Looking Up, Looking Around

“I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?”

In Saving God from Religion, Pastor Robin Meyers refers to Psalm 121, the Psalm assigned for today, to describe what he calls the “verticality” of conventional religion. Hear this reflection from chapter 1:

[Excerpt from pp. 35-6]

Despite our preoccupation with God “above,” however, at the center of our faith is a God who does not linger on high but comes to dwell in our midst as Emmanuel, God with us; the heavenly king stoops down to become an earthly servant. And in this way, he shifts our perspective on the divine: what was up has come down.

So instead of “looking up” to find God, what would it mean to start “looking around”[1]? “As a pastor,” Meyers continues, “I have long asked my congregants to just study their own lives more carefully. Put down your cell phone and look at the real world again. Look long, look hard, look carefully, and then use your heart as well as your eyes.”[2] Later he quotes the mystic Richard Rohr: “Once we know that the entire physical world around us, all of creation, is both the hiding place and the revelation place for God, this world becomes home, safe, enchanted, offering grace to any who look deeply.”[3]

That is not to say there is a cozy certainty in the life of faith. Jesus’ metaphor for the Spirit of God is decidedly this-worldly, nevertheless it implies freedom from containment or control: “The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” As long as God is “up above,” God remains at a safe distance. If, on the other hand, God is “all around” like an early-spring breeze, then God is less predictable yet more immediate, more intimate than we expect.

And God is more vulnerable. “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,” Jesus tells his followers, “so must the Son of Man be lifted up….” Lifting our eyes to the hill called Golgotha, we see the Lord who comes to help lifted on a device of torture and execution. And in his death at the hands of abusive power, he dignifies every victim of violence and degradation, and pierces the heart of every perpetrator. This is how God sends the Son to save us.

How can we grasp it? “You must be born from above,” Jesus tells the seeker Nicodemus. And Nicodemus can be forgiven for misunderstanding, I think. It seems so otherworldly. But what is more earthly and universal than the experience of being born? Jesus pushes that image to its fullest meaning. To be “born from above” is to know God as heavenly Bearer, conceiving, carrying, and giving birth to each and every one of God’s beloved. And our new birth inevitably draws us more closely into communion with Christ and our neighbors here and now.

Friends, the kingdom of God is labor and delivery, and we are infants waiting to open our eyes to a world brimming with beauty and pain. Look around: this is the world that God so loves, the same world God invites us to love, too.

[1]17.

[2]70.

[3]212.