanan, Pastor

Scripture: James 1:19-27, Mark 9:30-37

“You have made them a little lower than God ... you have given them dominion.”
Psalm 8:5,6

Ina play, That Day Alone, by Pierre Van Passen, Nazi troops have captured a rabbi and in the
process of doing everything they can think of to humiliate him they force him to take off all his

clothes, even his wedding ring. They bend him over a barrel and beat him senseless. Even then
the humiliation continues.

“The brownshirts arranged themselves in a semicircle ... One walked over and with
a pair of scissors cut the left side of Rabbi Warner’s hair away. Then he took hold
of the rabbi’s beard and cut the right side of it away. Then he stepped back. The
troopers laughed and slapped their sides.

“Say something in Hebrew,’ the captain ordered.

“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,’ the rabbi slowly pronounced
in Hebrew. But one of the other officers interrupted him. ‘Were you not preparing
your sermon this morning?’ he asked him.

“Yas,” said the rabbi.

“Well, you can preach it here to us. You’ll never again see your synagogue: we’ve
just burned it. Go ahead, preach the sermon,’ he cried out. ‘All quiet now, every-
body, Jacob is going to preach a sermon to us.’

“Could I have my hat?’ asked the rabbi.
“Gant you preach without your hat?’ the officer asked him.
“Give him his hat!’ he commanded.

“Someone handed the rabbi his hat and he put it on his head. The sight made the
men laugh the more. The man was naked and he was shivering. Then he spoke.

““God created man in his image and likeness,’ he said. ‘That was to have been my
text for the coming Sabbath.” [Van Passen, That Day Alone, p. 311; cited by
Cornelius Plantinga, Not The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, p. 32]

In the image of God. What in the world do we mean by that? We know, I think, what we
don’t mean. We do not mean that God looks like us; that there is a physical reality about God
which is mirrored in human physicality. Our Jewish forebears knew the danger of that kind of
thinking so they banned any physical representation of God; no idols; no pictures. They weren’t
even comfortable with verbal symbols for God, so they never even said the name of God out
‘oud. Michelangelo gave God the body of a strong, mature, potent male and stretched him over

_@ ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. But the moment we use a personal pronoun for God and then
proceed from the pronoun to masculine physicality — or feminine physicality, for that matter —

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we have crossed a line our oldest tradition warns us not to cross, and which having been

crossed, has caused us untold theological controversy. The image of God, whatever that means,
does not mean a body,

Now, what we’ve done is what always happens when we talk about this subject. We’ve
inverted the question. “In the image of God” is a statement about us, not God. “In the image of
God” is the answer to the most important question of all - who are we? What is a human being?
And that, say the scholars, is the most important question in all of history,

A century ago T. H. Huxley said that the most important, and most interesting question, is the
question of our place in nature and relation to the cosmos. [Hall]

Douglas John Hall, one of our brightest and best, echoes the sentiment one hundred years
later: “No question plagues the contemporary spirit so much as (the human) question,” and
cites modern American novelist, Kurt Vonnegut, who with characteristic bluntness and irrever-
ence asks, “What the hell are people for?” He asks, says Hall, for the whole epoch. [See D. J.
Hall, Professing The Faith, p. 233]

What we are for — what we are about, is to image — or reflect God. What an intriguing
thought: our purpose is to represent the reality of God. How shall we do that? Some have sug-

gested by employing our intellects, our logic ... God’s image is our power of reason. Or is it our
freedom?

The Reformation wasn’t too sure it trusted human reason or freedom. Instead, said Martin
Luther, God’s image in us is our ability to trust, to have faith, John Calvin came up with what I
think is the most intriguing notion of all by turning image from a noun into a verb. We image
God insofar as we turn our lives toward God.

Eugene Peterson, a contemporary thinker, says that it’s our imagination, our ability to see that
which is not available to our senses; our creativity is the image of God in us. That is why, by
the way, the church presents a Festival of the Arts annually. Not only because we like music
and sculpture and poetry, but because we believe human creativity is one of the ways God’s
image in us becomes visible.

And that, the idea that we have within us the capacity to imagine and create — to join God in
the project of creation — I believe, is not far from what the Bible itself says about the subject. In
the first story in Scripture God makes human beings, male and female, in God’s image and then
gives them dominion over the project of creation, gives them responsibility for managing the
place ~ a task that will require imagination and creativity, lots of hard work and determination —
and a spiritual commitment to the task, a personal accountability. What we are for, the Bible
says, what the image of God in us means is to be responsible for creation, for one another, for all
our lives. To exercise dominion.

“What are human beings that you are mindful of them, ...” the Psalmist asked.

The answer:

“You made them a little lower than God, crowned them with glory and honor. You
have given them dominion over the works of your hands.”

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Personal Description: “a little lower than God, crowned with glory and honor.” Position
description: “dominion over the works of God’s hands.”

Of course, the tradition also suggests that there are some inherent problems. There is a worm
‘n the apple. Human beings fall from grace, can’t live within the limits and responsibilities of
_reation and start to bungle things badly. It’s not all glory and honor in the Garden of Eden: it’s
lying and cheating and it’s the apathetic refusal to be responsible and before you know it, it’s
expulsion, exile, dislocation, alienation and tragedy, as one brother murders the other. The
tragedy of the Garden of Eden is simply the pathos of human history. In a recent essay in The
Christian Century, Kathleen Norris quipped:

“If Pm okay and you're okay and everyone’s okay, then why is the world most
certainly not okay?”

The Christian tradition has developed a marvelous eloquence over the centuries in describing
human frailty, failure, guilt and sin. So much so, in fact, that it has become a euphemism —a_
bad joke. There is a broad cultural suspicion that it isn’t authentically Christian if it doesn’t

exegete our sexual behavior almost voyeuristically, and the consequent punishment, the grislier
the better.

But there is this “other” word: this positive description of human beings which is there from
the beginning.

{ would argue that our spiritual rebirth and growth and formation begins here, not what’s
wrong with us, but with a sense of our God-given glory and honor, the image of God in us,
reflected in our power and potential and dominion.

Professor Hall writes urgently and eloquently:

“The critical dimension is only one side of the matter. The other... is that as crea-
tures of God, human beings are beings of astonishing promise and beauty who are
by no means forbidden to wonder at and rejoice in their own being...” [Ibid, p. 212]

Jesus did not ask his disciples to be less than they were. He never asked them to live with
less passion and love and joy and hope and commitment. In fact, quite the opposite. He called
them away from routine tasks to heroic discipleship; he invited them to him as children of God,
citizens of God’s Kingdom. He called greatness out of them — each one of them.

There is a wonderfully awkward and embarrassing incident in the 9th chapter of Mark that
underscores the point. It is a serious moment. He has just told them again about the way he
will suffer and die. Instead of listening and pondering, however, they are arguing about who is
the greatest. Jesus’ response is very interesting. He does not say what we think he should, that
disciples shouldn’t even be thinking about personal greatness at a moment like that: that they
should be forgoing any hopes they entertained of glory and success in the process of denying
themselves. It’s an interesting response, actually. “If you want to be first,” he says, “you must
learn to be a servant.” If you seek greatness, you must change, not your aspirations but your def-
inition. It is an important emphasis. Jesus calls his people to be great. God calls human beings

1) dominion — to this responsibility for creation, gives human beings the power, the intelligence
‘and imagination: attributes of God, in order to responsibly manage creation.

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Things go badly for us when we fail to live up to that high expectation: when we forget who
we are, that God’s image is in us, or when someone or something takes it from us. What could
possibly erase the image of God in us? The Nazi troopers tried and failed with Rabbi Warner.
But sometimes there are strong forces that succeed, particularly if they begin early enough.

We have, in the past month, experienced an urban nightmare. An eleven-year-old boy, carry-
ing a handgun, wounds two children and kills another, fourteen-year-old Shavon Dean. A few
days later this eleven-year-old, Robert Sandifer, is hunted down and executed. This is happen-
ing in Chicago, not Rwanda, not China, not Nazi Germany. And what to me is more of a moral
nightmare than the fact that it happened, that is we have accommodated it.

I don’t know what.to do about it — but I know that we are guilty of sin against God’s image in
us and God’s gift of honor and glory and dominion, if somehow we develop the capacity to
shake our head, sigh, take a deep breath, feel grateful that it happens on the South Side and not
here, install another deadbolt on our door and move on. I know that an eleven-year-old boy
with a handgun is a violation of everything we believe about creation, about humankind, about
what life in community means.

Maybe the mayor should ask the whole city to take a month and have a discussion about what
to do about it. Actually I think we do know what to do about it. Everybody who thinks about it
has part of the answer. Robert’s tragedy began when he was bom to a fifteen-year-old single
mother. We know the chances for wholeness and health in that situation are slim. Robert was
abused as a baby, in trouble in school, with police ... so hardened that he thought that being ina
court appointed foster home was “doin time.” The truth is that from the day of his birth, Robert
was told — by his parents, care-givers, the system that didn’t know how to cope with him — that
he didn’t matter, that he was worth little if anything, that he was a disposable object. And he
simply lived that out — in eleven short years.

What to do? Could we not make it an urban priority to prevent fifteen-year-olds from having
babies? ... and if that fails, make it our next priority to see that fifteen-year-olds with babies have
the resources to nurture them to health? ... and if that fails, make it a priority to see that the baby
is not abused? ... and if that fails, find a way to put that baby in a place that is safe instead of
returning babies to abusive parents in the name of someone’s notion of “family”? What to do?
Could we not make certain that a four-year-old is in preschool, in a safe and clean building, and
when he is six, that his school is as good as this marvelous society can provide?“ Can we not
build schools with as much pride as the United Center? And when he is eight that he has
places to go and things to do, What to do? Can we not take the gun out of a little boy’s hand
and out of his neighborhood and out of our life — so that when he gets angry, as little boys do, he
learns to push and shove, but not shoot and kill?

Brent Staples is a writer for the New York Times who has authored a fine book, Parallel Time,
which tells the story of his growing up in the African American community in Chester,
Pennsylvania, on to college and graduate school at the University of Chicago. His book begins
with the account of his return to Chester to identify the body of his baby brother Blake, a
cocaine dealer, who has been murdered. Staples writes out of his own Life experience:

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“The violence that stalks the cities today is a ghostly presence, made of self-
loathing and rage. It haunts the souls of teen-age boys who are fatherless and lost,
so much so that guns and gangs are the only solace. By fourth grade, those boys are
finished at school and have jumped some mental track. By sixteen they are so
angry that they ‘smoke you for staring at them.’” [New York Times, 11/5/93]

In the image of God. In a book that is receiving a lot of attention, The Seven Habits of Highly
Effective People, Stephen R. Covey argues that basic to success in business and in life is a sense
of self based on something other than what others tell us about ourselves. I don’t know what
kind of theological commitments Mr, Covey has, but he does sound like he knows about the
Judeo/Christian notion of the image of God and human responsibility and dominion.

Most of us, he says, come to a conclusion about who we are on the basis of what we think
others say about us — our social mirror and three social maps. We have three basically:

Genetic ~ You can’t help who you are; it’s in your genes; your grandparents did it to
you.

Psychic — Your early home life made you the person you are today; your parents
did it to you.

Environmental — Your boss or your spouse is doing it to you.

Covey says those mirrors are not accurate, but they have a way of becoming self-fulfilling
prophecy.

_ Basic to success, says Covey, is the sense of one’s self as a free and autonomous and valuable
~ human being. It is not far, I think, from what the Bible means by dominion.

Most of us, I think, receive it when someone gives it to us: when someone reminds us by

valuing or respecting or loving us; or by expecting much from us, by depending on us and look-
ing to us to be productive and successful.

Brent Staples, the New York Times writer, looks back on his life and credits people who
would not give up on him: a high school English teacher, a Quaker student worker, a professor
who pushed him to go to college.

That gift: that reminder that human beings have God’s image and thus have dominion, is
given here in our Tutoring Program, when young children from Cabrini-Green sit down with a
volunteer tutor for a few hours every week, and in addition to math and English, learn an even
more important lesson, that they matter, that their lives are not expendable, that someone cares
about them, loves them, in a sense depends on them to become all they can become.

And it happens to you and me when we ponder — or are reminded of — the sheer miracle of
our own lives, and what we have been given, and what God has bestowed on us by way of glory
and honor,

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“How did you survive poverty and discrimination and racism and become so incredibly suc-
cessful?” someone asked the distinguished African American intellectual, philosopher, poet,
Howard Thurman. He answered, “My mama kept telling me I was a child of God and I believed
her.”

Something like that happens to a man or a woman when the reality of God’s love in Jesus
Christ sinks in. We are not disposable. We are worth the life of God’s son. We are not a cosmic
accident. We are created in God’s image. We are not placed here willy-nilly to simply take up
space for seventy or eighty or ninety years and then disappear. We are here to exercise domin-
ion over creation, responsibility for our own lives.

We are not created for a few decades and then discarded on the ash heap of history — none of

us; not little Robert Sandifer, not Shavon Dean, not you or me. We are created with God’s image
in us, with honor and glory and dominion. Amen.

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