The Rev. Frank Logue
King of Peace Episcopal Church
Kingsland, Georgia
July 21-22, 2007

The Image of the Invisible God
Colossians 1:15-28 

I once had a boss who said that he husband had the toughest sales job in the world. I knew he sold advertising for a radio station and so I wasn’t sure what was so hard about that. But she had a point. She said he sold airtime. That’s what they call it. They sell your product some time on the air. Anyone who can sell you air and time can sell you anything.  

She convinced me that selling air and time was funny, whether or not it was difficult. Years later, I find that my job is not so different from sales and to the degree that I have a product, it seems just as ephemeral to some. Airtime is in fact much more solid to some folks than God, who you can not see. God is invisible and yet I spend my time pointing toward that God who can not be seen as an answer to problems that are all too clear.  

But I proclaim God to be invisible from a pulpit with a picture of Jesus on it and in a church that has images of The Last Supper, Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem, and more. So while God is invisible, we also have a lot of family photos to go around. 

This wasn’t always so. In the early days of the faith, some Christians argued whether it was idolatrous to paint pictures of Jesus. After all, the Old Testament scriptures had prohibited making graven images or idols and so Jews had not pictured God. Islam would follow a similar path and picturing Mohammed, much less Allah can still get you in a heap of trouble as last year’s controversy about cartoons in a Danish newspaper proved.  

John of Damascus (676-749) wrote of this problem in the 700s. He asked,  

How depict the invisible? How picture the inconceivable? How give expression to the limitless, the immeasurable, the invisible? How give a form to immensity? How paint immortality? How localise mystery?[1] 

So back in the 8^th century, some people were creating icons, like the one on the front of the pulpit here at King of Peace. Others saw those as idols. But for John, there was an answer as to how to draw God and why we could now do so when it wasn’t permitted in the Old Testament. He said that God himself had provided the form to picture. This is what Paul wrote in today’s reading from Paul’s Letter to the Colossians when he called Jesus, “The image of the invisible God.”  

John of Damascus put it this way in his writings on Holy Images, 

When He who is a pure spirit, without form or limit, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing as God, takes upon Himself the form of a servant in substance and in stature, and a body of flesh, then you may draw His likeness, and show it to anyone willing to contemplate it….

 

Of old, God the incorporeal and uncircumscribed was never depicted. Now, however, when God is seen clothed in flesh, and conversing with men. I make an image of the God whom I see. I do not worship matter, I worship the God of matter, who became matter for my sake, and deigned to inhabit matter, who worked out my salvation through matter. 

For John of Damascus, painting these scenes in the ministry of Jesus was not only permissible, the paintings were instructional and devotional, no different from creating books to be read about Jesus. In either case, you use God-given imagination. He said if we were going to take away images, we should take away books as well for they were all part of language. 

I think it’s an interesting point about language. But other forms of art do influence or vocabularies and our books. When we hear someone read the story of Jesus’ birth, part of how we picture the words “stable” and “manger” are affected by the many paintings we have seen of the Nativity. We know that a manger would have been a quite crude feed box and that stables in Bethlehem were largely caves, yet the wooden box in a barn-like structure is a more common way to conceive of the words. And when we think of The Last Supper, DaVinci’s painting is as much in our minds as a Jewish Passover in an Upper Room in Jerusalem. The words led to the pictures which lead to how we imagine the stories. 

This is why pictures are so helpful. Through images, we can come to enter more fully into the language of Salvation History. The images help us to grasp the God who is beyond images. For Jesus is not contained in the sum total of all the paintings made of him or all the movies made of his life any more than Jesus is contained within the words of the books written about him, including the Bible.  

John of Damascus was right, images are helpful. But the iconoclasts of his day and those who would follow in the Reformation were also right in trying to help people see that God is not contained within the images. In fact, we often need to break the idols, the images, to find the God beyond them. If you have one cherished picture of Jesus, it is just another way of putting God in a box.  

But the instinct to picture him is still helpful. As long as we see that in Jesus’ life and ministry we are seeing the image of the invisible God. What a great gift God gave us in the Incarnation. In becoming flesh in Jesus of Nazareth, we didn’t so much find out what God looks like, as God is no more a Palestinian male than he is any other person. But God took on the flesh of a Palestinian man and lived among us in order to show us love.  

John put it this way in the letter we call First John, 

This is real love. It is not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other. No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us. (I John 4:10-12).  

Real love is that God entered in to human history in human form, sending his Son as a sacrifice for sins and as a pattern for living a godly life. For those, like John, who lived with Jesus, walked alongside him and heard him teach and watched his actions, they had the clearest picture of God possible. This life and ministry of Jesus is what God is like.  

Why couldn’t God be present that way to all people, in all places and every generation? Why couldn’t the image of the invisible God be more broadly available for us to learn from? The best scriptural answer I have is that the image of the invisible God is quite near. In fact, you are surrounded by the image of the invisible God right now. For in Genesis we are told, 

God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. (Genesis 1:27) 

Humans are made in the image of God. We have that divine spark within us. In responding to God, and the quickening of the Holy Spirit within us, we can live into that image imprinted on our very souls. That’s why we sometimes see Jesus in one another. As I quoted from I John earlier, “No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love has been brought to full expression through us.” 

We can bear that image of God to one another. Yes, we will mess up, fall short, get it wrong and all that. But there are moments, and I have seen in many of your lives so I know it is true, there are moments when we do get it right. I think it’s more of getting ourselves out of the way so that God can work through us. But there are times when we show that true godly love and compassion to one another. And through that love, we see the love of God that we can’t see. 

So, yes, I do sort of sell something a about as tangible as airtime. But there is a lot more to it than that. Because if this life of faith didn’t work, then we would have packed up and gone on to something else long ago. But we humans persist in the knowledge and love of God, because God is real. Just as we can’t see the wind, but we see the effects of the wind, in that same way, we do not see God, but we see the effects of God’s love all over the place. We see it most fully in the Word made flesh Jesus. But we see the effects of God love pretty clearly at times in one another. For we are called to be the image of the invisible God and every once in a while we are just that.  

So if you feel like you want to get a look at Jesus, look around this church. Certainly you will find some lovely artistic portrayals of Jesus. We value Christian art at King of Peace and gain some of our vocabulary of faith through the eyes of artists.  

But look harder into one another’s eyes as you share the peace in just a few moments and I think you’ll find that the image of the invisible God is closer than you think. Because someone might just see it shining out from your eyes, as unlikely as that may seem to you. 

Amen.