It seems only fitting that the day after John Calvin’s 500th birthday I would be preaching on what the Book of Order reminds us is the central theme of the Reformation – the Sovereignty of God. In fact, the dull and often rulebook-like Presbyterian Book of Order is surprisingly eloquent in its expansion on this theme saying that, “Central to this tradition [our tradition] is the affirmation of the majesty, holiness, and providence of God who creates, sustains, rules, and redeems the world in the freedom of sovereign righteousness and love.” But equally as eloquent and much more succinct was my theology professor, Doug Ottati, who always summarized this main tenet of our theology by telling his students that most important thing to remember in anything we try to say about God is: “God is God, and we are not God.”

It seems so simple. God is sovereign, in control, all powerful, almighty, all loving, everywhere and working through everything. This is what religion is all about, isn’t it? At its base impulse, having “religion” means at least acknowledging if not worshipping a power greater than ourselves. Religiously observant people have always claimed there’s someone out there bigger than us – our creator. There’s someone out there more loving than us – our redeemer. There’s someone out there helping us to grow in our own humanity – our sustainer. There aren’t many places where we use the word “sovereign” anymore, but this descriptor certainly indicates to me a kind of separateness and a much higher authority than I possess. God is the radical Other who will always be out of our grasp.

But the problem is that we try pretty hard to get God in our grasp. There’s nothing more seductive to religious people than the lure of certain truth that particular religions claim to have. No matter which perspective we choose for ourselves, we want to be right. We want that almighty, all-powerful God on our side. We want to be in God’s good graces. To that end, we subscribe to the codes and laws of our holy scriptures. We make faith statements, and defend those statements. We talk about what it’s like to walk our personal walk with Jesus. And without a doubt, we are apt to judge others who do things differently. For a multitude of reasons, following the jealous God of the “Ten Commandments” promotes the kind of human anxiety that reduces us to the sum of our best arguments. We are terrified, rightly so, of God who ultimately has the power to choose to either deliver us from evil or punish us for not only our sins but the sins of our parents and grandparents. The powers and principalities of this world, as ominous as they are, are nothing compared to the fear we get from wondering if God is blessing us or cursing us.

That said, it’s a whole lot easier to conceptualize and idolize a god who is within our reach than to worship the Great Mystery. But then, God seemed to know we’d have some trouble on this from the very beginning. The first two commandments clearly recognize the unbounded authority of our Holy God. The first says, “I am the Lord your God, so you shall have no other gods before me.” And secondly, just in case we missed the first point, God does not want us to be seduced into thinking that idols are any kind of substitute for God. God created human beings to be more responsive than that, and God is jealous of our affections shifting anywhere else, especially when it’s to something far lesser than the majesty of God. Perhaps these two laws seem arrogant when compared to the accessibility and unconditional love that comes from Jesus. But then Jesus himself talks frequently about putting God first, about following the will of his Father regardless of how hard that might be, and about the primacy of loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. This insistence on God being at the center of our lives is a repeated theme throughout scripture and it is very much the central theme of our theological heritage – so where does that really take us in any practical terms? How do we live out this central tenet of our faith?

The immediate answer that comes to my mind is “poorly.” We are, in fact, pretty miserable at keeping God at the center of our lives. It’s like we have attention deficit disorder when it comes to God. Our affections are drawn elsewhere over and over again. We begin to have less and less need of God. God may be God – but we see that we can be like God, mini-gods, the gods of our own destinies. It’s a control thing. We want desperately to believe we are in control of our own lives. Our culture has a thousand different ways of telling us that we are. We can control our lives by being thinner, more beautiful, wealthier, smarter, …by being better communicators, better parents, better at our jobs, or better Christians. We displace God with the latest and greatest fads that keep us thinking that we are ultimately in control. But once we start down this road of comparisons, we find that there is no end in sight. There are so many variables influencing the outcomes of things, that to think we might be able to have control of even our own lives is delusional really.

Is it any wonder that John Calvin painted a pretty dismal picture of our ability to be faithful when he started looking at the knowledge of God and the knowledge of humanity through these particular lenses? If at the core of our belief system we place the desire to put God first, humankind started messing that up from our archetypical foreparents Adam and Eve on through. I suspect Calvin pretty much thought that humanity was a constant disappointment to God on that regard, and that the only thing keeping us at all in relationship with the divine was God’s great love for us – grace so to speak. We may not be God, but we are most certainly loved by God; and therefore we are freed to love ourselves, to forgive each other, and to trust that God is in control so we don’t have to be. It’s OK in the Reformed Theology scheme of things to be a messed up sinner starting with the very core of our beliefs. In fact, that’s the only kind of person any of us really gets to be.

Starting with the sovereignty of God, always, is an attempt to stay humble in our proclamations about who God is and about who we are in relationship with God. Just in case any of us thought we could be God, almighty, all-powerful, always right, we would start out by being absolutely wrong. That, in and of itself, begins to shape any statement we would want to make about religious truth. God is God. We are not God. We don’t know if God will save everyone or only the good ones. We don’t know if God likes Republicans better than Democrats or the reverse. We don’t know if God only accepts Christian worship or is glad to be worshipped by people of all faiths and understandings. We cannot claim with any certainty whatsoever what belongs to the mind of God because anything we say has already been filtered through the imperfect minds of human beings. This is something that confounds people outside the Reformed tradition, and makes many people in our current cultural mix very uncomfortable. Being certain of one thing - that God is God, and we are not God - leaves a whole lot of space for uncertainty and room for seeing things differently when it comes to the hot button topics of our day. It allows for God to be Other and mysterious when most Christians prefer the accessible humanity of Jesus. It gives us the freedom and the responsibility to say, “I just don’t know,” from time to time. And it gives us far more flexibility to actually grow in our understanding of God and change our mind on issues of faith.

This great theme of the Reformed tradition is an incredibly mature, old, and wise understanding. As much as I would like to say it’s the best way of looking at religious truth, I can actually stop myself before I do. Every great and deep faith tradition contributes something unique to our knowledge of God – even in the remarkably skewed ways we interpret those understandings at times. But I find it takes a mature spirituality to put God in the center of all we do, to recognize the sovereign love and justice of God in the course of all our day to day interactions. And at the same time, it is a mature spirituality that even mature people have a hard time living into. It’s not easy to keep our affections that focused and that simple all the time.

So this Sunday, and every Sunday, in church, at home, or at work, we affirm and we bow down to the majesty, holiness, and providence of God who creates, sustains, rules, and redeems the world in the freedom of sovereign righteousness and love. We do so because it is who we are, not just as Presbyterians, but as human beings who stand in awe of the God who is the Great Mystery. God alone is God, and humbly we are not.

Amen.