Sermon for the 1st of June - Sunday after Ascension

What would you say if someone asked, “Do you believe in God?”
At first, it seems like a simple question. Yes. No. Maybe, “It depends.”

But lurking just beneath the surface is a deeper and more important question:
What do you mean by “God”?

 The word “God” carries a lot of baggage. For some, it conjures images of a distant judge, angry and vengeful, keeping score. If that’s the God people are rejecting, I often find myself agreeing with them. I don’t believe in that God either.

 So perhaps the better question isn’t “Do you believe in God?” but “Which God do you mean?” Because the heart of Christian faith isn’t belief in a concept or a celestial being, but trust in a mystery.

 This is where Christian mysticism offers profound wisdom. It reminds us that God is not an object among objects—not a thing we can observe or dissect. God is beyond comprehension, beyond category. As Paul Tillich wrote, God is “the ground of being”—the very source of all that is. God is not a being. God is Being itself. And above all, God is love—to be known not through analysis, but through encounter.

 The early Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria put it this way:

“God is ineffable, beyond all speech, beyond every thought. God is not in space, but above both place and time and name. God is anonymous.”

 To some, this sounds like erasing God entirely. One commentator, Thomas Biggs, critiques Clement’s vision as ending not with God but with nothing—a God so stripped of attributes that nothing remains.

But here’s where two images can help us.

First, imagine an onion. You peel away layer after layer, and in the end—there’s nothing left. That’s one view of apophatic theology: the more you strip away, the more God disappears.

 But consider a second image: a sculptor with marble. The sculptor chips away at the excess stone—not to destroy, but to reveal the form within.
In the same way, apophatic theology doesn’t erase God, it removes distortions. It peels away the false images—the angry sky-father, the cosmic accountant—to reveal something truer. Not absence, but Presence. Not a void, but a deeper fullness.

 And yet, Christianity doesn’t stop at here. The astonishing claim at the heart of our faith is that the unknowable God has made himself known. Not in a concept, but in a person. Not from a distance, but up close—in Jesus Christ.

 In him, the disciples saw the very being of God walking among them. Healing the sick. Welcoming the excluded. Speaking truth to power. Responding to hate with love. The invisible God became visible—not explained, but revealed.

 But then comes the Ascension—the moment we just celebrated. Jesus departs. He’s lifted from their sight, and the disciples are left staring into the sky, bewildered. Two men in white appear and ask, “Why do you stand looking into heaven?” (Acts 1:11).

He is gone. Or is he?

 Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space, once said, “I looked and didn’t see God.”
But perhaps he was looking in the wrong direction. God is not “up there.” The Ascension is not about Jesus floating into space—it’s a transformation of presence. Christ is no longer located in one place, but now fills all places.

Heaven and earth have met in Christ. And God is now everywhere.

Next week, we’ll mark Pentecost, when the Spirit descended like fire and wind—God’s presence not just around the disciples, but within them. But even today, we live in that in-between space—after the physical departure of Jesus, but before the full unveiling of God’s kingdom.

 And in that space, we sometimes feel... the silence. Prayer can feel empty. Church can seem hollow. God seems distant.

Mystics call this the dark night of the soul. John Bunyan described it as the valley of the shadow. These are not signs of failure. They are part of the journey—moments when God is doing hidden work within us. Teaching us to trust. To walk by faith, not by sight. These seasons are our own Gethsemanes—where we learn, again and again, that God is not a feeling to be grasped but a presence to be trusted.

 A mature faith lives with this tension: presence and absence. Certainty and mystery. Joy and longing. It doesn’t demand a God of easy answers, but clings to the God revealed in Christ—the one who came near, entered our suffering, and walks with us still.

So when someone asks, “Do you believe in God?”
We might say:
Yes. But not the god of control and coercion.
Not the god of tribalism and fear.
We believe in the God who comes close.
The God who is mystery and mercy.
Who is both hidden and here.
The God made known in Christ—
Who has not left us abandoned, but fills all things with love.