Week 2: June 6 through 13

There seem to be two related units in this week’s poems: a reflection on the hiddenness of God (June 6-10) and a reflection on those who lack faith (June 11-13).

As Christians, our way of knowing God is through Jesus Christ.  Attempts to know God in another way are doomed to failure: clouds and dreams, as described in the poems for June 6 and 7.  Our difficulty, of course, is that we do not have Jesus with us in the flesh, and so our only way of knowing the Savior is through faith.  I call this a difficulty, and I certainly experience it that way: I struggle to believe in something that I cannot see or feel.  But in faith we have access to everything we need, and even participate in God’s life, as described in the poem for June 9:

Thou art the one self-perfect life, and we
Who trust thy life, therein join on to thee,
Taking our part in self-creating light.

And even more fully on June 10:

Thou lay’st it on me, son, to claim thee, sire;
To that which thou hast made me, I aspire;
To thee, the sun, up flames thy kindled fire.
No man presumes in that to which he was born;
Less than the gift to claim, would be the giver to scorn.

If you will forgive the masculine language, this is of universal importance: it is an expression of the truth expressed in John 1:12-13—"But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God.”

God created us to be God’s children—God loves us, and wants us to know that love and participate in that ultimate life.  Luther wrote of a “happy exchange,” in which Christ in the Incarnation took on flesh, took on sin and death and all the poverty and need attendant on being human, and assumed them for himself—while at the same time, and in the same Incarnation, transmitted to humankind the life and blamelessness of God.  When we were baptized, we died and were born again—born to precisely this, and we are not presumptuous in claiming it for ourselves.

But how to live that out—when we are still human, still frail, still sinful?  That is the great question of the Christian life, but also a question not to worry about overmuch: Christ has done what is necessary for us.

I was, to be honest, a little disappointed with the poems for June 12 and 13, regarding those who don’t believe in God.  Smugness and contempt are a temptation whenever we speak of those with whom we disagree, and I fear it’s a temptation that MacDonald succumbed to here.  But I thought one turn of phrase in particular was interesting: “Nothing they could know, could be God.”  I think that’s true for us believers, too.  What if, as Kierkegaard suggested, God were a green bird in the town square?  We could all go out and confirm the existence of such a god.  But what claim could such a God have on us?

We cannot know God.  And yet, God has sent his Son into the world in order that we may know God.  Though God is unknowable, yet we know God—through Jesus Christ, whom we receive in Word and Sacrament.

Next week: Poems for June 14-20.  Doubts, and God’s presence in the midst of our doubts.  Goads to belief and understanding.  Hunger to know God.