When we are very young, mommies and daddies (and to some extent all adults) seem to have amazing powers. They are big and strong and know everything. They can do fantastic things that are clearly beyond our ability to understand or imagine. They are to be respected, maybe even feared. Obedience to them certainly is the better option for tiny creatures. 

One of the most incredible abilities that parents, especially mommies, have is that mysterious healing kiss. One well-placed kiss and, right away or in just a moment, the hurt fades away and all is better. Sadly, we grow older and the owies that we run into along the way are much, much bigger. Mommy’s kiss just doesn’t have the same healing force anymore.

It’s possible that sometimes, without even realizing it, we might want to believe in a god who can kiss it and make it all better. We hurt so badly, those we care for hurt so badly, our whole broken, bleeding world hurts so badly that we long for a god to magically intervene and set everything right. That god never shows up, like some wizard or superhero, to destroy the evil, and the evildoers, through prodigious deeds of power and might. Spoiler alert!  God will not make it all better.

The God we are given is more like the parent who sits with their child day and night as that child battles some horribly painful, destructive disease. God is with us (Emmanuel), day and night, loving us, comforting us from our many fears. This God will hold our hand and walk with us through this life into fullness of Life.

One of the pervasive images with which we humans clothe God is that of a god that controls each and every moment and movement – a god who usurps the possibility of any freedom on our part. Like a puppeteer, this god toys with us, individually and as a species, throughout our lifetimes and our history, pulling the strings and making us move, dance, stumble, fall – literally jerking us around. No will of our own. This god is intimately, intricately and invasively involved in everything – a divine busybody, a divine bully who hoards the universal remote control that animates all things.

From the perspective of the divinization of human knowledge, this tyrannical god is ridiculous, yet comes in handy. It is a caricature very easily dismissed. Yet it meshes well with the perspective that we are the helpless pawns of a myriad of visible and invisible, purely natural and completely explainable forces. There is no need for a divine being, all is explainable through science – to the free and mature human being of today.

People of faith try to navigate the choppy waters of the narrows between the extremes of, we are totally free and we are completely controlled by forces beyond us. It is true that our freedom is very limited. And it is also true that we are able to say yes and no, to choose, to some degree, how we will live. People who love recognize the element of freedom that makes love possible. Without freedom, love, the free gift of one’s self, is meaningless. It couldn’t exist. Love cannot be programmed or even predicted.

God is Love, as Scriptures tells us. God wants us to be free from all that limits or impedes what is possible for us. God desires that we are free to choose to love, and to know that we are loved – no strings attached.

It seems that we humans have tried to domesticate God for as long as we have recognized something greater than ourselves. After all, a tamed and housebroken god is much easier  to live with. We would prefer to think that God can be trained to obey our simple commands. God can’t! The fact is: God is wild, unpredictable – always coming up with new, surprising and unexpected (according to our way of seeing)  actions.

God cannot be tamed. God doesn’t depend on our care and feeding. And God certainly requires more than to be taken our for a walk, or run, now and then. We cannot put a cute, little red bow on God. Just try to put a leash, or a bit and bridle, on God!

We can’t have it both ways. Either God is Sovereign, or is not God. Either God takes the lead, or we do. We can see how well we’ve done as a species by looking at human history. To the extent that we’ve lived as God desires, the world has been a better place. Whenever we’ve chosen to do it our way, pain, destruction and suffering have increased. Which divine being do we choose? Caged, or free range? I prefer God: who doesn’t fit in a carrier, the front seat of our car, a trailer. or even our whole house. This God, beyond our imagining, has been trying forever to teach us to be wild – wildly loving.

The God of the great Israelite prophets, and the God revealed in and by Jesus, is a God of unexpected (by us) reversals. This God delights in turning our preconceptions and favorite biases on their heads. We like to imagine that those who parade around pretending as if they have it all together are the ones God favors. Not so! We tend to see those with wealth and positions of power as being on top. Not so – according to God (Luke 1:50-53). The Way offered by Jesus is the direct opposite of climbing the ladder of success. If we have God’s love, we don’t need to grasp for the prevailing societal goals.We don’t need to let ourselves be swayed by every new wave. We can find peace and happiness (even joy) by placing ourselves at the service of others (like Jesus kneeling to wash his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper) not trying to climb over each other like a litter of piglets to get ahead (wherever that is).

We human beings are not foreigners to the dynamic of reversal. It seems to have started early in our existence. In the first two chapters of the first book of the Bible, Genesis, is the wonderful teaching story of creation. In Genesis 1:27, there is the amazing statement that God makes us in the divine image and likeness. Believe it or not, when we look at one another, with eyes of love – like God does – we can see God reflected! We can see Goodness, Beauty, Gracefulness. But how quickly do we try to do unto God what God has done to us. We try to remake God according to our own image and likeness. This never goes well.

We too often reduce God to the size of our egos, or to the shape of our fears. We re-imagine God, not out of our sense of wonder or our deepest desires, but out of our shallowest childhood wishes. We try to shove God into conveniently controllable boxes that we construct. We dress God up in our clothing, yet fail to see how ridiculous this god looks – something like stuffing Goliath into an extra small tuxedo. Not a pretty sight!

And how does God respond to our foolishness? Like a wise and loving parent who knows all our silly games of make-believe. Can you imagine a divine smile? A chuckle? At times, a divine tear? God is God – beyond our imaging, beyond our futile attempts at manipulation, beyond the limits of the image and likeness we prefer to project. We don’t need to puff ourselves up all out of proportion. Let God be God.  We don’t need to be.

Do we picture God down on the farm? Out in the field? Tending crops? Kneeling in the dirt? At the beginning of Chapter 15 (verses 1-6) of the Gospel according to John, Jesus places Abba God directly in the field of agriculture. He says, “I am the vine. You are the branches. My Abba is the one who works the vineyard.”

We once took our vacation in Germany, in the valley of the river Moselle. It’s wine country! One of the walking trails along the hillside passes through an expansive vineyard. Every so often there is an informational placard, explaining something about growing grapes to produce quality wine. One of the facts that stays with me is: from Spring until after the harvest, the vinedresser tends the land and each vine about 19 times. Definitely time intensive!

The work that God does with each and every one is prodigious and necessary – working and nourishing the soil in which we are planted, cutting away all that is dead in us, pruning us back to the point where it looks like  nothing viable remains (but there is!), removing what is immature and excessive, so that we can be stronger, more fully alive and abundantly fruitful in the vineyard that is the world. And God never stops. (Good thing!)

You can imagine how painful this is. Probably you’ve experienced it. Maybe you didn’t recognize what was going on at the time. It’s so hard for us to let go of who we think we are, and who we think we should be. We have so many habits that get in the way of what God would prefer for us. We fearfully hang on for dear life to what is more than we require, what is not really life-giving for ourselves and for those with whom we’re connected. The soil we would choose for ourselves often cannot sustain us during all the seasons and in all the weather we will experience throughout our days.

God knows what to leave – what we truly need. The exquisite care with which God works within us is incredible. If we go along with the action of God’s Spirit, how amazing and fine is the wine that flows out from our lives!