A picture of God

Jul 17, 2016
5 min read

Martin Pommerenke

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

The first time I remember seeing a picture of God was on the front cover of a supermarket tabloid.

It’s true.

I was probably about 3 or 4 years old, and I was at the home of my babysitter - her name was Leeda. My dad would drop me off at Leeda’s house, where there were a bunch of other small kids. She’d turn on the TV to daytime game shows, dump out a box full of toys on the floor, and flop down to chain smoke on the couch.

Amongst the newspapers on the floor next to the coffee table was one of those things that you buy in the grocery line, with headlines like “Bat boy born in Milwaukee.” And that sort of thing. You know the type.This paper’s headline, however, was something like, “God’s Face Revealed in Man’s Door.”

And sure enough, there was God’s face, emerging from the parallel grains of a wooden door - a long, wavy face, two knots for eyes, and a dour, ghostly look.

There he was! Creepy God, lookin’ at me! From the front cover of that week’s National Enquirer.

And I screamed when I saw it.

Yes, this was my very first picture of God, and while your experience might not have been as dramatic, perhaps you also have heard a description of God that is frightening or angry.

For me, and maybe for you also, this picture of God can come to mind more quickly in times like we've seen in the last few weeks. Times when it seems like each week, or even each day, we wonder what is falling apart: police officers murdered, racism on the rise, sometimes violent political instability in Europe, and unimaginably horrific terror attacks all around the world.

It makes me wonder if we might begin thinking somehow that God looks like the worst of us.

Today, though, we're offered a different picture of God.

It's a picture of God that we might invite into our hearts to take the place any that are judgmental, or even hateful. A picture of God that answers fear with welcome.

This picture of God comes from the reading we heard today from the Hebrew scriptures, in what’s known as the story of the Three Visitors to Abraham.

The LORD appears to Abraham as three men are suddenly standing near him. When this happens, there is no doubt in Abraham's mind who this is that's come to visit. So Abraham runs towards them and bows to the ground, and says, “My lord,” - singular - imploring him to rest and have something to eat. The text says that "they" - plural - they say yes. So, the Three Visitors kick off their shoes, make themselves comfortable, and have something to eat.

Much has been made in the writings of the church fathers - the earliest bishops and theologians of our faith - about this particular story.

St. Augustine says of Abraham, “He saw three, yet adored one.” St. Justin Martyr writing in the second century says that "the one who was seen by Abraham at the oak of Mamre was God, accompanied by two angels." Later, in the fifth century, Severian says, "Christ appeared to you, O excellent one, escorted by two angels."

So this was a theophany, an appearance of God to a mortal person. And the one whom Abraham adored was said to be the pre-incarnate Son of God himself.

The Church’s understanding of this story expanded. As our faith developed through the centuries, it was Cyril of Alexandra who first said that the Three Visitors were a type - a foreshadowing - of the Most Holy Trinity.

This picture of God we hear today in this Abraham story is a compelling one. One that has come to be depicted in icons of the Orthodox church for centuries, starting most famously with the icon by Andrei Rublev. This icon tradition inspired by the Abraham story continues even to today.

The endurance of this scene and the icons it has inspired in our faith tradition tells us something important. The Church in its early life saw in this Old Testament story a picture of something fundamental about God - that God’s very nature is community, is togetherness, is perfect fellowship and harmony.

So instead of an image of an angry sky-god that condemns us, this reading from Genesis illustrates a picture of the Trinity - a God who sits all around the table and has something to eat with Godself.

This is the God we worship and adore; the God who sits around the table and has something to eat.

And because this is who God is in the deepest parts of Godself, our response as those made in the image of God is to be community for each other.

Being made in the image of this God means that our best selves are those who make community with others. Those outside this place and outside of our own beliefs and comfort zones.

The picture of God we see in this story, and the way we ourselves become a living demonstration of it, is needed even more today, when it may seem to me and you that our country and our world is descending into chaos - no matter what our politics.

This picture of God we see in this scripture, and in the Holy Icons, invites us to to move beyond feelings of anger, fear, or even helplessness. When we are community for each other, the very creator of the universe becomes present to us.

Our doing as God does, living our full identity as being made in the image of God, reminds us that God becomes present in our midst when we are one community, one human family together. Making community means that we are giving testimony to this most holy mystery of the Trinity.

So who is the God who comes to visit you today?

Is God like who I saw in supermarket paper? Is God like, as Christopher said on Facebook this week, “beautiful like a grandmother who never stops spoiling us with cookies”? Does God look to you like an indescribably beautiful white light of love?

Perhaps to these, we might add this other picture of God. Perhaps we we may hold in our hearts the icon of the most holy Trinity - a God who sits around the table and has something to eat. So with this icon in our hearts, let’s gather with all of humanity in love around the table of the world.

This world is waiting and longing for our love, mine and yours. Truly the LORD will visit us when we do.