D - Divinity

James Cathcart July 06, 2023 1 0

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Acts 17: 22-28 (NRSVA)

22 Then Paul stood in front of the Areopagus and said, ‘Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way. 23 For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. 24 The God who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things. 26 From one ancestor he made all nations to inhabit the whole earth, and he allotted the times of their existence and the boundaries of the places where they would live, 27 so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. 28 For “In him we live and move and have our being”; as even some of your own poets have said,

Divinity — in a sense God’s Godness. A way of expressing that we can’t put God in a box, on a shelf, or on a plinth. We are made in the image of God, our humanity comes from God, but God is more than human. If we think that we are controlling God, that God is at our command, that we can limit God, then the thing we are controlling, commanding or limiting is not God. Because God is bigger than that.

The Bible is a beautiful and raw testament to our human relationship with the divine. With what it means for humanity to wrestle with who and what God is. Paul is kind of saying to the Athenians in today’s text, “You kinda get it, but you’re also missing the point, God’s closer than you think.”

God’s graciousness is so big and so vibrant that we say it’s divine, more than human. God’s compassion is like our compassion, we can recognise ourselves in it, but it’s so much more in scope and majesty and effect. We use our limited language and imagery to describe someone who is beyond the limit of language and metaphor.

That doesn’t mean our analogies are pointless for they allow us to get senses, here and there, of the expansiveness of God. We just do well to acknowledge that God is big, really big… divine.

The bigness can be overwhelming but the wondrous thing about our faith is that the divinity at the heart of the universe wants to know us, to be with us, to hear us, to make a place for us.

An infant cries out in expectation that someone will hear them, will recognise them, and acknowledge them as their own.

In God we find a response to our essential human longing — but not one made in our own image or by our own hands. God, in response to our longing, is not a hollow wish that conveniently fills a gap, if so it wouldn’t enrich, challenge and deepen our lives. The spark of our Christianity is the immediacy of God, who as Paul says “is not far from each one of us”, who is like us but different. Not a human echo, but a divine being that inspires us to become more fully who we truly are.

PRAYER:

Dear God

We come, not because you need us

but because you want us

because you love us,

and we love you.

Amen.