Is Our God too Big or too Small?

Early in my career as a teacher of theology, I used the classic book by J.B. Phillips entitled Your God is Too Small.  However, over the past twenty years or so, I've noticed in our current generation of young people the prominence of a focus on God's bigness. Worship that seems to often move college students, and many other Christians, tends to focus on God's transcendence and awesomeness. "Awesome" just might be the most common word my students, and many other Christians, use to describe God.

This focus on God's bigness is often used in worship to create an acute sense of our smallness in relation. Ecstatic worship is often triggered by a felt sense of God's transcendent power, size, and awesomeness. My sense is that a lot of contemporary worship is explicitly aimed at trying to create this experience. And that makes sense. Worship means "to bow down." Thus, to worship God means to "bow down" before God's power and size.

And yet, I wonder about all this. Particularly from a missional perspective. Specifically, I struggle with how the felt sense of smallness experienced in this type of worship is supposed to transition into Christian mission. I do see how an acute sense of our smallness works as a trigger for ecstatic worship, but find it hard to see how that sense of smallness helps Christians learn to eat with tax collectors and sinners.

Put bluntly, I'm wondering this: How does an experience of God's awesomeness help you learn that God is love? Let me be clear. I think God is awesome. I think it's good, as a critique of human pride, to experience God's awesomeness. I'm just expressing a concern about how this sort of ecstatic worship transitions into missional living.  Perhaps, at times, our God is too big.

Too much focus on God's awesomeness leaves us ill-equipped to see God's smallness in the world. Perhaps we'd be better able to transition from worship to mission if we started focusing on God's smallness rather than on God's bigness. Isn't it one of the purposes of worship to help us see aright? To see God more clearly? If so, perhaps we need to start worshiping God's smallness. 

Can we see the smallness of God in this famous section of Night, Elie Wiesel's memoir of the Holocaust:

The SS seemed more preoccupied, more disturbed than usual. To hang a young boy in front of thousands of spectators was no light matter. The head of the camp read the verdict. All eyes were on the child. He was lividly pale, almost calm, biting his lips. The gallows threw its shadow over him.

The three victims mounted together onto the stairs.

The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!" cried the two adults.

But the child was silent. "Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked...

"Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He? He is--He is hanging here on this gallows..."

This is a powerful story, with particular resonance for Christians, a people who worship a God who hangs dead on the gallows. And I wonder, when we read stories like Wiesel's, if contemporary Christian spirituality, a spirituality so focused on God's bigness, is able to train us to see God in the figure of that little boy.

How can we learn to see God's smallness in each other, in our world, in our every day busyness?

A prayer from Walter Brueggemann:

In our secret yearnings

we wait for your coming,

and in our grinding despair

we doubt that you will.

And in this privileged place

we are surrounded by witnesses who yearn more than do we

and by those who despair more deeply than do we.

Look upon your church and its pastors

in this season of hope

which runs so quickly to fatigue

and this season of yearning

which becomes so easily quarrelsome.

Give us the grace and the impatience

to wait for your coming to the bottom of our toes,

to the edges of our finger tips.

We do not want our several worlds to end.

Come in your power

and come in your weakness

in any case

and make all things new.

Amen.