John 1: 1, 2, 16,18; Ephesians 1:5

Getting to know God

Our youngest son Andrew had a friend from Ghana named Kofi.  Kofi’s parents were members of Capital Christian Centers and therefore Pentecostal. The mother, a very nice woman, wasn’t too crazy about Presbyterians, because she said that Presbyterians in Ghana (and there are a lot of them) were somewhat elitist in her opinion. But she liked to say and I remember this well:”people need a savior.” She didn’t say it in a way some American evangelicals talk about Jesus as “Lord and Savior,” often setting themselves apart from people who would not publicly say such a thing, but she said it with such compassion for human beings who so often feel overwhelmed and lost.  It didn’t sound mechanical and automatic, separated from the reality of life. It was fully genuine and out of love.

This is what our text in Ephesians is pointing at. Through Jesus the Christ we are adopted by God. This is perhaps the meaning or part of the meaning of having a savior.  In chapter 1 of the Gospel of John we are told of Jesus as the Word Who had made God known.  Jesus the man has made God known.  Friends, how do we know God? We have talked about different ways in which people think God is made known.  God is made known through the One we know as the savior.

I saw the most amazing biography of Marlon Brando by Stevan Riley (“Listen to me, Marlon” the showtime channel). It was built around the tapes of him talking Brando made.  For an almost obsessively private man, this was incredible revealing and enormously insightful.  I don’t know much about Brando other than his sending a Native American to accept his Godfather Academy Award as a way of protesting the treatment of the First Nations people.  I had only seen three of his movies: “On the Waterfront,” a “Street Car named Desire” and “Apocalypse Now.”  I knew he was brilliant and a recalcitrant actor who would drive directors crazy. I also knew he had married a Tahitian and had bought an island there and that his son had killed the boyfriend of his daughter.  The biography did not surprise me where it came to his civil rights activism, although he was quite courageous, or where it came to his constant womanizing and his objectifying of women.  I wasn’t even that surprised that he was a prankster who at the same time was also very serious and not all that humorous.

No the thing that struck me was his honesty, a brutal honesty.  This was a kind of honesty that stings and can make everyone hearing it feel uncomfortable. He didn’t want to make anyone feel good.  I felt I got to know him. He talked about his sensitive, creative mother being an alcoholic who always went off to get drunk rather than take care of him, of his father who was a mean, philandering drunk who used to beat his mother, of the traumatic and failed military school experience. He said how he went from woman to woman because “if you have not known love you don’t know where to find it……” He talked about how acting was lying.  “We all act,” he says “to survive, it is just that actors get paid for it.” So I felt I got to know this mysterious man and saw him no longer as a caricature, but as someone authentic, at least later in life.  But I also saw the desolation, his despair and the lostness.  I was left with a feeling not just of profound discomfort, but with the conclusion that Marlon who once was almost a deity to people , that Marlon the recluse needed a genuine church family and yes, a savior, like all of us.

Friends, maybe getting to know a human being-and we are all mysteries- has something to do with getting to know God.  God introduced patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, leaders like Moses, Judges like Samson and Deborah, Kings like David and Solomon, covenants to bind God and people together, prophets to issue rebukes and proclaim visions of the future.  But people only really tend to learn things through people. This was the stroke of genius on God’s part.  The only way God, the great “I am” could be known to people was through a human.  This brings us back to John.  “No one has seen God,” he says, but Jesus has made God known.  Through Jesus we know what God is like. That is what Christians believe.  Getting to know God is so much harder than getting to know people and that is hard enough as it is already. Brando was right: people act all the time, put up fronts, deny their vulnerability, avoid uncomfortable situations. We act even if we don’t know we act.  “Acting is surviving,” says Brando.

No, friends, getting to know God is harder.  The Bible may be inspired, but many of the words betray the culture and the sensibilities and the knowledge of the people who wrote things down.  How could any of us ever say we know God?  That is so pretentious. But then we have the Gospels that tell of this man Jesus and the amazing things He is capable of and the honest, truthful things He says.  He does not act and does not lie.  That is where we need to go to get to know God.  Thanks be to God.