Texas Vacation: Day 6 – The Image of God
On Sunday we attended what was probably the best sermon I’ve ever heard. It was a church in Frisco, Texas, one of those huge modern ones with indoor-stadium seating and armies of greeters and kiosks outside the sanctuary advertising church services. A friendly place filled with friendly people and no sharp edges.
But the sermon was something else entirely. The subject was the significance of being created in God’s image, and it was unsentimental, hard, uncompromising. The pastor spent a lot of time parsing his way through a few verses from Genesis; in particular, he pointed out the difference between being created in the image of God, and being created as the image of god. Both formulations appear in various places in the bible: the former means that we kind of look like God, that we’re sort of flawed, stunted mini-gods; the latter means that we’re manifestations, earthly expressions, of God’s will. Or something like that. I don’t think I totally got it, but I find these kinds of exegeses fascinating, despite the fact that the original text has been redacted and scrambled and transcribed and translated and stretched so many times over the centuries that I can’t imagine how any of the language’s original subtleties could have possibly survived.
So that was cool; not earth-shattering or anything, but cool. I would have walked out of there mildly contented (but still mostly bored) if he hadn’t said this:
Imagine you’re standing in a green meadow, looking out at a brilliant red sun setting over a bright blue ocean. You turn around and study the sunset again, reflected this time in a range of snow-capped mountains. It’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.
But then you smell something unpleasant; and, looking down, see a drunk man lying unconscious at the bottom of a ditch, sprawled in his own vomit.
The question is: in which of these sights — the sunset, the mountains, the drunkard passed out in his own filth — does one find the face of God?
The answer is the drunk, because we are the image of god. The rest is just window dressing.
This just blew me away, and I’m struggling to understand why. I don’t agree with the human-centric view of the universe implicit in this parable: the notion that we are the acme of creation, God’s ultimate achievement. It’s this kind of thinking that’s slowly killing the planet. But there’s something captivating about the notion of looking past simple, uncomplex, postcard beauty and finding something else: something intrinsically beautiful.
Maybe we need to tell ourselves that we’re fashioned in God’s image before we’re able to acknowledge that kind of beauty.
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