What Does God Look Like?

I want to begin today with a simple question: what does God look like? Can you picture God in your head?

There are a couple of stereotypical images that we imagine when we think of God. One of the most prevalent is the “bearded old guy in the sky,” which may actually be a reflection of how powerful and influential Renaissance art has been in giving us ideas about what God looks like. This is the image from, among other paintings, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel, the image in which a bearded Caucasian God stretches out his finger to a lifeless Adam in order to grant him life.

A recent study from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill asked participants to envision the face of God in their minds. But rather than come up with Michelangelo’s stereotypical image, the composite picture of God that emerged from the respondents was a young Caucasian male. Perhaps this study is unsurprising, however, because it shows us that people tend to create God in their own image. Attractive people chose more attractive faces; younger people chose younger faces; Caucasian Americans chose Caucasian faces and African Americans chose African American faces.

Amid the civilizations of the ancient near East, there is certainly a reason that the Jewish religion made a startling and controversial pronouncement about their understanding of God. The second commandment states it clearly and plainly: don’t create an image of God, a picture, a statue, a carving. This is not because the Jewish people thought it was wrong to use art in religious ways or for religious purposes, but because they believed that any picture of God limits God; and God, by definition, is beyond human understanding, beyond human depiction. We can’t make an image of God because we literally can’t. We can’t compress into a finite form an infinite God. Any picture of God is inevitably going to be wrong on some level, because it is incomplete.

And yet the Bible is full of rich imaginative language that depicts God in diverse ways; as a father, and as a mother, and as a ruler, and as a servant; as a breath of wind, and a silent voice, and a refreshing rain, and a strong rock, and as a mother hen, who gathers her chicks under her wings, and in hundreds of other poetic and beautiful ways.

These metaphors for God show that there is an underlying tension in the way that we think about and portray God. On the one hand, we have to be careful not just to create God as a mirror image of ourselves and limit God; but on the other hand, we can only know God through the things of this world, the common material of our daily lives. Both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament embody this tension between transcendence--the idea that God is totally different from us, completely beyond our understanding--and immanence--the idea that God is all around us, near us, present in and through the common and ordinary stuff of life.

So when it comes to an accurate portrayal of God, we can actually say quite a bit. God is both out there and in here--out there, in space and time, in dark matter and black holes and neutrinos, stretching back in immense light years to the Big Bang, to the creation and evolution of the cosmos and of humankind, and yet God is also here, in this room, right now. God shows up everywhere, if we are on the lookout--in our friendships, in our experiences of the natural world, in our failures and successes, in our joys and in our tragedies; even in our academic classes, believe it or not.

As the American poet Walt Whitman put it, God has left God’s imprint and design on the natural world; Whitman called even the grass itself beneath our feet “the handkerchief of the Lord, a scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt.”

Though God is indeed the God of the cosmos, God is also the God of small things, the God of beautiful things, and the God of ordinary things. Don’t imagine that God is just the bearded dude in the sky; God is much, much richer and deeper than that tired and stereotypical picture.

Christianity teaches that, in the Eucharist, God shows us God’s self in and through the most ordinary human creations--bread and wine, two of the oldest products of civilization. In these most ordinary elements, God says, I will come and be present among you. You can taste me, touch me, smell me, drink me, and eat me. I will become food to feed you and wine to gladden your heart. This is why I and several students baked this communion bread today, to remind us that God will show up in the most ordinary ways, not in a stale communion wafer produced hundreds of miles away, but in the flour, molasses, honey, and baking powder in our kitchens; in real bread prepared and baked by real people.

In the Church, communion is called a sacrament; and the technical definition of a sacrament is something visible that communicates the invisible grace of God. I want you to know that besides the extra-ordinary established sacraments of the Church, you, too, are sacraments of God. You, too, each one of you, are God’s chosen and blessed elements. You, too, have the ability to communicate the simple and profound nature of God to others. When we ask what God looks like, we look at the bread and the wine. God looks like food and drink. We also look at each other. God looks like you. God looks like me. Perhaps the second commandment forbidding graven images is meant to remind us of this fact: we are the image of God. We are the face of God for each other.

The Eucharist is meant to be a heavenly banquet, a picture of God’s kingdom in which all people are welcome, all people eat and drink together, in which humanly constructed barriers and walls come tumbling down, in which the refugee and immigrant and outcast come to the table and all are fed, all who hunger and thirst are satisfied.

We open our hands to receive Eucharist to show that we come with no preconceptions, no preconditions, no agendas, no politics, no judgment of others, no hatred, no anger, no envy, no jealousy, no walls, no fences, no barriers, nothing that separates us from God’s unimaginably wide love. We come with nothing and we receive that which has been broken, Christ’s body, Christ’s love, breaking forth from this bread and this wine, entering our broken lives, our broken and needy bodies and enabling us to give what we have received--God, God’s very self--to the world.