Seeking God

Homily for Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Easter

Cultural anthropologists know that it is the nature of humanity to seek to know and worship divine beings. The broad range of practices associated with the human quest across time and cultures to comprehend the all-powerful, all wise, and all just reveals that God is indeed larger than our ability to comprehend. Paul addressed the Athenians with this reality. At best we all have only glimpses of God, from which we create our religions. That becomes a problem when we begin to worship our religion and not the God that is in everything and for everything. We can easily go off track and worship something like gold, silver, or even stone images of God fashioned out of our human imaginations.

Thankfully, Jesus gave all of humanity seeking to know God a greater insight into who God is by revealing something of God’s relationship to us. Through his life, death, and resurrection, Jesus brought God closer to humanity in a much more intimate way. This was a huge leap for most people of the time. Religion was based on what people tried to understand from the prophets or what they thought they already knew about God through Old Testament stories. Jesus’s teachings, however, were more about loving relationships between God and humans and humans with each other than they were about laws and religious traditions and temples. Even more challenging, Jesus tells us that we must learn to identify and trust the Spirit that speaks on behalf of Jesus and the Father in seeking and worshiping God.

Jesus did not give us a list of detailed instructions for everything that was going to happen to each of us in every time and place. Rather, he gave us specific principles associated with love, trust, truth, and hope, from which to base our relationships with God and each other. Our faith tradition has taught us that through we must listen to the Spirit of truth revealed to each of us in love, and hope. In this way, the Spirit frees us from an exhaustive and incomplete list of rules, practices, and traditions that are never open to reinterpretation in current times and places. That does not mean we are all left to our own devices. We do best when we identify with religious traditions that value scholarly inquiry into the works of the Spirit, inspired preaching, and a community of believers who study the Word of God with each other. We also do best when we listen to the lived lives of our brothers and sisters undergoing struggle and pain for the voice of the Spirit among us to guide us in ways of love, truth, and hope.