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God of glory,
touch our lips with the fire of your Spirit,
that we with all creation
may rejoice to sing your praise;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

Seeing God I John 3:1-3; Matthew 5:1-12

Introduction
When I was in the 6th form (years 12 & 13 in modern schools) my school chaplain, David Sharp, published a book called No Stained Glass Window Saints. It was a book about what the first Christians might really have been like as they tried to follow Christ. They were really human, striving to be good, not the holy-looking type of saint with a halo that you see in beautiful stained glass windows. As we observe All Saints Day it will help us if we don’t see an “us” and “them” but see us all together as God’s people. If we think that the “saints” are stained glass types who are a different kind of being to us, then we carry around in ourselves an unhelpful idea of what it means to be holy, to be God’s people. That is not the Bible’s idea of saints at all. In the NT the word translated into English as “saints” just means “holy ones”, or, more helpfully – the ones who are God’s. I would hope that all of us have a desire to belong to God in some way.

No One Has Seen God
I would like to offer for our thoughts today a meditation on the theme of “seeing God”. In the part of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount we know as the Beatitudes he says: blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God (vs8). In the first letter of John he writes: what we know is this: when God is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is (vs2). On this All Saints Day I simply want to suggest that the saints, God’s people, are those who want to see God as he really is. All who have this desire in them are those who are already becoming saints.

Of course, the first response that might arise in us is that God is invisible. Are we not taught that from a very early age? You cannot see God because that is part of what God means. God is everywhere, but you cannot see him. Like the air, we depend on him. Like the wind, we can see evidence of him, when he has an effect on things that we can perceive. But God is invisible. So how can the Bible talk about seeing God?
Pure in heart
Let us look closely at what today’s Bible readings say about seeing God. Jesus said, Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God. Some experts say that the Beatitudes are Jesus’ version of the Ten Commandments. He gave them on a mountain, just as Moses got the Commandments on mount Sinai. But instead of being negative, full of “thou shalt not”, they are positive: “Blessed are those who are meek, merciful, peacemakers..” and so on. Notice also that Jesus says that the blessed are those who are like something rather than what they do or refrain from doing. He is urging certain qualities in a person in order to be blessed: being meek, merciful, peacemaking and so on. So those who are pure in heart are those who show a quality of character – purity of heart. To be pure is not about being innocent, about not being involved with the real world and all its difficulties, but about gradually removing what does not really belong to who were really are. To use an illustration, when our blood is purified by going through the kidneys all the dead cells and sources of disease are removed, leaving clean blood to run around our bodies and carry oxygen and nutrients to the various organs and tissues that keep us alive. So to be pure in heart is a continual process of removing all that does not really belong in order that we may live as God intended.

Seeing God
Jesus said that those whose lives are marked by this process will see God. But how can this process happen? In Christianity a basic truth is that we can never achieve a state of blessedness completely in our own strength – we are first given what we need as a gift of grace. As we receive a gift, we can cultivate it, use it, exercise our spiritual lives in order to make the most of that gift. John says that the gift we are given is that of becoming God’s children. See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God! Then he says, All who have this hope in him purify themselves. It is a matter of receiving a gift and then working with it, making sure that a process continues in us. John also says, a little later in his letter, No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is perfected in us (4:12). The nature of this process is love. In other words, to practice the love of God’s children is to catch a glimpse of God – to be involved in the process of loving which is to begin to see God.

Image of God
One of the things that really influences our progress in the spiritual life is our image of God. This may sound a little strange at first. If God is invisible, and the commandments forbid us to make “graven images” of God, then surely we shouldn’t have any image of God in us. But the truth is that we are all influenced in our spiritual living by the way we think of God. It may be a hard question for some to answer, but what is your image of God? How do you think of God? Where is God for you? What is he like? It is not uncommon for many to be influenced in their attitude to God by the way their own natural fathers have been. For instance, someone who had a father who was difficult to please or was emotionally remote is often unconsciously influenced by that in their spiritual life. They are controlled by the feeling that God is hard to please, is far away, they rarely feel relaxed and accepted, they suffer from guilt working overtime.

Perhaps you can begin by asking yourself where you place God. Many people struggle either because of modern science or psychology with their belief in God when they think of him as above, outside, beyond. For me I find it much more helpful to think of God as deep inside, in the depths of my and every other being – the theological techies’ word for that is “immanent”. Actually, we need a balance: God is both transcendent (beyond) and immanent. No image of God is sufficient, but to acknowledge how we think of or “see” God in our limited way, is to begin to explore our relationship with God – that is to seek purity of heart. As we seek purity of heart we do so in the faith that we shall see God as he really is. That is the true saint!

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