The One in Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Sixth Sunday of Easter, May 14, 2023, by the Rev. Holly Huff.

In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.

As human beings created in the image of God and called good, union with God is something to be discovered, not something to be acquired. Union with God is discovered, not acquired because God is already the ground and source of our being, we have never been separated, and so the spiritual life is a journey into deeper flesh-and-bone understanding of that union. Through spiritual practices that teach us to surrender our deeply imbedded resistances to our loving, trustworthy God, the things that block and cover over our essential bedrock union with God start to fall away, and over the course of a life we see more and more the shining realization of that union with God, the revelation or uncovering of what has always been the truest truth of who we are.

So union with God is something that we discover, not something we acquire. Paul says as much to the Athenians in our reading from the Acts of the Apostles today. “The God who made the world and everything in it… himself gives to all mortals life and breath and all things.” All beings were made by God — called into existence by God and called to return to God. This longing for our soul’s homeland is in us—we search and seek and in Paul’s words “perhaps grope for him and find him—though indeed he is not far from each one of us. For ‘In him we live and move and have our being’; as even some of your own poets have said, ‘For we too are his offspring.’”

Indeed God is not far from each one of us. God is the source of our life, not just in some before-time creation but the source of our life sustaining us moment by moment, breath by breath. The rise and fall of our lungs, spirit-filled, evidences this radical nearness of the God who made us by love and for love. Indeed not far from each one of us is a dry Pauline understatement—we are talking about the God in whom we live and move and have our being! Can you hear this? Our being is happening in God’s being. The fact that we live at all unites us to God, roots us in the infinite divine love that made all things. There is nothing to achieve or accomplish by our prayer or in our spiritual life but to let all the illusions that cover over this rootedness fall away, let them dissipate, let them wisp away.

These illusions of separation are rather like inversion haze, which accumulates and hangs low and covers over the beautiful Wasatch, wiping them from the landscape and making it hard to breathe. And discovering our essential bedrock no-one-can-separate-you-from-love-of-Christ union with God is like the relief when the rain finally comes to knock the smog out of the air and reveal the mountains: still, striking, steady through it all, whether visible or invisible. Union with God is not acquired but discovered, as something already given to us.

The anonymous 14th century author of The Cloud of Unknowing puts it this way in the companion volume on prayer, The Book of Privy Counseling: “God is your being, and what you are, you are in God.” You are not the sum total of God’s being, but “God is your being, and what you are, you are in God.” Or St. Augustine: “Lord, you are closer to me than I am to myself.” Paul Tillich, following Paul the Apostle, calls God the ground of being, being itself. The God of Moses is revealed at the Burning Bush as the one who is, Being with a capital B, the Great I AM. We live and move and have our being in God’s being. Each of our lives, our own I AMs, participate in the Great I AM. Our being in God’s being: you in me and I in you. The fact that we exist at all, that we have life and breath is given to us in each moment from the source of life and breath, the ground of being to which we are always united whether we know it or not, the one who “holds our souls in life.”

Union with God can’t be acquired or achieved, only discovered and accepted with open hands. Our being in God’s being, you in me and I in you, means that in every circumstance no matter how hazy there is a bedrock connection to the source of life, a blazing bush joy of being that the smog can’t choke.

We usually try to make it harder than it is. Paul warns the Athenians not to approach God as though God needed anything from them! The work of prayer is not our work but God’s work in us. It’s the work of divine love gently loosening everything that holds us bound, teaching us to let our I AM rest in the Great I AM, to find our being nestled in God’s being. Abide in my love. I in you and you in me. This is an incredibly gracious teaching, an easy yoke. It’s all been done for us. Just because we live, our being already participates in God’s being. Our part is to let love uncover and reveal that we already live and move and have our being in God, nothing to earn or acquire.

So our part is to offer ourselves, to say yes, like Mary, to show up and make some space for God to do God’s work. Make some space for God to settle us and root us in that bedrock union which we discover has been there all along. All the spiritual practices of Christian discipleship and each aspect of the Way of Love are ways of letting God show us this shining reality. Each of them call us to deep rest, letting our being rest in God’s being.

Michelle Doherty and I led an intro to Centering Prayer workshop over at All Saints this past weekend, and I was noticing once again how absurdly gracious this whole thing is: you don’t have to do anything! 25 people on a Saturday morning gathering in a ring of chairs around the baptismal font, listening to rain tapping the roof and traffic on Foothill and the chirp of cellphones from the other room. It’s radically simple: no methods, no techniques, just resting easy in the God who gives us life and breath and all things. Simply resting in the presence of God, the one in whom we live and move and have our being. Not trying to do anything or make anything happen or make our minds a certain way—as though God needed anything! Learning to do less, to surrender our efforts and resting in God’s being, rest in unconditional belovedness poured into our hearts. Just being. Just offering ourselves to God’s presence, and receiving our life from God’s hands, burbling up like that fountain of everlasting life: “Lord, give us this water always.”

The gift is always being given. Our very being participates in God’s being; Jesus will never leave us orphaned but lives in us; the Spirit of truth abides with us and prays in us, with sighs too deep for words. As the Athenian poets knew, “We too are God’s offspring.” Springing off from God’s own being, springing fresh in each moment frame by frame. “Indeed God is not far from each one of us.” Each one of us is being invited to discover this already-given union with God in our own flesh, in our hearts and minds and experience. To make just a tiny bit of space to simply be, to rest in our own being and there discover, there find uncovered, the gentle background hum of Being itself, radiantly suffusing all things. Resting in God’s being, in whom we live and move and have our being. Our own I AM finding its rest in the great I AM, closer to us than we are to ourselves. I in you and you in me.

Amen.