The LORD is my Shepherd
The Community of the Moral Agent, and the Glory of the LORD
If the first movement of the Psalm—the “is”— places us before the singularity, the eternality of God which brings past and future to bear upon the present, placing the moral agent always before the singularly present God, the second movement in this phrase is to place us—within time—before God. The Reformation, at its most rhetorical, played this theme up tremendously, emphasizing that the person stands not before priests or confessions, but before God alone and to God alone they would be responsible.
It is not before an academic or before a friend that we stand, Kierkegaard reminds us, but before the eternal God; there is a qualitative difference, then, with the authority which we are confronted with. Whereas with another creature, there is giving and receiving of reasons, for neither of us are entirely certain of future outcomes, present contingencies, or, to be sure, the past which we appeal to. We offer obedience because of contingencies: because people are (for the moment) in authority over us, or because they are wiser or make a more compelling argument. But none of this makes sense with God, Kierkegaard writes. To say to God “You make a good argument, but we’ll see about next time” is to mistake God for our contemporary, a peer.
To attend to God means ultimately to distance oneself from the judgments of others, and indeed, from the relatively wisdom from others on all things theological. But the risks here are two-fold. First, my judgments, not about God, but about what it means for me to follow through on what I have heard, are fallible. There is no sense in which my conscience is, or was ever meant to be, absolute. The risk that this approach runs, as Bonhoeffer argues, is that it ultimately divides the individual hearer from all of creation, all of time, and all other creatures by necessity. If we hear God in such a stripped down kind of way, then our division from others is not simply desirable, but absolutely required for us to attend to God as we should.
Is this what it means to listen to the LORD morally? I’m with Bonhoeffer on this. There is no equalizing the terms of moral argument, between God and creatures. But, as we’ll talk about next time, the only God there is is one who took and flesh and walked among us, and this qualification makes all the difference in terms of how we read the presence of the LORD. And as such, our seeking of the LORD’s wisdom is not something which requires each creature to disavow all other creatures in order to hear the LORD: this is not a zero-sum game.
To hear the LORD well is to hear the LORD, both as the One who is not a creature, but also as the One who has a body: the frail and gathered church. We attend to the alien presence of God not as a buddy, but as our very life, the One who sustains us our creaturely life as the One who took on creatureliness and yet sustained that life from beyond the limits of being a creature. We attend to God, not expected by God to be anything other than creatures, but in that creaturehood persists the very capacity to know the LORD, communicated to and communicating with God.
The moral life begins here—not in division from others, but always and ever knit to other creatures. Moses hears the voice of the LORD within the burning bush, as one who is ensconced within his life in Midian; Abraham takes his whole household with him in search of the Promised Land. There is no place we could ever hear God than from within the complexities of where we start, and it is no problem from the LORD that we do so. For the word of the LORD is knit together the folds of creation which are broken, not to extract up the people of the LORD from creation, but that through them, the light of God might break forth to the nations, refracted in light upon bending light.