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Let us pray.

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God, as we open your word, let us hear what you want us to hear

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so that we might be who you want us to be and do what you want us to do.

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Amen.

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Our second reading is from John, chapter 14, starting with verse 8.

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Let us listen together for God's word to us.

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Philip said to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father and we will be satisfied.

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Jesus said to him, Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me?

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Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

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How can you say show us the Father?

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Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?

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The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own, but the Father who dwells in me does his works.

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Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.

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But if you do not, then believe because of the works themselves.

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This is the word of the Lord.

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Thanks be to God.

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In the early 1990s, the Pulitzer Prize winning author Annie Dillard was speaking at the Orchestra Hall in Chicago.

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As she was speaking, she was smoking a cigarette and walking around the stage.

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At the end of her speech, when it was time for the question and answer period, someone got up and asked her,

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You often mention God in your work. How can someone as educated and intelligent as you be so certain God exists?

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She shrugged her shoulders with her cigarette in her hand and said, We've met.

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And then she moved right along to the next question.

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Just like that. So simple, so clear, so confident. If only for us in our sense of God's presence, our encounters with God,

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if only it was all so clear, if only we felt such confidence, we often struggle to articulate our experience of God.

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We question it. Was it really God?

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We propose all kinds of alternate explanations, these kinds of experiences that might be experiences of God.

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They just register differently in our mind and in our senses than ordinary experiences causing us to doubt them,

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even if our heart feels sure.

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And so if we're going to have a harder time understanding one or the other of Jesus's natures,

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his human nature or his divine nature, I think where we're going to be tripped up is understanding what it means that he was divine.

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In a twenty twenty two survey, forty three percent of evangelical Christians in the United States agreed with this statement.

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Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.

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Forty three percent of evangelical Christians in the United States agreed with that statement.

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During these weeks of Advent, we're looking at the three gifts that the Magi brought to Jesus.

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And today we're on the second of the three, and that is frankincense.

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Frankincense was one of the most demanded, most expensive spices in the ancient world,

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but it had a special meaning for Israel in the Book of Exodus and one of the explanations of how Israel is to offer

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their sacrifices to God as they're figuring out this new covenant relationship.

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It spells out specifically how frankincense, among other things, is supposed to be used.

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And those who use it in other ways, for instance, as perfume, as was common in the ancient world,

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well, they were to be removed from the covenant family, voted off the island if they used frankincense in the wrong way.

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So the significance of this particular element in Israel's worship has led to the longstanding

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interpretation of this particular gift that it symbolizes the divinity of Jesus.

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So what are we to make then of Jesus as divine?

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I once heard the New Testament scholar NT Wright joke that we often think of it as Jesus going around being God everywhere.

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We sometimes imagine that Jesus has superpowers at His disposal.

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When I was a kid, I loved the movie Ben Hur with Charlton Heston, super long movie.

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It required two VHS tapes.

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And in this movie, if you've seen it before, it takes place at the time of Jesus,

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but Jesus doesn't really factor in as a major character, but He does make a couple of key appearances

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at important moments in the story to drive the plot in important ways.

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But when Jesus shows up, you don't see His face.

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He doesn't speak.

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He just sort of appears and does whatever He needs to do for the movie.

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And then He vanishes again.

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He has a kind of mystique about Him.

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He's aloof.

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He's almost like an angel appearing and then vanishing again.

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These kinds of images of Jesus as a divine being, whether it's the aloofness, the angelic quality,

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or the imagined superpowers that He is supposed to have, these things contrast a little bit too much

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with our imagination of Jesus as a human being, a mortal.

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And we have a hard time squaring that circle.

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It gets us back to our difficulty pinning down our encounters with God.

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Our general sense is that human things are human things and divine things are divine things,

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and if something is human, then it's not divine.

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The two are mutually exclusive.

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And we're not alone in feeling this way.

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Some of the earliest theological challenges that the church had to deal with were about this dual nature of Jesus.

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But even before that, if you look at our passage from John, the disciples themselves are struggling to understand it.

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These men got to spend an enviable amount of time with Jesus,

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and still they don't feel like in Him they have encountered God.

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Philip says to Jesus, Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.

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Now, I have preached on this chapter in John countless times,

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sometimes in a setting like this, but more often actually in funeral services,

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because the first seven verses of John 14 are where Jesus comforts His disciples

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by telling them that where He goes, they will follow, that a place is being prepared,

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and that Jesus Himself is the way and the truth and the life.

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And then I leapfrog over a whole bunch of verses to verse 27, where Jesus says,

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My peace I leave with you, my peace I give you.

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Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.

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It's a wonderful message of comfort, especially at a time of death.

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But I don't think I've ever stopped to think about verse 8,

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where Philip makes this demand of Jesus.

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It's hard to believe that he had the gumption to say this directly to Jesus' face.

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And it makes Jesus mad. I like to imagine Jesus is mad here.

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It seems to come through the words, but the words sort of flatten it all out.

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Jesus says to Philip, Have I been with you all this time?

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And maybe he's pulling out his beautiful movie star hair while he says this.

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Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still don't know me?

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How can you say, Show us the Father?

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Now in Philip's defense, in our own defense, what exactly should we be looking for in Jesus?

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What should we expect to see in Jesus that signals to us the presence of the Almighty God?

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What does divinity look like in a human life?

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Typically, I think we imagine divine attributes that get pasted onto a human frame.

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God is good. God is loving. So of course Jesus is those things, and we know that.

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God is also all-powerful, all-knowing. So those must be attributes that belong to a divine human.

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God is the maker of all things, and not only that, but God sustains all that has been made

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and directs it towards God's purposes.

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If this is who God is, we look for evidence of these things in the human Jesus.

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And yes, of course, we see the miracles that Jesus does,

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but we're probably looking for something more on the order of telling this mountain here

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to throw itself into the sea than we are to providing extra wine at a wedding reception,

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which is impressive, but we still have questions.

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Someone who possessed all of these divine traits you think would just exude power,

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would have an obvious aura of divinity.

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So when we don't see those things that we would expect of a divine incarnation,

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we conclude that Jesus is a great teacher, but he's not God.

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Show us the Father, and then we'll be satisfied. Can we stop wasting time?

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Jesus, no more games, let's cut to the chase. Show us the Father.

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The great 20th century theologian Karl Barth once said,

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You can't speak of God by speaking of humanity in a loud voice.

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And what he means by this is that we can't just take our ideas

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and amplify them to the nth degree and say that that is God.

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For example, humans have some strength, but it's limited.

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So God's strength is unlimited. Humans have some knowledge, but it's limited.

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So God's knowledge must be unlimited. Humans have some goodness, but it's limited.

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So God's goodness must be unlimited. You get the idea.

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We take what we know about humanity and we say it really loud

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and assume that that's the nature of God.

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What this amounts to is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.

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We do get a glimpse of that thing that we are trying to see, but it's a distorted,

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diminished picture of what we're looking at. It doesn't magnify or clarify.

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In fact, it makes it harder to see. It's counterproductive.

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So when we look through the wrong end of the telescope, we keep looking for God,

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but we fail to see clearly.

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Show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.

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But we're not satisfied yet. Jesus hasn't yet shown us God in a really compelling

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or convincing way, so we're still skeptical. We're still holding out for more.

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Theologians have long discussed the idea that God is sometimes hidden.

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Sometimes God feels absent. It's a way of expressing God's mysterious nature,

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and sometimes that feeling that God is distant or inaccessible to us.

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In an earlier age, when Christians reflected on the hiddenness of God,

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it becomes an argument against God's goodness.

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People see that God is not intervening to correct wrongs and say,

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how can a good God not act?

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But nowadays, we draw a different conclusion. When God feels distant, inaccessible,

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or hidden, it's not so much a problem of God's goodness as it has become a problem

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of God's existence. Instead of saying, how can God not act,

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people might be more inclined to say God must not be there at all.

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And this raises the stakes of this question. Our demand of God becomes that much more pressing.

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Don't show us the Father, and we will be satisfied. Don't show us the Father,

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and we're done. We'll go another way.

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And here's where Jesus loses his patience with Philip and with us.

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How can you say that? Have you been with me all of this time,

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and you still don't know me?

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The Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood writes,

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the historic Christian doctrine of the divinity of Christ does not simply mean

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that Jesus is like God. It is far more radical than that.

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It means that God is like Jesus. We've been looking at this backwards.

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We need to turn the telescope around. Instead of starting with our assumptions

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about God and then deciding whether or not we think Jesus exhibits sufficient

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divineness to qualify, we should be starting with Jesus.

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And from there, beginning to discover the nature of God.

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The poet Christian Wyman writes, the revelation we want, or at any rate,

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the revelation we need is not ultimate, but intimate.

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What he means is that we need a revelation of God that is close,

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that is familiar, that is accessible.

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We often assume that if Jesus is divine, there will be telltale signs.

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Of course, the sinless perfection, but also that dispassionate distance

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of the Ben-Hur movie or unbridled power or a piercing gaze that can look deep

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into your soul. We assume that divinity is something that Jesus just wears

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on the outside. And when we don't see these things, we wonder, is he really divine?

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Show us the Father. Give us that ultimate revelation,

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that convincing, compelling revelation once and for all.

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Show us the Father. But what we see instead is a man who stoops to wash feet

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like a slave. We see a man who breaks bread with unsavory characters

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and unchurched outcasts. We see a man who rages at religious corruption

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and who warmly welcomes the children. We see a man who would sooner die

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a shameful death than fail to love or forgive the ones who kill him.

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Right, that's all pretty nice. We know the story of Jesus. That's great.

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He was a good guy. But show us the Father. Do you not believe that I am in the Father

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and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you, I do not speak on my own,

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but the Father who dwells in me does his works. He has been showing us the Father

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all along, revealing God to us in a way that God has never been revealed before.

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This is what it means when we say that Jesus is divine. To borrow the words

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from our affirmation of faith that we'll say together in a moment from Colossians,

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Jesus is the image of the invisible God. It means that if Jesus is a humble servant,

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then God works through humble service. It means that if Jesus spends time with the lost

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and the least, that God dwells with the lost and the least. It means that if Jesus

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rages against empty religion, that God is not to be found in empty religion.

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And it means that if Jesus shows self-giving love, that God is self-giving love.

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God is not hidden. God is not absent. God is found in every act of love,

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in every word of forgiveness, in every moment of grace. Believe Jesus when he says

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that he is in the Father and the Father is in him. But if you don't believe Jesus,

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if you can't take his word for it, then believe because of the works themselves.

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Believe because you've seen the life of Jesus, the image of the invisible God.

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Let us pray.

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God, we have seen and studied the life of Jesus, but not always found you in him.

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Open our eyes to see in his work, in his teaching, in his grace,

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your very nature, your very will, your very presence. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.