Today we prepare to welcome the newest member of the Church of God, little baby Abigail we do so recalling not just the voice of John calling in the wilderness, and not just the baptism of Jesus Christ himself, but also the movement of God throughout creation or what we might refer to as human history.  And we read of that in Genesis One, Chapter One with the opening statement:  In the beginning ….

And that got me thinking a little bit about the mystery of our transcendent God – God who is of such great mystery and so far beyond our human comprehension that we are unable in our human limitations to truly conceive of who God is.  I distinguish that very carefully from the same God I usually preach about who is in us and with us, especially in the intimate encounter with the person of Jesus Christ.  And that’s because there’s more than one way to experience or understand God, limited though we are.  And so with the Genesis reading coming to us today in the lectionary, I couldn’t resist going there – just a bit. 

There are a couple of ways of thinking of God, generally speaking.  One is by descriptive terms and one is by feeling or experiential statements.  Both are valid.  Theologians have a habit of using descriptive words to describe who God is, or to help us develop a sense about God’s character.  We see that in doctrinal statements, we see it in prayer, we understand it from scripture and we sing it in the words of our hymns and canticles.  In fact, any time we have a conversation about God, or our faith, we are doing theology.  – It is one of the ways our faith seeks understanding.  If we were to write down for instance, on a chalkboard, all the words we might use to describe God, we would eventually start to repeat ourselves using synonyms, and eventually we would start to get frustrated by the awareness that our language simply is not able to capture all that God is.  If we try to figure out all the logical conclusions to what we read or feel we understand, we can find ourselves throwing our hands up in frustration because we simply cannot figure it all out.

Then there’s another kind of language that the human race uses, that’s quite universal, and that’s math and science.  At Regis College, which is a wonderful Jesuit college, and where I did some of my training, I remember one of our professors telling us that “mathemeticians made the best theologians.”  And that’s because there is a particular kind of logic that can bring one to an “ah ha” moment – or if the thinking doesn’t come to some kind of a logical conclusion, it shows itself to be flawed – and that somehow reveals something about God.  Believe it or not, that can translate into really good pastoral relationships.   If we listen to secular scientists talk about the big bang theory using whatever models of quantum physics they have to explain the universe – even they concede that what is behind that – what philosophers call the first cause or the first mover - is beyond even their ability to comprehend and interpret – and they recognize that, not always necessarily as a statement of faith, but as a statement of mystery.   After centuries of debate, science and theology are no longer at an impasse.  They have caught up with each other.   And there’s a reason for that.  Science, language and theology for all its brilliance, have a common meeting ground in that they are still limited human activities. 

Now, none of this is particularly earth shattering, and by about now I suspect that you are wondering where I am going with it.  Well, I haven’t gone anywhere yet – we’re still on Genesis.  And I take us back to my opening statement where I said we have two ways of looking at God.  Descriptive and experiential.  Science and language are the descriptive pieces.  And they seek to explain “outwardly” something about God and give us some structure to hold on to.

The experiential piece speaks to our interior experience of God.  Feelings that like God, cannot always be captured in language, and can certainly not be captured in science.  This is our spiritual side.  This is where we start to encounter – sometimes with some resistance, who we truly are, and who God truly is to us – especially to us.  If you have ever struggled to describe how you are feeling, especially in relation to how you are experiencing God, you will know what I’m talking about.  Words simply don’t do it. 

Genesis tells us, that in the beginning, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.  Another way of understanding the wind of God, is the breath of God, or the spirit of God hovering over the primordial waters.  This is not a statement of God creating something from nothing.  This is God, creating order out of chaos.  This is God, present and in control – separating the waters, relegating the darkness to night, rather than banishing it, having mastery over day and night, naming it and declaring it good.  In the Hebrew cosmology, creation is effortless, peaceful and good which you can see brings us back to the descriptive language.

But for our purposes today, I draw your attention to the breath of God or the spirit of God as that which is life giving.  Certainly as Christians, we recognize that all life comes from God and that where there is breath there is life.  That’s the obvious part.  But in baptism, we really are born into a new and different kind of life – with another heartbeat if you will.  And like the primordial waters over which the breath of God hovered, so too over the baptismal waters is the life giving breath of God present. 

We read also today about John baptizing people with water, for the forgiveness of sins.  But when Jesus is baptized, and the sky opens up, and the spirit descends on him like a dove, we do well to know that this represents a new kind of communication between God and humanity.   And that comes to us through our interior feelings and promptings – for this is where god speaks to us.  It is one in which that heartbeat in our life journey if we pay enough attention to it, will move in a greater rhythm with that of Christ.  This is what it means to be spirit filled.  It won’t always be easy.  It shouldn’t always be easy.  We can take heart that sometimes, even being spirit filled, we will encounter like Christ did, desert times – moments when we are swept away as if by that same wind, that same breath – into areas we would rather not go.   Perhaps these are among the pivotal times when we must be satisfied to sustain ourselves on the meager diet of descriptive words.  And so we journey forth, in the fullness of a presence of God who is both known and unknown to us, trusting that we will all encounter at different points of our life, a variety of landscapes along the way, and in that process learning for ourselves that God is ultimately present with us, and we are present with God.

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