On the True Image of God

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, on the Eleventh  Sunday after Pentecost, August 24, 2025]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen. 

I would first beg your collective indulgence for a personal message to our new priest-in-charge. I am both honoured and humbled, Mother Samantha, that you have asked me to preach on this, your first Sunday as a priest in Our Lord’s One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. We all pray for every grace from the Holy Spirit to rest upon you and that God grant you and Hyacinth many happy years. I do wish that the times were less trying, yet here we are, and to be truthful every era and epoch presents serious challenges to the faithful. Rest assured, you have our prayers and our support as we confront the issues of today.

My fellow Children of the Living God, one such issue which confronts us all is that of the competing images of God coming from pulpits, television programs, social media posts, blogs, webcasts, and streetcorners. These portray God as a vengeful, spiteful being looking for opportunities to cast lowly humans into an everlasting lake of fire. Some portray God as a benevolent, indulgent, and permissive being Who lets us do whatever we will, and Who watches our worst behaviour in sorrow, but doing little else. Also, some portray God as a supremely indifferent Creator, who is so transcendent we are beneath the notice, God being more interested in playing billiards with star clusters and galaxies than dealing with us. Some portray God as many gods governing various facets of nature and human experience. Some say that there is no God at all. We cannot even lean back on the unified witness of Christians because that witness does not seem to exist. Even among Christians the images of God vary from person to person, every person or group trotting out some passage of Scripture or another to justify that view. How are we to fulfil the promises we made at our baptism if we have no idea to Whom we have made these promises?

I mentioned that each of these competing images come with Scripture passages intended to prove the image offered. Our readings today can fall into that category.[1] Who, in reading the passage from the Epistle to the Hebrews, would not feel at least a small pang of anxiety? The writer stresses that this God is due reverence and awe, and rightly so since next to Him even the Universe is nothing and can be wiped out with a word. However, this picture is incomplete and ignores the rest of the witness of Scripture and even of that Epistle itself.

I ask that we consider both our Old Testament passage from the Prophet Isaiah and the passage from Luke’s Gospel. While God in these passages is invoked as just and righteous, there is also the undercurrent of mercy and forgiveness. Those who preach a transcendent and indifferent God would have us ask why that latter bit. They would ask whether God really need us? Would God be diminished in our unmaking or even if the heavens and earth were no more? Would God suffer if we were left to our own devices? Those who say there is no God would say that neither would apply. Proponents of many gods shrug their shoulders and say some fit the one mould and some the other. I am going to go out on a limb here and say that these opinions really do not matter for the simple reason that God has already called out that lie by entering into relationship with us when He took flesh of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit and walked among us.

So, what about the visions of a vindictive God versus a permissive God? Again, we have Jesus Our Lord as the plumbline to get the right angle, and we turn our attention to a little confrontation in a small synagogue in the Holy Land on a Saturday some two thousand years ago. Is this a tableau confronting the image of a vindictive God all about rules or a permissive God for whom rules do not matter? Or is there something more going on here?

There are two phrases I wish to highlight. The first is “A woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years,”[2] and, “a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years.”[3] Many scholars of this age would write this off as superstitious and unscientific twaddle and go at great, and even insulting, lengths to explain this as a benighted explanation of a hitherto little understood physical condition. In that hubris they miss the point entirely. Whether this lady had scoliosis or a demon is immaterial, what is pertinent is that the woman suffered from an underlying base condition, our forced separation from the source of Light and Life, instigated by none other than the Devil. Our Lord had called Satan “a murderer from the beginning,”[4] but who was the victim? That victim, reinforced here, was us, the crime was enticing us away from God and from His life-giving presence, so that in misery we might wither and die in the darkness.

Near the beginning of His ministry among us, when he preached to His home crowd in Nazareth, Our Lord read a different passage in Isaiah.[5]  He chose to read a passage that would summarize His whole mission: the release from captivity and oppression and blindness.[6]  If we continue reading that passage, the very next line reads, “and the day of vengeance of our God.”[7] Now let us refer back to today’s Gospel, particularly where Our Lord said, “Ought not this woman…be set free from this bondage on the Sabbath day?”[8] Here our Lord linked this individual mercy to His greater mission, “The Day of the Vengeance of Our God,” the release of us all from this very same bondage.

The Scribes and Pharisees and other leaders of that time share a common failure with us. We see vengeance and our very petty old natures assume the notion that every little score we have been keeping God has been keeping on cosmic balance sheets. The vengeance of the Day of the Lord is not about celestial bookkeeping but something deeper. I believe that Our Lord came among us to wreak that vengeance on Holy Friday, Holy Saturday, and Pascha Sunday. This time the Angel of Death was not coming for the first-born of Egypt but the first-born of Sin, Death itself. Every act of mercy Our Lord performed while among us and every act of mercy He commands of us today highlights this. First, He demonstrated the all-encompassing love that is God and how it is poured out upon all of us even in our separation and estrangement from Him. He enacted the vengeance of God upon Death, Corruption, and the Devil by inflicting the Deathless upon Death, by burning out Sin with the Sinless One, by the Incorruptible overriding Corruption, and by showing the powerlessness of the Devil in the face of the Omnipotent and Terrible God we see in today’s Epistle. This is the context in which we must make any reading of Scripture. It is not about blind following of rules and satisfying an angry God, or blowing away useless rules, but the rescue and restoration of us His creation from what would destroy us.

Now today’s passage in Isaiah can shine forth in its full glory. The Sabbath here is a picture of the Kingdom of God, where selfless love triumphs over self-interest. Rather than forced inactivity, the Sabbath is all about a release from bondage, not just bondage to Egypt, not just bondage to self, but bondage to Death and Corruption. Our Lord came not to abolish the Sabbath, but like the rest of the Law to fulfill it. He came among us to effect for us the eternal rest from the great tyranny of Sin and Death. Our mission as the Church is to proclaim and to demonstrate this, both in sharing the Good News, but living it, to bring to as many as possible the realization that God actually LOVES us to the point that He confronted and defeated those things that would destroy us, and He does so for no other reason than that is Who He is. This is no petty, vindictive God, this is no grandly indifferent God, this is a God who has come among us as one of us, descended to the Dead to destroy Death’s hold upon us, and offers us that blessed release and redemption if we dare take it up.

Our Lord demonstrates this daily in the acts of mercy performed by His Church. We His body then must take up this mission, to proclaim release from blindness, captivity, and oppression and then to do whatever we can to reverse or counter any of those signs of our former enslavement. Let us not get caught up in rules for rules’ sake but keep our eye on the reason we have them in the first place, to live more effectively as the redeemed and emancipated Children of the Living God. Let us encourage each other rather than bring each other down, let us remember that Sin and Death no longer have the last word. And let us remember that even when Sin and Death lash out to silence us that Our Lord took their worst and defeated it and promises us that victory as well.

Indifferent or vengeful? No, Our God is supremely invested in us and continues to do so today. We need only to step out of the Shadow and into His Light, leaving behind the path of our former enslavement which would lead to our extinction. Let us walk in His Light together and spread that Good News. Let it be so!

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Is. 58.9b-14, Heb. 12.18-29, Lk. 13.10-17

[2] Lk. 13.11

[3] Lk. 13.16

[4] Jn. 8.44

[5] Lk. 4.18

[6] Is. 61.1-2

[7] Ibid.

[8] Lk. 13.16