The God revealed to us in Jesus Christ is too big to be captured by any one sect, nation, generation or political philosophy. “He” is untamed and un-tamable – we might almost say wild. Radically, stubbornly free-willed, this is a God beyond our wildest expectations or the bounds of our control. Religion – including the Christian religion – is all about the human effort to tame God. The Christian faith, however, is not a religion but a relationship.
The Christian God is not one Person, but three. This God is a community, existing in absolute harmony. What is the power that holds this harmony together? Is it the power that holds the atoms together – that activates the electrons?
It is that and so much more. It is the power of love.
God is Love, is held together by love, and has created us out of love. All other power, including human power, is but a distant reverberation of this. Only human beings are capable of choosing a different power, of imagining that the force that emanates from them is of their own creation. But merely human power is not only lesser, but false.
Who could make God good? Who could hold God – Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer – together if these Persons chose to part? Who might call God back to faithfulness if God chose to be faithless? We may choose to break faith with God. God has not chosen to break faith with us.
This is the God Who made us, Who redeems us from death and despair back to life, Who sustains us from day to day to day. This is our Christian God. How can we ever grasp this Power, or hold it fast, or tame it to do our bidding? Anything we can tame is lesser than us, not greater. It is not God, but an idol made of clay.
Love cannot be tamed. Be it what we call straight, or gay, or bisexual, it can’t be domesticated. The religions that attempt such folly – all of them – worship idols. If there is one God in the universe Who loves us, Who made us, Who never, ever breaks faith with us or abandons us, it is the God we meet in Jesus Christ.
We must never forget that the same power – the same unfathomable love – that holds God together in One also binds God to us. How much does God value love? Much nonsense has been written about Christ’s ultimate sacrifice on the Cross – of God’s ultimate sacrifice of Christ. It was not, as some have claimed, “child abuse.” It was a freewill offering made by Christ Himself.
In Jesus, God gave Himself to us. He was not Clark Kent in Superman costume. Jesus came to us all Man, and gave for us the only human life that that Man had. He would not compromise on love to meet the demands of human power. Because God could not be tamed, and because Jesus lived out the free will of God offered to us, Jesus could not be tamed.
Thus was He killed. He went to the grave completely true to the Father, to the Spirit and to us. And He was stronger than anything human beings could do to Him. Because God cannot be tamed, God could not be contained in the grave. The power that holds God together – that unfathomable love – is the power that raised Christ to life that will never end.
That is the power that made us. It’s the power that enables us to love. We can choose love, just as God chooses love. Let us always choose love. And let us choose to love the God Who can never be tamed.
That God doesn’t expect us to be tamed, either.
A self-described “Libertarian Episcopalian lesbian,” freelance writer and the author of Good Clowns, a young adult novel published in 2018, Lori Heine published a blog called Born on 9-11 and was a frequent contributor to the website Liberty Unbound. A native of Phoenix, Ariz., she graduated from Grand Canyon University in 1988 and spent much of her life in the insurance industry before turning full-time to writing as a freelancer, blogger and author.