Thirty-second Sunday of the Year -- November 7, 2004

    Your God is too small,” wrote the Bible scholar J. B. Phillips and titled his book on that subject with those very words -- “Your God is too small.” These days our God is too small, way too small.
What our Lord has to say in today’s Gospel offers a remedy to this shortcoming in our reflective life. Fascinating is it not, that Jesus, in order to counter the argument of the Sadducees, who denied the resurrection of the dead, chose a most remarkable scene from the Old Testament, the scene where Moses, the soon-to-be leader of Israel, comes across a bush in the desert, a burning bush, a small tree that though burning is not consumed? He approaches and hears a voice. In fear and trembling he realizes that he has stumbled across a manifestation of God. And this God speaks -- as He is always desirous of doing with us -- and grants Moses the favor of knowing God’s proper name. “I AM,” Moses, “I AM. That is my name. Go tell the people of Israel that ‘I AM,’ that ‘He Who Is’ has sent you to them.” “Moses,” God is saying, “you’ve done gone and bumped into Being Himself. I am life, I am being. It is my nature to exist. I am who am.”
    For the Sadducees in today’s Gospel, God was not big enough for death. Their idea of God was too small, for they couldn’t contemplate a God who conquers death. The Greeks and Romans of that same time too had an awfully small view of God, so small that they took God and divided Him up into all kinds of gods and goddesses, one to take care of the harvest, another the wine; one to look after health, another wisdom; one god to help in war and another in peace. And so on. Their gods were all very small, simply because the Greeks never had a burning bush experience that would have opened their eyes to catch a glimpse of the most astounding truth of all: that behind the flickering reality of this world is Someone who is the author of all reality, Someone who spoke the worlds into existence, Someone for whom a thousand years are as one day and one day as a thousand years. That is, Being Himself, the Source of all that is, or as St. Thomas Aquinas put it, the God who is the pure act of existing.
    Now I don’t want to get all abstract with you. On the contrary, I would like to be -- for myself as much as for you -- very concrete and practical. And here’s what I mean. We are tempted, especially with our more or less “scientific” mindset, to assume that what we taste, see, touch, hear and smell is what is most real. Or, as some more modern philosophers have said, my own experience of myself, convinces me that at least I am real. But the ancients, the medievals, the whole court of world opinion, all the way up until now have refused to stop there and have gone on to think: as real as I am to myself, as real as the world of things seems to be to me, there is one thing that keeps me from resting in that seeming reality, the reality of myself and the world around me -- none of it lasts. There’s the rub. Not a single thing as it is lasts: no building, no tree, no mountain, no man nor woman. They come into being, they change, and over time they will disappear. We are told that the whole universe follows this very same pattern, that the cosmos itself is winding down.
    What do we make of all of this? Well, people of wisdom, real wisdom, have said that sense everything that we experience in the here-and-now (including ourselves) does not last, then none of this can be the source of being itself. Everything comes and goes, but being remains. And here we are on the outskirts of contemplating the vision of Moses and the burning bush. We have, perhaps, not arrived here in our thinking before, because our god has been more or less on a par with the things that come and go, the things of daily life that we need and want. God, maybe for some of us, has been so closely connected with things, shiny new things, or with the ability to procure ever newer things, that we have plumb forgot to peep around the corner of time and realize that all of it is winding down. Like a novel, like a story, our life is being played out. We are passing through time. Will we stop to observe the burning, yet unconsumed bush? Will we let the words spoken to Moses -- “I am who am” -- echo in our consciousness and like the very outstretched arms of God grab us by the shoulders and shake us until our teeth rattle and say, wake up, wake up! Your God is too small.
    This God is so “big” He is being itself. Not an abstraction, but very much real, personal, alive, apart from and transcendent over all creation and yet absolutely necessary to everything’s staying in existence. And here is the difficult part, at least at first -- this God, who is being, the source of all being, loves with a tenacious and dynamic love what He has brought into existence, especially us. God made us, in fact, to be the response to Him of the whole universe, whose immensity only hints at His infinity. We are to respond to our Creator, not by reducing Him to manageable proportions. That’s called idolatry, the sin that brings down the wrath of God. No, we are to respond by praising God’s greatness and glory, this God who is not small, and who will not let us get away with trying to make Him small. Humanity gives voice to all that God has made, the whole universe, and proclaims that, yes, God is He who is, Being Himself, Life itself and yet intensely personal, loving, judging, demanding and infinitely consoling. Everything, I mean everything, in this world had a beginning, and it will come to an end. You and me included. God alone remains. God alone is being unlimited, life inexhaustible, joy, love, happiness and peace dwelling to perfection in Him. God alone remains.
    But He remains ... for us. “God,” our Savior said, “is not the God of the dead but of the living. All are alive for him.” Don’t try to make or keep Him small. Know that this God of life is not to be trifled with but is to be loved and worshipped and obeyed. Know that the thing that we don’t want to ever think about -- our death, our end in this world -- is not the end for a God who is life, a God who would make us sons and daughters of the resurrection. Dare we hope for this? We can hope only if we let go of small gods, gods we make to serve us, gods too weak to help us when we need them most, when time is running out, when everything for us is passing out of existence. God alone remains. But He remains for us -- there at the end of time, and the beginning, for us, of eternity.