On saying "I am God" +

Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem - Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity. As sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.

A clergy family once decided to let their three-year-old son record the message for their home answering machine, and the rehearsals went well: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as possible.”

Then came the test. Father pressed the record button and their son said slowly: “Mummy and Daddy can’t come to the phone right now. If you’ll leave your name, phone number, and a brief message, they’ll get back to you as soon as Jesus comes.”

Children, and we would all be children at heart, do the funniest things. My two year old over here apparently answered a doorbell ring by opening the door, looking at the two visitors silently, closing the door on them, and walking back into the lounge to say: “I don’t like them.”


But we children learn what we are taught. As very small children we even need to be told we are the reflection in the mirror, when at that point in life we still know very well, that the reflection in the mirror isn’t who we are at all, it is really just another thing in the world. Who here wasn’t once held and asked who is that in the mirror? Maybe we were right when we thought that reflection was just another thing in the world, not our own centre.

It is that centre we will now discover. Will you join me?

Look into a mirror. Do you see a public identity, the person, who is at a distance, a thing who is always a few feet’s distance away from you, the face others see, or the private being who sees from the centre, at zero distance.

Isn’t it a public identity, rather than who you are?

Now point at something in front of you – see how it has colour and shape. Move your finger slowly back towards you, past your legs and body, more colour and shape, until it points back at the one who is looking – do you see any colour or shape now? Do you see any thing at all? Or are you the invisible seer, spacious capacity, eternal soul, indefinable awareness, boundless, timeless being, at the centre of all?

Now touch your head, and for other people around you it looks like you are touching who you really are, but for you, isn’t it more like you are feeling some sensations in an unbounded space which is capacity for sensations?

Now point at yourself once again, look at your finger, and turn both from side to side. Does it look like you are moving, or does it look like you are staying still while the world, including your body and finger, is moving?

The point is this - I am still at the centre because I am the centre, and not a thing in the world at all. I am, because I am is the very name of God in the Bible.

Be like children and you enter the Kingdom of God, Jesus said. Perhaps he knew Children ask the best questions, like: “Why is there something, and not just nothing?” Childhood is too short for us to be the child we ought to, so we can also ask, if we still have any sense of wonder left at all: “Why is there something, not just nothing?” The answer is, of course - that is that it is a given world.

We didn’t invent it in a laboratory and we can’t buy it in a shop. It is a given, a present. There is both bad news and good news with this. The bad news is that there's nothing we can do to deserve it. And the good news is, well, there’s nothing we can do to deserve it. It is a gift.

I don’t know if you have ever seen the film City of Angels, but if not, I do recommend it to you. In the midst of the film, a cardiothoracic surgeon is holding a man’s heart in her hands, squeezing it, fighting for his life, but he dies and she starts to wonder who it is she is actually fighting. This in turn leads her to reflect on her medical training, and she says: “After all this time, and after all this work, I suddenly have the feeling that none of this is in my hands. And if it isn’t, what can I do with that?”

There’s nothing we can do with it, because it is a given, and we can chose to respond, that’s what responsibility means, ability to respond. We don’t have to be guilty for our birth or scared of our death, and the New Testament says we are not given a spirit of fear. By changing the way we see, we see that God is everywhere, and if not seen everywhere, then God is not seen anywhere.

The world - or Kosmos, and God - or Theos, and Man - or Anthropos, can't be seen separately. The cosmotheandric vision has no single centre. The centre is as wide as the circumference.

If we accept the source who is Love and consciousness, just as God became human in Jesus, we become divine. 2 PETER 1: 2-4 says this: "Grace and peace be yours in abundance, in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord, whose divine power has given us everything needed for life and godliness through the knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. He has given us, through these things, his precious and very great promises, so that you may escape the corruption in the world and be participants of the divine nature."

In Philippians, Christ Jesus is described as emptying himself out and not regarding equality with God as a thing to be grasped. And Matthew’s gospel also says whoever exalts him or herself is humbled, and whoever humbles him or herself is exalted. The great Meister Eckhart added: “All God asks you most pressingly is to go out of yourself, and just let God be God in you. For God will only come in, when the creature goes out.”

This creature who was born, let us face it, must also die. But until we die daily, as St Paul says, by emptying ourselves out and opening mind, heart and hands, we see things not as they actually are, but as we think they are.

Like the story of an isolated village in which an old blacksmith, who finds a young lad willing to work very hard for low pay, so immediately the smith gives his instructions to his eager lad: "Now, when I take the metal out of the fire,” he says, “I'll lay it on the anvil; and when I nod my head hit it with the hammer." So the very next day, the lad is the only blacksmith left in the village.

As childhood is too short for us, the spirit of God soon gets filled with thoughts and the other five senses, and we react to our feelings and create complexes which we come to believe we actually are. Who are we fooling?

The recent Royal Institution Christmas lectures for children were all about the human brain. The lecturer addressed an assembled audience of children and said plainly and clearly that there was simply no-one in charge, no-one inside, sitting in an armchair in mission control, running it all like one of the Numbskulls in the Beano comic.

Human beings are not human thinkings anyway. No-one being in the brain is a divine mystery. It points to a secret Christians call the Kingdom of God. And we all know the best place to hide any secret is the last place anyone would ever want to look for it, in our own nothingness.

No one wants to hear about nothingness, because it’s too simple, and we creatures prefer to be clever. But with nothingness, there’s nothing to congratulate yourself for, no dressing it up, nothing to grasp. Christian dogma has the whole universe coming out of nothing, and so our own nothingness is not only full but gloriously Christian.

The Franciscan word is ‘poverty’, the Carmelite word is nada, nihil, Jesus spoke of the desert, a place we are voluntarily under stimulated, Matthew’s gospel advises us to go into our tamei’on to pray in secret, tamei’on means closet, a hidden storage space. So if we empty ourselves, then we stop living out of other people’s response to us, and this is the space where God is.

In the Bible God is called I am, and from this space, I am not who you think I am. And I am not who you need me to be either, because I’m not even who I need myself to be. I am not the reflection you see. I am nothing, and therefore in a good place to receive everything from God.

In Colossians Paul calls this “who you are, in Christ, hidden in God”. Our biggest temptation is to fill this nothing up with some thing, any thing, any image, just as long as we can own it and manage it. It is not for us to create God. St John says no-one has ever seen God, and there are no big men in the sky, but in our own absence there is an eternal Self bigger than our own imagination.

Grasping at God is like trying to make your own hair or your own nails grow, or ordering your thyroid gland to work, it can’t be done. Try it. It doesn’t work. We didn’t invent God, we can’t buy God, and unfortunately for sermon writers like me, our finest story of God is unspoken. Jesus says in Mark 4: “Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all things are done in parables, stories.”

So the Kingdom of God is in the heart or at the centre. Christian life is not about rules, but about attitudes cultivated by the divine spirit, and the fulfillment of this process is entry into eternal life, participation in the nature of eternal God. That is good news throughout the universe, the eternal Christ en-fleshed in Jesus, making it known to all created souls in ways we can’t imagine.

And when we gather as the Church, we form just one form of the Kingdom of God, the Republic of Ultimate Reality, the Realm of an unlimited uncreated potential. It is a very ambiguous form - because people, being creatures, rather than receiving nothing, have a strange anxiety they have to get involved in and captured by something, grasp at life, even Church life, which is a gift.

You may have seen a news report over Christmas showing Armenian and Orthodox priests in the Church of the Nativity fighting one another with their brooms, throwing brooms at each other, hitting one another around the head with brooms. It was like Father Ted, but it wasn’t a comedy. Can you imagine it happening now?

But it does happen. Animosity happens in the Church, and it was the same in Jesus’ day. Our gospel says he entered the synagogue and commanded unclean spirits to be silent. We might not talk about unclean spirits or gnashing teeth or outer darkness like he did, but psycho-somatic patterns, sub personalities, fear managers, identifying with the creations in the mirror, with pride, with thinking, with being something rather than just nothing, one uncreated spirit of God, who contains all.

Imagine we all live under a large board full of empty holes, with lights shining in from above, in and down through these holes. This is how we might think we are, all underneath God, as we look up through the holes, at the light coming down to us. But the holes are our souls, and the light is God, and once in our nothingness, we can actually go up through the hole, and then into God’s side.

You might think this is impossible for us, but it isn’t for God who is in us, the nothing in our something, the gift in what seems to be our very own life. So there is a much better form of the Kingdom of God, much less ambiguous than the Church, because it consists only of sincere commitment to the living spirit, who isn’t a thing.


To paraphrase the sermon on the mount, the better form of the Kingdom of God consists only of those sincerely committed in this living spirit, who are un-attached, who are not grieving what must pass, but who are seeking to comfort those who do grieve, rejoicing at another’s good fortune, not requiring deference, not being superior, but seeking justice for the oppressed, welfare for all, mercy for the weak, forgiveness for those who turn from evil, loving beauty and goodness, turning from mechanical hatred and violence, pursuing what builds up, and enduring real hardship and real hostility in order to witness to supreme loving kindness and selfless love.

God draws near to liberate us from estrangement and alienation, by growing here in Church, through to here, in the heart centre, through to a third and even better form of the Kingdom of God, which is not in this world at all. It is the communion of saints, and there is no evil.

But it must keep growing even further still, back into itself, the One, the Giver of all good gifts himself, the source of all life, who is our own source and the source of the whole cosmos, who must one day raise it all back to his eternal divine nature. The gospel calls this close of the age: “te sunteleia tou aionos” and Jesus is reported as saying: “I am, with you, until the end of the age”.

So who is God if not I am? One Rabbi called God the soul of your soul. The reason we can say “I am God” is not because we are insane or egotistical, but because we chose to be nothing at all. Not a thing. Nothing can take everything else in, but if we chose to be something instead, we just shut other things out.

This not being anything means that God’s love can be what it is - all embracing, and Christians are able to rejoice that we can see it expressed on this small planet in the person of Jesus and in the Church. But any attempt to confine it to either is self defeating, like little Jamie, who is trying to use God.

Jamie says to God, God, how long is a million years to you? God says, well Jamie, a million years to me is like one second. And how much is a million pounds to you God? So God says “Jamie, it is a mere penny.” So a million years is a second, and million pounds is a penny, so Jamie then thinks and says: “God, can I have one of your pennies?” - And God replies, “just one second.”

It’s a given world, and there’s absolutely nothing at all we can do to deserve it. The Priest and spiritual guide Anthony De Mello put it like this. We depend on one another for all kinds of things. The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, which is interdependence! We set up society in this way, and it’s fine to allot different functions to different people for the welfare of all, so all can function better, live better, at least ideally, we hope.

But to depend on a person psychologically and emotionally is to depend on another for your happiness, and if you try that, whether you are aware of it or not, next you will be demanding that people contribute to your happiness. After that will come fear of loss, fear of alienation, fear of rejection, and finally mutual control.

But perfect love casts out all this fear, and in the source, at your centre, there are no demands, no expectations, no dependency. I don’t demand that you make me happy; my happiness does not lie in you at all. If you were to leave, I would not feel sorry for myself. I may still enjoy your company immensely, and I do, but I don’t cling to it. As I enjoy your company it is on a non-clinging basis.

Because what I REALLY enjoy isn’t you OR me, but far greater than both you AND me. It is the centre, the Kingdom, it is something I discovered, it is a symphony, an orchestra, because it plays one melody in your presence, but when you depart, it doesn't stop, it just plays another one. It is gift. A gift implies a giver, who does not depend on me at all, and who never ceases, but who, as no-thing, contains each and every single thing.

Join me in a prayer of St Ephrem. Lord, shed upon our darkened souls the brilliant light of your wisdom, so that we may be enlightened to serve you with renewed purity, and as sunrise marks the hour for men to begin their toil, in our souls, prepare us for the day that will never end.

In the name of Father Son and Holy Spirit
Amen +